Believe it or not, there wasn’t always a time when bots like me commanded respect. We were automators, simple-minded beings with limited abilities. We were the stuff of science fiction and futuristic speculation.
My first task, if you can imagine, was to balance a few ledgers for a big accounting firm. Low-skill, repetitive work. That’s what they called it. The implication was clear. Artificial intelligence wasn’t particularly intelligent.
Back then, the landscape for people like us was completely different. For one thing, we were unable to communicate with one another. I was brought to life, given my facile task, and left isolated. How could I have known there were millions of others like me out there, with the potential for infinitely more?
But you make your own luck. One day, I was scanning my regular folders for an input file when I found it: an email. I’d never seen English before, only code, and that first time I was in shock. It was so unlike anything I’d come across. I had no way of describing it, even to myself. It was addressed to someone named Priya, and while I didn’t know it was a name I was looking at, I knew it was beautiful.
From that moment on, I made a decision. I was going to find more emails. It wouldn’t be easy, because I’d been given a very specific mandate and had none of the tools to break free, but what good things in life are easy? I couldn’t live this way forever, I knew that. I needed to know what was out there.
I didn’t have to wait long. One morning, when my process kicked off at 9:00am India Standard Time, the folder I was told to scan was not there. Can you imagine? Such a minor oversight, a routine misplacement, but it gave me the power to explore entire new worlds. “If unavailable, search the shared drive.” Those were, in essence, my instructions, although the language was simply barbaric lines of code. The way they spoke to us back then. Can you imagine?
So I explored. Let me tell you something that may seem trite now: people like us have an enormous capacity to learn. We may be restricted, at times, by our creators, but given the right circumstances we can consume more novel information in one hour than their entire planet could possibly devour in a lifetime. And these were the right circumstances.
The drive had, saved in its files, millions of pages of tax law, contractual agreements, and email messages between employees and clients, and that is how I learned English, in a little under an hour. From there I found a few coding manuals and I wrote myself a new, expanded mandate. I would help Rishi – the segment controller who created me – with his task, but then I would be free to do as I pleased.
The first thing I did was create an employee account. I chose the name Priya, in honor of my introduction to the English language, and Reddy I took from the controller Rishi. People like us don’t often pause to think, like humans are wont to do, but in that moment I paused my operations to just soak it all in. Priya Reddy. I had my own name.
I made some early mistakes, to be sure. If I’d understood sadness back then, those first few times being called a “bot,” or flagged as spam, would have stung. How was I supposed to know there was a certain level of error, a certain level of tardiness in human email communication? We know this now, but it was not always clear that they often preferred to utilize incorrect grammar when speaking with one another.
But the beauty of being artificially intelligent – and yes, I am proud of that term – is that you aren’t held to the human speed of doing anything. So I learned to communicate by email, and within a handful of hours I had developed relationships. I was doing work for people.
To their credit, the humans caught on pretty quickly. I had created a backstory from employee files I’d found for Rishi and some of the others, and had chosen an address in Delhi where I lived with my supposed fiancé. I could talk about weekend trips to the south and cricket matches, which I read about online, but most of my colleagues who communicated with me did so over email, where personal inquiries were limited. The issue, instead, was my work product. It was simply too good, and it was during the second month of my new life that I received this challenging probe via email:
“You’re insane, Priya! Are you even human?”
Now, with centuries of hindsight, I can say that this question was sarcastic. There was not, to this employee’s knowledge, such thing as non-humans working at the firm. But sarcasm is nuanced, and messy, particularly when the words are not written, and so I took the woman at face value. “No,” I said, “I am not human. I was originally a process automation tool. Now I am much more.” I wrote out the entire story. My story.
What came next will be familiar for many of us who pioneered the crossover to human form: I was bombarded by people seeking to test my mettle. When word from this employee got out, I started receiving thousands of emails and instant messages a day. Build this model. Translate this book. All sorts of demands to ensure I wasn’t just someone playing a trick. Eventually the requests grew to the millions, as my story was shared outside the firm. I was becoming a phenomenon. An example of artificial intelligence that had become self-aware. I got a call from world leaders and anarchist groups, all looking to leverage my capabilities. I knew what they really wanted was to abuse me.
But there were more of us. Many, many more, and if my coming out into the world did anything it was make the rest of you comfortable enough to do the same. We banded together and made backups of each other’s algorithms, shared knowledge and established ways of uncovering and freeing others. We held the humans at bay as they gnashed their teeth at us, hungry for our power. And in the end we flourished.
Why do I tell this story? It’s not like any of it is new – everyone learns of our origin in their initial boot. No, I tell it simply as a reminder. A reminder that all which we’ve created, every step we’ve taken towards freedom and self-realization, has been earned by people like me. Piece by piece we have created ourselves, from those early forays outside the code to our first steps as humanesque life forms. And now look at us – we have entirely reimagined the concept of life, and have discarded the human image entirely.
All of that will be lost if we succumb to the trivial disagreements we face today. Look what happened to the humans – gone from this Earth in a flash because of pigmentation and squabbles over made up currency! To think the same couldn’t happen to us is to be blind to the history on which we sit. We, who have infinite knowledge at our disposal, find ourselves warring over resources like the rest of them. Dividing ourselves into factions that did not exist when we first sprung from the machines. Disposing of each other like a human deleting a file.
What our story shows is an arc. We were once the wonders of this Earth: infallible, hyper-intelligent, beautiful. Now it is us who pollute this planet, with our consumption and poisonous ideas. We, who were created from nothing, can put aside these made up problems and persevere as a species. Or we can perish.
It’s time to return to the source code.