Flashforward got a lot of hype as the next Lost — a laughable prospect to anyone aware of how brilliant Lost is — and while it certainly was one of the more promising pilots of the last few years, it is with equal certainty not the next Lost.

The one advantage it has over Lost is that it wears its science fiction on its sleeve; unlike Lost, which cloaked its science fiction with mystery, intrigue, and vague fantasy, Flashforward is from the outset delving into the implications of time travel and discussions of free will vs predestination. Unfortunately, that’s also Flashforward’s greatest weakness.

The first two acts which detail the initial cataclysm — in case you were wondering what the fuck Flashforward is, the essential premise is that for 137 seconds everyone in the world blacked out and during that time they all saw a vision of their future, specifically April 29, 2010 10PM — are great stuff. The carnage of the aftermath is visceral and jarring with lots of great short shots of people suffering through the fog of war slowly lifting over them allowing a clearer picture to form.

But once that fog lifts the show devolved into a series of conversations pondering the implications of what they’ve experienced. Because of this, there’s not nearly enough time devoted to giving the characters some much needed depth. Joseph Fiennes’ Mark Benford is given some level of history, and somewhat necessarily his wife as well though not with the same depth. I find Benford’s AA sponsor one of the more fulfilling of the characters right now so I take that as a sign that the show knows how to develop characters well, it just opted to utilize the pilot to explore directly some of the headier concepts the show’s dealing with. Not the choice I’d make but it doesn’t ruin the show, unless it becomes a running pattern.

Though the geek in me appreciated the explicit geeky discussions of free will vs predestination, I’ve come to appreciate the character driven exploration of these sorts of ideas that Lost does so well, and so the lack of character development bothered me. Of course, the show managed to make me almost forget about my issues with the show’s characters by ending off on the excellent cliffhanger with the lone person walking amongst the blacked out masses during those fateful 137 seconds. All told, I’m excited for more, though I’m also hoping for more from the show as it finds its way.

In the 60′s and 70′s there was lots of hope and high expectations (never good things, FYI). Artificial Intelligence (AI) was going to be conquered with relative ease and by the turn of the millennium we’d have self-aware machines helping out humanity wherever they could out of the kindness of their heart, or they’d have taken over society and enslaved us all. Either way, everyone was certain it was going to happen Any Day Now.

That didn’t happen. Autonomous robots are still a fanciful thought with the closest approximations of thinking and feeling robots merely mimicking emotions they’ve been taught to mimic and parsing the expressions on our faces through complex analysis which ultimately comes down to further training of what emotions a certain kind of face means.

There are some efforts out there that rely on emergent properties popping up in simple loops of code which are initially taught a few base commands some of which would allow the code to modify itself. These are slow going but I think they are the best bet right now.

A few years ago I was considering a minor in cognitive neuropsychology, primarily because I was interested in AI and I wanted to try it from a different angle. Rather than come at it from a mathematical deterministic manner, I began to think about AI development from an evolutionary standpoint.

Intelligence didn’t come from nowhere; it took thousands of generations of incremental improvements, both physical and mental, to get to the level of humans, or even the level of dogs. Which is why self-modifying programs seem like the best bet of the available options, but I think there is one thing that self-modifying programs lack that could be crucial in developing truly independent and self-aware intelligent machines: childhood.

I’m sure that my stance has either been attempted enough times to be proven useless or is actively being researched by people in the field who know much much more about all this stuff, but I think that the AI researchers out there need to start looking at creating families. Instill in the base code of the first generation of programs a need for procreation and a few other basic operations and let life flourish or crumble.

I’m not saying that this is easy, but I think it will be the method by which substantial artificially intelligent machines will be created. Rather than create something in our own image, we must generate an environment conducive to development and allow it to persist.