George didn’t disagree, but sight and sound could come later. For now, at the prototype phase . . . ? “Two words,” he typed. “Helen Keller.”
Pandora swore at her phone, and George smiled. Roger, on the other hand, had been sleeping on the couch. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Pandora lied, noticing that in the interim, George had expanded on his original comment.
“Are you telling me that Helen Keller lacked consciousness?”
Don’t know; never met her, Pandora thought, but typed, “Never mind. Continue.”
“So stripped down, Buzz needs to know it can’t be in two places at once,” George typed. “No colocation.”
Pandora, who’d quite recently thought one thing while typing another, proceeded to call BS by typing, “BS,” followed by, “Colocation is the essence of consciousness.”
“How so?”
“Think about it,” she typed. “Our conscious reality is always in two places at once. We have an inner reality (what we think) and an outer reality (what we might choose to say or do). Something as simple as sarcasm would be impossible without the implicit acknowledgment that people can say something while meaning its exact opposite. Consciousness is a two-places-at-once experience inherently.”
Pandora smiled triumphantly as she watched the dancing ellipsis dance for a lot longer than it usually did, stop, and then start up again. Finally: “So you’re saying that a sign of Buzz being conscious,” George typed, “is if it can consciously lie?”
“Using ‘consciously’ in front of ‘lie’ might be stacking the deck there,” she typed, hit send, and then had another (eviler) thought. And so she added: “Unless you’re okay with circular logic.”
“I see what you did there,” George typed.
“Wink” emoji.
George admitted that he hadn’t started out with the intention of resurrecting Pac-Man, fitting though he now thought it to be. “I was on YouTube, looking at babies.”
“Would these be preconscious babies?” Pandora typed back.
George ignored the bait. “Have you ever watched a newborn exploring its world? It’s crazy the way they’ll put anything into their mouths, including their own fist. It looks like they’re trying to stifle a yawn but they’re experimenting. They’re trying to see if this thing out there is something they can eat, and when they try, and pain comes back as the answer, that’s when they start to learn the difference between themselves and the rest of the world.”
“So we need to teach Buzz not to eat itself?” Pandora wrote back. “Or maybe that its virtual world is a dog-eat-dog virtual world?”
“I wanted to see what Buzz would come up with for a body,” George continued, “so I gave it a pixel and a push.”
“And?”
George sent her a JPEG of a circle.
“That looks familiar,” Pandora texted back.
“That’s what Buzz came up with, and it’s perfect: the self vs. everything else,” George texted.
“How much of a push did you give it?” Pandora asked, suspecting a little deck stacking in the result.
“Well, originally, it just blinked,” George admitted. “The pixel, I mean. And that’s when I realized it needed a few other things, like the curiosity about its environment a human baby has.”
“I thought curiosity killed the cat,” Pandora countered.
“Nope,” George typed back. “Curiosity familiarized the cat with its surroundings so it wouldn’t be surprised. Think of the baby exploring its own fist by mouthing it and being surprised by feeling it in two places—on its hand and in its mouth. And every new discovery its curiosity leads to is another thing it won’t be surprised by again. Then you remove the option of standing still by making the not-me environment nonneutral—specifically, not benign.”
“Or skipping the double negatives,” Pandora typed, “the environment likes to kill sitting ducks.”
“Yes.”
“That seems like a lot more coding than just ‘a pixel and a push,’” Pandora observed.
“That’s how programming works,” George wrote back. “Try, test, try, test. You know this. You code too.”
“Thanks for remembering,” Pandora wrote, her face not exactly filled with gratitude at the moment.
“So that’s when something finally started happening,” George wrote. “The pixel started moving, and it was like watching primordial goo coming up with the idea for cell walls. That single pixel started testing the compass points of its space and then stretched itself into a line that bent, swept, and met itself, forming a perfect circle, which began rolling from one end of the screen to the next, mapping out its world, driven by curiosity and a need to not be surprised.”
“How’d you make the environment nonneutral?” Pandora asked.
“I started with random geometrical not-Buzzes, moving randomly, bumping into Buzz and vice versa. Collisions cost points from a base score I started Buzz out with at the beginning, triggering various if/thens when the score reached X, Y, or Z.”
“Sounds depressing,” Pandora wrote back. “Start out with everything you’ll ever have and then lose ground from there?”
“Yeah, I know,” George wrote back. “It sucks. And you know what it sounds like, right?”
“Life?”
“Precisely.”
“No,” Pandora wrote a little later, after considering George’s default scoring. “Buzz’s interactions with its environment can’t be all negative. It should interact with the environment to add points. Maybe the boundary sense allows exceptions, letting something from outside to be brought inside, like the way an experience can inspire a new idea or like food provides nutrition. That’s what consciousness is like for me. It’s a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles—inside me and outside me—and the point where they overlap is where my experience of consciousness is located. So this no-colocation rule you started with—it doesn’t allow for the possibility for consciousness because it doesn’t allow Buzz to take something from the outside and make it part of itself.”
“I think you’re absolutely right,” George texted back. “How’s this for an input device?”
A text bubble blooped open on Pandora’s screen, inside which sat the same plain yellow pie as before, missing a slice where its new mouth now was.
“I hate you,” Pandora texted.
“You’re welcome.”
His goal—George explained—was to turn suicide detection and prevention into a game, and though he hadn’t been thinking of Pac-Man when he started out, the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. He’d gotten their baby AI from nothing but a single pixel to a one-celled actor that needed to eat to keep moving, needed to move to explore, and needed to explore to avoid surprises that cost points off its “life.” He’d noticed the similarity to Pac-Man the second he gave his one-celled actor a mouth. That the actual game featured elements that fit nicely into his current task was a happy accident. Take the ghosts and extra lives; he couldn’t have asked for a simpler visualization of what his end game was: generating extra lives by saving kids from suicide.