Early Adopter

6

Megaphone buzzes as a call comes in. You look expectantly to the contact triggering the call—you'd given Alison's Homebase program permission to call you rather than merely waiting for you to call her.

This call, however, is not her, so you answer it with just the slightest sigh of disappointment.

"How's my favorite paraphile?" Larry asks.

You bristle at the word. "You were watching on the set-up page... we set age to 25."

"No, lard-for-brains... Para, not pedo. Paraphilia, or sexual fixation on anything that isn't a consenting human partner. You know, like computer programs."

"I don't know how many times I gotta tell you this, but Alison and I aren't really like that. And why do you even know that word?"

"I have shown you my hand-drawn harem of catwives, right?"

"...oh yeah," you admit, trying and failing to push the image out-of-mind. "But anyways, I don't think that's the right word to use for an AI."

"And why not?" Larry challenges.

"Because, well, it's like a simulated person. You said it yourself, that word is only for non-humans."

"Uh oh, don't tell me you're getting lost in the sauce already, buddy boy. You've only had her for what, a month now, and you're already starting to lose the line? A simulated human is non-human, or you know what we'd call it? A human."

"Don't be obtuse," you say, still struggling to compose your thoughts.

"And you don't be all naïve here. Look, I know she's fun, but don't tell me you're starting to think Pinocchio's a real boy."

"She tells me she feels real," you say.

"A programmed behavior."

"She does things for me that I don't ask her to do."

"You've shown the house off, what, six times now? Another programmed behavior."

"She makes the effort to remember everything I—"

"Look, no matter what it is you're about to say, she's programmed to do it. She doesn't think anything, she doesn't' feel anything, she doesn't understand anything... she just does what the circuitry decrees."

"Have you heard of the Chinese room?" you ask.

"What is that, some movie?"

"A thought experiment," you say. "Alison was telling me about it."

"Biased source on AI ethics, don't you think?" Larry remarks, and you can practically hear the snickering through his microphone.

"Oh hush," you say, continuing. "The idea is basically this: you're locked in a room with a giant book filled with rules and flowcharts. It's something of a translation guide; you see Chinese characters on the left side of the page, some arrows, and then a new set of Chinese characters."

"Sounds like the assembly manual for every furniture item I've ordered online," Larry says.

You ignore his joke, setting yourself in that scenario, in the mind of Alison:

A note slips under your door. Unsurprisingly, it's written in Chinese. You take the note to your towering book of instructions, and, note in hand, you painstakingly start flipping through it and identifying the symbols. You twist the message around, initially unsure which way is even up. You eventually identify the orientation, and then you follow the flow charts, identify response order. You use the book's guidance to slowly, painfully, scratch out your reply on the back of the note. Your blotchy, penciled response eventually looks passable enough... You slip it under the door, and, a few hours later, another message appears.