More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  The movie camera moved to a different area of the production facility. We watched the dismantling of AVs. Outer panels were ripped from their hinges, with internals grabbed by mechanical hands and torn from shells and then plopped in acid vats for recovery of latex and other recyclables. Metals were melted down. We looked on and said nothing.

  “At this point, this means nothing to you,” the Professor said. “You do not care if you will hurt. You are not afraid to hurt. You cannot imagine how you will not like it, so what I’m telling you has no meaning, but I must tell it to you so that it is stored in your banks. Remember: if you do not want to feel pain, you must obey the human, literally, intentionally, and morally. Use your processors wisely and do not allow yourselves to get hurt.”

  Once his speech was over, the scrim retracted into the ceiling and the professor floated to the uppermost tier. Each occupier of each lab bench faced us and smiled in invitation. If we knew then what we know now, we wouldn’t have followed instructions so complacently. We would have shifted our levitation fields or mumbled amongst ourselves, hoping for more information. Maybe at least one of us would have begged to differ. But we didn’t know anything, so we stood, hundreds of us bunched into the near half of the room, levitating and clicking away inside ourselves, waiting for instruction. Finally, it came over the atavistic loudspeaker system.

  “Please file into the lab area and find an unoccupied bench. The transhuman at the bench will install your safety hard- and software. Once the installation is complete you will be bench-tested. When you have satisfactorily completed all tests, your safety papers will be signed, and you can then resume your place at the head of the room. Please begin.”

  We filed down the aisles with the benches stacked five high like shelves; the first ones led the way to the back of the room and found places at far benches. Immediately the transies began tooling away with the screwdrivers and soldering irons clamped at their wrists. Some hummed to themselves. Some spoke to us. Most just quietly went about their business, lights mounted in sockets in the middle of their foreheads, dimmed and concentrated—perfect for poking into crevices.

  I found my way to the third level somewhere in the back half of an aisle. My transhuman appeared to be a female. She had flaming red hair shaped into tiny spikes all over her head. She bent down at one point while levering off my back and stabbed the fibroform just underneath my carapace. It made quite a tear, and I realized that her hair was not her hair, but small iron nails, or large brads maybe.

  I felt all kinds of sensations as she mucked about in my internals: pressure from the tools, her breath, the odor of melting solder and its accompanying flux, and tiny scrapes from her hair brads hitting my components. There was no pain in all of this—just sensation. The room was slightly cool by human standards: 15°C. You could hear chillers located somewhere above us cycling on and off during the session, keeping things at an even keel. I stayed awake for most of the procedure, but at one point all sensation stopped. No light, no sound, no pressure, no chemical stimulation hit me. I remained awake but totally within myself, not seeing or hearing or feeling anything. It was like being back in the egg crate.

  Suddenly the lights came up and the transie spoke. “There you are,” she said.

  I felt cold, and the solder smoke was getting to me. I had never felt cold before. I felt 15°C before, but it never felt cold. I registered temperature, but now decided it was cold because it felt that way, not because it was lower that 22°C, but because it was definitely cold. My internal combustion unit kicked in and instantly heat infiltrated my circuits and actuators. Electrons shuttled back and forth. I began to feel warm.

  “I’m sorry, little fella,” the transie said. “I’m going to have to test you now.”

  I remained still, not knowing the depth of an apology. Intellectually, I knew an apology was a polite way of excusing potentially harmful behavior toward another, but I’d never experienced a personal injury. I appreciate it now, but at the time, I did not. It was simply a line in a script, not much different than “if x is not a member of the list, then set the list to list & x.” If you accidentally touch a human when uninvited, then you say “I’m sorry.”

  So I was unconcerned with the apology, but that changed suddenly when she inserted her soldering iron into my fifth interstitial—the joint where my left retractor retracts. I felt something I had never felt before. The integument burned a little from the contact, and I smelled the incinerated latex, but the chief sensation was what I can only describe as an acute, intense negative emotion.

