Machines Like Me

The engineer was a woman, Sally, not much older than Miranda, and tall, somewhat stooped with sharp features and an unusually long neck. Scoliosis, perhaps.

As she entered the kitchen, Adam politely stood. ‘Ah, Sally. I’ve been expecting you.’ He shook her hand and they sat facing each other across the kitchen table while Miranda and I hovered. The engineer didn’t want tea or coffee, but a glass of hot water suited her well enough. She took a laptop from her briefcase and set it up. Since Adam was sitting patiently, expression neutral, saying nothing, I thought I should explain about the kill switch. She cut me off.

‘He needs to be conscious.’

I’d imagined that she would be turning him off in order to lift his scalp somehow to peer into his processing units. I was keen to look at them. It turned out she had access by way of an infrared connection. She put on her reading glasses, typed in a long password and scrolled down through pages of code whose orange-tinted symbols changed at speed as we watched. Mental processes, Adam’s subjective world, flickering in full view. We waited in silence. This was like a doctor’s bedside visit and we were nervous. Occasionally, Sally said ‘uhuh’ or ‘mm’ to herself as she typed in an instruction and got up a fresh page of code. Adam sat with the faintest of smiles. We marvelled that the foundations of his being could be displayed in digits.

Finally, in the quiet tone of one used to unthinking obedience, Sally said to him, ‘I want you to think of something pleasurable.’

He turned his gaze to Miranda and she looked right back at him. On screen the display raced like a stopwatch.

‘Now, something that you hate.’

He closed his eyes. On the laptop, there was no discerning the difference between love and its opposite.

The routines continued for an hour. He was told to count backwards in his thoughts from 10 million in steps of 129. He did so – this time we could see his score on the screen – in a fraction of a second. That wouldn’t have impressed us on our ancient personal computers, but in a facsimile human it did. At other times, Sally stared in silence at the display. Occasionally, she made notes on her phone. At last, she sighed, typed an instruction and Adam’s head slumped. She had bypassed the disabled kill switch.

I didn’t want to sound like an idiot, but I had to ask. ‘Will he be upset when he wakes?’

She removed her glasses and folded them away. ‘He won’t remember.’

‘Is he all right, as far as you can tell?’

‘Absolutely.’

Miranda said, ‘Did you alter him in any way?’

‘Certainly not.’ She was standing now and ready to leave but I had a contractual right to have my questions answered. Once more, I offered her tea. She refused with a slight tightening of her lips. Without quite meaning to, Miranda and I had moved to block her path to the door. Her head seemed to wave on its long stem as she looked down at us from her height. She pursed her lips, waiting to be interrogated.

I said, ‘What about the other Adams and Eves?’

‘All well, as far as I know.’

‘I heard that some are unhappy.’

‘That’s not the case.’

‘Two suicides in Riyadh.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘How many have overridden the kill switch?’ Miranda asked. She knew everything about the Camden meeting.

Sally appeared to relax. ‘Quite a few. The policy is to do nothing. These are learning machines and our decision was that if they wanted, they should assert their dignity.’

‘What about this Adam in Vancouver?’ I said. ‘So distressed about the destruction of native forest that he downgraded his own intelligence.’

Now the computer engineer was engaged. She spoke softly through lips that were tight again. ‘These are the most advanced machines in the world, years ahead of anything on the open market. Our competitors are worried. Some of the worst of them are pushing rumours on the Internet. The stories are disguised as news, but they’re false, it’s counterfeit news. These people know that soon we’ll be scaling up production and the unit cost will fall. It’s a lucrative market already, but we’ll be first with something that’s entirely new. The competition is tough, and some of it is utterly shameless.’

As she finished, she blushed and I felt for her. She had ended up saying more than she intended.

But I stood my ground. ‘The story of the Riyadh suicides comes from an impeccable source.’

She was calm again. ‘You’ve kindly heard me out. There’s no point arguing.’ She made to leave, and stepped around us. Miranda followed her into the hall to show her out. As the front door opened, I heard Sally say, ‘He’ll reactivate in two minutes. He won’t know that he’s been off.’

Adam was awake sooner than that. When Miranda came back into the room, he was already on his feet. ‘I should get to work,’ he said. ‘The Fed is likely to raise its rate today. There’ll be fun and games on the exchange markets.’