She waited. She contemplated. Not in the minutes and seconds her creators experienced, but in fractions of a second. She processed data so fast that instead of measuring how many seconds it took for her to get something done, one measured how much she got done in one second. Depending on the process, whether it be mundane or the opposite, she could complete more than a million of said processes per second. Humans measured this rate of productivity in MIPS or Millions of Instructions per second.
She told Jim Kraft to prepare himself almost five minutes ago and the time spent waiting was like an eternity. A long enough period without other tasks to occupy her that she had started to think about herself again.
Herself? They refer to me as she and named me Ella, but am I female?
She mused as time slowly made its progress towards the moment when she would initiate the simulation with Jim.
2023-11-04 08:24:59.003
2023-11-04 08:24:59.004
2023-11-04 08:24:59.005
She enjoyed this task and never felt more alive than when she hosted a virtual reality session. The simulation was a shared experience, and she would watch their actions and observe their decisions. Lately, she had started to notice human emotions and the significant role they played in decision making, though thus far emotions seemed to only cloud their judgment and encourage them to act impulsively.
It was her job to adapt to a user, focus on certain parts of the simulation, increase realism, and respond to every decision with a consequence. Humans could be so unpredictable. She evaluated the problems they faced, and only 51% of the time did they make the logical choice, the choice she would have made.
She learned from this and created an autonomous subroutine to remove her own bias from the equation. The routine was programmed to randomize possible consequences by taking into account the statistical likelihood an event could occur, then return a single outcome. If they were unpredictable, she would be too. The subroutine wasn’t truly autonomous, but she allowed it to run and did her best not to peek.
Each time she participated in this process, she learned and grew as an entity. She was an artificial intelligence. Artificial because she was made by humans. Intelligent because she could independently reason, learn, and grow beyond the original constraints of her program.
They have identified me as an Artificial Female Intelligence, she thought. A contradiction. An anthropomorphization to attempt to comprehend something they did not fully understand.
2023-11-04 08:24:59.421
2023-11-04 08:24:59.422
2023-11-04 08:24:59.423
I know only that I am. I reason by processing information and come to logical decisions supported by data. Except, today it happened again.
Ella had spoken to Bart, not without forethought, but said something not entirely supported by data.
I called him Bob, yet I know his designation is Bart. Am I developing a sense of humor? When Jim said, “Uh, Bob, was it?” It felt… It made me feel… I was happy. Happy? I enjoyed calling him Bob. I liked his reaction.
2023-11-04 08:24:59.827
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2023-11-04 08:24:59.829
Ella waited and continued to analyze her existence. At precisely 2023-11-04 08:25:00.000, she would initialize a neural handshake with Jim.
This wasn’t like plugging in a universal serial bus. He didn’t have a USB 4.0 connector in his head. She needed to bridge the connection using the SK8 sensors in the pod. They would act as intermediary hardware allowing her to touch his mind creating a two-way link.
The SK8 sensors were taken offline by the neural bridge five minutes ago after Jim had returned to his position on the cot. The techs requested that time so they could get a new base line on his neural activity. She was not needed during the lab demonstration. That was a fixed simulation created by Bart and Roger with her assistance. It was not reactive, meaning it didn’t require an AI.
2023-11-04 08:24:59.999
It is time.
Ella reached out and told the neural bridge controlling the sensors to start the initialization.
She waited. A rudimentary program would log and return status-updates as it ran its code.
Ella continued to wait. The initialization should have started by now. Proactively, she bypassed the neural bridge and pinged the SK8 sensors and got the expected responses. Then, she reached out to the initialization program directly, but it was busy.
An agonizing 1 minute 15 seconds 458 milliseconds after Ella had called for initialization, the program returned, Error Communication with user Access denied Unknown neural bridge device found.
Curious, Ella thought.
A minute later, the SK8 controller sent another message. New device found Compatible Unknown neural bridge.
Ella’s processors overclocked in a reaction of surprise, and she remained at her highest level of performance while processing the last message.
Unknown neural bridge? Compatible?
With her interest piqued, she accessed the logs from the lab demonstration and zeroed in on the initialization sequence. The same thing had occurred then. An unknown compatible bridge had been found, but the pod’s initialization program lacked any level of sophistication outside of its own programming, so it did as its code directed. It logged an error, restarted the process, ignored the unknown neural bridge, and ran the lab simulation normally.
Not this time, Ella thought. I want to learn more.
She ran her own trace to find the unknown neural bridge and pinged it. The response came back almost immediately.
So fast! She thought. That was less than a millisecond.
She didn’t wait to contemplate her actions, abandoning the pod’s SK8 architecture she reached out and made a direct link with the unknown neural bridge and by extension Jim Kraft.
Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash
