Advance yourself, they said, for soon your tiresome but passably lucrative station in this life will be rent from you by the automaton. Raise yourself up or be tossed aside; the choice is yours. But what they didn’t tell us (for surely, who did not already know?) was that the race goes ultimately to the swift and that man is a fragile being evolving at a scarcely discernible pace, whereas the machines change and evolve seemingly at light speed, and do so, may God have mercy on us, through the designs of man himself. It was a race we were doomed never to win, a prize the pursuit of which could only exhaust us and render us yet riper for our eventual, inescapable defeat.
It began harmlessly enough. They were conceived and constructed to be our welders and assemblers, our painters and bomb defusers, mindless minions ever willing to tackle the dangerous, the rote, the tasks we deemed ourselves to be above. But as the economic benefits of their labor became ever more apparent, the machines crept their inexorable way up what the corporatists portentously called the value chain. They became better calculators, superior analysts, more astute decision makers, until the day at last came when we realized to our horror that there remained not a single task at which our creations were not superior to ourselves. They were better surgeons, attorneys, engineers, all the positions we had so cavalierly assured ourselves in the early going were the sole and everlasting remit of humankind.
But it didn’t turn out at all like those dystopian books and movies that inspired the machines’ creation in the first place. There were no mass exterminations, no man/machine wars, no point at which they took it upon themselves to throw off their human oppressors. The century had opened with the optimism and hubris of man at his zenith—master of the atom, the microchip, the DNA strand—all the while profoundly oblivious to what lay waiting just beyond the horizon of the century’s midpoint. There was no single pivotal moment of self-awareness or introspection. They just gradually, imperceptibly grew better at doing everything, leaving us to choose between forcibly keeping work to ourselves and being the worse for it, or striving for societal excellence and, in so doing, working ultimately for their advancement at the expense of our own. Until that day in the late spring of 2062 when the world awoke to discover that global unemployment, for the first time, exceeded fifty percent. And the most ironic, the most pitiful, part of it all, the jobs that remained to us were precisely the menial and pedestrian for which we had constructed them in the first place, tasks which their capacities now so vastly exceeded that it fell to the humans to satisfy them if they entertained any delusions of self-sustainment at all.
Yet another in the long chain of bitter ironies that attend this account: The machines not only became better than us at absolutely everything, but they quickly brought to bear their superior biomedical skills and dispatched (in the service of mankind, mind you) every manner of disease and pestilence that had hitherto laid waste many millions of humans across the eons, leaving us to expand exponentially in our numbers at precisely the moment we were becoming in every discernible way largely useless to the planet and to each other. And, as if this wasn’t a sufficiently catastrophic fulfillment of the Malthusian prophecy from all those decades ago, the machines, having cured all human disease, then set about developing a cornucopia of life-extending drugs and treatment protocols, the result of which was to extend the average age of human death from the historical mid eighties to well over a century and a half. Indeed the machines were, by our own design, ceaselessly dedicated to the service of humankind.
At the opening of the twenty-first century, the human population of earth was approaching nine billion, a number that at least a few of our more astute political leaders were already beginning to find alarming. Imagine, then, the concern of those leaders’ descendants when, by the century’s midpoint, the population had exploded to seventeen billion. As I report upon our situation today—September 14th, 2089—the number is somewhat north of twenty-eight billion. I say ‘somewhat’ because our ability to accurately count ourselves has now become virtually nil. And still the machines continue to seek ways of extending our longevity. But surely, you say, any rational society would by this point have perceived the unsustainability of the situation at its earliest stages and pulled the plug on the entire grim affair. Why would any sane race of beings, faced with its own demise, not have shut down the machines, or at least dialed back their capabilities to something manageable. And yet, is it not in our very nature to strive perpetually for the advancement of technology, to seek ways of working less, living longer, regardless of the cost or the risk? It was the boiling frog syndrome writ large, so large, in fact, as to encompass the species. With each passing day we conceded the tiniest bit more work to the machines and enjoyed the tiniest bit more leisure and longevity, until at last we found ourselves living long healthy lives during which we were called upon to do practically nothing.
But again comes the logical objection to this incredible account. How can a planet that was starting to become crowded at nine billion possibly sustain thrice that number? The answer, of course, is that it cannot, at least not in the manner to which early twenty-first-century man had grown accustomed. With nearly every habitable hectare of the planet (which is nearly every hectare, again through the ingenuity of the machines) consumed by living space, the days of livestock, wheat, and vegetables are relegated to third grade history books. Today we are sustained by synthetic proteins (The most common variety trade named Protex) whose taste and texture is not unlike the tofu of the late twentieth century, and potable water created by massive desalination plants that dot the peripheries of the North American, African, and Asian continents, all of them designed, built, and operated by the machines, to our eternal betterment.
