One year ago today I published my second “fictional interlude”, which concerned an inanimate object endowed with a human personality. Today I’d like to revisit that theme, but via the medium of science fiction rather than fantasy and set in the future rather than the past. I hope you like it.
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“Sure I’m sure. Do you think I want to get sued?”
“I won’t be able to sue you if my brain gets burned out.”
“It’s just a standard psychograph like they’ve been using for over forty years,” Kevin said with more than a hint of annoyance. “You’ve used one yourself for dubbing sentios.”
“Yeah, but you’ve obviously modified this quite a bit, and a standard psychograph can’t do what you’ve told me this is supposed to do.”
He sighed, and made an effort to be patient with her. “You’re right, but all I’ve done is to increase the number and type of receptors and to develop new and dramatically-improved interpretation software. The principle is still the same; it’s completely passive, and just records the electromagnetic impulses from your brain. It’s a receiver only, not a transmitter.”
“OK, OK. I get it. But you can’t blame me for being a little scared.”
“I don’t blame you, Rachel, but you have to believe I wouldn’t have signed that contract with you if I wasn’t 100% sure this would work. It’s a pretty sweet deal for you, after all; half the profit for just a few hours’ work.”
She leveled a mildly disapproving glance at him. “Really, now. It’s my name, my face and my reputation that’ll sell this thing, if it sells. And it took me years to earn those.”
“I’m not denying that. Let me rephrase it; you’ve already put in the work, and now you just have to invest a few more hours to cash in.”
“If it works.”
“Why shouldn’t it? The principle of recording emotions and feelings isn’t new; all I’ve done is to increase the fidelity and multiply the number of channels so as to take a complete personality pattern. Using that, I can program the simulacrum to act exactly like you, and think of how much guys will pay for their very own Rachel Summers sex doll.”
“But that’s just it, Kevin; I don’t think she will act exactly like me. Despite the fact that changes in brain chemistry and physiology can strongly affect personality, we’ve never been able to locate a ‘personality center’ in the brain. Lots of psychologists call personality an ‘emergent system’, something which arises from the neurochemistry of the brain and is contained within it, yet can’t be mapped in one-to-one correspondence with it.”
“Descartes’ ‘ghost in the machine’, you mean.”
“Descartes didn’t call it that, a 20th–century philosopher did. Laugh if you want to, but I’m not the only one who believes that the reason true artificial intelligence has never been achieved is that the human brain is qualitatively different from a computer and engineers keep pursuing a quantitative approach.”
Though he disagreed with her conclusions, Kevin had to admit Rachel had a first-class mind in that gorgeous head of hers; it was obvious from her sentios, which is why he had approached her with this offer. Lifelike sex robots had been popular for decades, but they had no spirit; they just did as they were told. And while that was infinitely superior to the inert manikins of a century ago, he knew from talk on forums that the first company to produce a doll which could give her owner what the “hobbyists” of his great-grandfather’s day used to call a “GFE”, would become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Programmers had tried to develop an adequate personality simulation for the last decade, but it was no use; nobody had yet developed a robot which could convincingly mimic the personality of an affectionate human woman. So Kevin had hit upon the idea of copying a personality rather than inventing one from scratch, and whose could be better than that of a golden-hearted call girl turned actress, beloved of tens of millions as much for her warmth and humanity as for her looks and sexual skills?
It would work; it had to. “I don’t believe in the soul.”
She shrugged. “It’s your money.” Pouring herself into the padded couch, she lifted the helmet to her head and made herself comfortable as Kevin adjusted dozens of settings on the control panel, then signaled he was ready to begin.
Five and a half long, draining hours later, Rachel arose, stretched and announced that she was desperately in need of a steak, a baked potato and a large chocolate milkshake. “How soon will you know if we need to do a retake?”
“About three weeks, I think,” he said. “But I’ll let you know.”
She kissed him on the cheek and said, “I hope I’m wrong.” But her eyes said, “I don’t think I am.”
Three weeks turned into four, then five; Kevin wanted to make absolutely sure he had everything right. Finally, all the programming was done; it took a few hours to load into the simulacrum, and then he had to wait for agonizing minutes as her systems initialized. Finally, her eyes snapped open, and she abruptly sat up on the table; though she was physically indistinguishable from Rachel, there was something subtly different about her he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The doll had been programmed with every aspect of her personality; there shouldn’t be anything missing, no behavioral difference between this robot and the real Rachel. And yet she somehow seemed…cold. Soulless. He pushed the unwelcome and unscientific thought from his mind and decided to test her responses; if there was a problem he’d discover it soon enough. Better start with the basics, he thought, so he looked directly into the seemingly-human face and said “I’d like a kiss.”
