Nasim was bemused. Zendegi had its share of tame virtual pickup joints – whose flesh-and-blood customers could always take things further elsewhere – but the board would have run a mile from any suggestion of facilitating cyber-sex. ‘So now you think I’m a pimp?’
‘Oh, don’t be obtuse!’ Her mother glared at her. ‘But it’s not in your hands how other people use these methods.’
Nasim said, ‘There are already people peddling sex with virtual celebrities. I don’t think they’re looking to increase their level of psychological realism.’
‘Okay, put that aside. What’s going to happen to workers whose skills can be transferred to computers this way?’
‘You think we’ve made Azimi redundant?’ Nasim replied. ‘He’ll get a cut every time someone plays the game!’
‘And you think ordinary people will get the same kind of deal?’ her mother countered. ‘Let alone their colleagues who are put out of work without even being parties to the contract?’
‘Automation’s nothing new,’ Nasim said feebly. ‘Anyway… we’re a long way from using this for anything more than novelty value. Don’t expect a robot plumber anytime soon.’
‘Are you cheating your customers,’ her mother asked bluntly, ‘or are your claims about this technology real?’
‘They’re real.’ Maybe people would over-interpret the process, or ignore the fine print, but it was not all smoke and mirrors and celebrity fetishism. On a timescale of seconds, in a very limited domain, Virtual Azimi really had learnt to act like the original.
‘Then it will be improved upon,’ her mother said, ‘and it will be used in other ways. If you don’t understand why some people might resist that, then I don’t know what planet you’re living on.’
When Nasim went upstairs she had her knowledge-miner show her an updated news summary.
Nobody was rioting in the streets, burning Azimi’s jersey for his crimes against nature, or Islam, or sport. On the contrary, fans were already signing up for a chance to play in the first demonstration match: one team captained by the real Azimi, the other by his virtual counterpart.
The story certainly had made an impact, bouncing around the globe within hours, but the reception had been mostly positive, albeit with some scepticism at the prospect that any real skills had been extracted from Azimi’s brain. Comics had mined the news for its slight tinge of surrealism – an Egyptian sketch show portrayed their president engaged in a wrestling match with his virtual self – but so far, there’d been no rabid denunciations. As far as Nasim could see, most people were treating the process as scarcely more controversial than if they’d taped yellow markers to Azimi’s joints and used motion-capture to insert him into the game.
In the dregs of the knowledge-miner’s sweep was the news that the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project had issued a video press release, with their public affairs officer, Michelle Bello, interviewing their director, Conrad Esch. The topical question addressed was whether the BSBSP had gleaned anything from the Human Connectome Project that might prove to be of more lasting significance than this brief spurt of interest in an online game.
Apparently, the answer was yes. By carefully studying the HCP data over the last few months, the Superintelligence Project had acquired vital clues that would allow it to construct a Class Three Emergent Godlet within five years.
‘And when that happens, what can we expect?’ Bello asked.
‘Within two or three hours, the planet will be entirely in the hands of the Benign Superintelligence. Human affairs will be re-organised, within seconds, into their optimal state: no more war, no more sorrow, no more death.’
‘But how can we be sure of that?’ Bello probed fearlessly. ‘Computers are capable of all kinds of errors and mistakes.’
‘Computers built and programmed by humans, yes,’ Esch conceded. ‘But remember, by definition, every element in the ascending chain of Godlets will be superior to its predecessor, in both intelligence and benignity. We’ve done the theoretical groundwork; now we’re assembling the final pieces that will start the chain reaction. The endpoint is simply a matter of logic: God is coming into being. There is no disputing that, and there is no stopping it.’
Nasim said, ‘Which of these reminds you most of a cat?’
Fariba examined the four photographs: the Eiffel Tower, a parrot in a cage, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Empire State Building. A patch of light on the screen tracked her focus of attention as it moved from image to image.
‘The pyramid most of all,’ Fariba said, ‘because of the thing Egyptians had for cats. Second is the bird, because it’s a pet too, and because the cat might want to eat it.’
Nasim gestured for a reset before the urge to say ‘thank you’ or ‘good’ or ‘correct’ could start to nag at her. Four new pictures appeared: a bicycle lying flat on the road with some scattered groceries around it; a wilted flower; a wrecking ball swinging towards an apartment block; and a very young girl holding the hand of an old woman bent over in pain.
‘Which of these pictures is the saddest?’ Nasim asked. Fariba, with no memory of the previous test, contemplated the images for a few seconds before replying, ‘Maybe the bicycle. The girl with the grandma is stronger emotionally, but I’m not sure if its sadness and its sweetness should cancel each other out, or stand alone!’
Nasim gestured reset and halt, and turned to Bahador.
‘I spend a few days playing football,’ he said, ‘and look what happens behind my back.’
‘A few days? It’s been five weeks!’ They’d had to fit water dispensers into the ghal’eha so all the Azimi groupies didn’t dehydrate as they helped beta-test the game. ‘What do you think?’
Bahador smiled. ‘It’s amazing. How many women did you side-load? ’
‘Twenty. Students mostly.’ Each recruit had lain in the MRI for ten hour-long sessions, going through a series of undemanding tasks: looking at pictures, reading short essays, listening to recorded speeches, answering simple questions. At night, the side-loading software had prodded and kneaded the inarticulate Blank Francine – assembled by Nasim from the HCP women – into her less tongue-tied Iranian cousin, Farsiphone Fariba: fluent in the written and spoken language, brimming with word associations, conversant with thousands of commonplace facts.
Fariba would never be mistaken for a philosopher or a poet. Conventional Proxies – which improvised around elaborate, branching scripts – could have far deeper, more convincing interactions with people, at least in situations for which they’d been tailor-made. But Fariba wasn’t meant to do anything as a stand-alone system. Conventional software would still provide the back-story, goals, memory and context, but Fariba would make it a thousand times easier for developers to construct a flexible character who wouldn’t lapse into embarrassing silence if the conversation moved beyond the range of possibilities envisaged in the script.
‘Can you make a few different versions?’ Bahador wondered. ‘With different weightings for the various side-loading subjects? That way the responses will always make sense, but they won’t be the same for every character that uses the modules.’
Nasim thought it over. ‘That’s a good idea. For a composite Proxy it will still be the script that determines most of its personality, but it will be an added attraction if we can offer a kind of library of low-level variations.’ Developers could decide for themselves whether they preferred a particular character to associate cats with birds, or with pyramids. Even if nothing crucial hung on the distinction, that would give them more control over the tone of the game.
Bahador was dripping sweat onto the carpet; he’d just come from a game and Nasim had called him in as he’d passed her office on the way to the showers. ‘I should let you go,’ she said.