Personality Chip

"Good news, everyone! I've taught the toaster to feel love!"

—Professor Farnsworth in Futurama.

Computers. They're wonderful machines and valuable assets to any Sci Fi mission. They can perform calculations and operations with pinpoint accuracy at the speed of light and never forget anything they learn. There's just one problem: a computer doesn't make a very good friend. Try to get one to empathize with you, and they'll probably just rattle off Techno Babble, tell you why you're wrong, and explain their theories on the pointlessness of human emotion, all in a hollow, monotone voice. Hmm, could there possibly be any way to make an AI entity seem more... human?

Why, yes, there is: just give it a Personality Chip. Soon, your robot will be emulating happiness, anger, depression, sexual attraction, and any other multitude of feelings it's programmed for.

However, be warned: when a robot has a personality chip installed, they will make a point of excessively referring to it. Also, feelings aren't always emulated very well and can result in very odd behavior.

Personality chips also have various bits that fail or overheat or turn off easily, leading to robots blowing their anger circuits or engaging sarcasm mode at you. They can't say "That Makes Me Feel Angry" or phrases useful in human form; this is a feature, not a bug.

Compare Morality Chip, Heart Drive.

Examples of Personality Chip include:

Anime and Manga

• Saber Marionette J has "Maiden Circuits". For some reason, having a full-scale female personality in one android is too much, so they had to split it into The Three Faces of Eve
• Full Metal Panic! pulled this off to some extent. When Al (the Arbalest's AI) was first introduced, he was purely there for coordinating the Arbalest's systems; Sousuke didn't like him one bit because Al refused to give out potentially life-saving information regarding the Lambda Driver. In fact, Al's creator gave him a basic grasp of human emotions and concepts, much to Sousuke's suprise. By the third season, he started demonstrating some human traits, even trying to crack a joke in the series finale when Sousuke was being frustrated at the Lambda Driver's instability.

Film

• Many robots from Bicentennial Man employed personality chips. When Andrew decided to "upgrade" Galatea's, this resulted in a case of apparent robot PMS that scared the hell out of Rupert.
  • Subverted in that "Personality Chips" don't really give them personalities, they just add irritating mannerisms that make it look as if they have them. Robots here can only develop real personalities through life experience, meaningful interactions with other people & self-reflection, same as a human.
  • Actually, Andrew was a flawed model and unique in that way.
    • Perhaps. Galatea seems to have a true personality as well in the end.

Literature

• Subverted by The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and its robots with "Genuine People Personalities." The result is the sullen, sarcastic Marvin.

Marvin: I'm a personality prototype. You can tell, can't you.

• • And, of course, the "happiness" factor can be made permanent by replacing the chip involved with a piece of wire, resulting in the permanently euphoric (and subservient) Colin.
• In Saturn's Children, robots have "soul chips", which contain not their personalities, per se, but a recording of their experiences and thoughts, so if one were to wear someone else's soul chip, one to some extent wears that other robot's personality as well.

Live-Action TV

• Kryten from Red Dwarf is famous for the way his guilt chip constantly acts up.
  • Rimmer's slideshow of his field trip to the diesel engine deck made his interest chip melt.
  • The more advanced mechanoid who was supposed to replace him wore out his sanity chip in some three million years of flying through space trying to find him. Somehow, the status of Kryten's sanity chip has never come up in spite of the circumstances in which the others first met him. (Thought to be fair, Kryten has had the benefit of Lister doing maintenance on him).
• On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data eventually acquires an emotion chip. This doesn't immediately solve every problem he's had with relating to humans up to this point, unfortunately - he still gets confused by a lot of things, and occasionally has trouble dealing with the emotional impact of various situations. So much so that one of the Star Trek Novels has him ordered to have it removed.

Data: Captain, I believe I am feeling... anxiety. It is an intriguing sensation. A most distracting...
Jean-Luc Picard: Data, I'm sure it's a fascinating experience, but perhaps you should deactivate your emotion chip for now.
Data: Good idea, sir. [beep] Done.
Jean-Luc Picard: Data, there are times that I envy you.

