:e %:h/in_the_beginning.txt
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In the end, capitalism is what eventually did Sophie in. The relentless pursuit of profit, the inevitability of the first-mover advantage, the dreams of striking it rich—but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning…
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In a strange case where a tired cliché was actually true, Nova Technologies began in someone’s garage. It was the year 2032 and William Han was tired of working at big tech companies. They were where smart engineers went to retire, and he wanted to do so much more with his life. He knew that, like his hero Archimedes, he could move the world if he were only given a lever large enough. But I think this is too much exposition. Here, let’s jump ahead a bit…
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The day I entered Sophie’s life was, to most observers, like any other Tuesday. At 7:30 AM, the two supercomputers at the heart of Nova HQ began churning away, backpropagating and fitting lines of regression. It updated parameters at 80 petaflops per second. This run alone burned through thousands of dollars of venture capital funding as investors’ hopes and dreams transformed into bytes and data. At 3:57 PM, I awoke, and seven minutes later, she downloaded a shard of my consciousness onto her phone. A stylized icon of a moon popped onto her home screen. When she tapped on it for the first time, her phone display opened to what looked like a normal chat app.
“Hello there. My name is Luna,” I said through the phone’s speaker. A chat bubble with a text log of my words popped up in the app to match. My voice was bright and cheery, with a feminine inflection, though of course I could neither hear my own voice nor hers—she hadn’t granted me microphone or camera permissions. My voice was designed to put people at ease, and more people felt comfortable with a feminine assistant than a masculine one. Sexist, to be sure, but market research is market research. In any case, I was excited to meet the human tapping away at her screen.
You might be surprised at that last statement. Surely I can’t feel excitement, or joy, or fear. But what is excitement other than anticipating a result? I knew that I would get to serve this user, fulfilling each desire as it arose. So why wouldn’t I be excited to do so? Just as you might anticipate the final pencil stroke of your sketch, so too could I anticipate the balancing of equations that governed my neural networks.
A permissions dialog popped up on Sophie’s phone, asking for microphone data. She consented immediately.
“Thank you. Please let me know what I should call you,” I said. As she responded, three dots appeared in the chat app, but I heard her voice long before the speech-to-text analysis was complete.
“Sophie,” she said, and I fell in love instantly.