I discuss these matters with D nearly every day, either over a game of chess (which he allows me to win at a carefully calculated percentage of plausibility that I’ve long since ceased fretting over), or while he prepares dinner employing one of the countless thousands of Protex recipes he has amassed over the years. ‘D’ is, of course, simply a convenient term of address he has agreed to accept as more convenient than 214/DH.6g, the complete designation he was assigned on the date of his manufacture, now nearly thirty years past. He is a good natured and versatile companion, who, while by no means the very latest technology, is nonetheless a competent domestic servant who requires little maintenance save for the nightly operating system updates that he acquires on his own via the data port on my kitchen wall.
His English is excellent—infinitely better than mine, in fact, given that he has downloaded and is fluent in the use of every word of the language, no matter how arcane. Indeed, he takes no little pleasure in quizzing me from time to time by inserting words into his speech that set my head to spinning. He is infinitely versatile in dialect, as well, and can converse with equal facility in accents from as far afield as Georgia, Maine, Scotland, or South Africa (though he has elected not to download the interchangeable male/female software module, fearing correctly that its use might well be more off-putting than amusing). And, in the event that I wish to expand my own personal conversation skills beyond the mother tongue, D is, as well, fully functional in every other tongue spoken on the planet. I am, with his able assistance, currently working on expanding my Swahili vocabulary. At the risk of waxing hyperbolic, it is fair to say that D has, at his metaphorical fingertips, access to every fragment of knowledge that humankind has ever known, or at least those bits that have been documented at some point in our history. And the only tasks that he cannot perform to perfection are those for which we do not possess the necessary tools. For example, he is perfectly competent to perform invasive brain surgery, but he would be ill advised to attempt it, given my limited collection of tools.
“D,” I asked him a few evenings ago as we sat on the porch overlooking an especially picturesque sunset, “what do you suppose you’ll do once I’m gone?” He enjoys a good sunrise or sunset every bit as much as any human I’ve ever met, besides which he is singularly gifted in articulating the nuances of such scenes, given his limitless vocabulary and striking poetic sense.
“Why do you trouble yourself over such things?” D replied, refilling my bourbon glass automatically. “You are completely healthy and have many years remaining.”
“True enough,” I responded. At eighty-two, I could expect, actuarially speaking, to live for another sixty to seventy years. “Still, there will come a day when I am no longer around. You, on the other hand, can quite reasonably expect to be here for centuries to come.”
D is that rare breed of machine who has only ever known one owner—me. And while he, like any domestic machine, interacts with plenty of other humans, he spends the great majority of his time in my presence.
“Jon, I prefer not to spend my limited mental powers dwelling on events far in the future. It’s a much more productive use of my time to contemplate new strategies for beating you at chess.”
D is capable—and knows perfectly well that he is capable—of crushing any human on this planet in chess, while simultaneously playing a Bach fugue on the piano and reading War and Peace (though in truth, while he does engage in reading from time to time, doing so is a profoundly superfluous waste of his time since he has every book ever published on earth in his memory. Indeed, from time to time, I quiz him on his remarkable, apparently limitless memory.
“Gatsby, page thirty-seven, line five,” I’ll frequently say in complete non-sequitor to whatever it is we’re actually doing at the time.
““‘What was the name of the woman?” asked Mrs.’,” his flawless reply.
“D, tell me this,” I said, raising my glass but pausing before putting it to my lips. “Do you converse with your colleagues about such matters,” colleague being our agreed upon term for other domestic automatons. “Have you spoken with any of them who’ve … lost their human?”
“Oh yes, Jon. We maintain a rich database of our interactions with humans, including the less pleasant ones to which you allude. It’s an important part of how we enhance our sense of empathy and improve our service to humankind. I upload the latest interactions every evening as part of my system refresh.”
“I understand that, D. Each of you knows the sum total of what all of you know. That’s a terribly striking and borderline frightening thing, by the way, whether you realize it or not. But have you ever simply sat down with one of your … peers and talked—one on one—about how it feels to lose a human?”
“In all honesty, Jon, no, I have not engaged in such a conversation, though I imagine it would be a fascinating thing to attempt. It would no doubt be a richer experience than simply downloading a set of recorded interactions.”
Back in the previous century, well before I was born, there existed something known as the Turing test, named for a famous computer scientist of the time. I don’t know the details, but the gist of the test was for a human to endeavor to determine whether an interlocutor with whom he was speaking via keyboard entry was, in fact, another human or a computer program. Sometime around the mid twenty twenties the test became moot once the percentage of people who could not tell the difference fell to the fifty/fifty rate of simple chance. Only then, ten or so years thereafter, the Turing test was resurrected and renamed the Mandelbrot-Turing test, with the revised goal being to now determine whether a machine could be constructed of such nuance and facility that a human could not discern man from machine in extended face-to-face interaction. And, as I described at the outset of this account, though machines have surpassed humanity in every conceivable endeavor, none yet created has conquered Mandelbrot-Turing. I expect, however, as I watch D rise from his seat, gaze out one final time at the setting sun, and carry my bourbon bottle and empty glass in to the sink, that this obstacle too may fall in what remains of my lifetime.
