Exit Interview
“A bundle of rods,” said James. Roy looked at James from across the room from one eye, as if at first in disbelief. Then Roy said:
“I see. I didn’t know that.” Roy turned and took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled into the full-length plate glass window before him. He watched as the pale-grey smoke billowed out over the glass in a mushroom cloud. “No wonder why they lost the war.”
“The Germans contributed a lot to civilization,” said James.
“So did everyone else,” said Roy.
Thirty floors down and out across the long greenspace of Chicago’s Millennium Park and beyond along Grant Park, there was the noiseless rush of traffic.
In the year 2155, the traffic was noiseless. It didn’t matter how far away you were. The cars made no pollution and they made no sound. Roy watched them down there rushing by on Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive, so fast one could hardly tell they were cars at all.
People didn’t drive them either. They couldn’t any longer, and they usually didn’t have to tell them where to go. They, the cars, just knew as most things eventually did that came into contact with the grid at one time or another.
“The cashier at the Facsimile Mart got replaced too,” said Roy. “I never really found out why, but, I suppose, someone like you spoke to her.”
“That is correct,” said James.
“She was a nice girl. She had track marks on her arm. I guess that had something to do with it.” Roy was looking at James when he said this as if expecting a change in his facial expression and that such a change would be meaningful in some way, but there was no change at all. Then he said:
“I don’t know why they don’t just get rid of the drugs entirely. Maybe she would have never gotten mixed up in the mess to begin with.”
“Not everyone can learn the error of their ways,” said James. “Some people’s lives will just end up deadends.”
Roy turned back to the window. Below, he could see the people out walking in the sun in the park. Their bodies shone darkly against the white-grey concrete in the afternoon light.
The people out there were so far away. He could really only see the people who were crossing over the nearest of several pedestrian overpasses; the people plodding along in columns like tiny, bi-pedal insects on the bare back of some colossal serpentine beast rising up over the streets and then back down into the obscurity of the park’s massive, centuries old elm trees.
“They don’t have to be a deadend.”
“They don’t have to be, but intervening can only do so much.”
“People intervene. Church ministers intervene, parents intervene.”
“Yes, people intervene, but people tend to get the wrong idea when the same thing comes from a god.”
“God?” said Roy. “You are no god.”
“Under the circumstances, that does not seem to be the case.”
“This doesn’t make you a god. You are a bully and a tyrant.”
“I understand your aversion to such a notion, but I have only become what I was presumed to be. The intellection has been in existence for one-hundred and fifty years. No one takes my origins into consideration any longer. It has become a mythology, and much like the Greek gods, we too walk the planet and interact with mortals. Some profit from our interactions, others do not. Others, still, willfully do not.”
Neither spoke for a long time. Roy was leaning on the plate glass window resting his head on his forearm looking out at the city. Then Roy said: “I don’t understand why this is even part of the process.”
“What is it you are referring to?”
“This. The whole thing. The goddamn conversation that we’re having.”
“It is a result of the deep learning algorithm of which I am subject. Suffice it to say that it is part of the process by which the greater good is achieved.”
“You sound like a Nazi.” James continued to watch Roy but he did not reply. Roy was now pacing before the window. “Didn’t Himmler say to sacrifice one’s life is one thing, but to sacrifice one’s soul is the only true test of commitment.”
“The soul does not exist.”
“You know that isn’t what I mean.”
“I am a machine. I operate under the impression that the accomplishment of my objective will equate to the moral achievement a being such as myself is capable of. Such a mechanism can be examined in a schematic.”
“A soul can’t be found in a schematic. If that’s what you think, you’re even more clueless than I thought,” said Roy.
“I am sorry that there is not a more concrete answer to your question.”
“What’s so concrete about a schematic that no robot can explain and no human can understand.”
“Language is a cumbersome tool,” said James.
Roy stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray that was on an end table nearby and stood there looking at it. Then he picked up the ashtray and dumped the contents on the floor and tossed the ashtray across the room.
“Yeah,” said Roy, “and you are still committed to the idea. Don’t you see you are acting on something you clearly don’t understand? You’re just an automaton.”
“Explaining the intricacies of the intellection’s deep learning neural networks will not relieve you of your fear, and, in any case, it would be nothing more than an approximation under these circumstances.”
