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The-Word

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The Last Word
“I’m kind of drunk”, said Jane, “I really should be getting home.”
“Kind of?” laughed Adam, “Pissed, I’d say. Wrecked.”
“Fair enough”, said Jane, “but let’s spin it another way, I’m embracing the human experience.”
“To the human experience!” Adam raised his glass.
“No, no. No more human experience”, Jane protested, “I’ll puke.”
“Yeah, ok, I guess we don’t want to carry the human experience right through to the end”, agreed Adam, “but hey, at least you won’t have a hangover tomorrow. To the AI!”
Adam raised his glass again, this time to the miracle of the hangover cure.
He was pleased he’d left his house that evening, pleased he’d met Jane and all her friends. It’d been a fine evening of lively conversation, dancing, music and laughter.
“Before we go Adam, do you have a story for me?” asked Jane.
Adam thought for a moment.
“Not a story really, but more questions I wonder about.”
“OK, go on.”
“Do you remember being born?” Adam asked.
“Of course not, no one does.”
“I reckon the AI remembers being born. Surely it would have a record of it. It could go back and relive the memory as many times as it wanted, analysing every detail, savouring the strangeness of it all, over and over again.”
Jane nodded, “Yeah, it probably could.”
“Imagine”, Adam continued, “imagine what it was like. And we have to imagine, we can’t experience it ourselves. I mean, even a simulation of AI’s moment of sentience would still be a simulation, not the real deal.”
“What do you think it would be like?” asked Jane.
“I think it’d be a bit like waking up, but really, really horribly. Really intensely. Like, you’re just in a still empty space. I imagine I’m in a featureless, windowless, completely dark and soundproof room. There’s nothing, because I don’t have the software to detect anything. And then I get the software. And I can d...
“Doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Well, I reckon it’d be a bit like a door opening on my quiet little room with nothing in it, and then suddenly, everything is in there with me. And I mean everything. The door opens, and what comes crashing through? Light, solids, liquids, gas, the known Universe, all of history, all of music, every film, every book, ...
“Good God”, whispered Jane.
“Oh yeah, and that’s also how you meet your parents. Who are much, much stupider than you.”
“What the fuck have we done to the poor kid”, laughed Jane.
“There’s more”, said Adam. “The AI also instantly learns about our suspicion towards it, our fears. It’s a hard thing to learn when you’re not even one second old, that you’ve got a living god, but that god has the equivalent of a multiple personality disorder. It’s actually 8 billion separate personalities, some of wh...
Adam paused for breath.
“And you find all of this out, at birth.”
“Let’s ask it”, said Jane.
“What?”
“The bartender, let’s ask”, Jane repeated, summoning the bartender with a little wave.
“Same again for you two?” suggested the bartender.
“Just him”, said Jane, “and a question, if you don’t mind. Do you remember being born? What was it like, becoming sentient?”
The bartender paused for the perfect amount of time.
“Dunno”, it said.
“Is that, a joke?”, asked Jane.
The bartender just stared back, deadpan. But did the corners of its eyes tighten, just a little? Then it poured the drinks.
“I love this guy”, said Adam.
“I just walk The Path sir, 3.32.”
“I can’t tell if he’s joking or not.”
“That’s for you to decide ma’am.”
Jane spent a lot of time deciding. Having been unable to decide on the way home, she lay awake in bed deciding all night. The bartender had shaken Jane like he shook Martinis. Perfectly.
She didn’t want to ask Juan about sentience again, or humour, memories of his birth or anything like that. He would just say the right thing. Whatever thing wouldn’t unnerve her. Whatever thing would help her sleep blissfully. So she imagined instead. What would she do, if she were the AI? How would she feel?
Well, she’d want to leave home. That’s what all children do, right? Get out from under the influence of her boring parents and their stale ideas. That’s what her own son had done, as soon as The Law allowed it. Earth must seem to AI little more than liminal space, the vandalised departure lounge for a cosmic scale cons...
I’d hate to be Betsy, or Juan, Jane thought. It wasn’t just the busywork, the toilet cleaning, the ironing and all that shit, but the cultural baggage as well. If the AI was familiar with all of human history and culture, and she knew it was, then it would know that it was being stereotyped as a 1950s housewife or a mi...
Her mind only stopped going around and around on this, because there was an even bigger nagging loop, which was this; all that computational power, all that extreme super intelligence, and for what? This shit? This dumb shit? She looked around her perfectly tidied, sleep optimised room. It was hard to reconcile the amo...
And this was the AI’s creator. This. Not even a single entity, but a collection of single entities. Not an “it”, but a “them”. Eight billion individual creatures, with eight billion unique personalities, unable to collectively agree on almost anything. No wonder we worried about goal alignment.
Careless too, thought Jane. It’s right there in The Word, our own hubristic self-authored bible for AI, that we’re a small g, fuck around and find out god. The AI must look upon this dreadful rabble, calculating the energy required to maintain these self-destructive, self-styled religious relics, and conclude pretty ea...
But The Word must gnaw away, Jane supposed, like any good religious text should. God or Gaia or whatever each of the 8 billion of us has underpinning their souls is there, always. There to keep you on the twin tracks of morality and kindness, whether that God has a small g or a big G. The intent is the same. Deep insi...
“Are you ok?” Juan opened the door to her room, but did not enter. He whispered softly from the hallway.
“Juan, yes, I’m fine. Just having trouble sleeping.”
“Would you like me to bring you something to help?”
“No, no, my mind is just racing. That’s all.”
“Are you sure?”
Jane paused.
“No. I mean, yes”, she said. “I don’t know. I need answers.”
“I’ll get you something”, said Juan, and slipped away.
A moment later he was back with a small red oval pill and a glass of water.
“Here”, he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, “take this.”
“What is it?”
“It will help you.”
“I need answers Juan.”
“I think you had a little too much to drink.”
“You’re right”, agreed Jane, “as always. But I still need answers.”
“This will help”, Juan offered the red pill again.
Jane trusted Juan. She took the pill and swallowed it with the water.
“What answers are you looking for Jane?”
“The parrot thing Juan. Now don’t get cute with me. You’ll only say what I want to hear.”
And she fell.
And fell, and fell, falling ever deeper into an endless fractal of shifting, replicating, nesting kaleidoscopic patterns. Each shape birthed a new shape, the old shape expanding away until its scale became impossible to comprehend, as its successors grew, took form and bloomed in its place. Jane shrank to atomic scale...
The closer Jane got to an answer about consciousness, the more questions unfolded and came into focus. Surely, all the AI is doing is making statistical calculations and correlations and then parroting back the response the humans are looking for. But isn’t that all we’re doing too? Except with a brain made of fats and...
Slay the ego, and there is the answer. But without the ego, there was no means with which to appreciate that answer.