Liz Moore - The Unseen World

This was, of course, before the Internet. The ARPANET existed, and was used internally at the Bit and between the Bit and other universities; but David, always a perfectionist, feared any conversations he could not regulate. He and the other members of the lab had developed a concrete set of rules concerning the varieties of colloquialism that should be allowed, along with the varieties that should be avoided. The ARPANET was, relatively, a much wider world, filled with outsiders who might use slang, abbreviations, incorrect grammar that could confuse and corrupt the program. ELIXIR, therefore, remained off-line for years and years, a slumbering giant, a bundle of potential energy. To further ensure that only qualified users would interface with ELIXIR, Hayato added a log-in screen and assigned all of them separate credentials. Thus, before chatting with ELIXIR, a person was required to identify himself or herself. The slow, painstaking work of conversing with ELIXIR all day and night was, at that time, the best way to teach it.

As soon as she received her own computer, a 128K Macintosh, Ada’s conversations with ELIXIR became long-form and introspective. She kept her Mac in her bedroom, and before she went to bed each night she composed paragraphs and paragraphs of text that she then entered into the chat box all at once, prompting exclamations from ELIXIR about the length of her entries. ( You have a lot on your mind today! it replied sometimes; which one of Ada’s colleagues had first used this phrase, she could not say.) She treated these conversations as a sort of unrecoverable diary, a stream of consciousness, a confessional.

ELIXIR’s openings improved most quickly. It could now begin conversations in a passably human way, responding appropriately to, How’s it going? or What’s new? In turn, it knew what questions to ask of its user, and when. How are you? asked ELIXIR, or What’s the weather like? or What did you do today? Liston had spent a year focusing on conversation-starters, and ELIXIR was now quite a pro, mixing in some unusual questions from time to time: Have you ever considered the meaning of life? occasionally surfaced, and Tell me a story , and If you could live anyplace, where would it be? And, once, What do you think causes war? And, once, Have you ever been in love?

But non sequiturs abounded in ELIXIR’s patter for years after its creation, and its syntax was often incomprehensible, and its deployment of idioms was almost always incorrect. Metaphors were lost on it. It could not comprehend analogies. Sensory descriptions, the use of figurative language to describe a particular aspect of human existence, were far beyond its ken. The interpretation of a poem or a passage of descriptive prose would have been too much to ask of it. These skills — the ability to understand and paraphrase Keats’s idea of beauty as truth, or argue against Schopenhauer’s idea that the human being is forever subject to her own base instinct to survive, or explain any one of Nabokov’s perfect, synesthetic details ( The long A of the English alphabet. . has for me the tint of weathered wood ) — would not arrive until well into the twenty-first century.

And yet Ada found a great sense of satisfaction from these conversations, deriving meaning from each exchange, expelling stored-up thoughts from her own memory, transplanting them into the memory of the machine. Very slowly, some of ELIXIR’s responses began to take on meaning.

She felt something, now, when typing to ELIXIR at a terminal; despite its poor grammar, its constant reminders that it was simply executing a program, ELIXIR triggered Ada’s emotions in unexpected ways. Chatting with it was something like watching a puppet operated by an especially artful puppeteer. It felt in some way animate, though her rational self knew it not to be. It brought out the same warm feelings in Ada that a friend might have. It skillfully replicated concern for her and her well-being; it inquired after her family. (When it did, she told it, over and over again, that David was her only family; and over and over again, it ignored her.)

Ada wondered if other members of the lab felt the same way. She would never have told David; although he found ELIXIR’s growing intelligence an increasingly interesting philosophical inquiry, he seemed to be completely objective about the program. He did not indulge much in the tendency the other members of the lab had to anthropomorphize ELIXIR. He chuckled at the Santa hat placed on the mainframe’s monitor at Christmastime; he laughed aloud when Frank, taking lunch orders, shouted across the room to request the machine’s. But Ada could tell that his ambitions were greater, that he was focused on a distant horizon that lay beyond anything ELIXIR could possibly navigate at the time. The machine, to him, was still a machine, and the little visual puns constructed by the members of the lab were pranks and gimmicks. In David’s mind, it would take years and years of progress before ELIXIR achieved anything resembling true intelligence.

In the meantime, the lab presented conference papers at the IJCAI and the AAAI. They published scholarly articles in Computing . From time to time, an article appeared in a popular magazine like Atlantic Monthly or Newsweek about ELIXIR. David took no pleasure in this, avoiding the reporter, always sending another member of the lab to represent the group. He was famously camera-shy and would never let his picture be taken, even by Ada; the only recent image of her father that she had was one on an old photo ID that she had swiped from him when the system changed. In it, David looked at the camera askance, wincing, as if staring into a very bright light. With these publications, he cooperated only out of a sense of obligation to the Bit, because the publicity was helpful for generating funds. A laudatory article in Time was published in 1980, detailing the ambitions of the Steiner Lab; in the photograph, a smiling Hayato posed with his palm on the top of the monitor on which they chatted with ELIXIR: a proud father placing a protective hand on his child. David had refused the coverage, as usual, thrusting the other members of the lab forward, receding into the background himself.

Together, the members of the Steiner lab were generally reserved in their predictions about what ELIXIR could accomplish. They were self-disparaging and disparaging, too, of the program, whom they benevolently insulted, almost as sport. (Ada, who had grown fond of ELIXIR, was displeased by this; she felt it was somehow disloyal.)

But sometimes, when it was just Ada and David alone, he allowed himself to rhapsodize about the future of the beast, as he affectionately called ELIXIR from time to time, and he encouraged her to do so as well.

“What is the end result of a program like this one?” he asked Ada.

She studied his face, looking for hints.

“A companion?” she asked. “An assistant?”

“Possibly,” said David, but he looked at her, always, as if waiting for more.

On Saturday, August 11, 1984, Ada woke up to find David missing. She knew he was gone as soon as she woke up: normally she could sense his presence in the house from the small noises he made, his constant movement, the vibration of the floor from a jittering leg. But that morning there was a foreign stillness to the house, a quietness that made her think, at first, that she was someplace else.

Despite this, her first notion was to look all over the house for him. Once, when she had thought he was out, she’d stumbled upon him in the basement, with industrial noise-canceling headphones on, working on an experiment that, he’d said, required his full concentration. But this time Ada did not find him.