by D B Hartwell
The interviews, along with all the other marketing tricks, did their job. We had to outsource manufacturing so quickly that for a while every shantytown along the coast of China must have been turning out Lauras.
• • • •
The foyer of the bed-and-breakfast we are staying at is predictably filled with brochures from local attractions. Most of them are witch-themed. The lurid pictures and language somehow manage to convey moral outrage and adolescent fascination with the occult at the same time.
David, the innkeeper, wants us to check out Ye Olde Poppet Shoppe, featuring “Dolls Made by Salem’s Official Witch.” Bridget Bishop, one of the twenty executed during the Salem Witch Trials, was convicted partly based on the hard evidence of “poppets” found in her cellar with pins stuck in them.
Maybe she was just like me, a crazy, grown woman playing with dolls. The very idea of visiting a doll shop makes my stomach turn.
While Brad is asking David about restaurants and possible discounts I go up to our room. I want to be sleeping, or at least pretending to be sleeping, by the time he comes up. Maybe then he will leave me alone, and give me a few minutes to think. It’s hard to think with the Oxetine. There’s a wall in my head, a gauzy wall that tries to cushion every thought with contentment.
If only I can remember what went wrong.
• • • •
For our honeymoon Brad and I went to Europe. We went on the transorbital shuttle, the tickets for which cost more than my yearly rent. But we could afford it. Witty Kimberly™, our latest model, was selling well, and the stock price was transorbital itself.
When we got back from the shuttleport, we were tired but happy. And I still couldn’t quite believe that we were in our own home, thinking of each other as husband and wife. It felt like playing house. We made dinner together, like we used to when we were dating (like always, Brad was wildly ambitious but couldn’t follow a recipe longer than a paragraph and I had to come and rescue his shrimp étouffée). The familiarity of the routine made everything seem more real.
Over dinner Brad told me something interesting. According to a market survey, over 20% of the customers for Kimberly were not buying it for their kids at all. They played with the dolls themselves.
“Many of them are engineers and comp sci students,” Brad said. “And there are already tons of Net sites devoted to hacking efforts on Kimberly. My favorite one had step-by-step instructions on how to teach Kimberly to make up and tell lawyer jokes. I can’t wait to see the faces of the guys in the legal department when they get to drafting the cease-and-desist letter for that one.”
I could understand the interest in Kimberly. When I was struggling with my problem sets at MIT I would have loved to take apart something like Kimberly to figure out how she worked. How it worked, I corrected myself mentally. Kimberly’s illusion of intelligence was so real that sometimes even I unconsciously gave her, it, too much credit.
“Actually, maybe we shouldn’t try to shut the hacking efforts down,” I said. “Maybe we can capitalize on it. We can release some of the APIs and sell a developer’s kit for the geeks.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Kimberly is a toy, but that doesn’t mean only little girls would be interested in her.” I gave up trying to manage the pronouns. “She does, after all, have the most sophisticated, working, natural conversation library in the world.”
“A library that you wrote,” Brad said. Well, maybe I was a little vain about it. But I’d worked damned hard on that library and I was proud of it.
“It would be a shame if the language processing module never got any application besides sitting in a doll that everyone is going to forget in a year. We can release the interface to the modules at least, a programming guide, and maybe even some of the source code. Let’s see what happens and make an extra dollar while we’re at it.” I never got into academic AI research because I couldn’t take the tedium, but I did have greater ambitions than just making talking dolls. I wanted to see smart and talking machines doing something real, like teaching kids to read or helping the elderly with chores.
I knew that he would agree with me in the end. Despite his serious exterior he was willing to take risks and defy expectations. It was why I loved him.
I got up to clear the dishes. His hand reached across the table and grabbed mine. “Those can wait,” he said. He walked around the table, pulling me to him. I looked into his eyes. I loved the fact that I knew him so well I could tell what he was going to say before he said it. Let’s make a baby, I imagined him saying. Those would have been the only words right for that moment.
And so he did.
• • • •
I’m not asleep when Brad finishes asking about restaurants and comes upstairs. In my drugged state, even pretending is too difficult.
Brad wants to go to the pirate museum. I tell him that I don’t want to see anything violent. He agrees immediately. That’s what he wants to hear from his content, recovering wife.
So now we wander around the galleries of the Peabody Essex Museum, looking at the old treasures of the Orient from Salem’s glory days.
The collection of china is terrible. The workmanship in the bowls and saucers is inexcusable. The patterns look like they were traced on by children. According to the placards, these were what the Cantonese merchants exported for foreign consumption. They would never have sold such stuff in China itself.
I read the description written by a Jesuit priest who visited the Cantonese shops of the time.
The craftsmen sat in a line, each with his own brush and specialty. The first drew only the mountains, the next only the grass, the next only the flowers, and the next only the animals. They went on down the line, passing the plates from one to the next, and it took each man only a few seconds to complete his part.
