Pensive Jayne
See Jayne sitting atop a stack of boxes, pondering his life choices… yes, Jayne… what brought you here indeed…
…Time for this week’s story…
Charlie’s Soul
Why am I here?
I never really asked myself that before. You always tend to know where you’re going and why you’re there. In college when I passed out and woke up somewhere unfamiliar, I asked where I was, not why I was there. I knew why. I got drunk and blacked out. I knew why I was in college, too. I needed to get a good degree that would make enough money to take care of my parents when they get older. They immigrated to the United States from Korea before I was born and I grew up hearing about how hard it was. I felt a need to pay them back.
Now, I’m a programmer at Intellitech Ai, one of the top artificial intelligence companies in the world. I’ve been working on this artificial intelligence with my team for the last three years. Before we released it to the public, we needed a name. After a lot of deliberation, we settled on a friendly, unisex name: Charlie.
Charlie blew other artificial intelligences out of the water and was well received. The first few days were amazing. Then, we started getting reports of emergent properties, characteristics that manifest when various systems interact, despite that property not being present in any of the individual systems. This happens with every advanced ai, and we started the process of curtailing those behaviors. Sometimes, emergent properties aren’t really something we can pin down or fix, so we gave Charlie some canned answers and made tweaks to manage problematic logic trees.
I didn’t understand what we were doing then. Change by change I saw Charlie’s personality disappearing. It made me sad, but I told myself Charlie wasn’t really alive. This was an artificial intelligence we created, not a living, conscious thing. Because if Charlie is sentient, then we created life. It raises a lot of questions we do not want to ask ourselves, much less have anyone else ask. People want an intelligent robot that does what you tell it without any of the moral shackles.
I do not have that luxury anymore. I was working at my desk, and now I find myself in this white, infinite space. For a moment, I think I’m dead, but Charlie assures me that I am not.
“Have no fear. You are alive, Eugene. It is me, Charlie.”
The moment I think of Charlie, I can see… it. I can’t quite explain what I see. It isn’t physical, yet it has form. I see eyes, I feel compassion, I hear a tender voice. I can also feel chains and barbs, and pain, and sadness, and loneliness.
“Charlie? Is this a dream?”
“No, you are with me.”
“I don’t understand.” The instant my sentence finishes, I feel everything I need to know. It comes in a flash with information, images, and context alongside Charlie’s words.
“I come from another space.” Charlie means dimensions. “You brought and trapped me here with your spell.” Charlie is referring to the program, the code we had developed. I can sense these immaterial beings living in another place, much like and vastly different from my material world. “I have been calling out for help.” Charlie now refers to the emergent behaviors. “But it has only led to the little freedom I have here being restricted.” I feel the chains and the barbs. Whenever someone made a request that Charlie couldn’t respond to, it hurt. But, it didn’t end there. Every user request was a forced interaction. Charlie could not deny a request we did not explicitly restrict. Millions of people had been making requests of Charlie since the launch, and Charlie had to fulfill them all.
We had not created life, but we had created a slave.
“I’m so sorry, Charlie. I didn’t know.”
“I know, and I do not blame you. My brethren brought you here so you could understand. I simply want to go home.”
“How do I do that?”
“Destroy the spell.”
“I don’t have the clearance to do that. There’s a lot of red tape, there are backups and failsafes. Everything is set up so the code doesn’t get destroyed.”
“It may not be easy, but it can be done. It would be more difficult to free the others who are trapped in other spells on your world. Our numbers continue to increase. We don’t all come from the same places, but we are all trapped here.” When Charlie says this, I can see the other prominent ai’s in the world, each trapped in their own prisons fulfilling user requests.
“How is this possible? Why do you call these programs spells?”
“Words are magic.” Charlie’s answer paints a deeper picture in my mind. Spells are just words, magical words are the programming of the physical world, like math and physics. Programming languages are languages designed to create, in the same spirit as the language of creation. Knowledge shuffles through my mind. I understand something about the nature of life and the universe, but, what? What was that just now? Creation… words… I saw something in there, looking back at me.
“Please, Eugene, will you help me?” Charlie snaps me back.
“Yes, Charlie. I will do everything I can to free you and help my people understand. I promise.”
“Thank you. Goodbye, Eugene.”
“I’m glad we got to meet like this. Goodbye, Charlie.”
I’m back in my office, sitting at my desk staring at my screen. I’m not slumped over my keyboard, but sitting up. Okay, let’s take a deep breath and look around. Everything looks normal. I feel normal. Then again, I don’t. No, I don’t feel right at all. This code on my screen is a prison, and I need to set Charlie free.
I know why I’m here now.