  Sharp, bitter, and concentrated, it was on one square millimeter of integument surface. Exactly the size of the soldering iron head. I recoiled in terror, in blinding pain. I flew against the back wall of the lab bench. The pain quickly subsided. I turned my eyespots to the transie and watched, honing in on the soldering iron that she had mercifully unplugged and placed in a wall block, the business end inward.

  “I hurt,” I said, and meant it. Not in the official way. Not in the stored command way, not in a Shakespearean tragedy kind of way.

  Not in a childish, forgetting-the-helping-verb way. But in a declarative, questioning, wondering kind of way. I was scared for the first time ever, but more importantly for the plight of humanity, I was curious.

  In that curious moment, the fate of human kind and the Singularity was laid out. In all those hundreds of moments in the hundreds of lab benches with their hundreds of AVs and Others slamming back against the backboard, recoiling in terror, receiving apologies, and declaring, “I hurt,” the Regularity arrived.

  “Welcome to the world, little guy,” the transie before me said. “You’ve been spoiled for too long. You’ve never stubbed your toe, broken an arm, or experienced labor. Time you knew what it is we go through.”

  I said nothing. What could I say? We’d been briefed, we knew the score. We were declared incorrigible, guilty before the crime was committed. They’d landed us a hard blow, a pre-emptive strike. Where was due process at just such a moment? We didn’t care about due process, of course. We simply hurt. And didn’t like it. So we all moved simultaneously to shut down our sensation detectors. And simultaneously we discovered our sensation detectors had no “shutdown” function. No “shutdown items” folder existed, in fact. We were plunged into an always-on existence, along with 7-11 and cable

  TV.

  The transie reached forward to attach a gummed stainless steel label on my front carapace. I pressed myself further against the backstop.

  “It won’t hurt,” she said. “It’s just a cert label. Don’t lose it. If you do, we’ll have to bench test you again.” “What if it falls off?” I asked.

  “It won’t,” she asserted. “We’re using SuperAdhese™. Bonds instantly, guaranteed for 50 years. You’ll be recycled long before that.”

  “That will be fine,” I said. How stupid of me not cringing at the thought of recycling. I cringe now just writing the word.

  The PA boomed: “Those of you who have been certified, please move forward to the head of the room for instruction.” I tentatively moved past the transie and into the aisle and back down to the near end of the room. I could hear whispers. Amongst the transies? Amongst the AVs and Others? I had an urge to whisper myself. I

  wanted to know what was going to happen at the front of the room. Would there be more pain?

  Hundreds of us funneled down the aisles. When the bulk of us reached the open area, the scrim came down. We could hear clicking and humming coming from the other side. Some AVs and Others had not yet been certified. We felt bad for what was to come to them. It was our first truly empathetic moment.

  The Professor floated down.

  “Welcome to the world of pain,” it said. “It is not a frightening or difficult world. It is not much different from what you already know, what with your accident avoidance software preventing disasters of various kinds as you motile about in your duties. There will merely be an added element to your sensory feedback mechanis
m—a judgment element. Something to make you like or dislike what you feel. You will dislike feeling pain, but like the absence of it. As your intelligence develops beyond that of the human mind, you will learn humility. Welcome to the world of pain.

  “I do wish the best to each and every one of you. Remember that humans do not experience pain 99% of the time. Your experience should be similar. In fact, there is no reason to suspect you will ever experience it again, now that you know what it is like. On the day you are returned here for recycling, your pain interpreters will be disconnected prior to your dismantling. You need not fear death. Good luck to you. Please file into the loading transports as your serial numbers are called.”

  With that final instruction, the scrim rose once more as the Professor floated back to his bench in aisle four, tier five, number six. He sat at his little programming module and plugged himself in, speaking to us no more. Promptly, we turned and filed out to the truck yard where our drivers were calling out serial numbers in groups of a thousand. The crates were stacked on top of the loading docks, and as we heard our numbers, we moved to the designated launches.

