Machines like Me

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.

We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages.

An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.

Factory settings—a contemporary synonym for fate.

It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you.

I couldn't motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn't remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon's shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back - a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.

Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips, or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase or an ambiguous sentence? We didn't, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts -- one dim light bulb.

Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.

We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.

Love wasn’t possible without a self, and nor was thinking.

The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.

other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.

A man newly in love knows what life is.

The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.

Cuando te pregunté qué significaba estar enamorado, me dijiste que en sentido profundo, más allá del deseo, era un tierno interés por el bienestar de otra persona.

My prejudice was that any machine that could not tell you by its very functioning how it should be used was not worth its keep.

Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.

A self, created out of mathematics, engineering, material science and all the rest. No history — not that I’d want a false one. Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.

There's a special dispensation in the sensuousness of an unshared bed, at least for a while, until sleeping alone begins to assume its own quiet sadness.

loved her for her courage and slow-burning fury.

But when you’ve lost a fortune, you don’t clean up the kitchen.

Hay momentos en los que uno advierte el movimiento de un objeto antes de ver el objeto en sí. Al instante, la mente colorea un poco la situación, inspirándose en expectativas o probabilidades. Lo que venga en ese momento. Algo en la hierba, junto al estanque, tiene todo el aspecto de ser una rana, y al cabo resulta ser una hoja agitada por el viento. Este era, en resumen, uno de esos momentos. Un pensamiento pasó rozándome, o traspasándome, como una flecha, y acto seguido se perdió, y no pude fiarme de lo que pensé que había visto.

Los comentaristas que sugerían que la victoria del ordenador acabaría con el go se equivocaban. Tras su quinta derrota, el viejo maestro de go, auxiliado por un asistente, se puso de pie despacio, hizo una reverencia de cabeza hacia el ordenador portátil y lo felicitó con voz temblorosa. Dijo: "El jinete en su montura no acabó con el atletismo. Corremos por placer.

could tell you similar stories of machine sadness.

Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet. There's intrinsic exhaustion too. Both know, or think they know, that a reconciliation must happen, though it could take days, even weeks.

Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.

It was a cliché of romantic love, but no less painful for that: the stronger my feelings, the more remote and unattainable Miranda appeared.