Episode 20: Resistance Six

At the world headquarters of Medalion, Inc., the company that was both heir and executor of all the promises Silicon Valley ever made, the mood was more tense than usual. Today’s crisis was ostensibly concerned with reference frameworks for empathetic interaction between the subjects and what the Director called VIEPs (for Virtual Intrinsically-Encoded Persons), but what others had taken to calling creeps behind his back. Medalion’s first product was a plasma of microscopic robots that could repair pretty much any problem inside a person; today the company was using its deep knowledge of the workings of the human body to build a believable substitute for it. The hope was that these VIEPs would serve as a kind of society for the remnant, when everyone else was gone. The big question was how to make the VIEPs a vital, comforting, encouraging presence, and not just a herd of cattle in the middle of the road stupidly blocking the way. How do you teach an empty vessel to respond to a living person in a living way? The question for the engineers of Medalion, really, was how do you teach empathy to a creep? The original promise of the company’s health tech was so profound that they’d been flooded with resources, and remarkable advances were made in many areas that at first seemed tangential to the original vision. Not many were around to witness it, but those who did were stunned when the company produced a convincing artificial person, one that appeared to live and move in the way of its creators. But it was an entirely different matter to make these things appear human. A failure in this latter effort would effectively kill the VIEP program. There were many reasons why it might fail: the complexity of building a community out of a swarm of hardware mites for starters. Also, the fact that the builders themselves were dying off at an alarming rate – they were running out of time. And for those that remained, the work itself was reassuring, but hope that they would be successful was fading. At least, the Founders told themselves, the children would live a good long time, whether asleep or awake and alone; they would survive with their basic needs met. The Director wanted more. He believed that surviving alone wasn’t enough and that long life didn’t count unless you could really live it. So he insisted that the children be woken up regularly, and that, on waking, they would be greeted with a community to be a part of. The technology was mostly there, though so far it was just that – technology. A decent language-based interaction was possible, but the overall effect of sharing anything more complex than a math problem with a VIEP was one of distance; as if you were trying to communicate with a bookshelf, albeit one that could look up a satisfying response by itself. For it to work, the action of his Encoded Persons had to be as genuine as possible, based on what’s happening in the moment. The more remote the reference – emotions based on a fixed database of relational patterns, for example – the less authentic the interactions would be. Everyone recognized the difficulty: even real people struggle with emotions in relationships, struggle to decouple what is essentially their own historical database of interactions from what is happening in the present. Our drive to survive is tied to primitive defense mechanisms, by which we interpret everything through a threat-filter rooted in past experience. This makes empathy difficult even for the best of us. Long before anyone at the company would take seriously the idea of an artificial future society (let alone an emotionally engaging one), Dr. Brigid Tobin made her first appearance on a team call to argue for a little more empathy among the living. The engineers were having trouble with the human subjects, that is the three children that were spread across sites around the country, whom they characterized as being oppositional and defiant. Brigid was able to help the team see that the kids were only resisting because they were stressed and scared, even if they showed it in confounding ways. It can be hard enough to deal with the fact that your customers might not appreciate your efforts on their behalf, without taking into account that your whole user-base is made up of three children at the end of the world, chosen for unknown reasons to represent all of humanity to the future, alone, with nothing to reassure them but your high-tech promise that that future is full of wonder. It took Saint Brigid to suggest that this might not be only a marketing problem. Her advice was simple: they had to spend the day on the floor. Sit with them; stop talking at them, except to offer words to reflect their experience. Essentially, the advice, as interpreted by the engineers, was to make the children the emotional reference-point for interactions. Do they seem sad? Don’t argue that they should be happy, or that they should be honored to be a part of this historic moment. Acknowledge that they have every reason to be upset, or confused; after all, confusion was a perfectly legitimate response to the madness of the moment. Work from their perspective – argue for them. Her advice turned out to be a significant help for those technicians whose expertise did not extend to working with kids. As attention shifted from keeping the subjects alive to actually providing them something closer to a life, the Director took a particular interest in Brigid’s perspective, but for reasons different than the others’, and for reasons that remained hidden to her: he was trying to build more emotional machines. As the engineers on duty this morning described it, the first steps taken in this direction were shaky. They had spent a couple months training the VIEPs to respond to and progressively match the affect of human subjects. It was delicate work: they didn’t want to mirror emotions too precisely, because that would be weird, especially coming from a computer. So they were playing around with a more fuzzy response. But, the fuzziness of the logic was presenting like sloppiness, and imprecise in the wrong kind of way. The human subject for the day’s testing – a volunteer from Software named Brett – woke up already in a bad headspace. Like everyone, he was worried about the pace of the project, which is another way of saying he was terrified at the pace of events in the world. But while nobody could escape the effects of the now unrelenting stress, Brett seemed to feel it more than most. To anyone assessing his mental health, he would present as the kind of person for whom the extra support of pharmaceuticals, or possibly other more intrusive interventions, would be indicated. He was also the kind of person who would try anything ... once. He got new injections whenever there was an experimental update to the swarm; he would go a week on an entirely synthetic diet before most people had been willing even to taste artificial salad; and, he was first to volunteer for ten weeks in the CRIB system. Being the first to sleep that long established his reputation as a willing, and brave, test-subject, but all he wanted was to get some rest and relief. It didn’t really work, but everyone knew that a couple months offline wasn’t enough to effect real change, considering the constraints put on the machine when dealing with the mind. He woke up from his extended nap feeling deeply rested but any psychological relief he might have hoped for wouldn’t come close to matching his expectations – and couldn’t last anyway, especially when he was bound to wake up in a world that was, not surprisingly, worse off than the one in which he had fallen asleep. Today, he wanted to get away from the computer and do a little field work, as it were. He wanted to have a real conversation with the characters he’d been working on; he understood that empathy was going to be the killer feature, even if it was only a coded response. He’d been finding precious little compassion from his coworkers… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com