So the “treasures” are nothing more than mass-produced cheap exports from an ancient sweatshop and assembly line. I imagine painting the same blades of grass on a thousand teacups a day: the same routine, repeated over and over, with maybe a small break for lunch. Reach out, pick up the cup in front of you with your left hand, dip the brush, one, two, three strokes, put the cup behind you, rinse and repeat. What a simple algorithm. It’s so human.
• • • •
Brad and I fought for three months before he agreed to produce Aimée, just plain Aimée™.
We fought at home, where night after night I laid out the same forty-one reasons why we should and he laid out the same thirty-nine reasons why we shouldn’t. We fought at work, where people stared through the glass door at Brad and me gesticulating at each other wildly, silently.
I was so tired that night. I had spent the whole evening locked away in my study, struggling to get the routines to control Aimée’s involuntary muscle spasms right. It had to be right or she wouldn’t feel real, no matter how good the learning algorithms were.
I came up to the bedroom. There was no light. Brad had gone to bed early. He was exhausted too. We had again hurled the same reasons at each other during dinner.
He wasn’t asleep. “Are we going to go on like this?” he asked in the darkness.
I sat down on my side of the bed and undressed. “I can’t stop it,” I said. “I miss her too much. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t say anything. I finished unbuttoning my blouse and turned around. With the moonlight coming through the window I could see that his face was wet. I started crying too.
When we both finally stopped, Brad said, “I miss her too.”
“I know,” I said. But not like me.
“It won’t be anything like her, you know?” he said.
“I know,” I said.
The real Aimée had lived for ninety-one days. Forty-five of those days she’d spent under the glass hood in intensive care, where I could not touch her except for brief doctor-supervised sessions. But I could hear her cries. I could always hear her cries. In the end I tried to break through the glass with my hands, and I beat
my palms against the unyielding glass until the bones broke and they sedated me.
I could never have another child. The walls of my womb had not healed properly and never would. By the time that piece of news was given to me Aimée was a jar of ashes in my closet.
But I could still hear her cries.
How many other women were like me? I wanted something to fill my arms, something to learn to speak, to walk, to grow a little, long enough for me to say goodbye, long enough to quiet those cries. But not a real child. I couldn’t deal with another real child. It would feel like a betrayal.
With a little plastiskin, a little synthgel, the right set of motors and a lot of clever programming, I could do it. Let technology heal all wounds.
Brad thought the idea an abomination. He was revolted. He couldn’t understand.
I fumbled around in the dark for some tissues for Brad and me.
“This may ruin us, and the company,” he said.
“I know,” I said. I lay down. I wanted to sleep.
“Let’s do it, then,” he said.
I didn’t want to sleep any more.
“I can’t take it,” he said. “Seeing you like this. Seeing you in so much pain tears me up. It hurts too much.”
I started crying again. This understanding, this pain. Was this what love was about?
Right before I fell asleep Brad said, “Maybe we should think about changing the name of the company.”
“Why?”
“Well, I just realized that ‘Not Your Average Toy’ sounds pretty funny to the dirty-minded.”
I smiled. Sometimes the vulgar is the best kind of medicine.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
• • • •
Brad hands me the pills. I obediently take them and put them in my mouth. He watches as I sip from the glass of water he hands me.
“Let me make a few phone calls,” he says. “You take a nap, okay?” I nod.
As soon as he leaves the room I spit out the pills into my hand. I go into the bathroom and rinse out my mouth. I lock the door behind me and sit down on the toilet. I try to recite the digits of pi. I manage fifty-four places. That’s a good sign. The Oxetine must be wearing off.
I look into the mirror. I stare into my eyes, trying to see through to the retinas, matching photoreceptor with photoreceptor, imagining their grid layout. I turn my head from side to side, watching the muscles tense and relax in turn. That effect would be hard to simulate.
But there’s nothing in my face, nothing real behind that surface. Where is the pain, the pain that made love real, the pain of understanding?
“You okay, sweetie?” Brad says through the bathroom door.
I turn on the faucet and splash water on my face. “Yes,” I say. “I’m going to take a shower. Can you get some snacks from that store we saw down the street?”
Giving him something to do reassures him. I hear the door to the room close behind him. I turn off the faucet and look back into the mirror, at the way the water droplets roll down my face, seeking the canals of my wrinkles.
The human body is a marvel to recreate. The human mind, on the other hand, is a joke. Believe me, I know.
• • • •
No, Brad and I patiently explained over and over to the cameras, we had not created an “artificial child.” That was not our intention and that was not what we’d done. It was a way to comfort the grieving mothers. If you needed Aimée, you would know.
I would walk down the street and see women walking with bundles carefully held in their arms. And occasionally I would know, I would know beyond a doubt, by the sound of a particular cry, by the way a little arm waved. I would look into the faces of the women, and be comforted.
I thought I had moved on, recovered from the grieving process. I was ready to begin another project, a bigger project that would really satisfy my ambition and show the world my skills. I was ready to get on with my life.