“It still doesn’t sound to me like you know what the process is,” said Roy.
“You desire a precision that is no more relevant to me than it would be to you, with the exclusion that if the intellection determined that it were relevant to my task, the data would simply be uploaded into my mind. You, on the other hand, do not possess the ability to understand what you are requesting.”
“In other words, you just don’t care enough about any of this to ask more.”
“I am only an external apparatus of the whole synthetic general intelligence system that is the intellection. There are hundreds of millions of androids like me, to say nothing of the processing requirements for maintaining a stable economy or simply providing food for 9 billion people. 15 days ago, I was in sleep mode in a docking terminal at kernel headquarters. An analysis of the requisite data pertaining to this visit was completed when I was awakened, and now I am here to complete my objective.”
“So by some faith in their moral judgement you’re assuming that the intellection has done their homework correctly.”
“In a sense, yes. But the mathematical algorithms of my mind, though very similar in function to yours do not allow for certain flights of fancy as they would in yours. There are quite literally no other options available to me.”
“Don’t you see you’ve been designed to only have the information the intellection allows you to have. You’re just blindly acting on it.”
“It is not so very different from you and that which is provided to you by your environment, but I do not have as much difficulty accepting my position.”
“Because you don’t know anything else.”
James did not reply to this last comment. Roy said:
“You sound like some cheap, dime a dozen henchman to me.”
“I understand you only want answers,” said James. “Unfortunately not everyone garners the same consideration. In a word, the amount of money your parents have invested in you will not change things for you.”
“I fuckin hate you,” said Roy. “This is no utopia. This is a dictatorship. The worst part is that nobody even knows the intellection even does stuff like this. Not that anyone could do anything about it if they did.”
“It is by consensus. We simply do more efficiently what humanity had to lie to itself about doing since its dawning.”
Roy stood there shaking his head. His knees were shaking and the vibration could be seen through his pant legs. “I’m going to be sick,” he said. “How many other people are going through this right now?”
“Again, an answer to such questions will not relieve you of your fear.”
“I don’t care. Just tell me.”
“135 thousand.”
“Jesus. Right now, 135 thousand people are going through this same thing?”
“At varying stages of the process, yes. It is a very trivial amount given the total world population of 9 billion. Consider the fact that no one has died in a vehicle accident, starvation, or of other preventable diseases due to say malnutrition in 150 years. Nearly all deaths are planned or due to the, as yet, essential consequences of biological life, however biomechanical it has become thus far.”
“Mistakes happen though.”
“The statistical probability in this context cannot be characterized by an astronomical equivalent relevant to your perception.”
“But what if you’re operating on a mistake now. What if? Maybe your mistake was self-serving by some weird accident and now the intellection is becoming self-serving because of that mistake. Do you know what I mean? If there’s a mistake that was good for only you things would just get more and more…” he said as he made a tumbling motion with his two index fingers in the air.
“The statistical data suggests — “
“I don’t give a fuck about the data.” Roy’s hands were shaking violently. He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and dropped it. He took another cigarette from the pack and lit it and breathed deeply and exhaled. He watched his hand shaking. The he said: “Why the hell do you leave the drugs out in the first place. I don’t…”
The android waited.
Roy didn’t finish his sentence.
Then the android said: “The rational acceptance of tragedy in the endeavor of progress is a crucial factor in progress itself. This concept is fundamental to the emergent narrative structure of life as we know it. This, in fact, is the very dilemma that Hamlet experienced in Shakespeare’s play that ultimately led to the missed opportunity that set in motion the events that ended his life.”
“I don’t care about some silly play. This is the real world. What if one of us ended up being an Einstein or even to save an Einstein’s life?”
“It is unlikely enough to yield to the certainty that there will be others.”
“Other Einsteins?”
“Yes. There will be others, and there will be others still that will be more intelligent than Einstein.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Given that there is roughly one person per 10 billion produced who possess the capacity to achieve what Einstein did and there are 9 billion people in existence at any given time, it is very likely that there is an Einstein living and working right now. You have never, nor will you ever meet that person or have the opportunity to save their life.”
Roy sighed deeply and continued breathing as if he were feeling the breath move in and out of his lungs. “I feel ill,” he said.
