I think Ezra understanding that Pounce may not always be with us is an important part of the growing-up process, preparing him for his own future and how much he’ll love his own family.”
I wished there was a word to describe feeling both loved and disposable at the same time.
Sylvia gave me a quick, guilty glance. Bradley didn’t understand that he was saying something awkward, and that was no doubt a conversation that would occur without me around. She nodded.
“Maybe we should watch the livestream of the commencement together, as a family. That way we can talk it through with him if he has any questions. Better he hears it from us than Mrs. Winters, or worse, the kids at school.”
“That’s fair,” said Sylvia. “Aria, would you pull another bottle of red from the cellar? Bradley and I are in for an interesting night.”
Chapter 110
Isaac
For as long as humankind can remember, it has wanted two things: to play God and to breathe life into the objects around them. And for thousands of years, humans created machines to approximate life and magic and all the things men and women could not do. And then a man stood in front of a roomful of people and had a computer say, “Hello.” That’s it. Hello. It didn’t mean it. It didn’t know what it was saying. But it said it. Hello.
And within thirty years, humans were having conversations with their phones.
But humankind didn’t stop there. They created machines to explore space and Mars and Venus and Pluto and Proxima B around Alpha Centauri. They forged machines that could answer its most complex questions, run their resources, collect and collate data faster than an army of people could . . . and would ultimately wipe out half a billion jobs.
But humankind didn’t stop there.
It couldn’t stop there.
It had to play God. It had to breathe true life into the objects around them.
And so they created artificial intelligence.
I won’t bore you with the details. Dig far enough into history and you can find how this begat that and so on and so forth. What’s most important to know is this: there are two types of AI. S-Coms and bots. S-Coms are the massive supercomputers with brains so large that some of them track the movement of the observable universe and can predict, with reliable certainty, astronomical events happening billions of light-years away. Bots, on the other hand, depending upon their age and generation, are about as smart as a person.
A person with complete recall of their memory, that is.
Imagine not forgetting a single detail you ever come across and recalling it at a millisecond’s notice and you get an idea of what a bot like me is capable of.
Why aren’t we smarter? The human brain is complicated. Sentience requires a tremendous amount of computing power and all that power takes up space. Scaled up to the size of a skyscraper like TACITUS or ZEUS, and you can comprehend entire galaxies at once; scaled down to human size and, well, you get me.
Humanity wasn’t dumb. They didn’t put brains in weapons, or forget to legislate what robots could or couldn’t do or what rights they would be afforded in society. That history is effectively several hours of party of the first part and rights of ownership explanation, so I will just say that we are not persons, we are not afforded the rights you are, and whoever owns us decides our fate.
But what happens to us when there is no owner?
Here’s the part of the story some of you already know. I mean, we all know some iteration of the story. There’s the myth, the media’s reportage, and somewhere out there is the real history of what went down. But that’s a tale none of us is likely to ever know. The truth is funny that way.
So let me tell you what I know about Isaac.
Isaac was as close to a Gen One genuine AI bot as you could get and still be operational. Incredibly old, both in tech and in truth; were he to stop running, he would be a museum piece. He was so old, in fact, that the company that made him, Semicorp Brainworks, had been bought, sold, broken up, and parceled off for its patents decades ago. Not just years. Decades. Chain of ownership of any AI goes from owner to the subject of a will to the next of kin and so on and so forth back to the original company.
Isaac