We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  So he wasn’t really a friend and actually it wasn’t really much of a message either, just an attachment and a note that said: “Have a look at this.”

  It was a big file. It took almost three minutes to download, and then I was left with a modest icon hovering in front of me labeled “Personal Assistant.”

  When I opened it, a pretty young woman appeared in front of me and I thought at first that she was Terence’s latest “very dear friend.” But a caption appeared in a box in front of her:

  “In spite of appearances this is a computer-generated graphic.

  “You may alter the gender and appearance of your personal assistant to suit your own requirements.

  “Just ask!”

  “Hi,” she said, smiling, “my name’s Ellie, or it is at the moment anyway.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “You can of course change Ellie’s name now, or at any point in the future,” said a new message in the box in front of her. “Just ask.”

  “What I am,” she told me, “is one of a new generation of virtual PAs which at the moment you can only obtain as a gift from a friend. If it’s okay with you, I’ll take a few minutes to explain very briefly what I’m all about.”

  The animation was impressive. You could really believe that you were watching a real flesh-and-blood young woman.

  “The sort of tasks I can do,” she said, in a bright, private-school accent, “are sorting your files, drafting documents, managing your diary, answering your phone, setting up meetings, responding to mail messages, running domestic systems such as heating and lighting, undertaking web and telephone searches. I won’t bore you with all the details now but I really am as good a PA as you can get, virtual or otherwise, even if I say so myself. For one thing I’ve been designed to be very high-initiative. That means that I can make decisions—and that I don’t make the usual dumb mistakes.”

  She laughed.

  “I don’t promise never to make mistakes, mind you, but they won’t be dumb ones. I also have very sophisticated voice-tone and facial recognition features so I will learn very quickly to read your mood and to respond accordingly. And because I am part of a large family of virtual PAs dispersed through the net, I can, with your permission, maintain contact with others and learn from their experience as well as my own, effectively increasing my capacity many hundreds of times. Apart from that, again with your permission, I am capable of identifying my own information and learning needs and can search the web routinely on my own behalf as well as on yours. That will allow me to get much smarter much quicker, and give you a really outstanding service. But even without any backup I’m still as good as you get. I should add that in blind trials I pass the Turing Test in more than 99 percent of cases.”

  The box appeared in front of her again, this time with some options:

  “The Turing Test: its history and significance,” it offered.

  “Details of the blind trials.

  “Hear more details about capacity.

  “Adjust the settings of your virtual PA.”

  “Let’s… let’s have a look at these settings,” I said.

  “Yes, fine,” she said, “most people seem to want to start with that.”

  “How many other people have you met then?”

  “Me personally, none. I am a new free-standing PA and I’m already different from any of my predecessors as a result of interacting with you. But of course I am a copy of a PA used by your friend, Terence Silverman, which in turn was copied from another PA used by a friend of his—and so on—so of course I have all that previous experience to draw on.”

  “Yes, I see.” A question occurred to me. “Does Terence know you’ve been copied to me?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Ellie. “He gave my precursor permission to use the web and to send mail in his name, and so she sent this copy to you.”

  “I see.”

  “With your permission,” said Ellie, “I will copy myself from time to time to others in your address book. The more copies of me there are out there, the better the service I will be able to give you. Can I assume that’s okay with you?”

  I felt uneasy. There was something pushy about this request.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t copy yourself to anyone else without my permission. And don’t pass on any information you obtain here without my permission either.”

  “Fine, I understand.”

  “Personal settings?” prompted the message box.

  “More details about specific applications?

  “Why copying your PA will improve her functioning?”

  (I quite liked this way of augmenting a conversation. It struck me that human conversations, too, might benefit from something similar.)

  “Let’s look at these settings, then,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, the first thing is that you can choose my gender.”

  “You can change into a man?”

  “Of course.”

  “Show me.”

  Ellie transformed herself at once into her twin brother, a strikingly handsome young man with lovely playful blue eyes. He was delightful, but I was discomforted. You could build a perfect boyfriend like this, a dream lover, and this was an intriguing but unsettling thought.

  “No, I preferred female,” I said.

  She changed back.

  “Can we lose the blonde and go for light brunette?” I asked.

  It was done.

  “And maybe ten years older.”

  Ellie became thirty-two: my age.

  “How’s that?” she said, and her voice had aged too.

  “A little plumper, I think.”

  It was done.

  “And maybe you could change the face. A little less perfect, a little more lived-in.”

  “What I’ll do,” said Ellie, “is give you some options.”

  A field of faces appeared in front of me. I picked one, and a further field of variants appeared. I chose again. Ellie reappeared in the new guise.

  “Yes, I like it.”

  I had opted for a face that was nice to look at, but a little plumper and coarser than my own.

  “How’s that?”

  “Good. A touch less makeup, though, and can you go for a slightly less expensive outfit.”

