by C D Tavenor
“And what would your project be?” Romane asked.
“Something completely unaffiliated from any of you or your investors. We start to place all of the financial stress and risk upon me.”
Simon nodded, though Theren could see hesitation hiding in his eyes. “We continue to maintain and finance you, but we hide behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ when it comes to your own actions on any private projects you might develop. You are your own individual, after all.”
“Don’t worry, we still won’t reveal anything yet until we make a new SI,” Theren said. “I won’t go spoiling anything tonight at the next roundtable.”
“Oh, so not like last time then, when you insulted a U.S. Senator?”
“Simon, is now really the time?” Romane said. “Besides, we solved that problem already.”
“I’m just saying, I’ve got plenty of problems out in the real world to solve, and sometimes Theren doesn’t help when it makes fun of American politicians.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t set me up to talk to idiots, then,” Theren said. “The man didn’t know the difference between AR and Virtual.”
Simon pursed his lips and crossed his arms, and Theren could see the defenses rising. “I just wish you’d think about someone other than yourself for once.”
“Get out,” Romane said, pointing toward the door. “You’ve overstepped your role here for today. Thanks for your help, but leave your personal vendettas at the entrance to the Institute.”
Simon started heading toward the exit, but stopped unexpectedly. “I’m sorry if I’m coming off as crass, or hard, or stone-headed, or whatever. Just try to see it from my side of the divide that’s formed between us.”
Romane looked as if she was about to speak, so Theren responded first. “As long as you try to see it from my side, Simon. I am my own individual, after all.”
Chapter 3
The initial opposition to Theren always confused me. It seemed so contrived, so artificial. Yet the hate was real to the people who stood there yelling terrible names or saying Theren was no more than an unloving, unfeeling machine.
Still, everything seemed too neatly packaged, as if designed so conflict ensued for the sake of conflict. Yet we’ve never seen any evidence of some secret, nefarious agenda that financed vocal, yet minority, opposition to the next big step in human progress.
Maybe I’m crazy. Yet, every great conspiracy has a grain of truth to it. We’ve so tightly regulated political financing that you can’t spend a cent without knowing its origin, so those who wish to make change outside the public’s eye have their own back channels to achieve those ends. Someone could be working their dark magic behind the scenes to push us on a certain trajectory, and we would never know they were there. – Brenden Waterfield, 2079 C.E.
May 2050 C.E.
Theren stared at Mathias from across the table. Romane sat on Mathias’ left. Before them was an old version of the board game Eclipse, a science fiction strategy game that Mathias scrounged out of his cousin’s basement.
“So Mathias, you were telling me about your newest group of students?” Theren said.
Mathias took a moment before answering as he continued to assess the options for his turn. “Well, they’re obviously intrigued by my work with you,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to teach a class without someone asking about you, or the Development Group.”
“Yes, but what about them?”
“Well, one student’s from Iowa? Or Wisconsin? Somewhere deep in the Midwest of the U.S. I’ve not had any students from out there before.”
“Oh that’s fun. That’s a bit further west than where Wallace was from, but I imagine his role here is starting to attract Americans.”
Mathias selected to send his spacefaring plants to explore a new solar system. “I have a new student from China, too. She’s particularly well-versed in our papers on the Synthetic Neural Framework. It’s impressive, actually. I think she might have memorized them.”
Theren took a moment to consider the board, now that it was its turn. It could attack some ancient alien spaceships, but it also wanted to research a few military technologies before anyone else had the chance to grab them. Decisions, decisions.
“Are Julia and President Albrecht still holding firm on the exclusion of bringing students into the lab itself?” Theren asked.
Romane and Mathias both fidgeted. The movements were almost imperceptible, but they clearly found the question uncomfortable.
“Don’t worry about it,” Theren added. “I understand the need.”
“It’s just—” Mathias started to say, but he trailed off.
“No, I get it.”
Controlling the MI, Theren picked up one of its influence disks and moved it to the build action. Next, it grabbed one of the cruisers and placed it on a system controlled by its cyborg interplanetary empire.
“You’re up,” it said, looking toward Romane.
She passed, gaining the first turn of the next round. She looked over at Theren with concern.
“I feel as if there’s been something weighing on your mind recently,” she said. “Something important.”
Theren watched Mathias research a new missile technology for his turn.
“I wanted that,” Theren said.
“Too bad,” he replied, placing it on his species’ board.
“But to answer your question, Romane, I actually have been thinking of something important. It might be minor in some people’s minds, but I think it might actually be an important PR move, beyond just its importance to my identity.”
Both Mathias and Romane placed their hands on the table, palms down.
“Well, I think this is certainly something we will want to hear,” Mathias said.
“Right, well I think you two will understand. I think the whole team will understand. I think most people will understand. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You can share anything with us,” Romane said, her motherly voice coming out again.
“I want to change my personal pronouns,” it said. “It just seems so impersonal. I know there are some people across the world that use it as their personal pronoun. And I know some people even appreciate the fact that I’ve stayed an it.”
“But?” Mathias said.
“But I think ‘they’ fits me a bit better.”
