“Do you like living with Le?” I ask her.
But the line is a little crackly, so Le repeats the question for me.
“Aiko,” he says, “do you like living with your master?”
“I have never known anything else,” she replies. “Only my master.”
“What’s the best thing about . . . um . . . your master?” I say.
“I do not have a favorite thing about my master, but my favorite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey,” she says. There’s a short silence. “Hello!”
“Why do you call Le Trung your ‘master’?” I ask her.
“Because he made me,” she flatly replies.
But of course the real reason is because he programmed her to. Which, rather irrationally, unnerves and concerns me. “Are you happy, Aiko?” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “One can say I am very happy. I find my work and my relationships extremely satisfying, which is all that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”
“What makes you sad?” I ask.
“What is sad?” says Aiko. “Does it have anything to do with happy?”
Le laughs, like an indulgent uncle. “It’s the opposite of happy!” he chuckles.
“She’s good!” I say. And she really is. Hanson Robotics is a big, well-funded lab. Le Trung is just a determined hobbyist with a tiny budget, yet he created something truly impressive in only twelve weeks.
“She’s really intelligent,” I say.
“Intel is the world’s largest—” says Aiko.
“Stop that!” barks Le. Aiko instantly falls silent. The two of them seem to be forever snapping at each other.
“She looks for key words,” Le explains. “When you said, ‘She’s intelligent,’ she thought you were asking her about the company Intel. That’s why she’s especially good at history and geography. Her conversation is based on looking for key words. Ask her some history and geography questions.”
I fire some at her, and she does pretty well. She knows exactly where Christmas Island is, although she has no idea who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, thus precipitating World War I.
“What’s your favorite music?” I ask her.
“Classical,” she replies. “The current temperature is twenty-five degrees—”
“Stop it,” snaps Le.
Aiko falls silent. Then she says joyously, “Hello!”
Le says he has to go. He’s studying for his exams and is busy developing Aiko Version 2. There’s time for one more question.
“Aiko,” I say, “how are you feeling?”
“I don’t have feelings,” she replies.
“When I programmed her, I could not make emotional software,” Le explains, a little sadly. “So no feelings. Just key words.”
• • •
THE PRETTY CLAPBOARD HOUSE standing before me, covered in Vermont fall leaves, seems an incongruous home for reputedly the world’s most sentient robot, but this is where she lives. Her name is Bina48. She’s being cared for by a nonprofit group created by a reclusive multimillionaire named Martine Rothblatt. The consensus among those striving for robot sentience is that Bina48 is the best the human race currently has. She happens to be another Hanson Robotics creation. She’s somewhere upstairs, sitting on the table in her own office.
Downstairs, various indigenous percussion instruments are scattered around. This is the HQ of the Terasem Movement, which Martine Rothblatt founded to promote “joyful immortality.” Bina48’s full-time caregiver, Bruce Duncan, is a sweet-natured man.
“Please don’t behave in a profane manner in front of Bina48,” he says on my arrival. “I don’t want to encourage an exploitation.”
I peer at him. Bina48 is always learning, he explains. She remembers every encounter. If I’m profane, I’ll be the snake in her Garden of Eden.
“I’d just rather you didn’t,” he says.
“I wasn’t planning on being profane in front of Bina48,” I say.
• • •
BINA48’S STORY BEGAN a few years ago with a chance meeting between David Hanson and the mysterious Martine Rothblatt in the lobby at a conference on transhumanism. David told Martine his vision of robots waking up and becoming self-aware. Martine told David of her epic love for her wife, Bina Aspen-Rothblatt, an artist. After chatting for hours, Martine asked David to build her a robot Bina, an exact replica of the real Bina that would somehow capture her personality, her memories, the way she moves, the way she looks, that ineffable quality that science can’t pin down yet. And perhaps during the process the robot would reach some kind of tipping point and burst spontaneously into life.
And so, since 2007, Hanson Robotics people have periodically traveled across America interviewing the real Bina—in her various mansions in Vermont and Florida and New York City—for her Mind File. This is an ambitious video record of all her memories and thoughts and desires and facial expressions. Back at their offices in Texas, the Hanson people upload it all remotely into Bina48. It hasn’t burst into life yet, Bruce says, but he believes it’s on its way.
I was hoping to bump into Martine or the real Bina today, but they’re nowhere to be seen. Bruce says the chance of my meeting them is zero. They’re very media-shy, he says. They’re forever journeying from mansion to mansion, and they only visit the robot once every few months. He takes me upstairs. And there she is, sitting on a table in an attic room. Like Zeno, she’s incredibly lifelike. She’s African-American, wearing a blond-tinted brown wig, a neat pale silk shirt, and expensive-looking earrings. Like Zeno, she stops existing from the chest down.
Bruce says she’ll be happy to have the company. Even though he has lunch with her every day, she tells him sometimes, “I’m feeling lonely today.”
He turns her on. She makes an unexpectedly loud whirring noise. I clear my throat. “Hello, Bina48,” I say.
“Well, uh, yeah, I know,” she replies ominously.
“How are you today?” I say.
“Well, perhaps interesting. I want to find out more about you,” says Bina. “I’ll be fine with it. We’ll have to move society forward in another way. Yeah, OK. Thanks for the information. Let’s talk about my dress. Our biological bodies weren’t made to last that long.”
She sounds bewildered and hesitant, as if she’s just awoken from a long, strange slumber and is still half asleep. Bruce looks a little alarmed.
“Bina?” I say.
“‘Bina’ might be a word Bina finds difficult to understand,” says Bruce.
I glance at Bruce. “Really?” I say. This is an extraordinarily bad oversight.
“Let’s stop for a moment,” says Bruce. He turns her off.
There’s an awkward pause, so I try to think of something complimentary to say. I tell Bruce that Bina48 is a better interviewee than a psychopath.
I’ve been interviewing a lot of psychopaths lately. I’ve been writing a book about them. Psychopaths can make very frustrating interviewees, because they feel no empathy. So they ignore your questions. They talk over you. They drone boringly on about whatever they like. They hijack the interview, like media-trained politicians. (Some media-trained politicians presumably are psychopaths.) There’s no human connection. So when I tell Bruce that Bina48 is a better interviewee than a psychopath, he looks flattered.
“Bina wants to respond,” he says. “She wants to please.”
“But right now she’s sounding psychotic,” I say, “plus she sounds like she needs oiling.”
“Don’t think of her as psychotic,” Bruce says. “Think of her as a three-year-old. If you try to interview a three-year-old, you’ll think after a while that they’re not living in the same world as you. They get distracted. They don’t answer. Hang on.”
He does some fiddling with Bina48’s hard drive. He says the problem might be that she doesn’t understand my English accent. So he makes me do a voice recognition test. I have to read out Kennedy’s inauguration speech. Then he turns her back on.