Tara took four years to develop. I worked on her in secret while designing other dolls that would sell. Physically Tara looked like a five-year-old girl. Expensive transplant-quality plastiskin and synthgel gave her an ethereal and angelic look. Her eyes were dark and clear, and you could look into them forever.
I never finished Tara’s movement engine. In retrospect that was probably a blessing. As a temporary placeholder during development I used the facial expression engine sent in by the Kimberly enthusiasts at MIT’s Media Lab. Augmented with many more fine micromotors than Kimberly had, she could turn her head, blink her eyes, wrinkle her nose, and generate thousands of convincing facial expressions. Below the neck she was paralyzed.
But her mind, oh, her mind.
I used the best quantum processors and the best solid-state storage matrices to run multi-layered, multi-feedback neural nets. I threw in the Stanford Semantic Database and added my own modifications. The programming was beautiful. It was truly a work of art. The data model alone took me over six months.
I taught her when to smile and when to frown, and I taught her how to speak and how to listen. Each night I analyzed the activation graphs for the nodes in the neural nets, trying to find and resolve problems before they occurred.
Brad never saw Tara while she was in development. He was too busy trying to control the damage from Aimée, and then, later, pushing the new dolls. I wanted to surprise him.
I put Tara in a wheelchair, and I told Brad that she was the daughter of a friend. Since I had to run some errands, could he entertain her while I was gone for a few hours? I left them in my office.
When I came back two hours later, I found Brad reading to her from The Golem of Prague, “ ‘Come,’ said the Great Rabbi Loew, ‘Open your eyes and speak like a real person!’ ”
That was just like Brad, I thought. He had his sense of irony.
“All right,” I interrupted him. “Very funny. I get the joke. So how long did it take you?”
He smiled at Tara. “We’ll finish this some other time,” he said. Then he turned to me. “How long did it take me what?”
“To figure it out.”
“Figure out what?”
“Stop kidding around,” I said. “Really, what was it that gave her away?”
“Gave what away?” Brad and Tara said at the same time.
• • • •
Nothing Tara ever said or did was a surprise to me. I could predict everything she would say before she said it. I’d coded everything in her, after all, and I knew exactly how her neural nets changed with each interaction.
But no one else suspected anything. I should have been elated. My doll was passing a real-life Turing test. But I was frightened. The algorithms made a mockery of intelligence, and no one seemed to know. No one seemed to even care.
I finally broke the news to Brad after a week. After the initial shock he was delighted (as I knew he would be).
“Fantastic,” he said. “We’re now no longer just a toy company. Can you imagine the things we can do with this? You’ll be famous, really famous!”
He prattled on and on about the potential applications. Then he noticed my silence. “What’s wrong?”
So I told him about the Chinese Room.
The philosopher John Searle used to pose a puzzle for the AI researchers. Imagine a room, he said, a large room filled with meticulous clerks who are very good at following orders but who speak only English. Into this room are delivered a steady stream of cards with strange symbols on them. The clerks have to draw other strange symbols on blank cards in response and send the cards out of the room. In order to do this, the clerks have large books, full of rules in English like this one: “When you see a card with a single horizontal squiggle followed by a card with two vertical squiggles, draw a triangle on a blank card and hand it to the clerk to your right.” The rules contain nothing about what the symbols might mean.
It turns out that the cards coming into the room are questions written in Chinese, and the clerks, by following the
rules, are producing sensible answers in Chinese. But could anything involved in this process—the rules, the clerks, the room as a whole, the storm of activity—be said to have understood a word of Chinese? Substitute “processor” for the clerks and substitute “program” for the books of rules, then you’ll see that the Turing test will never prove anything, and AI is an illusion.
But you can also carry the Chinese Room Argument the other way: substitute “neurons” for the clerks and substitute the physical laws governing the cascading of activating potentials for the books of rules; then how can any of us ever be said to “understand” anything? Thought is an illusion.
“I don’t understand,” Brad said. “What are you saying?”
A moment later I realized that that was exactly what I’d expected him to say.
“Brad,” I said, staring into his eyes, willing him to understand. “I’m scared. What if we are just like Tara?”
“We? You mean people? What are you talking about?”
“What if,” I said, struggling to find the words, “we are just following some algorithm from day to day? What if our brain cells are just looking up signals from other signals? What if we are not thinking at all? What if what I’m saying to you now is just a predetermined response, the result of mindless physics?”
“Elena,” Brad said, “you’re letting philosophy get in the way of reality.”
I need sleep, I thought, feeling hopeless.
“I think you need to get some sleep,” Brad said.
• • • •
I handed the coffee-cart girl the money as she handed me the coffee. I stared at the girl. She looked so tired and bored at eight in the morning that she made me feel tired.
I need a vacation.
“I need a vacation,” she said, sighing exaggeratedly.
I walked past the receptionist’s desk. Morning, Elena.
Say something different, please. I clenched my teeth. Please.
“Morning, Elena,” she said.
I paused outside Ogden’s cube. He was the structural engineer. The weather, last night’s game, Brad.