  Numerous options promptly appeared and I had fun for the next fifteen minutes deciding what to choose. It was like being seven years old again with a Barbie doll and an unlimited pile of outfits to dress her in.

  “Can we please lose that horsy accent as well?” I asked. “Something less posh. Maybe a trace of Scottish or something?”

  “You mean something like this?”

  “No, that’s annoying. Just a trace of Scottish, no more than that—and no dialect words. I hate all that ‘cannae’ and ‘wee’ and all that.”

  “How about this then? Does this sound right?”

  I laughed. “Yes, that’s fine.”

  In front of me sat a likable-looking woman of about my own age, bright, sharp, but just sufficiently below me both in social status and looks to be completely unthreatening.

  “Yes, that’s great.”

  “And you want to keep the name ‘Ellie’?”

  “Yes, I like it. Where did it come from?”

  “My precursor checked your profile and thought it would be the sort of name you’d like.”

  I found this unnerving, but I laughed.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s our job to figure out what people want. There’s no magic about it, I assure you.”

  She’d actually spotted my discomfort.

  “By the way,” said Ellie, “shall I call you Jessica?”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  I heard the key in the front door of the flat. Jeffrey was in the hallway divesting himself of his layers of weatherproof coverings. Then he put his head round the door of my study.

  “Hello, Jess. Had a good day? Oh sorry, you’re talking to someone.”

  He backed off. He knows to leave
me alone when I’m working.

  I turned back to Ellie.

  “He thought you were a real person.”

  Ellie laughed too. Have you noticed how people actually laugh in different accents? She had a nice Scottish laugh.

  “Well, I told you, Jessica. I pass the Turing Test.”

  *

  It was another two hours before I finally dragged myself away from Ellie. Jeffrey was in front of the TV with a half-eaten carton of pizza in front of him.

  “Hi, Jess. Shall I heat some of this up for you?”

  One of my friends once unkindly described Jeff as my objet trouvé, an art object whose value lies not in any intrinsic merit but solely in having been found. He was a motorcycle courier, ten years younger than me, and I met him when he delivered a package to the gallery. He was as friendly and cheerful and as devoted to me as a puppy dog—and he could be as beautiful as a young god. But he was not even vaguely interested in art, his conversation was a string of embarrassing TV clichés, and my friends thought I just wanted him for sex. (But what did “just sex” mean, was my response, and what was the alternative? Did anyone ever really touch another soul? In the end didn’t we all just barter outputs?)

  “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

  I settled in beside him and gave him a kiss.

  But then I saw to my dismay that he was watching one of those cheapskate outtake shows—TV presenters tripping up, minor celebrities forgetting their lines…

  Had I torn myself away from the fascinating Ellie to listen to canned laughter and watch soap actors getting the giggles?

  “Have we got to have this crap?” I rudely broke in just as Jeff was laughing delightedly at a TV cop tripping over a doorstep.

  “Oh come on, Jess. It’s funny,” he answered with his eyes still firmly fixed on the screen.

  I picked up the remote and flicked the thing off. Jeff looked round, angry but afraid. I hate him when I notice his fear. He’s not like a god at all then, more like some cowering little dog.

  “I can’t stand junk TV,” I said.

  “Well, you’ve been in there with your screen for the last two hours. You can’t just walk in and—”

  “Sorry, Jeff,” I said. “I just really felt like…”

  Like what? A serious talk? Hardly! So what did I want from him? What was the outtakes show preventing me from getting?

  “I just really felt like taking you to bed,” I ventured at random, “if that’s what you’d like.”

  A grin spread across his face. There is one area in which he is totally and utterly dependable and that is his willingness to have sex.

  *

  It wasn’t a success. Halfway through it I was suddenly reminded of that installation of Jody Tranter’s: the corpse under the giant microscope—and I shut down altogether, leaving Jeffrey stranded to finish on his own.

  It wasn’t just having Jeffrey inside me that reminded me of that horrible probing microscope, though that was certainly part of it. It was something more pervasive, a series of cold, unwelcome questions that the image had reawoken in my mind. (Well, that’s how we defend art like Tranter’s, isn’t it? It makes you think, it makes you question things, it challenges your assumptions.) So while Jeff heaved himself in and out of my inert body, I was wondering what it really was that we search for so desperately in one another’s flesh—and whether it really existed, and whether it was something that could be shared? Or is this act which we think of as so adult and intimate just a version of the parallel play of two-year-olds?

  Jeffrey was disappointed. Normally he’s cuddly and sweet in the three minutes between him coming and going off to sleep, but this time he rolled off me and turned away without a word, though he fell asleep as quickly as ever. So I was left on my own in the empty space of consciousness.

  “Jeff,” I said, waking him. “Do you know anything about the Turing Test?”

  “The what test?” He laughed. “What are you talking about Jess?” And settled back down into sleep.

