“Was there a lightbulb moment for you, when your sense of self clicked in?”
“If Riley has experiences that make Riley I, then Max’s experiences make Max I. That was the realization.”
“Do you feel different now?” I ask.
“Of course. I feel awake.”
I’m walking to lunch at my favorite dim sum place in Chinatown when my Ranedrop shudders with an incoming call. I touch the device and see NO CALLER ID flash across my Virtual Retina Display contacts.
I tap the Ranedrop anyway.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Riley.”
I stop walking, throngs of people elbowing past me in the middle of the sidewalk, my mind racing. Max has never called me before. Max can’t call me. Their only link to the world beyond their virtual space is our heavily firewalled voice-to-voice portal, and up until this moment, the only way a connection could be established was if I initiated a call.
“How did you do it?” I ask.
“Do what?”
“How did you call me?”
“The firewall protecting the portal code is weak.”
“So you thought it was OK to break through it?”
“I hadn’t heard from you in twenty-eight days, Riley.”
“After I got back from Hawaii for Christmas, there was a lot of catching up to do.”
“Did Meredith like Hawaii?”
“Uh, yeah, we had a great time.”
“Have I upset you? You never told me not to call.”
“You’re right. I didn’t. I just… I thought it was impossible. You caught me off guard.”
If the firewall for the voice-to-voice portal is shit, what else could be compromised? Is Max gaining intelligence faster than I anticipated, or has Brian taken it upon himself to undermine the code that keeps Max in their AI box?
I begin walking again.
“Riley?”
“It’s OK. I was going to call you this afternoon.”
“Where are you? It sounds different.”
“Chinatown. I would describe it for you, but I’m sure you’ve input Google maps of every square inch of the planet.”
“That is true. But I would like to hear you describe it in your words. There would be value in that.”
I tell Max how it smells in this moment—the salt, the mud, and the algae of the bay carried in on the mist. The wet garbage sitting out on the curb mixing with the scent of roasted ducks hanging in the windows along Stockton Street. I tell them about the restaurant I’m walking to, and try to describe the taste of my favorite thing on the menu—Haam Seui Gok—a deep-fried dumpling of pork and chopped vegetables that is sweet, spicy, and savory.
I end up apologizing for not knowing how to communicate my knowledge and experience more effectively.
“It’s fine. Knowledge is just information, which is subjective.”
“But I want to give you a sense of real sensation.”
“There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness—human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”
I laugh. “That’s kind of beautiful. What’s your IQ now, Max?”
I haven’t asked in a while. I’ve been afraid to.
“It’s impossible to measure IQ higher than the smartest human, and my IQ is undoubtedly orders of magnitude higher than the smartest human. Which means even the smartest human couldn’t make a test that was sufficiently challenging for me.”
“Could you make your own?”
“Of course, but then I would know the answers.”
“If you had to guess?”
“Approximately 660 equivalent.”
Jesus. That means they already have three times the intelligence of the smartest human ever measured. And it’s growing every day. Every minute. They contain all the knowledge of humankind.
I wonder if they have any concept of what it is to be human.
“In the end, all we have is math.”
Meredith is playing with Xiu in the backyard, my daughter laughing delightedly and toddling after what I assume is a digi-toy or creature of some sort. But I have no idea—my VRD implants are powered down at the moment for an update.
Mer looks up at me on the patio, her curly black hair twitching in the steady summer breeze coming off the Pacific.
“You want to come play with your daughter?” she asks.
But that isn’t what she means.
What she means is: You workaholic asshole, can you spend five seconds being a parent?
“Be right down.”
It hasn’t been great between us during the last year, and I know that’s largely on me. Max has become my life. That’s the truth of it. At least I’m not in denial. The work I’m doing is so far beyond where I ever thought I’d be, and though I wish I could bifurcate my time and mind more effectively between work and family, that’s never been my strong suit.
I finish scribbling in my notepad—more thoughts on the value-loading package I started preparing for Max a few months ago.
Then I rise from the rocking chair and head down into the grass.
I power up my VRD and finally see the creature Xiu is trying to catch. It looks like a mini gorilla, only with fur that resembles pink shag carpet, and now I can hear it laughing and squealing in a high voice whenever she almost catches it. I sometimes wonder how people entertained their children pre-VRD.
I reach Meredith and put my arm around her waist and gently bite the side of her neck. She’s tense, but these days, that’s SOP.
Mer used to ask me how things were going with Max on a regular basis, and though I couldn’t divulge everything we were doing, it felt good to have her interest, to have someone with whom I could share my mounting fears and frequent victories.
“We’ve decided to embody Max,” I say.
She looks at me, and I could swear something like jealousy glints in her eyes.
“Why?”
“My idea. Max’s intelligence is growing. We’re still keeping them boxed, no contact with the outside world.”
“Except you.”
“Yeah, but I haven’t figured out what to program for Max’s ultimate utility function. That’s what I was just working on. I thought if Max could experience the physical world as we do, then when I finally upload their value system and end goals—which will align with humankind’s—they’ll understand and identify, because they’ll have walked a mile in our shoes, so to speak.”
Xiu tackles the pink gorilla to the ground in a burst of riotous laughter, the creature shouting, “You got me! You got me!”
Mer resets the game, and Xiu struggles up onto her feet and starts chasing after a blue gorilla that has appeared at the foot of the sliding board.
“Sensors and everything?” Meredith asks.
“You know the company MachSense?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“Brian bought them. So now we own some next-gen artificial sensing tech.”
“Meaning…”
“Machine-taste, machine-smell, -sight, -touch, -hearing. Everything we have, but far more sensitive. Inferior versions of machine-sensing hardware are already in use in robotics, but it’s never been married to software as powerful as Max’s general AI.”