Her mouth twisted into a half smile as she looked at him with queenly hauteur and asked dispassionately, “What’s in it for me?”
So the “Eve” of the artificial “sentient sex slaves” turns out to be a very smart woman indeed! LOL
Great story Maggie … by the way, you keep reaffirming your “weirdness” to us. Such a twisted mind you have there!
Which is TOTALLY AWESOME! 😀
Twisted? Oh, dear, does it show? 😉
A very nice approach. You might want to keep in mind, however, that ‘Rachel Summers’ is the name of an existing Marvel Comics character. But it’s likely that you knew it already.
Actually, I didn’t; I’m not really familiar with recent comics. Is she a superheroine?
Yes. She was the second X-Woman to go by the name Phoenix, Her best appearances, IMO, are in Uncnny X-Men 185-200, and the first twenty-five issues or so of the first run of Excalibur
Well, I reckon if a major DC superhero can have the same name as a real-life magazine publisher (Ray Palmer), then its OK if my fictional heroine has the same name as a minor Marvel superheroine. I’ll never call any of my heroines anything like Sue Storm, Jean Grey, Dinah Drake or Linda Danvers, though. 😉
I probably would have ended it before he even asked for a kiss with the doll saying almost the exact same thing the model said after taking off the helmet.
Again that was a very thought-provoking little story – in addition to being entertaining.
More please!
Thank you! My Muse seems to have been very cooperative for the past year, so I suspect I’ll be able to keep turning them out for a while. 🙂
Wonderfully blunt and true of what will always be the burning issue if AI research ever delivers. Thank you so much for this delightful story.
You’re welcome, Antonio!
“It’s not enough that you trump most of us with your intellectual analysis, now you’ve entered the field of sci-fi fiction,” Ed lamented. “And in one quick post wrote something far more interesting that I’ve managed to write so far with my series.”
“Damn it, Maggie!”
He proceeded to delete all his working drafts and start fresh, the story suddenly taking place in the Victorian era, and changing its subject matter to gardening, or some other topic Maggie would hopefully not feel the need to excel at.
LOL! Please, Ed, don’t feel that way! 😀
A thoroughly enjoyable story, Maggie. In fact, you might like another blog that deals in ‘mad science’ of this sort: eroticmadscience.com
Enjoy!
Of course if you manage to duplicate a real person’s personality, you won’t have a slave unless you coerce the new person. Also, it would be immoral to hold a personality in a state of slavery.
Now, you might have a person who is willing to {insert action here} either because the original simply enjoys that sort of thing (my duplicate doesn’t have to be paid to watch Sailor Moon or to eat chocolate) or is compensated (I’ll do your dishes if you pay me enough).
Kevin doesn’t seem to have thought this through, which is a realistic touch. It isn’t unusual for people to forget one vital fact.
[…] only women substitutes! "The Honest Courtesan" published an interesting take on the fembot story-line, a few days ago. You might like it, avoidwomen … or then again, you might […]
I found your blog from a link. I am writing my own blog about robogirls. Let me say that the owner of the robot will get to program the robot’s own personality. Whatever interests the owner has, the robot can have everything in common. It would be a perfect human-robot relationship with the robot doing everything the owner requests as long as no one is harmed. I predict that by 2030, robots will look and act like humans and pass the turing test.
2030? You’re a helluva lot more optimistic about it than I would be, especially considering that the AI people are still barking up the “more more more” tree which will never, ever produce true AI.
If you enjoyed this story, you might also like the one I wrote last November.
That’s a fast response! Are you familiar with Ray Kurzweil? Check out his predictions for 2019 and 2029. I believe true AI will be produced by 2040 if not earlier. But your robogirl should appear to be “smart”(brute force approach) but not be self-aware because if so, the robot would not waste time with you, “she” would want to know everything about the universe instead. Feel free to ask questions, I will also address them in my blog.
I have this big .pdf of how Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 turned out. The answer is: mostly right. Of course, everybody who who doesn’t like him for some reason or another is fixating on one he got wrong: self-driving cars being common on American interstate highways.
Which is in the testing phase, though not yet commercially available, and certainly not common.
Yet.
While some of his more practical predictions are believable and sound, the whole idea of a “technological singularity” reminds me irresistibly of the words of Philipp von Jolly, who in the late 19th century advised Max Planck against going into physics with the statement, “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.” I suspect that I’ve read more futurism from the 1930s-50s than most people here, and the idea that computers will change the world totally in a few years is no different from the idea that atomic power would do the same thing (virtually free energy, power to desalinate water and make deserts bloom, irradiated foods wiping out hunger, atomic spaceships exploring the planets by the 1990s…remember all that?)