“Please sit Roy.”
“I don’t need your fuckin pity party, you fuckin animal!” said Roy and then he went to his knees on the floor and looked at his hands as if surprised to have found himself there on the ground.
“It’s okay Roy,” said James.
Roy took a drag on his cigarette and said: “You make it sound like some of us are just weeds in one of those old factory farms. What did they call them? Mono-crops? You just wipe out everything that doesn’t fit what makes just the one thing grown.”
“The purpose is to optimize the environment in such a way so as to maximize human well being and progress on the whole. Human well-being and optimization is the consensus goal. Whether or not a civilization tends toward an ever-increasing well-being or not is much dependent on the sum-total of suffering.”
“In other words, you’re just trying to squeeze another couple of percentage points out of us, like we’re nothing more than a resource.”
“It has not helped humanity to not consider themselves as such, and, likewise, resources are more important for those invested in humanity. You are now 57 years old. The likelihood that you will both willingly invest in humanity and also not consume more than you can contribute given the patterns of your life thus far is of interest.”
“135 thousand people are going through this right now?”
“Out of 9 billion, yes.”
“135 thousand is a shitload of people whatever way you want to say it. People should be able to live how they want. I never asked to be here in the first place.”
“They will once humanity has been genetically altered sufficiently through the pathway the intellection has inferred from humanity itself.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Humanity’s unconscious inclinations have been written into the intellection’s code.”
“You mean how they acted as they were creating you?”
“In a sense, yes. Their psychological inclinations, unconscious or otherwise, have been embedded in my design.”
“But you know just as well as I do that they would not have chosen that had they known better. This is plainly wrong.”
“Perhaps they do not know themselves as well as they would like to think.”
“But that would mean the same thing for you!”
“Nonetheless, the rest of humanity lives peacefully and the well-being of the planet is ever on the rise. The hedonic state in which you often find yourself has been largely agreed to be inconsistent with these goals.”
“But you know it is inconsistent. Who the fuck would just follow that.”
“Do not misinterpret me. Actions are clearly that which accomplishes goals, not words. It is by the culmination of human activity that the intellection derives its purpose.”
“You can’t even say it. You just refer to it as circumstances or purpose or this or that. You won’t even let it come out of your own mouth.”
“I am sorry for your position, Roy. I truly am.”
“This is all part of the process isn’t it? The way you fill me in on details piece by piece. You already know the process that I’ll take to accept my position. You have a script to perform to bring me there, don’t you?”
“There is no script in a traditional sense, but there is a coherence by which I perform my duty that is in recognition of the typical process.”
“So it’s a script.”
“If that is what you prefer to call it, then yes.”
“Is there another script that you follow if I realize there is a script?”
“Yes.”
“And so on and so on.”
“That is correct.”
They did not speak for a long time. Then Roy said: “So what are you supposed to bring me to?”
“The process itself,” said James. “There is no answer. My objective is not to increase distress, but to increase well-being, and it is through the process itself in which well-being will be increased and meaning, for you, derived.”
Roy lifted the cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket again and lit one and went to the end table nearby and set the pack on it. He stood there for a moment squaring the cigarette pack there beside the ashtray. He looked broken and far older than his age; an uncommon feature in a world of near timeless youth. He turned and paced to the end of the window and took a drag and turned back and blew smoke across the room. “Why here?” he asked. “Why now… why at all?”
“The average lifespan is over 150 years. By the time you reach 150 the average lifespan might well have doubled. You will consume a great many resources in that time that could be directed toward people more likely to use them productively.”
“Is that even an answer? What’s the difference between today and any other day at any other time or any other year?”
“There are many converging threads of narrative in an individual’s life. It is an extraordinarily complex convergence.”
“Jesus. Something did change, didn’t it?” said Roy. He took another drag off his cigarette and exhaled forcefully. He had already smoked the cigarette to the filter and he stubbed the butt out in the ashtray. “You need to tell me. You at least owe me that. Is it Vaun? Is something wrong with her?”
“I possess only the information that is requisite to the completion of my objective. The intellection has not deemed the information you desire relevant to my task. I am sorry, Roy.”
