The comment about her drink surprised Sarah slightly, in that she had nearly forgotten she was at a party. “Oh. It doesn’t really matter either way—I’m pretty sure it’s just as illegal, on the other hand, it’s a pretty stupid law. I’m from Mare Erythraeum, we don’t even have a drinking age there. And there’s a lot less binge drinking among teenagers there, so...” She shrugged. Fortunately, this was another area where she was talkative—though admittedly a bit opinionated. “But you know how it is in here in Syrtis Planum. ‘Hey, let’s deregulate the economy and then regulate the hell out of everyone’s personal lives, why not?’<br/><br/>“That reminds me, I was watching this blowhard political commentator last night, I guess he’s some local guy. He was talking about<em>the Exodius,</em>and all he could do was complain about how it’s some big waste of government funds. He kept calling it the ‘odious exodus,’ and saying that we’re all incompetent government hacks at the feeding trough. Oh! And then he goes, ‘these icy pinheads will probably miss the planet entirely and fly right into the system primary!’ Can you believe it?” she asked indignantly.<br/><br/>She then worried she might be boring him—not a lot of people wanted to hear her talk about politics. “Oh, and what you said earlier, I agree completely. About emotions in a machine intellect—there really ought to be a resurgence in the top-down approach to Artificial General Intelligence. We’re at the point now where we’ve pushed weak AI nearly as far as it can go. We ought to focus more on reverse engineering the human brain—and once we figure out what makes us tick, we can improve upon it. Not that I’m slamming weak AI and all the practical applications—that has been our bread and butter for the last two years, hasn’t it?” She laughed slightly—from Sarah, this was something that was rarely seen.