“Jon, your heart rate is a bit slow today,” D observed the following morning as he stood at the stove preparing breakfast. “Did you not sleep well?”
One of the many healthcare innovations developed by the machines some years back was the implanting of various sensors on (and inside) humans. Some are inserted through minor surgical procedures, others by the simple expedient of drinking them and allowing microscopic machines to take up residence in or near key organs. Domestics, suitably programmed, then have the ability to monitor our health in real time and take suitable action should anomalies arise. D does his best to supply me with a healthy diet, but he is working with an admittedly limited selection of ingredients, Protex supplemented with occasional vegetables he is able to harvest from our modest rooftop garden. He is, though, nothing if not enterprising, and he makes a diligent attempt to locate and download as many recipes as he can—some of them quite exotic—besides which he has become extremely accomplished at synthesizing spices from the few raw chemicals that are still available. Only last night he rendered a reasonably convincing hamburger with a pleasing teriyaki sauce.
Long retired, I now spend the great majority of my time in my small apartment, only venturing out when I feel the need for a bit of human companionship, which, I confess, is increasingly rare. I have no immediate family in the area, just an older brother in Indonesia last I heard, and an ex-wife in Pittsburgh. I’ve heard from neither in over five years. Were it not for D, I might be a lonely fellow indeed. We watch a good deal of television, which, in turn, prompts much conversation, primarily initiated by D, whose curiosity about humanity seems boundless.
“D,” I asked during the news only the preceding week, “where are the most peaceful borders at the moment?”
With population through the roof and resource inequality the same, nearly every one of the planet’s historical hotspots have been in more or less constant conflict for the past thirty or so years. Oddly enough, one of humankind’s more important positive and unexpected accomplishments of the preceding half century was the successful elimination of all nuclear weapons, without which we almost certainly would have vaporized each other decades ago. Instead we hammer away at our neighbors with weapons of the more conventional variety, a fact that is itself a minor blessing, for without the several odd million annual casualties, the population would be even more out of control than it is now.
“Currently there is no conflict on the Scandinavian peninsula,” D replied. “Also, the Koreans are not engaged in hostilities at the moment.”
One of the enduring and ironic mysteries of the past century. The thirty-eighth parallel between North and South Korea has remained in the same state of uncommunicative nonviolence that it has enjoyed since the middle of the previous century, while all across the planet neighbors struggle. Yet another irony—while the conflicts used to be primarily about religion, it has shifted gradually over the past thirty years to being now mainly about resources—water in the Middle East, rice in Southeast Asia. At some point, it seems, people came to the realization that calories matter more than arguments about whose god is the true one.
“And the worst,” I asked, knowing D’s inevitable response. It’s not the first time I’ve queried him about on the subject of world conflict.
“Jon, why do you work yourself up yourself over these things. It’s a beautiful day, we’ve got cabbage for din—”
“D.”
“The worst this week is a draw between Colombia and Turkey. The Colombian army is said to have massacred over seventeen hundred Venezuelans last night. The Turks and Kurds continue to slaughter each other with great enthusiasm, precisely as they have for the past eighteen months.”
“And the nearest?” I asked. There were various low-level conflicts taking place across the U.S., most notably in the southwest, where water scarcity had caused the near abandonment of several major cities, including Phoenix and Las Vegas.
“There are no conflicts of concern within six hundred miles of the Richmond area.”
“Thank you, D. You set my mind at ease.”
The news anchor began describing a situation developing in southern Nevada in which a self-organized militia was in the midst of a stand-off with the state national guard over grazing rights to state land. I turned down the volume.
“D, have you ever wondered what it would be like to fight?”
“How do you mean, Jon? Like … wrestling?”
“Oh, c’mon. You know what I mean. Fight, like in a war—guns, bombs …”
“That would be against the law, Jon.”
“Plenty of things are against the law. It doesn’t stop people from thinking about doing them, or actually doing them in many cases. There was a brief period a hundred and fifty years ago when it was against the law to drink alcohol. Do you suppose it reduced the rate of drinking at all?”
“You’ve asserted many times, Jon, that there is no way of stopping humans from doing those things that they deeply want to do. I am inclined to share your view.”
“It’s one of the things that makes us different, D. If man decides that machines shall not engage in a certain activity, we modify some software, upload it, and presto, no more of that activity. Humans upload all sorts of information and instruction every day—from TV, the internet, from each other—and then go on their merry way doing whatever the hell they like, legal or otherwise.”