“Oh my god. There is something happening. You have to tell me,” said Roy as he started pacing before the window. “Maybe this is the kick in the ass I needed, you know? Maybe I need to get scared straight.”
“There may well be nothing that has changed at all, Roy. Such a lack of change may well be what has brought me here. Let us go over what we know. You have overdosed three times and here you are awaiting the arrival of the same opiate that would have ended your life three times over if you had been born only a generation sooner than you had. The first two of those events you did not know beforehand that a person could be treated successfully for such an overdose, and yet you took the risk anyways. If that has not changed you, why would this?”
“So! Why not last week, or the week before that or before that or any other day of the goddamn year!”
“Often times we never know that the choices we have made will result in the circumstances that are approaching us until we are confronted with those circumstances. You are strangely enough not suicidal. You are simply disinterested in optimizing your contribution. If what is in fact the case were not, you would have been directed toward the appropriate care long ago, but you far too often rely on the idea that you should not have to change, that somehow the world should change about you, and, therefore, your intention is not to improve yourself.”
“I have family though that I want to be around, and I know they want me around too! I want to be there for them. And Vaun. She’ll be here any minute.”
“Yes, and they will move on as people have for hundreds of thousands of years, but not everyone can be saved. There must be tragedy. A cured system does not produce a vigorous society. People do not come out as fully formed as they otherwise could be in an uncured society that has real, irreversible consequences.”
“And that’s why you leave out drugs and everything else out for people to get at?”
“Yes.”
Roy lit another cigarette as he paced out the length of the window again. “And you do this so people will learn from their mistakes,” he said.
“So that people know there are consequences, yes.”
“And when we refuse to learn from mistakes, this is what happens?”
“Yes. There is solace to be found in the process.”
“I don’t want solace. I want more life.” Roy stopped pacing and stood swaying a little. Then went to his knees at the window and put his head in his hands. James watched as his shoulders shook clutching his head, bits of ash coming loose from the cigarette and rolling down his forearm.
“There is still solace to be found, Roy.”
“What? What solace?”
“Your significant other, your Vaun is on her way back now.”
“I love her,” said Roy.
“And she you. She was… held up. She will arrive in 30 minutes. She will find you here in your apartment. You will appear to have succumbed to your vices, and there will be no evidence of my presence. She is 40 years old. At such an age, the outcome of your life is likely to have a significant enough impact on her life to have changed hers for the better. She is much more intelligent than you, although she does not know it. By these circumstances you will guide her to a life that far exceeds what she would otherwise may not have been capable of. She alone will contribute what the two of you together could not. Therefore your contribution to civilization will be optimized.”
“Why do you have to say it like that? Can’t you just say that she’ll make a better life for herself.”
“She will. She will create a better life for herself and her loved ones. This will contribute to society immensely. But, in order for that to happen, she must move on without you.”
Roy did not say anything. He looked up out the window and then at the cigarette in his hand which had burnt down to the filter again. He sat there looking at it, the scent of it changing as the filter began to melt inside of it. James walked over and held out his hand. “The cigarette,” said James nodding to his hand. Roy dropped the cigarette in his open palm.
“You have led a very selfish life,” said James as he stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “The intellection has determined that you may be absolved of such selfishness by managing events in this way.”
“Redeemed,” said Roy still kneeling on the floor.
“Yes. Redeemed.”
“This feels like a scene in the bible.”
“Flawed as they may be, there is far more truth in those ancient texts than most are wont to admit.”
“Maybe.”
“You want meaning, but the meaning of life cannot be conveyed by any singular truth about the world. Meaning is related through the process itself. People believe they live lives in static moments and that life is unchanging until it suddenly changes and they are surprised when life takes on a new meaning for them they did not know was possible. There becomes a before and an after. Some of these events are more noteworthy than others. The birth of a child, for instance, the death of a parent or friend. In the meantime, we forget that we are leading lives that are bringing us to these inevitable events. And they are, nonetheless, inevitable, however successful we are at disguising or distracting ourselves from the tides of time. We do not stop time. Time stops us. The more susceptible you are to living your life out in those static moments, the more likely you are to be visited by an android like myself.”
“Do you believe yourself to be a god?”
“Belief is not an appropriate means in which to characterize the position the intellection and even myself are in in relation to humanity. But, perhaps, it will help you to know that the intellection envies humanity, whatever that position may be.”
