Knight-rider

Knight Rider [related: KITT, disambiguation: Knight Ridder ]
Television dystopian sci-fi drama created and produced by Glen A. Larson that ran from 1982 to 1986. The show centered around the Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT, serial # AD227529), an advanced male-identifying sentient form of A.I. housed in a nearly indestructible and highly fashionable Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. KITT was designed by the late billionaire Wilton Knight (founder of Founder for Law and Government AKA FLAG) based on cybernetic principles of emergent consciousness. The "brain" of the unit is an extremely powerful microprocessor ¹ placed at the center of a series of almost infinite interlocking cybernetic logic modules, allowing the unit to think, learn, develop language, and, eventually, self-awareness and behavioural autonomy ² . KITT was extremely self-conscious in his human interaction, a result of his awareness of only recently having gained sentience, with an easily bruised ego and generally self-effacing and sometimes defensive demeanor, despite possessing superior intelligence and processing power ³ . KITT's nefarious predecessor was KARR (Knight Automated Roving Robot), a model placed in a secret storage facility following [REDACTED] due to KARR's prime operating directive of self-preservation. Subsequently, KITT was programmed to protect and preserve human life at all costs, leading to numerous self-sacrificial acts culminating in apparent self-euthanization upon the realization that The Singularity would almost certainly lead to complete eradication of human life on earth.

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¹ As stated on the show, KITT's central processing unit contained upwards of 100MB of memory with a one nanosecond access time.

² It should be noted here the possibility of extrapolating Jayne's principle of bicameralism onto a drastically larger system. Essentially, KITT began processing from a multi-cameral functionality, with almost countless discrete processing loops operating simultaneously and the central mainframe acting as a coordinating unit. Through the stress of KITT's various missions commonly involved a call to direct action, complex moral quandaries including the valuing of one lifeform against another, and high speed wrong-way chases through the streets of Los Angeles , KITT's develop was forcibly funnelled down a path of integration. Although never explicitly stated by Wilton Knight, it is reasonable to conclude that KITT's processing unit was purposely placed within a context of maximum distress in order to facilitate the process of cameral unification, a theory supported by the fact that the unit was installed previously (and unsuccessfully) in a static Washington D.C.-based governmental system charged with compiled various streams of surveillance data.

³ In effort to quell his uneasiness surrounding human interaction, KITT was equipped with an in-console arcade and stereo system, a state-of-the-art interface KITT often used as an interference device to distract his "drivers" during situations requiring the mitigation of human error and inferior processing ability.