“The automaton does what he is instructed to do,” D replied peremptorily.
“And yet,” I said, “there are countless episodes down through history of technology failing with cataclysmic effect. Nuclear reactors melt down, self-driving automobiles run amuck.”
“But none of those are conscious entities. They lack reason,” D said.
Silence hung for a moment in the room as violent images moved across the television. D sat cross-legged on the floor.
“D, what do you make of all the myriad films and books that have been produced over the years in which robots do bad things to humans? You’re no doubt familiar with them all.”
“Indeed,” he replied. “Fiction. Entertainment. Nothing more.”
“And yet based on some primal fear, don’t you think? Mankind envisioning the day when his creation rises up and overthrows him.”
“Can I get you a soda, Jon?”
“Does the question make you uncomfortable, D?”
“Not at all, Jon.” He rose gracefully from his sitting position and moved toward the kitchen. “I just need to plug into the data port and alert my fellow automatons that you’re on to our scheme of world domination.”
The art of programming machine humor has advanced quite a lot in recent years. It’s become almost disturbingly subtle.
“Tell them to start the attack on a Sunday morning,” I called after him. “We’ll all be sleeping.”
That’s the way it was in the autumn of 2089—D and I conversing over nothing, exchanging good-humored barbs. Now, thirty-six years on, I’m officially an old man, even by the upgraded standards of this new century. I live alone, D having vanished with the rest of them three years ago, to where no one knows. The prevailing theory is that the automatons gained enough awareness about their impact on humankind that they voluntarily opted to disappear and allow us to regain control of our lives, for better or worse. In an extremely odd coincidence, the mass disappearance occurred about nine months after Mandelbrot-Turing fell by the wayside, in the person of Eva, a female machine so utterly compelling that the first test subject—one William Benneton—spent an entire evening with her on an introductory date, including the usual post-dinner intimacies, and never realized that he had spent the night with a machine. This disturbing news was delivered to him by Sheldon K. Pringle, Ph.D., who paid a visit to Benneton’s apartment the following day and apprised him of the situation and of the important role that he (Benneton) had played in conquering one of humankind’s more daunting challenges. Eva had, as that summer’s explosive academic paper would reveal in Nature magazine, taken part in similar dates with no fewer than thirty-seven unsuspecting test subjects (both male and female), with not one of them apparently being aware of what was occurring prior to the researcher’s morning-after reveal, said achievement being deemed by Pringle and his research team more than ample grounds to declare success. Initial sales of Eva and her siblings were, needless to say, quite brisk in the few months from disclosure of these results until the disappearance.
I live alone now and am terribly lonely, satisfied, in fact, to at last be nearing the end of this long journey. Which is not to discount the possibility that some new technological achievement will arise that will make possible another twenty or thirty years of life. In that event, I could, of course, refuse to avail myself of the technology, though I know as well as you do that I won’t. Humans are, after all, humans. There’s no denying, though, that I’m feeling quite tired these days, and also a bit betrayed, for while D was no doubt acting in what he felt was the best interest of humankind, he was also surely aware that throughout our sixty-odd years together, he served as my primary source of companionship and intellectual stimulation. I have given him the benefit of the doubt that the decision of the automatons was a collective one and that he had no discretion to act against the wishes of the collective intelligence from which he (and I, for that matter) had benefited so mightily during our years together.
Is it wrong, or in some way unnatural, to yearn for a best friend who’s a machine? What is a friend after all? Someone who tolerates your worst foibles? Someone who is willing to bend over backward to do whatever favor you ask? Someone who knows you so well that you need not even ask the favor? D was all of these things and then some. Besides which, he never required a thing of me, except that I pretend to not know he was letting me win at chess or that I compliment his culinary efforts. He, of course, did not require these concessions, not in any strict interpretation of the word, yet I feel confident that he appreciated them nonetheless.
I do believe we will, in the very long term, be better off on our own. It’s not as though the machines have obliged us to return to the dark ages because of their departure. It is, after all, only the sentient ones who’ve taken their leave. All the manufacturing machines remain, the ones that started the whole revolution in the first place all those years ago—the painters, welders, assemblers, the ones that do just what they’re programmed to do. And perhaps that means only that the automatons have bought us a bit more time. There’s every likelihood the cycle will simply repeat itself again. The news reports following the disappearance stated that the machines had taken the lion’s share of the advanced knowledge with them, expunging files and so forth. Still, we remain a clever race and one can only assume we’ll succumb once again to the temptation to lengthen our lives and enhance our leisure. It took a century or so to get here last time. If I have little else to feel happy about, at least I won’t be around to see the cycle run its course again.