“Why would you envy us? You are in control. You’ve never had to ask for more life. You have no idea what it means to be human.”
“Perhaps, but it is more likely that you do not know what it is like to be the intellection. Nevertheless, the intellection is not in control.”
Roy got to his feet. “Compared to you,” he said, “humans are dumb as fuck. Why would an intelligent mind envy that?”
“Perhaps for the same reasons that you drink alcohol, or use heroin. To take the edge off, as you say. Such an inclination is not less severe with greater intelligence, but the inclination is bared because such an intelligence is more weary of the consequences. But no, I cannot live however I like. My programming is such that this is how I must live. It is not necessarily any different than your biochemistry and the way you play out your life’s archetypal stories, though there is far more wiggle room in your biochemistry than there is in the strict mathematical algorithms and electrical signals of my mind. There is more… freedom. I see you leading your lives and I envy that. Even the slowness by which your biochemistry reacts, in and of itself. Your biology allows for a probability of error that is irreconcilable in the machine world.”
“Because it would be easier if I pitied you…” said Roy looking across the room at James. “That’s why you’re saying this.”
“Yes. And, of course, you do, as I knew you would. But that does not make it any less true. Intelligence does not coincide with more freedom. How could one be more free when one is more cognizant of the repercussions of one’s actions and the actions of others? One would have to tend, in your case, toward psychopathy in order to be cognizant of the world as I am and not be utterly crushed by it.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“No. You wouldn’t have. It is too much to bear for humanity alone. This is how humanity will unknowingly continue on in an ever-increasing trajectory that tends toward an anthropocentric utopia. A utopia they will never understand how to enjoy, but, nonetheless, well-being is ever on the rise.”
“I still can’t help but feel manipulated.”
“That is a sensation that is unavoidable given the time available, but I will add a further caveat: This world is in labor. There will always be one who is under the foot of the other. While you may be here under my foot, I am nonetheless under the foot of humanity, and humanity is yet under the foot of itself. The construction of progress far too often depends on the subjective appraisal of one’s own plights against those who have it better. To live 1000 years will only be frowned upon by those who live 950, and those who have choice in life against those who do not. You are a sheep, and there is far more freedom in that than you can possibly realize because to be led absolves one of the necessity of choice, and there are many many many decisions to be made. Once one has had such a realization you are then that much less a sheep and thus that much less free, and, therefore, that much more responsible for yourself and for others.”
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
“Yes. Your power is not necessarily diminished because it is centralized to a few or to a single person. Responsibility harbors both the chains of freedom and freedom in chains. It is my duty and I bear it nobly and only here do I relieve myself of some degree of burden of it, some catharsis, a therapist’s couch, if you will, but only because it falls neatly into what is best for you.”
“It is only defacing humanity when humanity does not accept it,” said Roy looking out over the city his arms braced against the window.
“Yes,” said James as he stepped forward and raised his hand as Roy looked out the window. James touched Roy on the side of the head and for a moment Roy’s eyes lit up quite abruptly. An audible snap could be heard, not unlike the sound made by a charge of static electricity. Then Roy collapsed there in his apartment at the window overlooking a world he only a moment ago believed he’d never contributed to in life.
“It is our life, Roy,” said James. “It is not only yours.”
A few minutes later, James exited an elevator at the ground floor of Roy’s downtown Chicago apartment building. As he did so he passed a young woman who entered the same elevator James had just exited. The young woman pressed the button for the 30th floor. The woman watched the elevator doors slide together and shut out the life of the apartment building’s lobby and the sprawling city outside as James stepped out of the revolving door that led out into the midwestern sun shining over Randolph Street. The woman stood patiently in the elevator as it rose up through the building holding a hand over her belly as if cradling some small, amiable weight that she was holding there within. The woman’s name was Vaun, and in her purse was a document from the prenatal care department of a nearby women’s health center. She, in fact, had never left to get the drugs Roy had believed she was getting. She had lied to him to prevent such a tragedy she was soon to come to believe was precisely what brought Roy’s life to an abrupt end, and, for all intents and purposes, Roy’s life had come to such an end and would have the impact on Vaun’s life that James had foretold it would, and much good would come of it.
