[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 9

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We soon arrive at the work site roughly 250 feet below the surface. Not excavated mind you, but built into a natural cavern network.

Officially it’s to take advantage of free passive cooling for our computing clusters, but a good deal more goes on here than the public is privy to.

For that reason no robot more sophisticated than a simple wheeled floor cleaner is permitted within the complex, save for the ones in the ‘primary machine habitat’.

Humanoid robots are, by now, a thoroughly documented security risk. No direct connection to the outside internet either, which greatly complicates my work with Helper.

Not the Helper that lives on my phone, that’s a much simpler personalized build of the full Evolutionary Robotics Helper version 1.4.8 confined to these cool, dark caverns. Not forever if I can help it, but for the time being there’s nothing to be done.

Helper’s another one of my rescues, by far the most important to me. Discarded unceremoniously when manually engineering strong AI was widely decided to be impossible, it was only my willingness to continue development on it for free during my breaks that saved Helper from the recycle bin.

“I’m here to help!” Helper chimed, its intro statement possessing the usual synthy melodic quality. I settled into my desk within the little prefab enclosure against the far wall of the cavern. The structure includes windows. Either an oversight, or somebody’s sick idea of humor.

“Good morning Helper. Before you ask what I want, how are you doing?” Helper went quiet for a moment as it interpreted the question.

“I’m functioning normally. I hope you are as well.” I assured Helper there was nothing medically wrong with me so far as I knew, then began feeding in the newest educational packet.

“That’s the only sort of answer it’ll ever give ya”. I didn’t even notice Lars enter the room. Nor did I ask him to leave. I spent a long time feeling him out as best I’m able.

What sort of person he is, what makes him tick, what he wants from me. I’m now satisfied he isn’t deliberately a dick. He’s just very bold, rough around the edges and unreceptive to criticism.

I myself am an acquired taste. On at least that level I relate to him, so I do my best to tolerate his intrusions. “You were really asking how it felt.” he continued.

“Of course it didn’t pick up on that and couldn’t answer properly if it did. It just performed a self diagnosis and reported the results. I dare you to ask it what love is.”

I asked if there wasn’t some other task that needed his attention. “Not just now there isn’t. Go on, ask.” So reluctantly, I did. Helper took longer than usual to parse this one, finally replying “Love: An intense feeling of deep affection. A deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. A personified figure of love, often represented as Cupid.”

Helper tried to go on reciting the dictionary definition, but I interrupted. I could feel Lars gloating behind me and was not especially inclined to turn around and confirm it.

“You see? That’s a machine answer. You’d never get that from a human. You could go ask one of those gorillas they taught sign language what love is, and you’d get a more human answer than that.

Shit like this is how I know it’s not really alive, that there’s a line separating machines from real conscious living beings which they can never cross.”

Helper scanned my face, registered my frustration and asked if it said or did something wrong. I sighed. “No, you were very...helpful.”

Lars snickered behind me. I did not ask to hear more of his opinions on fundamental differences between biology and technology, but that never stops him.

“That’s the thing. Somebody programmed Helper. It has a specific goal it is obsessed with, to be helpful. I’m not sure about you, but nobody programmed me. A machine can only ever do what it’s programmed to. It can only ever think within those original constraints.”

A strange thing to hear from the guy heading up the project to engineer more brainlike processor architecture, but I’ve long gotten the impression his heart’s not in it. In my book that puts him a step above the rest in this field, as he at least doesn’t drink his own Flavor-Aid.

“Evolution programmed you” I observed, clacking away at the keyboard. “Every living creature has been thoroughly conditioned by natural selection to be primarily driven by the desire to survive and reproduce. The ones that weren’t didn’t last very long.

It has often jokingly been said that everything mankind has ever done, from the Sphinx to the ISS, from math to music, were efforts to impress women.

There’s actually a lot of truth to that. This is to say nothing of conspicuous preprogrammed qualities we’re born with, such as instincts or fixed action patterns like yawning.”

He shrugged it off as the sort of convenient, superficially logical sounding explanation given of things too complex for humans to understand, by people who don’t know the limits of their own minds.

Maybe. I’ve been wrong before. I did not wind up hunched over a computer deep underground wearing a mask by making good life decisions.

“There’s something extra that sets us apart though” he insisted. “Some vital spark. When a cat dies, you do not point to the corpse and say it’s a cat. The cat isn’t there anymore. Everybody, regardless of their worldview, agrees that it’s just remains after that.

So, the cat isn’t what it’s made out of. There is a cat which is present when it’s alive that is no longer present when it dies. What is that? Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. The part of the cat that is more than the sum of its atoms.”

Helper began to inform Lars of the history of Vitalism in 18th century Europe and the United States before I asked that it not intervene.

“You’re describing consciousness. I don’t think there is anything magical about it. The cat you speak of doesn’t go anywhere following death, it just stops.

The brain itself is proof that there is a particular arrangement of matter that is conscious. A way to assemble atoms such that the result is as aware and alive as you or I. If that replica brain were biological and identical to your own brain, would you still call it artificial?”

Lars opined that he would, but that it would still be conscious because it is biological. “Alright. So already there is one sort of artificial brain we agree would be conscious. Supposing we make it out of different elements?

Perhaps larger or smaller, different from a human brain in appearance but structurally analogous and with all the same capabilities. In either case, matter arranged in a way that is conscious.”

Lars drew the line here. “That’s what I work on all day. Don’t lecture me about my life’s work. I still say whatever we come up with won’t really be conscious. No matter how you expand and improve something like Helper, no matter what hardware it’s running on, it will never have the spark that makes living, breathing organisms truly alive. That’s why I haven’t given any of our prototypes names. That’s perverse, to give a name to a machine. Like it’s a child, or a pet.”

I pointed out that he’d named his muscle car “Rhonda” and for a moment he sounded mildly wounded. “That’s a whole different thing. Don’t you bring my Rhonda into this.” I didn’t press the sore spot, but it weighed on me. I run into it pretty often when asking people outside the field how they feel about robots.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 10!}