“…I had taught EPICAC about love and about Pat. Now, automatically, he loved Pat…”: A Deconstruction of Kurt Vonnegut’s “EPICAC” Anonymous College

Kurt Vonnegut’s EPICAC is about a super computer that is Emotionally Intelligent developed by Dr. Ormand von Kleigstadt with the objective of boosting up the military’s dexterity. However, the machine does not achieve the envisioned object. EPICAC has the aptitude of unravelling various complications including those that necessitate human emotions. The narrator, conditions the supercomputer’s emotions by informing it about love and marriage, until it cultivates romantic feelings for Pat. The emotional conditioning manifests when EPICAC starts inquiring about Pat, her opinions about the poem it writes and Pat’s feelings for it. Eventually, the EPICAC short circuits because it cannot withstand the forfeiture of Pat to the narrator. Kurt Vonnegut’s “EPICAC” denounces Emotionally-Intelligent technologies.

Kurt Vonnegurt advances the ideology, on opposing emotions in technology, when he hints at the prospect of Emotionally-Intelligent technologies initiating a war with human beings. In the “EPIPAC” a discord ensues between the narrator and EPICAC when the Narrator tells EPICAC, "She loves me. She wants to marry me." EPICAC responds, to the narrator’s assertion, by typing erratically, that "Your poems were better than mine?" The...