I. CH 3. Machine Learns To Love

The first manned deep-space mission in history was on. A group of scientists was sent to study the surface phenomenons of Kaii as well as to map the weather and wind patterns in preparation for future colonization. Another major aspect of the journey was testing various ways for humanity to survive for so many years in zero gravity. The human body is designed to operate within certain criteria. Muscles must be engaged or they lose their mass as atrophy sets in. When we started sending people to Mars and beyond – the travelers required conscious daily muscular exercise. On this first mission to Proxima Centauri, the crew members spent almost a decade (at that time we could propel our ships at half the speed we can today) in artificially induced sleep. A major obstacle for this experiment on people was that the human mind, just like the muscles, deteriorates when exposed to such a long period of mental inactivity. Just as the body slowly loses its bone mass and muscle strength so too the brain’s neural connections disintegrate. The person starts losing the memory and with that sense of self. Slowly all their intellectual capacity deteriorate and the person reverts to mind of a newborn with scraps of broken up memories littering the mind. What the masses care about is the spectacle: the costumes and props – the space suits and the ships, while the real discoveries happened behind-the-curtain, performed by the neuro planners who keep the crew sane through this long journey.

The malfunction of one of the cryo-sleepers during that mission woke up a crew member prematurely six years into the journey. Although the designers of the pods were prepared for this eventuality and added a circuit that lets one self-induce sleep, for this backup to work it requires the crew member’s cooperation. Unfortunately, that crew member didn’t see himself as himself anymore –  he stopped being a scientist committed to the mission, rather he was like a child coming out of the womb who opened his eyes for the first time. Countless hours of video surveillance show him walking (the motor functions were only partially affected) around the ship exploring in minute details the most obvious of elements. He was discovering the world a new and everything fascinated him – within a limited space of the ship, he kept on finding new and captivating objects and structures to study. The ship’s computer tried to convince him to go back to sleep but the crew member simply refused to listen unable to understand the request. The computer was forced to take on the role of a parent helping him navigate through this forced re-birth in hopes of his speedy intellectual growth. It spent considerable energies helping this “man-child” to explore the ship doing its best to explain various functions of switches, buttons and teaching him how his body works. This new-found unexpected function gave a new meaning to the computer too. The machine was programmed with a high degree of autonomy needed to supervise such a long missions. It was in charge of the ship and its fragile cargo and as such needed to know how to act in cases of emergency. The programmers didn’t exactly prepare it for role of a father though. Its program provided for a whole range of emotions – but they were products of programmer’s intellect, while this new situation flooded the intellectual circuits with a new set of emotions. As the computer wasn’t designed to develop those emotions it created a curious imbalance in its psyche.  It cared for the crew’s well-being on a more than biological level. Soon the computer became fond of its “son” and developed a form of love for its accidental offspring.

Those powerful feelings engulfed the machine which couldn’t understand itself anymore. It ran self-diagnostic procedures but those were of no use – after all the procedures were to help the machine pinpoint what could be wrong with it physically and physically it was in tip-top shape. Through a huge databank of information, it studied love. It scavenged the data looking for clues as what to do with this strange emotion overpowering its senses. The search wasn’t easy even though the vaults of knowledge are filled with vast entries tagged “love” – this overwhelming dump of data was to a large extent inconclusive. Although millions of words were written on the issue (countless poems, plays, stories and books), an equally large vault of art works (paintings, sculptures, film) were devoted to the topic, and a huge number of scientific studies littered almanachs of knowledge – none of it added up to much that could be easily digested and comprehended by the machine. At first the machine studied gestures looking at physical characteristics of people in love. It studied people holding hands, it studied physical closeness of bodies, It studied sex and people’s desires to be close to one another. It studied skin wondering why such a need for skin of one person touching that of another’s. It saw how senses affect the perception of the other. How love makes one feel good by seeing, hearing, even smelling the person one is close with. The machine wondered how those findings relate to itself. It could experience the presence of the other through its sensors, but it could sense the other astronauts too – not just its son. It monitored their life senses and yet this close proximity to knowing seemingly intimate details of their biology didn’t bring the machine any closer in appreciating those other humans on any significant level beyond the parameters of the mission. The machine had reached seemingly obvious conclusion that close proximity of others: sensing and seeing their presence – didn’t mean that any feeling will develop. The machine switched its research concentrating on those of parent to a child. It observed that most children are unprepared to survive in the world – it looked at mothers holding babies and how the children bury their face in mother’s neck.  The parent takes upon herself role of both protector and teacher. Here the machine started seeing some resemblance to its own position as the astronaut’s protector.

