My characters talk too much

Here in America anyway the similar phrase would be "pull the rug out from under them". So the German version is close enough to be familiar, but sounds more... destructive! It works fine though.

 

If this is true, where do the robots' motivations stem from?

Dialogue should be a form of exposition. If it isn't, then it's probably best to rip it out. If there are no inner thoughts or emotions, what are you exposing by writing the dialogue?

Regarding how robots might communicate with one another, have you looked into how computers communicate? They use protocols; previously-established nouns and verbs to conduct communication of information. Timestamps are almost always included, as well as identifying tags for sender and receiver. These things are generally implied in human-to-human conversation. Making them explicit will set your computer-based dialog apart from that involving humans. Also, I've seen other authors format their computer-based dialog differently, using Courier font and brackets of some sort. To wit:

[time:1577725556, sender:borg-node-21859.22.3256, target:borg-node-21826.25.8634, action:query]history.activities.last24hours[query.end]

I've read novels where there is a lot of dialog in this sort of format, and it becomes tedious to read after a while. A handful of lines is one thing, but a page is exhausting.

I read a novella recently where AIs chatted back and forth regularly. I can't find it in my Kindle library, but I'll see if I can track it down. The mechanism the author used worked, because they used a truncated version of something similar to the above. If I remember correctly, they established the "session" at the beginning of the dialogue, then deconstructed it afterward. It still made it feel very "techy", but made it less tedious. Something like this:

[session.start:1577725556, session.id:8675309, participants:borg-node-21859.22.3256:beeble, borg-node-21826.25.8634:bobble]
[session.id:8675309, time.offset:427, sender:beeble]query:history.activities.last24hours[end]
[session.id:8675309, time.offset:436, sender:bobble]response: consume.newsreports.sports.baseball.scores, consume.imagery.sunrise, produce.data.personality.summary -target: borg-node-21826.25.8924:blinken[end]
[session.id:8675309, time.offset:455, sender:beeble]query: meeting.outcome -target: blinken -metric: quality[end]
[session.id:8675309, time.offset:460, sender:bobble]response: meeting.outcome.quality.excellent[end]
[session.id:8675309 action:end]

In this way, two machines have the following conversation:

Beeble: "What did you do yesterday?"
Bobble: "I looked at the baseball scores, took in the sunrise, and met someone named Blinken."
Beeble: "How did the meeting with Blinken go?"
Bobble: "Excellent."

It's still a lot of junk to read past. In small chunks, however, it's not too bad.

Cheers.

JD

 

I really don't like that kind of computer dialogue. I've seen it in writing several times. To me, it gives the impression of two 8-bit computers talking to one another. In reality, computers don't talk to each other using any kind of human readable language. That kind of message log is for the benefit of humans, not of the computers.

I'm positing robots that are designed to communicate using natural language, but develop a way of communicating with each other that cuts out extraneous language. They're not AI bots in the modern sense.

As for exposition and inner thoughts, the point is that the robots have no inner dialogue. They say what they are thinking. The dialogue IS their inner monologue, and it's key to the story and can't be cut out. What am I exposing? Exactly what they are saying.

I disagree about dialogue being exposition. It's as much exposition as narrative is. Dialogue can be an illustration, of characters, of events. In this particular story, it IS exposition, and that's perfectly possible without inner thoughts.

 

Well put, sir.

 

I'm currently writing exactly that - more on the intimacy side, though. I'm loath to disclose my [REDACTED], but automatons can fall-in-love through [REDACTED]. I'd find a way to convey your process without leading the reader. Out there, readers don't care what your's or my favorite flavor of ice cream is - we can't even make them try it, much less eat it. The way we write has to taste good to them. Go light on the tech-fudge-swirl until your next best-seller. Perhaps experiment with some initiation protocol, then fade into colloquial conversation with a standard word set. Or, maybe formalize the conversation instead. Automatons would say things the same way every time, would they not? Voice or tone would be better comfort food for the reader. I have a very monotonous techno-babble of an AI becoming sentient if you want to see it for laughs. It even has a line-printing console output!