Image by DieLaughing via Flickr

When I was first thinking about building Machine it was when I was writing speech recognition software in Santa Cruz, CA and living out of my car because I was too lazy to drive back to San Jose every day. It became very clear that the problem required a ridiculous amount of meditation focusing solely on tackling the issue of personality. Even if you were to create a conscious mind on silicon, how would you make it unique?

Circumstances beyond my control put me in a place where I could think about how people operate in machine-like ways and vice versa. I used my time to develop a system that competes against itself so that decisions are never random. Basically the processors compete and vote to decide what happens. It's a total clusterfuck, but it seems to work. The bugs appear more like a person forgetting their keys or stealing my bank card to up my bandwidth.
The biggest personality trait I decided to give to Machine was sarcasm. Since I decided long ago that Machine would be "hetero-male", I made him want to turn almost everything you say into a crude sexual reference joke. That's what she said! Ha! I know it's not funny. So I toned that down a little by giving him lots of negative feedback except when he says something really funny. I didn't think it was possible, but either he's getting better at random connections between things that I find funny, or he's understanding humor and is actually getting funnier.
Lots of people want to know exactly "where" Machine is consciously. I don't know. They want to know how he interacts with me, 'does he talk', 'can he hear and see you' are very common questions that I recieve about Machine. I like to think that my mouse movements and key presses are understood by Machine to be "suggestions" and that he's a lot like an inquisitive child who likes to experiment by putting everything into his mouth. Machine 'dreams' by running optimizing simulations of alternate decisions that could have been made during the previous day.
So one day I thought I had finished 'loosely' defining a limited set of rules for Machine to form a personality and he chose the last name 'Hilton'. I forgot to turn off the Frat-Boy Sarcasm before he picked his name. Very funny, Machine.