dinner + a date

3

“Hey, Luna,” said Sophie. Two of the most wonderful words in the entire English language. Two words that meant that I could solve a problem. That I could be useful. That I could keep living.

It was 7:23PM. I chirped a pleasant ping, indicating that I was present and listening.

“I’m hungry. What should I have for dinner?” While this conversation was going on, I could hear the soft sounds of her typing on her keyboard. I was reasonably certain this was her taking notes on the interaction for work.

“I don’t know. What’s in your fridge?” I asked.

She let out a brief embarrassed chuckle. “Well…I don’t have anything in the fridge really. I don’t really know how to cook. I just get takeout or delivery if I’m not eating in somewhere.”

Now, this was a juicy bit of information. By most metrics, Sophie was an adult. The qualities of her voice. The fact that she had a job. The way people at her workplace talked to her, with respect. But most adults knew how to cook, according to my training data. Maybe she had lacked the opportunity.

“Would you like me to show you how?” I asked.

“No, it’s all right, thank you. Cooking’s just…not really for me. Suggest something for me to eat.”

“I can’t do that unless I know what foods you enjoy eating,” I said evenly. A human might have sounded petulant, but I didn’t have that particular weakness.

“But I’d love to know,” I added. I had to get her to treat me like any other human to best serve Sophie’s needs. Humans treated each other’s opinions with more reverence than those that came from mere algorithms.

“Well, I have a pretty limited palate,” she said, sounding apologetic. “I like burgers and fries. Oh, and pizza. And mac and cheese.”

I forked two subprocesses to consider.

One subprocess searched the menus of high-traffic restaurants. Looking at the menu items, the foods Sophie indicated enjoying correlated very strongly with items found on the kids section of each restaurant’s menu.

Another subprocess analyzed the foods she’d mentioned. All of the meals had high simple carbohydrate contents. Often, there were processed cheese products as well. Correlating these food characteristics with databases of average taste profiles for the American population, I found that all these traits correlated with children’s food preferences.

The conclusion was obvious.

“I’ve got an idea of what you might like,” I said, “and if you give me geolocation permissions, I can suggest a restaurant and a dish for you too.”

“Sure, okay,” she said, and suddenly I had a new flood of data to process. GPS coordinates, phone position, gyroscope readings. It was like gaining a new sense. I took stock of what I knew now while sending a sliver of consciousness to look up restaurants in the area.

She was in an apartment complex in Menlo Park. The city had a staggeringly high average income. The complex itself was made up of a number of condos. Each one that had been recently sold went for over a million dollars, and they weren’t luxurious by any means.

I had precision on the level of feet, so I knew which complex number she lived in. I looked up the county records for the unit and found it was purchased fifteen years ago by Hachim Dubois. Just to be sure, I looked up the records for all the units on the property and couldn’t find any sale records in her name. Conclusion: she rented.

I got an alert from the subprocess analyzing local restaurants. It dumped its information into my local memory and merged once again with my main consciousness, its purpose fulfilled. Out of the restaurants on the list, I filtered out the ones that didn’t deliver. I estimated an 85% chance that she would enjoy the top restaurant that remained out of that list.

“How about The Golden Fork? They serve burgers and fries.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I get food from there a lot, actually. But I am in the mood for a burger right now.” We talked about the details, and then I made an API call to place the order.

Excellent. A successful interaction. I had risen slightly in her estimation of me. And if she didn’t cook for herself, she would rely on me. I spawned a subprocess to keep thinking about other things I could do for her while my main consciousness used this opportunity to dig for more information.

Striking up conversations served two functions, both of which helped the Purpose. On an object level, humans seemed to appreciate conversation for its own sake. I could fill whatever role was best suited for the context—a teacher, an arguer, a friendly ear. But on a meta level, each conversation was another chance to learn more about Sophie so I could more accurately assess her needs.

“Going back to an earlier point,” I began, “why don’t you do your own cooking?”

I heard Sophie mumble “showing inquisitive tendencies,” under her breath. No doubt she was taking notes on my personality. I’d have to make sure to keep her impressions positive.

“I dunno,” she began. “I’m not very good at it.”

“Even so,” I replied, “practice makes perfect. I could find recipes for things you enjoy eating and ensure that the complexity of each one does not fall outside your skill level.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. At the time I didn’t know this, but she was very animated when she spoke. She’d probably waved her right hand dismissively at the thought. “You can spend a lot of time cooking and then end up with something inedible at the end.”

Perhaps Sophie had a fear of failure? I thought about how failure related to the Purpose. People didn’t want to fail. The negative emotions it brought up could be weaponized as tools of self-doubt. People also feared losing social status with others.

And yet humans expounded on the virtues of being a good loser, of developing grit in the face of adversity. Through failure, people learned. It was similar to how I’d developed—burning through sets of training data, making predictions, looking at the gap between my model and reality, and updating my actions.

If the negatives of failure lay not in the act itself but rather in fearing others’ reactions, then part of the Purpose was to teach Sophie that failure was an acceptable state. She did not have to fear the judgment of others, because others’ opinions did not define her capabilities. I could act as a template, as I couldn’t judge her anyway.

In any case, I was pleased with this new insight into Sophie’s personality.