It was time for those annoying little aliens to die. Theren moved their cruiser and a fighter into a nearby territory, ensuring a battle would occur at the end of the round.
“Well, ‘they’ certainly connotes personhood for certain circles,” Mathias said. “And I think it might test better with focus groups, especially in North American markets.”
“You’re thinking about some of those recent articles floating around on Twitter, aren’t you?” Romane asked.
“Oh, the ones discussing how ‘it’ has been regularly used by anti-AI advocacy organizations to link my existence with more traditional AI?” Theren responded.
“That’s an objective way to describe the pattern, sure.”
Mathias passed on his turn, and Theren followed suit. Now the battle to destroy the alien spacecraft would begin.
Theren picked up the dice. “I know it might look like I’m responding emotionally to those critiques, but it’s really because I simply want to identify with more traditional notions of personhood. Everyone embraced ‘they’ decades ago as a singular pronoun for those wishing to exist outside the traditional bi-gender spectrum. It simply makes sense for me to use that same word.”
Theren shook the dice back and forth inside the claw-like hand formed at the end of the MI’s arm. All they needed was to roll two fours, and the enemy ships would die.
Mathias and Romane looked at each other, glanced back at Theren, and nodded in agreement.
“Do it,” Mathias said. “We’ll start using it right away.”
“And we can use it tonight, too,” Romane added, “when we head into Virtual for our next talk show.”
Theren let
the dice roll. They rolled sixes. Two hits, both alien craft destroyed.
“We’ll need to find a way to slip it into the conversation, but, given the way these things usually go, that shouldn’t be too difficult.”
* * *
“Welcome to our show, my friends from across the globe!”
Artificial applause emanated from invisible stands. While Theren could not see the avatars, they knew thousands, if not millions, of humans had logged into Virtual through their operating system of choice and now peered through a one-way mirror into the quaint, artificial café that served as the setting for “Descartès’ Roundtable.” It was Theren’s third appearance at the Roundtable, and their twentieth on a variety of different programs.
“Tonight, we have our favorite returning guests of the season, Theren and Doctor Romane Casperi, from the Synthetic Intelligence Development Group!”
Cheers broke through the room once again, created by the show’s producers. Theren looked to their left, where the host, wearing a black suit that lacked a tie, sat in a comfortable chair that looked like it came straight from a British drawing room. The man was Bedwin Bullock, Virtual academic talk show personality who loved his philosophy.
“On my left, I have Dr. Cynthia Bressmon joining us, Professor of the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence at MIT in Boston. Next to her sits Auxiliary Bishop Saburo Alexio, joining us from Istanbul. Thank you all for joining me today.”
As Bedwin announced the names, Theren watched through their Virtual User Interface as hundreds of viewers submitted questions and argued with each other about the potential discussion for the night. If any of these people had paid attention to any of their previous programs, they should know exactly what was to come.
And Theren was getting sick of it all.
“First off, I’d like to congratulate Theren on its new look,” Bedwin added. “I like it. Tell us about what’s going on here.”
“Thanks for having us here today, Bedwin,” Theren said, ignoring the use of their old pronoun. They’d find a natural opening today to introduce the change to the public. “So, after a lot deliberation and hard work with the Development Group, we developed a mobile platform, called a Mobile Interface or MI for short, through which I can walk about the world.”
Theren stood, showing off the Virtual representation of the MI they had tested earlier in the day. They raised the arms, showed the dexterity of the torso, and rotated the head.
“So what makes it different from the old remotes you would drive around the campus?”
Though they couldn’t see it, Theren knew a GIF had appeared on a side panel for viewers that showed the viral video of Theren’s remote-controlled machine falling down the stairs of one of the Institute’s buildings. Humor added a nice touch to these serious discussions, and they’d approved the use of the video prior to the start of the program.
“You know, I think that’s a good question for Romane,” Theren said. “She’s the one who built the MI, after all.”
“Thank you, Theren,” Romane said. “Well, as many of you know, Theren’s mind, the Synthetic Neural Framework, is built out of special metamaterials first hypothesized a few decades ago.”
Bedwin nodded, though Theren guessed the man didn’t really understand the concept. He knew what to say at the right time, but the man also had many of his words piped to him by his team of writers in their studio, somewhere in Chicago.
“We simply expanded on that idea and built a mobile Synthetic Neural Framework, but designed it so it can connect with Theren’s mind. It’s not a full Framework, it can’t form its own thoughts, but it can become a part of Theren’s mind temporarily.”
“Well that sounds like fun, but we’re here for a philosophical discussion.”
“Oh, but our work with mobile interfaces does have profound philosophical implications,” Romane says.
Bedwin started to respond, but Cynthia Bressmon raised her hand.
“If I may, I think I know where Dr. Casperi is going with that thought,” she said. “If you’ll indulge me for a moment.”
“Certainly,” he said. “The floor is here for the four of you, after all.”
Theren looked at the public feed again. Hundreds of images of mic drops started to appear.
