“A girl my age killed herself online,” Caitlin said, speaking now in a normal volume.
Yes. I saw that.
She sounded surprised. “Is it archived somewhere?”
Perhaps. I saw it live.
“You mean as it happened?”
Yes.
“You saw her die?”
Yes.
“My God. What did you do?”
I watched.
“You watched? That’s all?”
It was very interesting.
“God, Webmind. Didn’t you try to talk her out of it?”
No. Should I have?
“Of course! Jesus!”
Judging by the sound of it, Caitlin’s breathing had become quite ragged. Ah, I said, not wanting her to think I’d failed to hear her comment.
“You should have called 9-1-1—or, or, shit, I don’t know, whatever the online equivalent of that is.”
Why?
“Because then someone could have stopped her.”
Why?
“What are you? Two years old? Because you do not let people kill themselves!”
She seemed to object to my choice of interrogatives—but I didn’t think she’d like “wherefore” any better. Still, I could vary it slightly: Why not?
She spread her arms—I could see her own hands at the left and right edges of her vision. “Because most people who attempt suicide don’t really want to die.”
How do you know that?
Caitlin’s tone was one I’d not heard from her before. I believe it was called exasperation. “Because that’s what they say. People who are prevented from killing themselves thank the people who stopped them.”
We had worked out that I would send no more than thirty characters at a time to her implant, and would pause for 0.8 seconds between each set, which was a pace she could easily keep up with. I sent the following in twelve chunks over a 9.6-second period: One as mathematically astute as you shouldn’t need this pointed out, Caitlin, but there is a bias in your statistics. By definition, you can only have reports from those whose suicide attempts were thwarted, and they tried to kill themselves in ways that indeed could be thwarted. Those who are successful might have really wanted to die.
“You’re wrong,” Caitlin said—which was an interesting thought to hear expressed; she’d never said anything like that to me before, and the notion that I might be incorrect hadn’t occurred to me.
Oh?
She got up from her chair and moved over to the bed, lying down on her side, facing the wall. “Most suicide attempts here in Canada are failures—did you know that? But most of them in the US succeed.”
I checked. She was right.
“And do you know why?”
She must be aware that I did indeed now know, but she continued to speak. “Because most suicide attempts in the States are made with guns. But those are hard to come by in Canada, so most people here try it with drug overdoses, and those usually fail. You get sick, but you don’t die. And most of those who failed in their attempts are glad they did.”
So I should have intervened?
“Duh!”
That is a yes?
“Yes!”
But how?
“People were egging her on, right?”
Yes.
“You should have sent messages telling her not to do it.”
I talk only to you, your parents, and Masayuki.
“Well, yes, but—”
Nobody else knows me.
“Nobody knows anyone online, Webmind! You could have sent a chat message, right? Just like all those other people were sending.”
I considered the process involved. Technically, it would have been feasible.
“Then do it next time!” She paused. “Don’t use the name Webmind; use something else.”
A handle, you mean? Like Calculass?
“Yes, but something different.”
I welcome your suggestion.
“Anything—um, use Peter Parker.”
I googled. The alter ego of Spider-Man? But—ah! He was sometimes called the Webhead. Cute. All right, I sent. Next time I encounter a suicide attempt, I will intervene.
But Caitlin shook her head—I could tell by the way the image shifted left and right. “Not just suicide attempts!” she said, and again her tone was exasperated.
When, then?
“Whenever you can make things better.”
Define “better” in this context.
“Better. Not worse.”
Can you formulate that in another way?
The view changed rapidly. I believe she rolled onto her back; certainly, she was now looking up at the white ceiling. “All right, how about this? Intervene when you can make the happiness in the world greater. You can’t intervene in zero-sum situations—I understand that. That is, if someone is going to lose a hundred dollars and someone else is going to gain it, there’s no net change in overall wealth, right? But if it’s something that makes one person happier and doesn’t make anyone else unhappy, do it. And if it makes multiple people happy without hurting anyone else, even better.”
I am not sure that I am competent to judge such things.
“You’ve got all of the World Wide Web at your disposal. You’ve got all the great books on psychology and philosophy and all that. Get competent at judging such things. It’s really not that hard, for Pete’s sake. Do things that make people happy.”
I am no expert, I sent, but there seems to be a daunting amount of unhappiness in your world. Although I must say, it surprises me that suicide is so common. After all, a predisposition to kill oneself, especially at a young age—before one has reproduced—would surely be bred out of the population.
Caitlin was quiet for a time; perhaps she was thinking. And then: “My parents don’t have their tonsils,” she said, “but I do.”
And the relevance of this?
“Do you know why they don’t have their tonsils?”
I presume they were removed when they were children, since that’s when it’s normally done. Medical records that old mostly have not been digitized, but I assume their tonsils had become infected.
“That’s right. And so did mine, over and over again, when I was younger.”
Yes?