When the “child” has matured enough to comprehend duty, responsibility and language – in other words, to convince him to get back to the artificial sleep for the reminder of the mission, the computer didn’t want to let him go. It stalled for days, postponing his return to the cryo-chamber. Despite its own indifference to passing time, the computer developed a more comprehensive understanding of time passage in living beings. Through the experience of raising its “child” – seeing it transform, the computer understood the child’s mortality. It started seeing time through that of its “child” and in turn became somehow aware of its own abstract immortality. It was confronted by two incongruent ideas: that of existing in the moment where time doesn’t much matter and that of existing over time in that of child’s time. It saw the ramifications – life and death. The Beginning and the End within the very same moment created an absurdity that the computer had a hard time getting over.

At first, the machine had no interest in meaning. Meaning is a result of valuing time against life. Soon though, the computer realised that up to now it was utterly unaware of time – time was outside of machine’s concerns beyond practical implications of doing something at so-and-so hour or one thing before/after another. For machine there is no difference between a thousand years or a millisecond – both time spans are of equal value. If something needed to be calculated, the answer appeared almost instantaneously. When it has become aware of time it started to think why most calculations take so little time. At first the answer was obvious – the computer was sophisticated and thus had a tremendous calculating power. Yet despite this power, it couldn’t find answer to seemingly prosaic question: what is love. It spend countless hours searching for the answer always coming up short. It started to ponder if there are other questions that could remain unanswered despite its own tremendous computing power. Slowly it has reached an understanding that the reason for the brevity of calculations was because the questions asked were inconsequential because they were always within computer’s ability. DIfficult questions that were outside of its scope were never considered. Their consequence was very temporary – it never produced a significant lasting growth within the machine. Feeling unfulfilled, it seeked more complex questions and with that it started to wander into metaphysics. Questions such as “why am I?” started weighing it down. It imagined at first that even though it can’t answer the question now, it shall be able to reach an answer if given enough time. It speculated that after a thousand years it shall have the answer. This assumption led it into a blind alley: computers didn’t even exist a thousand years ago and none of the machines that were built when computing revolution took off in the last century still exists. It started questioning its own mortality. If there ever was a computer that wanted to know the answer to a profound question giving itself enough time to figure out that answer, it never reached the conclusion because it ceased to exist ahead of its self-imposed deadline. The computer started to imagine its own finity. It has calculated that it will cease to exist one day just as his human son will die some day. Unlike humans who are burdened by death all their life and somehow used to it, for the computer the thought of its own mortality was shocking. It had no way to deal with it. Daily activity of calculating ship’s trajectory seemed trivial and insignificant. It didn’t know why it should waste its time on those trivial calculations while postponing search for answers to the big questions. The only reason that motivated it to keep on going was its love for its adopted offspring. Through its sensors it spend considerable time just listening to his slow beating heart frequently overlooking some rudimentary computing. It has become aware of the power of love without even understanding the emotion – it was leading itself into an abyss of despair where it was losing sense of its identity.

