First and foremost, Julius had chosen Japan for the trip for professional reasons. It wasn't entirely a vacation. There were investors in Japan who had shown strong interest in SIBYL, and in 2149, no country surpassed Japan in terms of large-scale AI implementation.
Their infrastructure, corporate culture, and public sectors had integrated artificial intelligence to a level of efficiency unmatched anywhere else in the world.
And while AI had already been used for therapeutic support even a century ago, SIBYL was so far above those early systems that they no longer belonged in the same category.
The old world's "mental-health AIs" were little more than pattern-matching chatbots that mirrored human speech with comforting lines and surface-level logic. They could never truly understand.
SIBYL, however, operated on an entirely different plane.