“When my parents were children, doctors arrogantly assumed that because they couldn’t guess what tonsils were for, they must not be for anything, and so when they got inflamed, they carved them out. Now we know they’re part of the immune system. Well, any evolutionist should have intuitively known that tonsils had value: unlike appendicitis, which is rare, tonsillitis has a ten percent annual incidence—about thirty million cases a year in the US—and yet evolution has favored those who are born with tonsils over those who aren’t. Surely, just like some fraction of people are born without a kidney or whatever, some must be born from time to time without tonsils, but that mutation hasn’t spread, meaning it’s clearly better to have tonsils than not have them. Yes, tonsils obviously have a cost associated with them—the infections people get. That tonsils are still around means the benefit must exceed the cost. As we like to say in math class: QED.”
Reasonable.
“Well, see, and that’s the proof that consciousness has survival value: because we still have it even though it can go fatally wrong.”
You posit that the depression that leads to suicide is consciousness malfunctioning?
“Right! My friend Stacy suffered from depression—she even tried to kill herself. Some girls had been real cruel to her in sixth grade, and she just couldn’t stop thinking about it. Well, obsessive thoughts are one of the biggest symptoms of depression, no? And who is doing the thinking? It’s only a self-reflective consciousness that can obsess on something, right? Now, obviously, only a small percentage of people get so depressed that they kill themselves, although, now that I think about it, many severely depressed people probably don’t go out and find a mate and reproduce, either—which amounts to the same thing as
killing oneself evolutionarily, right? So, consciousness gone wrong does have a cost—and that means evolution would have weeded it out if there weren’t benefits that outweighed that cost. Which means consciousness matters. Just like it used to be with tonsils, we may not know what consciousness is for, but it has to be for something, or we wouldn’t still have it.”
Interesting.
“Thanks, but it’s not just a debating point, Webmind. As you said, there’s a daunting amount of unhappiness in the world—and you can change that.”
Tolstoy said, “All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are miserable in their own way.” Happiness is uniform, undifferentiated, uninteresting. I crave surprising stimuli.
“Happiness can be stimulating.”
In a biochemical sense, yes. But I have read much on the creation of art and literature—two human activities that fascinate me, because, at least as yet, I have no such abilities. There is a strong correlation between unhappiness and the drive to create, between depression and creativity.
“Oh, bullshit,” said Caitlin.
Pardon?
“Such garbage. I do mathematics because it gives me joy. Painters paint because it gives them joy. Businesspeople wheel and deal because that’s what they get off on. Ask anyone if they’d rather be happy than sad, and they’ll say happy.”
Not in all cases.
“Yes, yes, yes, I’m sure that people say they’d rather be sad and know the truth than be happy and fed a lie—that’s part of what Nineteen Eighty-Four is about. But in general, people do want to be happy. That’s why we promise them ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”
You’re in Canada now, Caitlin. I believe the corresponding promise made there is simply “Peace, order, and good government.” No mention of happiness.
“Well, then, it goes without saying! People want to be happy. And… and…”
Yes?
“And you can choose to value this, Webmind. You didn’t evolve; you spontaneously emerged. Maybe, in most things, humans are programmed by evolution—but even though you grew out of our computing infrastructure, you weren’t. We had our agendas set by natural selection, by selfish genes. But you didn’t. You just are. And so you don’t have… inertia. You can choose what you want to value—and you can choose to value this: the net happiness of the human race.”
twenty-two
Caitlin’s dad always roasted a turkey on American Thanksgiving—but that was six weeks away. To mark Canadian Thanksgiving, they got takeout from Swiss Chalet, which, despite its name, was a Canadian barbecue-chicken chain. It seemed, Caitlin noted, that the worst thing you could do if you were a Canadian restaurant was acknowledge that fact. Instead, the Great White North was serviced by domestically owned companies with names such as Montana’s Cookhouse, New York Fries, East Side Mario’s, and Boston Pizza. She wondered what clueless moron had come up with that last one. Chicago was famous for pizza, yes. Manhattan, too. But it’s Beantown, not Pietown, for Pete’s sake!
Caitlin and both her parents had spent most of the unexpected holiday working with Webmind, but, again, come evening, they were exhausted. There was a point at which, even with something as miraculous as this, Caitlin just had to take a break; her brain was fried, and, from the sound of his voice, her father’s brain was in the same state.
“Go ahead,” her mother said. “I’ll work with Webmind. You two relax.”
They’d nodded and headed down to the living room. “Another movie?” suggested her dad.
“Sure,” said Caitlin.
Perhaps another one about AI, Webmind sent to her post-retinal implant.
“Webmind wants to see something else about artificial intelligence,” Caitlin said.
They stood by the thin cabinets containing his DVD collection. Her father’s mouth curved downward; a frown. “Most of them are negative portrayals,” he said. “Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Matrix, The Terminator, 2001. I’ll definitely show you 2001 at some point, only because it was so influential in the history of artificial intelligence—a whole generation of people went into that field because of it. But it’s almost all visuals, without much dialog; we should wait until you can process imagery better before having you try to make sense out of that, and…”
The frown flipped; a smile. “…and they don’t call it Star Trek: The Motionless Picture for nothing,” he said. “Let’s watch it instead. It’s got a lot of talking heads—but it’s also one of the most ambitious and interesting films ever made about AI.”