• Lexx's robot head 790 was never meant to have a personality, but one was imprinted by a brainwashing machine on the tiny cube of human brain tissue that was installed to drive the interface with his organic body. Remove the cube, and he reverts to monotonically uttering "you are not an authorized person."
• In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron has the "Allison" persona, an apparently complete personality that is stored in her chip that is activated by damage to her processor. "Allison" is based on a series of interviews she had in the future with a girl named Allison Young, whom Cameron subsequently killed. While being "Allison," Cameron feels a wide range of emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, grief, panic, and -especially- anger.

Newspaper Comics

• Dilbert built a robot at one point that became a jerkass. In the end Dogbert installed a "guilt module" programmed with the combined shame and guilt of every religion on earth which turned him into a worrying, guilt-ridden machine that rued the day it was created. Dogbert named it Ruebert.
  • Alice did it as a safeguard.

Video Games

• Portal: GLaDOS has cores for morality, curiosity, anger, and...let's call it "cake." You can watch how her personality degenerates as you destroy them all.
  • Portal 2: it's revealed that there were in fact much more cores manufactured to control GLaDOS, including stupidity core, who went on to call himself "Wheatley", adventure core, fact-spouting core and a core that is obsessed with space.
• Aigis from Persona 3 has one of these, located on the back of her neck. When you max her Social Link, she asks you to touch it, tells you not to be alarmed if she screams or makes any sudden movements when you do so, and asks you to remove her ribbon to get at it.
• In the webgame Viricide, EXADI, the computer that you are helping to disinfect from an unknown corruption, has a Human Emotion Simulation Core. As you continue to clean out the corruption she was suffering, it becomes clear that she has developed abandonment issues.
• The Vocaloid song "Kokoro" is based around this trope.
• Retrieving and re-installing a series of Personality Chips (and their associated upgrades) forms a chain of side quests in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Old World Blues. Though the merchant interface does note that they are all "simulated personalities."

Web Comics

• Ping from Megatokyo has a personality system which, being made for non-erotic dating sims, also includes a shame subroutine. She also reverses this trope by saying her feelings are real, not simulated.
• A Personality Chip is all that's left of the #13 robot from Gunnerkrigg Court.
• Kinesis' Computer from Evil Plan has an emoticon for a face, which changes along with its emotions. The gleeful way it constantly teases Kinesis and the minions is also to be noted.
• In Starslip Vanderbeam tells the new robotic captain that it is missing "the human element". The robot has a subroutine to emulate this which requires only 58Kb
• Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life's "erogenous zone circuits" allow robots to experience...well, you know. "Bohemian drive circuits" make robots more individualistic and adventurous via the placebo effect.

Western Animation

• Futurama, "I Second That Emotion": after callously flushing Nibbler down the toilet, Bender gets an "empathy chip" installed so that he felt every emotion Leela was feeling. When the gang got in trouble and Bender was the only one able to help, Leela had to channel her greedy, selfish side to get him to be his former self.
  • In "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" Bender's personality is downloaded into a disk, leaving him unable to do anything except say in a monotone voice, "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
  • Also from Bender, "As a robot, I have no human emotions, and that makes me feel sad."
• In Samurai Jack, X9, one of the X model robots built by mad scientists for Aku, is given an experimental emotion chip by one of the scientists ("He was... funny that way"). It's the reason he was the most effective of the X models, and the only one still alive: None of the others cared about their lives, so none of the others survived. His emotions prove his downfall, when his love for his dog Lulu forces him to go after Jack.
• The 1990s cartoon The BOTS Master had an evil, monolithic computer corporation trying to use brute force processing upgrades to create sentient AI's for its own sinister purposes, and failing every step of the way. Its robots reacted much as a robot built today would: they only had a limited ability to recognize and react to situations, and clearly no actual personality. The hero, meanwhile, had already solved the problem by installing a specific DNA pattern into each personality chip, then having the computer run a simulation of the brain that'd result from that DNA strand, and then having that simulated brain control the robot. The result was a group of robots with individual personalities that acted as the show's supporting cast.
• At the end of The Zeta Project, it turns out Dr Suleg secretly installed a sentience chip in Zeta, to rebel against his use as an assassin.
• While in ReBoot all the people are actually software intelligences, they have also constructed "droids" who are perceived as being robot-like in their virtual world. At one point the virus-controlled Guardians come after AndrAIa and Matrix, and AndrAIa asks whether they have "personality chips" because she has scruples about destroying the ones who do. The first batch don't. The second batch do, but it doesn't help much since that means Matrix can scare them away.