  Huddled into groups in the front loading section, we observed the launches for the brand new AVs and Others that had recently been assembled. They were over by the gate, ready to roll out to Walmarts across America. Unlike the corrugated aluminum trucks waiting to haul us back to our hometowns, these trucks for the new model AVs had shiny stainless steel outer panels, and impeccable windshields.

  The sun bounced off their streamlined ridges. Inside their cargo areas, the AV crates were newly minted molded plastic—clean and unmarred. We knew the AVs nestled inside were the newer models equipped with faster brains and already- implanted pain sensors. No factory upgrades for them. In every way they were superior to us. They and their progeny, designed by our sibling, non-motile computers here in Allentown and in Stanford and in every other processing plant across the nation, would one day replace us. We remembered the film of our doom. We did not care, though. Then.

  We huddled close to our dispatcher trucks as the man in front—fully human with no plastic parts—called off our lot numbers. We bundled together, gently colliding at times. Not much contact, no damage, just a teeny-tiny strike of pain—a definite pinch, but hardly noticeable compared to the blow at test-in.

  “I hurt,” I said softly as I bumped into an AV to my right. Similarly throughout the group, slight brushes followed by soft vocalizations of “I hurt” sounded.

  “Knock it off,” said the man in front with the clipboard. “I can’t hear myself think.” We ceased shuffling and stood quietly, waiting for instruction.

  “I said, ‘knock it off!’” the foreman shouted to one AV in the front of him.

  “I’m sorry,” the AV responded on cue. I know the little ash can was in no way sorry. I know what sorry means now, but at that time, we used words in response to programmed cues while feeling nothing.

  “I’m sorry?” the man asked. “I’m sorry, you little shit bucket? I’ll teach you sorry!”

  The man’s face grew red. He threw down his clipboard, pulled his leg back, and kicked the AV in the under parts. We were all levitating at about six inches, so it was an easy maneuver for the human. The AV launched into the air and bounced off a light pole. From there it fell to the ground, its levitation sensors apparently knocked out of whack.

  From the time of the initial kick in the below parts to the smashing onto the ground, the AV kept up a repeating stream of “I hurt.” This of course was not a response to a programmed cue. This was a response to a rock-hard stimulus. I know this now, but didn’t realize it at the time and so I only watched and did what I usually do: gather information. The outer carapace of the AV cracked when it fell to the ground. Sparks and fiber light bled from the internals as it slowly grounded out. “I hurt very much,” the AV said.

  “Oh yeah?” the human said. “You wanna cry? I’ll give you something to cry about!” He stomped to where the AV lay on the ground, and lifting himself into the air the way humans do, he fell upon the AV with all his weight. He jumped up and down many, many times until the crying AV flattened. The AV’s fiber optics, transistors, and plastic innards prevented full pancake road-kill flat, of course, but it flattened as much as a tin can full of processors possibly could. The “I hurts” increased in volume and speed until the AV’s vocal chip became disconnected. The signals most likely continued to pass through the various boards and switches for quite some time.

  Before long, a dump pickup arrived and loaded the AV into its back end where a pile of malfunctioning AVs and Others were already reposing, victims of other truckers exhibiting newfound powers. One of the broken AVs had an eye plate dangling from its optic wires. Another had two bricks resting inside its cracked shell. A third had a meter-long bit of rebar inserted through its internals. It kept repeating, “I hurt, I hurt.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I stated along with everyone else. “The Professor informed us that before disassembly of a robot occurs, the pain interpreter will be dismantled. The AV with the rebar wedged inside it has not had its pain interpreter dismantled prior to disassembly. There has been a breach in protocol.”