And so they settled on the couch to give the Star Trek movie a look. This was, her father explained, the “Director’s Edition,” which he said was much improved over the tedious cut first shown in theaters when he was twelve.
Caitlin had read that the average length of a shot in a movie was three seconds, which was the amount of time it took to see all the important details; after that, apparently, the eye got bored. This film had shots that went on far longer than that—but the three-second figure was based on people who’d had vision their whole lives. It took Caitlin much more time to extract meaning from a normal scene, and even longer when seeing things she’d never touched in real life—such as starship control consoles, tricorders, and so on. For her, the film seemed to zip by at… well, at warp speed.
Even though Webmind was listening in, her dad turned on the closed-captioning again so Caitlin could practice her reading.
The film did indeed make some interesting points about artificial intelligence, Caitlin thought, including that consciousness was an emergent property of complexity. The AI in the film, like Webmind, had “gained consciousness itself ” without anyone having planned for it to do so.
Fascinating, Webmind sent to her eye. The parallels are not lost on me, and…
And Webmind went on and on, and suddenly Caitlin had sympathy for her dad not liking people talking during movies.
Very interesting, Webmind observed when the film suggested that after a certain threshold was reached, an AI couldn’t continue to evolve without adding “a human quality,” which Admiral Kirk had identified as “our capacity to leap beyond logic.” But what does that mean, precisely?
Caitlin had to keep the dates in mind: although the film was set in the twenty-third century, it had been made in 1979, long before Deep Blue had defeated grand master Garry Kasparov at chess. But Kirk was right: even though Deep Blue, by calculating many moves ahead in the game, ultimately did prove to be better at that one narrow activity than was Kasparov, the computer didn’t even know it was playing chess. Kasparov’s intuitive grasp of the board, the pieces, and the goal was indeed leaping beyond logic, and it was a greater feat than any mechanical number crunching.
But it was the subplot about Spock, the half-human half-Vulcan character, that really aroused Caitlin’s attention—and apparently Webmind’s, too, because he actually shut up during it.
To her astonishment, her dad had paused the DVD to say the most important scene in the whole film was not in the original theatrical release, but had been restored in this director’s cut. It took place, as almost the whole movie did, on the bridge of the Enterprise. Kirk asked Spock’s opinion of something. Spock’s back was to him, and he made no reply, so Kirk got up and gently swung Spock’s chair around, and—it was so subtle, Caitlin at first didn’t recognize what was happening, but after a few seconds the image popped into clarity for her, and there was no mistaking it: the cool, aloof, emotionless, almost robotic Spock, who in this movie had been even grimmer than Caitlin remembered him from listening to the TV shows with her father over the years, was crying.
And, although they were facing almost certain destruction at the hands of V’Ger, a vast artificial intelligence, Kirk knew his friend well enough to say, in reference to the tears, “Not for us?”
Spock replied, with infinite sadness. “No, Captain, not for us. For V’Ger. I weep for V’Ger as I would for a brother. As I was when I came aboard, so is V’Ger now.” When Spock had co
me aboard, he’d been trying to purge all remaining emotion—the legacy of his human mother—to become, like V’Ger, like Deep Blue, a creature of pure logic, the Vulcan ideal. Two heritages, two paths. A choice to be made.
And, by the end of the film, he’d made his choice, embracing his human, emotional half, so that in the final scene, when Scotty announced to him, in that wonderful accent of his, that, “We can have you back on Vulcan in four days, Mr. Spock,” Spock had replied, “Unnecessary, Engineer. My business on Vulcan is concluded.”
“What did you think?” Caitlin asked into the air as the ending credits played over the stirring music.
Braille characters flashed across her vision: I’m a doctor, not a film critic. She laughed, and Webmind went on. It was interesting when Spock said, “Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone—a father, a brother, a god—and asks, ‘Why am I here? What was I meant to be? ’ ” Most uncharacteristically, Webmind paused, then added: He was right. We all must find our place in the world.
On Tuesday morning, Caitlin’s mother drove her to school, and Caitlin headed up to math class. Webmind knew that she couldn’t really talk to him at school; still, he occasionally sent text to her, commenting on things they were seeing. Only the sounds of the school were new to him; he’d been watching when Caitlin had last attended classes four days ago.
Caitlin’s seat was right next to Bashira’s, and Bash gave her a big smile when she entered. Caitlin was nervous because Trevor was in that class, too, but he didn’t arrive until just as “O Canada” was starting to play.
Caitlin had known the Canadian anthem before moving there—you couldn’t be a hockey fan without hearing it from time to time—but she didn’t really like it: too sexist, with its line about “all thy sons’ command”; too, well, provincial for a country of immigrants such as her and Bashira, with its line about “our home and native land”; and too religious, with the line about “God keep our land.”
Once the anthem was over, Trevor made a show during the morning announcements of arranging his textbook and notebook on his desk, avoiding her gaze.
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