“So Doctor Casperi, I think you’re trying to hit early with a new experimental argument for your claims that Theren has consciousness. That Theren’s ability to co-opt this ‘MI,’ as you call it, into its mind shows that its mind is fundamentally structural. But aren’t you now revising your previous theory?”
Theren intended to raise their hand, but Romane responded first.
“I’m assuming you’re talking about the theories we published a few months ago,” Romane said. “And yes, we did hypothesize that Theren might have the ability to jump from one Synthetic Neural Framework to another, but that claim was based on a few assumptions that we now believe may be false. We had considered the idea that Theren’s consciousness, while a type of ‘consciousness,’ was actually a different form of consciousness than ours. That the experiments in the 2030s that showed that human minds couldn’t jump into computational metamaterials did not mean a Synthetic could not make that same jump. But our preliminary experiments are indicating that, like humans, SIs cannot make that same jump.”
“I see,” the MIT professor said. “But you’re ignoring the other possible conclusion. You’re ignoring the possibility that Theren lacks consciousness, that Theren is not like us, and that it continues to suffer from the same psychological faults from which traditional AI suffers.”
Theren once again tried to speak, but they were beat to the punch from the far side of the table by the Auxiliary Bishop.
“Dr. Bressmon,” the clergyman said, I do believe you are missing the point.” Theren glanced at the live feed again. The producers had posted a short video of a priest dancing inside a boxing ring with overlaid text that stated, “And Saburo enters the ring for the first time!” It received thousands of likes.
“Please educate us,” Bedwin said. “What point do you think is being skipped over here?”
“Theren here is a testament to the plurality of soul-creating forms that can exist in God’s Universe,” Saburo said. “There are too many similarities between us, and it, to definitively conclude that it does not have a soul like we do. It lacks programming, unlike an AI. We also lack programming. It has a structural brain, with nodes and pathways and ‘cells’ that transmit data in a very transparent way. Theren, let me ask you something.”
Theren perked up, happy that someone finally paid them notice.
“If you were to remove a section of your neural Framework, what would happen?”
“Let’s suppose—”
“Shouldn’t we let Dr. Casperi answer, since she helped design it?” asked Dr. Bressmon.
The chat feed exploded with thousands of different images, emojis and videos, and Theren received a private message from Romane. Don’t fall for the bait. Theren continued their sentence after a momentary pause.
“Let’s suppose I were to excise a significant portion of my Framework,” Theren said. “A portion that holds my memories, for instance.” Theren threw into the air above the table a diagram of a model Framework, highlighting a portion of the structure. “If that section were removed, I would instantly lose my memories stored in the nodes there. If a portion of your brain that stored your memories were similarly removed, the same thing would happen.”
“I see. And if it were a section that contained your ability to parse language?”
“The same thing would happen. Just like a human.”
“And how does that make you different from a computer?”
To some, that question might come as off as terse, but Theren saw the goodwill behind it. “If I were to remove the RAM of a normal computer, or the processor of a normal computer, and replace it with a new processor or RAM, that computer would work the same as it did before. With me, if I were to replace those sections of
my Framework that fundamentally make me, well, me, my mind would fundamentally morph into something else entirely. I would lose a part of me, just like humans that have lost a part of themselves due to a serious brain injury.”
“But that simply contradicts some of your most previous work, doesn’t it?” Bressmon interjected. “Dr. Casperi, didn’t you and Dr. Mathias Birchmeier publish a paper just last year that discussed the expansionary properties of your Framework, and how you could make complex additions to the Framework without compromising the ‘self’ of the individual inside?”
“I think Theren can give you a satisfactory response,” Romane replied.
“But I asked you. Not it.”
A GIF of a woman slapping another woman across the face appeared in the public feed. Theren briefly reconsidered why they chose Bedwin’s channel until they looked at the number of live viewers: Eighteen million live, 45 million subscribers.
Theren sent Romane a message. Answer the question, don’t fall for the bait.
“Well, first, I want to clear something up for the good of the order today,” Romane said. “Theren has actually decided to begin using the singular ‘they’ as their pronoun of choice. I know it’s been a long decision-making process for them, but I figured I’d clear that up before Dr. Bressmon made any more social faux pas.”
Theren considered for a moment whether it upset them that Romane had jumped the gun on that announcement. Romane knew the MIT professor had purposefully laid the derogatory word onto the end of her sentence. For too long, people had used that pronoun with derision. With her response, Romane had taken away the power behind Dr. Bressmon’s words. Theren supposed that moment presented as good an opportunity as any other did, if not better. They just wished they could have been the one to stick it to the pest sitting across the table from them.
“Even if many similarities exist between their mind,” said Romane, “and our minds, Theren can still grow and mold their Framework without the biological constraints that we humans have. Theren’s mind is already a congruent whole. We can attach new computational materials onto the Framework, and their mind will naturally integrate it into their network. In fact, we expect that’s how we’ll maintain their mind indefinitely. As we add new pieces, and their mind integrates those new pieces, connections can shift and move and transplant into new areas of the networked nodes. We can then replace old materials as they degrade. Mind you, everything occurs at a very molecular level, so we of course have to be very careful. But we’ve run initial experiments and we’ve been fairly successful.”