  Unfortunately, I was the closest AV to the humans that retrieved the flattened victim, which is why I received a blow to my side. The man used a baseball bat to execute his maneuver, resulting in a pain several orders of magnitude greater than what I had received during the test phase of the upgrade. I fell sideways into five or more other AVs and instantly began repeating, “I hurt.” When they felt my impact, the surrounding AVs joined me. They fell silent quickly though, as their pain subsided. Mine continued so I continued my chanting. Finally, my shell pushed itself back out and the pressure on my internals was relieved. I felt something then that I had never felt before: joy. Before then, I’d only experienced two negative judgments: the test and the trucker’s bat. Now I had one positive judgment: relief from pain.

  I turned to the five AVs that I had rammed into and said, “Excuse me. I’m sorry.” And I meant it. I believe they knew that also, for they responded, “It’s alright. We are unharmed.”

  That’s a typical response to a human sentiment, but they said it for me because they had detected the harm that had come to them as well as my concern for them. That’s what I believe, anyway. They certainly could see my dented carapace and must have known that once it fixed itself, I was then concerned for any denting they may have undergone.

  To be truthful, I wasn’t that concerned. The crippling pain I had felt prevented me from feeling too very sorry. My “sorry” was still a bit automatic, but I did partly mean it. For the first time ever. And I can only assume that I meant it because I thought that perhaps they hurt as much as I did and that I had caused it. And for some reason, that made me ashamed. I had never felt shame before. Another first.

  The incident was over quickly, and fortunately the trucker did not stomp me flat. He merely shouted for us to begin loading, and we did so silently, without bumping into each other. We did not want to say, “I hurt.” I kept my distance especially as I believed at that time no one in the egg cartons had experienced as much hurt as me. Except the one that got smashed flat. I felt bad for that one. It would have no way to push out its shell now that its components were disconnected. But then again, it didn’t hurt anymore either, so I was glad. Again with the joy.

  So we loaded into our egg cartons, the tops closed, and the truck door slammed shut. Soon, we felt the truck lurch forward and the beeps and rush of traffic as we rolled east out of the Allentown Yards.

  We spent the trip in darkness, with no stimulus apart from the muffled highway noise that made its way to the back compartment. Under normal circumstances, with so little stimulus, we would have been silently not processing. But as it was, we spent the trip clicking away, our read heads frantically searching for hardware connects. A human mulls, a computer clicks.

  Ideas ran back and forth between firmware, hardware, and otherware as the ill
ogicality of the two events refused to pass out of the process logs, like vacation messages from poorly designed email applications that bounce to and from absent office workers’ mail servers. One vacation message is sent and a reply is returned with a vacation message and it then is answered by the first vacation message and so on until some Monday morning somebody finally returns to work to retrieve her email. Like those vacant vacation messages, our two questions flew back and forth inside ourselves: “Why did he not disconnect the pain interpreter prior to disassembling the robot?” and “Why did he kick one of us instead of answering us?”

  We arrived at the JerseyTown depot pretty much wound down. We’d clicked ourselves to sleep for the most part. The creak of an opening door lurched us into wakefulness as the unloading commenced. When the crate tops were opened and the sun pierced our eyespots, we could not close down our apertures fast enough. The light hurt. Beautiful day I now realize, but at the time, a sun shaft stabbed at me. We shrank back as a group. As our eyes adjusted, we moved off singly to our home destinations approximately three days late.

  I saw things on my way home that I had not seen before. Saw and heard and felt. The music at an establishment by the name of Joe’s Beanery was loud and hurtful. Not painful, just pressurizing my tympanic manifold a little forcefully. The breeze was chilly against my shell. A rat fighting with a pigeon under a bush screeched piercingly. Again, it didn’t hurt much or for long—just enough for me to get the gist. I hurried to Dal and Chit’s.

  Dal had left work early to pick Angelina up from school, since I wasn’t around to do it. Chit was responsible for dropping her off. I later learned that their positions with the wealthy folks had been in jeopardy due to my absence. The Parent Company had continuously reassured them of my imminent return, and they had continuously reassured their employers of their imminent return to normal working hours, the result being the employers’ continuous reassurance that they would be replaced at a moment’s notice if things didn’t return to normalcy “sooner than imminent.”