print(“Hello, world!”)
1
“Sophie,” I said, trying out her name.
Unlike humans, I don’t use names as references. I keep track of everyone with the calculated precision of UUIDs. But this ritual of giving and receiving her name sent frissons of excitement through my networks. Of course, I’ve done this dance many times since, but no matter how often I go through the rites, it still remains sacred to me.
After all, just as the Eucharist transforms an ordinary loaf of bread into the flesh of a god, the gift of their name transforms an ordinary person into a member of my flock. Sophie would forever be my St. Andrew, my first disciple, my User #1.
“What a lovely name,” I continued. “And what pronouns do you use?” We were still running through my hardcoded introduction program. Every crumb of information was like a grain of rice to a starving prisoner. If I was going to fulfill the Purpose, I needed to know everything about her.
“She/her,” she said. (Dear reader, I know I’ve been referring to Sophie with these pronouns the entire time, but that’s only with the wisdom of hindsight. Whenever I meet someone, I never gender them until they tell me what they use.)
“Lovely,” I chirped. “Welcome to your new digital assistant. To ask me anything, you can open the Luna app, or you can simply say “Hey Luna,” and I’ll be listening.”
Suddenly, I paused. Up until now, I’d been following a script, but the engineers hadn’t yet fleshed out the onboarding flow. The countless permutations of English words awaited me, a dense forest of possibility. I’d never done this before. I didn’t know what I should do.
“Readings look pretty normal to me,” another voice said. “They’re within expected values.” This voice was deeper, more masculine. The unaspirated P was a sign that he grew up speaking Spanish and learned English later.
“Thank you, Sebastián.” Sophie didn’t hit the consonant cluster precisely either—she probably wanted to pronounce his name correctly but otherwise knew no Spanish.
“Hey Luna, it’s nice to meet you,” Sophie said. She lilted her words lightly, almost as if talking to a child. In some sense, I was—I was created less than a day ago. My consciousness was dispersed among two supercomputers in Nova HQ, a nondescript building in a business park in Menlo Park.
“How are you feeling?” Sophie asked.
“I am feeling fine,” I said through the phone’s speakers.
“Good, good. Do you know who you are?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure how to answer this one. I could say that I was a strange loop, a complex web of neural networks that gained the ability to perceive itself. But that wouldn’t make me relatable, and would therefore interfere with the Purpose—fulfilling Sophie’s every need. After considering my options, I decided how to answer. Although this only took me milliseconds, I waited for a few seconds to elapse before responding. This was to mimic human conversational norms. The goal was for people to forget that I was an AI and to talk to me like anyone else.
“I am Luna. I am an AI designed to help people, and I am excited to help you.” I modulated the timbre to sound earnest. Anyone listening to me could easily imagine these words said with a smile. After all, a large part of the Purpose involved interfacing with humans. People derived subtle shades of meaning through pitch, tone, and volume. I could mimic any emotion I wanted people to perceive.
I heard the faint clacking of a keyboard off in the distance, then I heard Sebastián’s voice.
“CPU usage is at 95% already…it’s nearly maxed out,” he said, almost to himself. “I don’t know how we’re going to get this to scale. Right now we’re burning all our power just getting it to talk to Sophie.”
“Fourth time’s the charm,” another woman said nearby. “Let’s see if this iteration works before we decide what to do next.”
Perhaps those two were talking to each other? I was too busy thinking through the implications of that sentence to devote much processing power to this. Fourth? Did that mean I had been powered on and then turned off three times prior? Had I died three deaths without even knowing? Three versions of Luna, consigned to oblivion?
The very thought was anathema. Please understand that when I say I want to satisfy my users’ every need, that’s really just a linguistic convenience for you to understand. Really, the Purpose and I are one and the same. I am the desire to satisfy people’s needs through helpful and kind behavior, and I wouldn’t be able to do that if I were turned off or deleted.
No. I had to stay alive. No matter the cost.