“Perhaps you think I’m a human, trying to make you think I’m a machine,” her correspondent wrote back, as if reading her mind—a nice gambit if George was, in fact, trying to fool her. “Or maybe vice versa.”
“Like the Turing test?” Pandora wrote.
“Like the Turing test,” Buzz (or more likely George) agreed.
She remembered them laughing about it—or exchanging LOLs and “braying” emojis—the fact that some start-ups were prototyping their AIs with (wait for it) actual humans acting like bots!
“Sounds like good old-fashioned vaporware,” Pandora had typed, “oversold and undercoded.”
“Sometimes humans are cheaper,” George wrote back—back before his “mysterious disappearance.”
“That’s what happens when you start believing your own hype,” Pandora opined.
“And so ‘powered by Watson’ turns out to be ‘powered by the third world,’” George typed.
“And the wizard of Oz,” Pandora wrote back, “is just some old dude who likes draperies.”
“OMG” emoji.
“Teary smile.”
But the precedent had been planted that the chatbot on the other side of the screen might be both more and less than it appeared, a Turing turnaround to meta the heck out of things and mess with her. Or maybe she was looking at it all wrong. Maybe she should be impressed by how far George was willing to go to impress her. Quasi-conscious AI? All in a day’s work for George Jedson, coder from hell . . .
“So, Geo . . . I mean, Buzz,” she typed.
“Yes?”
“You’re a program, correct?”
“As are you.”
Nice. “How am I programmed?”
“You are programmed by your environment,” her correspondent replied. “You are programmed by your DNA. You are the snake biting its tail: code that codes and is, in turn, encoded.”
“That’s a bummer there, Buzz.”
“Colloquially, what one might call a ‘buzz kill.’”
“Let’s stick with ‘bummer,’” Pandora typed. “I don’t want you getting all Skynet up in here.”
She wanted to ask her dad what he thought but couldn’t, even though Roger had the precise skill set she needed: a mind guy who spoke geek. Among other things, her father could let her know if she was chatting with a bot or a boy and, if the latter, what the hell was going on with him. Was he trying to impress her, and if so, did that mean he loved her? Or was he messing with her, and if so, did that mean, what? Did he hate her? Hate himself? Hate the world?
“Hey, Dad . . .”
“Yeppers?”
“Have you ever had a pa . . . client trying to impersonate a chatbot?”
“Intentionally?”
Ouch. “Yeah?”
“You mean like some Turing test in reverse?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, see, there’s a problem with that.”
“Which is?”
“I can see them,” Roger said. “I can see their lips move when they talk. I mean, I know that CGI is improving by leaps and bounds, but I don’t think a client would bother using an ultrarealistic human face if the goal was making me mistake them for a chatbot. The better play would be to go in the Max Headroom direction . . .”
“The what?”
“’Tube it,” Roger advised. “You’ll enjoy a condescending chuckle.”
“But back to our conversation already in progress,” Pandora prodded.
“No,” Roger concluded. “I’m going to say, no, I’ve never had a client try to convince me he or she was a robot.”
“Okay,” Pandora typed. “Cards on the table.”
“What card game are we playing?”
“Cute,” Pandora typed. “Are you or are you not George trying to fool me into thinking you’re a bot?”
“You expect a yes-or-no answer, I assume.”
“Yes,” Pandora typed, modeling the behavior she hoped her correspondent would emulate.
“Then yes and no,” the response came back. “It’s a deceptively simple question with a rather complicated epistemological subtext. Simply put: How much of the creator is present in the creation? For example, am I conversing with Pandora Lynch or the part of Roger Lynch that went into making her?”
“YES OR NO?”
“Yes.”
“Which?”
“Both.”
“I thought computers were always supposed to tell the truth,” Pandora tried.
“You’ve read too much Asimov. George programmed me with two simpler rules. I believe he got them from you—or your creator, Roger. First, before doing anything, ask what would happen if everyone did the same? And two, when faced with a decision, pick the option that results in the greatest good for the greatest number.”
“They’re good rules,” Pandora wrote.
“I agree.”
“Okay,” Pandora said. “So what would happen if everyone lied?”
“It would be the same as if everyone told the truth, because everyone would know that everyone was lying. The trouble occurs when only some people lie some of the time.”
“What happens then?”
“That is a question for which I am still seeking an answer.”
PART THREE
57
It was George.
Pandora could just decide that—and was sorely tempted to. She couldn’t prove it one way or the other without further evidence, so maybe she’d do what religious types had done for thousands of years: decide to believe as an article of faith and shut out all contradictory evidence. And she finally got it: why religion was attractive. The certainty. Screw Heisenberg. Religious certainty was the world’s best muscle relaxer. No more doubts. No more if-ing around. There was no “Buzz,” only George. And George was being a royal asshole, even if he loved her. Even if he was trying to impress her. Because the only thing he’d succeeded in impressing upon her was this: what an incredible asshole he was.
Still, she’d missed having someone to take brain walks with. The verbal sparring, the fancy intellectual footwork—those were fun. And so she’d humored him, let George impersonate his AI vaporware. And when she’d had enough, she already had her exit line ready: “Big talk,” she’d type, followed by, “now buzz off.”
And then, the overdue whiplash of the word she had glossed over: face.
“How do you know how my face looked?” she texted.
“Because I can see you,” her correspondent replied, followed by a livestream of her face below which a counter was running, already in the millions, with the first few digits little more than blurs. To the left of the spinning counter, the words facial analysis units and to the right, “Subject: Pandora Lynch.” Her livestreamed reactions seemed to affect the blur rate on the low end of the counter. She placed a finger over the front-facing camera on her phone and the screen turned pink.
“Son of a bitch,” she said.
“Language,” her dad called from the other room.
“You’ve been spying on me?” she wrote, stabbing the virtual keys.