User blog comment:PerhapsTheOtherOne/Synthetics In RWBY and Beyond: What's that all about?/@comment-24891101-20150601030205

My own opinion is that Penny is qualitatively different from the AK series, or the AI receptionists. Those are clever programming on silicon. Penny, in contrast, is the first neural net of sufficient complexity to generate Aura. This comes down to my personal theory on what the soul is, which is that it's an emergent property of a neural net, and is a fundamentally physical phenomenon, despite its cultural metaphysical trappings.