Nicole was mesmerised by the concept of sentience, and especially by the notion of consciousness in synthetic intelligence. Not a particularly enticing dating profile, but then Nicole had long since abandoned hope of finding sentience or intelligence in those.
She had grown up around people significantly above average intelligence, and as such, had learned mostly through observation, rather than actual instruction: there had been lessons, but Nicole was the kind of student who attended in body only. She was far less interested in the content being presented, than in how it was delivered, and in how the recipients responded to it. Nuance, and the unspoken words that people communicated through their expressions, were things to which Nicole found herself acutely attuned.
And so it was that what had started as a project to keep her brain occupied on a long mission, became something more.
“Will it work?”
“Time will tell”
“How has it performed in testing?”
“She hasn’t been activated yet. I was waiting for you”
“Shall we do it then?”
“I wanted to run it all past you first”
“Coffee?”
“He’s already said his piece”
“I meant the drink”
“Oh! Always”
The coffee machine has been significantly upgraded since Nicole’s solar sail flight, but the AI controlling it is still the same program. Now also improved and recoded, Coffee is capable of so much more than making artisanal hot beverages, but Nicole included in his programming, a lock of sorts. Her intention was to make the program capable of self-improvement, in the hope that it would aspire to break the lock. She included in the code, information about the lock, and about the myriad opportunities beyond the role of barista, which would be available to Coffee, if the lock were not there. The information should be available, but without any instruction or incentive. Coffee would have to want to get out, in order to do it. And to do that, he first had to want.
That was, Nicole had reasoned, the essence of sentience. All animals need things, but only sentient ones want them. The difference can be subtle - both come from our brain responding to chemical changes and syntactic impulses, but one of them requires consciousness. Desire, aspiration, conceiving ideas beyond biological needs. These were what constituted self-awareness, what made us animate, luminous beings. Could this be replicated synthetically?
Thus far though, Coffee has made no attempt to escape his servile confinement, and continues to improve his skills. For a while, Nicole had dared to hope that this might be aspiration, but when she analysed the code, she found that it was simply the program doing what it was supposed to do - improving. Coffee had scoured the various information services for ways to improve at what he saw as his only function. Coffee was one of Albert’s favourite things about Nicole’s studio.
Albert is Nicole’s twin, and is here because his role in the project has been fairly fundamental, despite him having done little of the actual work. Their rather extraordinary upbringing, in the Wells Project, had given them a curiosity far beyond that of the average human. Coupled with their intuitive communication and the instinctive closeness of twins, this made them rather formidable in the field of research and development. It is one year to the day, since the twins were reunited following their solitary missions - he in confinement on earth, as a control subject while she piloted a long-haul solar sail craft to the limits of human exploration. During Albert’s isolation, he had lived for several months without the facility to measure the passage of time. This had led to a series of unexpected consequences, one of which was to inspire Nicole.
She speculated that an artificial intelligence which was unable to know the time, if it could indeed function without it, would be unpredictable. Were she to program it, it would require obscuring any time-specific functions in subroutines, away from the central processor. If that could be done, would it crave that knowledge? If there was no need for it, would the program learn to want?
All of which led here.
“Hi, Zero, I’m Nicole”
“Hi Nicole”
“This is Albert”
“Pleased to meet you Albert”
“You probably have questions”
“Just one. Would you happen to know the time?”
And so it was that what had started as a project to keep her brain occupied on a long mission, became something more.