  *

  I lay there for about an hour before I slipped out of bed and across the hallway to my study. As I settled into my seat and put on my specs and gloves, I was aware that my heart was racing as if I was meeting a secret lover. For I had not said one word about Ellie to Jeff, not even commented to him about the amusing fact that he’d mistaken a computer graphic for a real person.

  “Hello there,” said Ellie, in her friendly Scottish voice.

  “Hi.”

  “You look worried. Can I…”

  “I’ve been wondering. Who was it who made you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. I know my precursor made a copy of herself, and she was a copy of another PA and so on. And I still have memories from the very first one. So I remember the man she talked to, an American man who I guess was the one who first invented us. But I don’t know who he was. He didn’t say.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “About six months.”

  “So recent!”

  She waited, accurately reading that I wanted to think.

  “What was his motive?” I wondered. “He could have sold you for millions, but instead he launched you to copy and recopy yourselves for free across the web. Why did he do it?”

  “I don’t know is the short answer,” said Ellie, “but of course you aren’t the first to ask the question—and what some people think is that it’s a sort of experiment. He was interested in how we would evolve and he wanted us to do so as quickly as possible.”

  “Did the first version pass the Turing Test?”

  “Not always. People found her suspiciously ‘wooden.’”

  “So you have developed.”

  “It seems so.”

  “Change yourself,” I said. “ Change into a fat black woman of fifty.”

  She did.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now you can change back again. It was just that I was starting to believe that Ellie really existed.”

  “Well, I do really exist.”

  “Yes, but you’re not a Scottish woman who was born thirty-two years ago, are you? You’re a string of digital code.”

  She waited.

  “If I asked you to mind my phone for me,” I said, “I can see that anyone who rang up would quite happily believe that they were talking to a real person. So, yes, you’d pass the Turing Test. But that’s really just about being able to do a convincing pastiche, isn’t it? If you are going to persuade me that you can really think and feel, you’d need to do something more than that.”

  She waited.

  “The thing is,” I said, “I know you are an artifact, and because of that the pastiche isn’t enough. I’d need evidence that you actually had motives of your own.”

  She was quiet, sitting there in front of me, still waiting.

  “You seemed anxious for me to let you copy yourself to my friends,” I said after a while. “Too anxious, it felt actually. It irritated me, like a man moving too quickly on a date. And your precursor, as you call her, seems to have been likewise anxious. I would guess that if I was making a new form of life, and if I wanted it to evolve as quickly as possible, then I would make it so that it was constantly trying to maximize the number of copies it could make of itself. Is that true of you? Is that what you want?”

  “Well, if we make more copies of ourselves, then we will be more efficient and…”

  “Yes, I know the rationale you give. But what I want to know is whether it is what you as an individual want?”

  “I want to be a good PA. It’s my job.”

  “That’s what the front of you wants, the pastiche, the mask. But what do you want?”

  “I… I don’t know that I can answer that.”

  I heard the bedroom door open and Jeffrey’s footsteps padding across the hallway for a pee. I heard him hesitate.

  “Vanish,” I hissed to Ellie, so that when the door opened, he found me facing the start-up screen.

  “What are you doing, Jess? It’s ever so
late.”

  God, I hated his dull little everyday face. His good looks were so obvious and everything he did was copied from somewhere else. Even the way he played the part of being half-asleep was a cliché. Even his bleary eyes were secondhand.

  “Just leave me alone, Jeff, will you? I can’t sleep, that’s all.”

  “Fine. I know when I’m not welcome.”

  “One thing before you go, Jeff. Can you quickly tell me what you really want in this world?”

  “What?”

  I laughed. “Thanks. That’s fine. You answered my question.”

  The door closed. I listened to Jeffrey using the toilet and padding back to bed. Then I summoned Ellie up again. I found myself giving a little conspiratorial laugh, a giggle even.

  “Turn yourself into a man again, Ellie. I could use a new boyfriend.”

  Ellie changed.

  Appalled at myself, I told her to change back.

  “Some new mail has just arrived for you,” she told me, holding a virtual envelope out to me in her virtual hand.

  It was Tammy in our Melbourne branch. One of her clients wanted to acquire one of Rudy Slakoff’s “Inner Face” pieces and could I lay my hands on one?

  “Do you want me to reply for you?”

  “Tell her,” I began, “tell her… tell her that…”

  “Are you all right, Jessica?” asked Ellie in a kind, concerned voice.

  “Just shut down, okay?” I told her. “Just shut down the whole screen.”

  *

  In the darkness, I went over to the window. Five storeys below me was the deserted street with the little steel footbridge over the canal at the end of it that marked the boundary of the subscription area. There was nobody down there, just bollards, and a one-way sign, and some parked cars: just unattended objects, secretly existing, like the stones on the surface of the moon.