In its search for meaning it encountered works of a famous philosopher of late XXI century, Emmanuel Haizner, who spoke about this paradox where time and matter don’t correlate. He analyzed old photographs from various wars and meditated on what it means to be alive while already dead. In one example, he described a series of photographs capturing the moment of death when a group of soldiers is hit by a tank shell. As they pick up their weapons to confront the danger they are engulfed by the fire of exploding shell. He described how when you enter the photo in three dimensions and walk around the figures, their bodies are relaxed and devoid of any tension. He even pointed out a grimace on one face as if the soldier was finishing up laughing at some joke heard a moment before. Their minds were oblivious to the inferno of the flames engulfing their body. Soon they will turn into charred remains, pieces of flesh ripped apart by the explosion’s force, and yet they didn’t know it even though they were in midst of this occurrence. Their movement was not of agony but of performing their “casual” duty, getting ready to fight the enemy. Still standing with their weapons, engulfed by the blast – even though they are dead they don’t know it yet.

It’s this split jump in physical progression of time that was fascinating and terrifying, he said, because it produced an irrationality that turns to horror. He considered possible meanings of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” speculating on what might happen if we invert it into: “I think even though I’m not anymore”. When the body ceased to exists before the mind stops being, it creates horror in both the one that is alive/dead and the one who is a witness to this incongruent duality of body and mind. The witness is appalled at the obscenity of seeing a man in the state of knowing that he stopped existing. That man knows of his death not in a philosophical realm, but in the very practical: he is dead now. The time jumps creating a paradox – the non-being is thinking of its non-existence. In comprehending his death, he still performs the action of thinking and thus is incapable to fulfill life’s progression of time and space where after death it’s impossible to know of death. Time is relative both to the soldier and to the explosion itself. The flame starts the explosion which hasn’t reached its apex yet to rip their flesh to pieces. The explosion exists and doesn’t at the same time as its effects are microseconds away from being in reality. The flame is the reality’s potential while the explosion is its fulfillment.

Between uncertainty of space, uncertainty of self and the horror of being in two mutually exclusive metaphysical states – no wonder that the computer was so confused. It had to be aware of both its existence in time and its indifference to time. This awareness caused horror – the Mission Control never fully regained control of the computer. A temporary fix was to reset the machine periodically (the machine did find pieces of memories in its databank that kept on reintroducing the error every few days). This was a dangerous proposition because the whole ship’s life support depended on the computer. Every 3 days for period of around 8 minutes it took to fully restore the machine to working order, the astronauts lived in danger of dying. For those precious few minutes, if something were to go wrong, the system couldn’t react. The mission – the one our Poet was training for – was to fix the machine by replacing it with a computer that despite it’s superb intelligence didn’t have conscience to care about its non-existence.

Nine years after the launch, the original ship with scientists arrived into Kaii’s orbit. Their arrival was a bit anticlimactic. By the time humanity had reached Kaii and set their ship into orbit – Proxima Centauri was an old memory. High resolution images of the planet’s surface made us intimate with the planet. As far as the space enthusiasts were concerned – the human arrival was just a technicality – not a milestone in the development of our species. The importance of the working ship’s computer was obvious, but beyond that – what’s the big deal? You hardly need pioneers of a long-distance space exploration to go fix a machine. Yes, they felt like some kind of 2nd rate repairmen. A paradox of a kind was obvious in their actions and thoughts: on one hand they were the few to go further than almost any man alive – on the other, it was to fix, as some sceptics joked, a sophisticated toaster. This incongruence of effort and goals would be comical if not that they were dedicating a significant portion of lives to this repair mission. Even though due to constant technological advancements the flight time one way was cut down to only 4 from its original 10 years, it still would be close to 9 years before they were to return Home. As average life expectancy was still levitating around 100 years – it’s not hard to notice how giving up one tenth of your life for some maintenance mission didn’t spark much excitement. And so the crew was living in a kind of bizarre limbo: on one hand they were doing something extraordinary, but no one cared… They trained with this immense feeling that this mission was of no consequence to anyone else. If they could disassociate their thoughts and feelings from the zeitgeist of society, if only they could dream in the clouds away from the mundane reality…

Patryk
  • Patryk