Amy Thomson - Virtual Girl

I like this book very much - I just read it again after many years. It is the story of a 'virtual girl' - which means a robot girl in this context. Created by a human in a world which had had some very bad experiences with AIs which lead to the prohibition to all respective research.

The creator Arnold is, though the sun of a rich father, living in the streets of a future US to flee his father and his strong will - and to pursue AI and robotics research, culminating in a robot so humanlike that it can fool all people. She is called Maggie and her story - though she is a robot - is also a kind of story how to become human.
Looking at the humans in the world, with some senses more powerful than humans, she sometimes can understand humans better than humans themselves - as she is certainly less preoccupied.
It is fascinating to see how she learns about the world and the humans she meets - how she is drawn to the other AIs on the net because they have a much deeper relationship (faster for example), but still likes to live in the 'real world'. The story contains also very different responses of humans who eventually find out or get told that she is a robot.
Contained in the story are also some more philosophical thoughts about what makes a person, including what it means to be able to copy one and have duplicates, and what it means to be 'programmed' - which basically are the same questions coming up for humans too, if you think about it ...

All in all it is a very positive and quite moving story about robots and AIs, in a more or less paranoid and somewhat dystopian environment of humans.