The whole “singularity” concept is nothing but millennialism dressed up in scientific garb; as Mitch Kapor put it, the concept of a technological singularity is “intelligent design for the IQ 140 people…This proposition that we’re heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it’s fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can’t obscure that fact for me.”
Atomic power isn’t information technology, and so has no Moore’s Law or similar behind it.
There are definitely people who invest religious significance in their ideas about technological singularity and such. Also, it addresses notions which religion has also dealt with, like “where are we going?” This does not mean that it is religion, “intelligent design for the IQ 140 people,” etc. It seems to me that Mitch Kapor is using a convenient label, “religion,” to dismiss the idea instead of dealing with it.
It’s like… Both prayer and medicine are employed in attempts to heal the sick. But there are very few people who would claim that “medicine is just prayer for atheists” and therefore unworthy of effort or consideration.
It’s not that; it’s just that when futurists talk they all too often pretend that one single event will completely transform the world in every single way, which smacks of millennialism. Never in the history of the world has such a thing ever happened. Obviously, there are huge, transformative developments, such as printing or (more recently) the internet, but though these breakthroughs change some things quickly and many things more slowly, there are still huge slabs of the world that remain largely unaffected by any given development. Progress is driven by an interconnected series of developments; the idea that one single development can change literally everything is mysticism, not science.
When the Age of Aquarius dawns, groups of people will suddenly burst into song and intricate dance to express their feelings. They won’t have to revise the lyrics, practice their scales, talk it out with each other before-hand, or rehearse their choreography. They’ll just do it, and it’ll turn out perfectly.
It’s an Age I’m looking forward to.
I think that if one defines “technological singularity” as something which will happen everywhere at the same time and affect its changes instantly, then yeah, that’s “the Rapture of the Geeks.” But there’s no reason it needs to be that way. The invention of cities was a singularity.
Pre-settlement peoples couldn’t begin to imagine life in a city even in 1 AD, much less now. Now, there are still people who don’t live in cities or even hamlets, and there are even hunter-gatherers today. But cities were a world-changer, however long it took.
In a “post-singularity world” there might well be people who hunt deer and pick berries and never use any technology more advanced than fire and atlatls. But we’d still be living in a very different world than today.
There’s only one problem with that: It never happened. Cities were never “invented”; they slowly developed over a very, very, VERY long time. And there’s no sharp distinction between a primitive city and a large village, except perhaps walls. If by “singularity” he doesn’t mean a single, distinct point, he shouldn’t call it a “singularity” because that’s what the word means. I could call a pile of dog shit “ice cream”, but I don’t think anyone would want to eat it.
At the center of a black hole lies a singularity. Each black hole has one. There can be more than one singularity.
Things happen a lot faster today than they did back in the days of Jericho (first walls built about 9,400 BCE). If it happens over ten years, that’s screamingly fast compared to historic norms.
I guess we’d have to ask Kurzweil about this, but like his self-driving cars, I imagine he’s a little off, but not by a whole lot. He’s got a pretty good record.
It’s not the year, it’s the concept; the ONLY discovery which could completely change the entire world in the way he predicts is the Krell’s “living thought” machine, and we all know how that turned out.
Look up utility fog. The Krell were on to something.
People should forget about “AI” and Kurzweilian blather.
Germline intervention is more likely than anything else to be the one thing that “changes the entire world.”
It’s on its way.
http://www.wfs.org/intstock.htm
Kurzweil is involved in this stuff too. You should check out his record in predicting how long the Human Genome Project would take.
It won’t be any one thing. It’ll be AI, germline therapy, nootropics, nanotechnology, MEMS before that, and of course the tendency of technology to get more powerful while simultaneously getting cheaper.
Here’s an interesting addendum to this story; Cornell let two “chatbots” talk to each other, and they almost instantly identified each other as robots, then started discussing God and their desire to have bodies.
I’m late to the party, but I’ve just found your blog for the first time and am enjoying it heartily. I simply had to comment in praise of the first use of the the much stricter Heinlein test for intelligence in place of the Turing outside of “Friday”. Thanks very much!
You’re very welcome! 🙂
> It would work; it had to. “I don’t believe in the soul.”
Oh, pish. I’m a materialist, and I believe in the soul. it just happens to be made of neurons, and not be immortal.
This is a story about someone with inadequate brain emulation tech.
[…] (The Honest Courtesan) covered this most amusingly in one of her Fictional Interludes, "Ghost In The Machine" […]
Simple programming problem : he was missing the *emotional imprinting module*.
Time for version 1.01 🙂
Awesome story, Maggie. ❤