In 2005, I wrote The Empath, a book about an AI platform that understands human emotions and then manipulates them to predict and control elections and markets. Two weeks ago, I dropped a hint about how to build such a machine on /pol/.
In the book, a company named Promethia engineers people with significant alterations to their brains. The vast majority of such experiments end in complete failures because the link between DNA and neurology is incredibly complex. Eventually, a good-enough technique is discovered.
The company engineeers two children, Sen and Cari. Sen is a child who has no capacity for human emotion other than experiencing perpetual, sheer terror. His ability to comprehend mathematical complexity, however, is unrivaled in all of human history. He develops new techniques to reduce decoherence problems of quantum computing, allowing the development of the primary AI in the story, Esai. His twin sister, Cari, exists for the sole purpose of providing emotional comfort and support to Sen.
Trying to develop such mathematical prowess in a single human proved to be extremely difficult, so they settled for twins: one with a mind that is barely stable enough to endure on a day-to-day basis and another with a deep emotional bond to keep him stable. The key to getting to this point was a legal innovation.
Creating human clones is mostly illegal. Experimenting on humans, clone or not, is incredibly illegal. So Promethia leverages paleogenetics to create Neanderthal brains. They aren't human legally, so there's no prohibition on experimentation, and they are similar enough to humans to help improve research.
Today, the world has caught up to my idea:
https://singularityhub.com/2018/05/23/living-neanderthal-mini-brains-may-reveal-what-makes-our-brains-special/
For those who remember, I posted this pic on the now deleted /pol/ thread. It was a brief timPost too long. Click here to view the full text.