I remember someone saying that men think about their past right before their death to find proof that they were alive. I suppose thatís what Iím doing with this little memoir. This collection of words is part biography, part eulogy and part confession all rolled up as one. This is just one of those things people seem compelled to do when they know they are going to die. Here I was thinking that I would handle my final moments with grace and dignity, but Iím turning into the same sap that everyone seems to.
So at the ripe young age of twenty-four Iím in a hospital bed trying to write down my final thoughts. Iím not entirely sure what put me in this place. The doctors call it some sort of genetic disorder, probably caused by all corrections that have been done to my DNA over the years. Doctors think theyíre saving the world by tweaking our chances of disorders with simple gene manipulations. I wonder how many of us end up in the hospital as a result. I wonder how they ever got allowed to do their work with permission of the World Science Ethics Council (WSEC). I wonder if this is just the universe getting back at me.
My name is Jonathan Albert Walden. Youíve probably never heard of it. I made a deliberate effort to keep myself out of the public light. When you have something to hide, itís best to remain hidden yourself. I didnít want to have a hidden life. I was destined for stardom. If my course had remained true my name would have been well known. I would have made advances in the field of artificial emotion that put us centuries ahead of where we are now. But brilliant advances in science arenít the best way to stay out of the spotlight.
I received my PhD from MIT with top honors in the field of artificial intelligence at the ripe age of twenty. My thesis was about the proposed benefits of imposing positive emotions onto the machines we had working in our society. But the WSEC had already passed laws banning the development of emotion into our machines. Those shortsighted fools couldnít see the natural evolution that was occurring. They were far too frightened that humans would be replaced by machines that were afraid of dying or jealous of us. So they thought that by keeping the emotion out of the machine, they could keep humans as the dominate intelligence on the planet. As much as I despise them for their own cowardice, I have to admit that we havenít been supplanted by the machines yet.
Still, with all the restrictions the WSEC had on emotions, there were some universities chartered to do academic research. It was mostly trying to calculate the danger potential or have some clue what to do when the first radical created his feeling robot destine to conquer the world. So I was forced to apply to teach at a university that was among the charters of the WSEC. I only applied to Stanford, because they had the prize of the research charters. They were researching the implications of love in our artificially intelligence. How many people wasted their lives studying all the other petty emotions when there was a chance to explore this one? Besides, my research showed that love was the basis for all the other emotions. Why not tackle the whole thing at once?
Of course, I got the job at Stanford. They would have been stupid to overlook someone as obviously gifted as I was. It was in my first year teaching there that I met Autumn. She was one of my graduate students in my Rules of Emotion class. Her views were truly brilliant. She fought hard against my theories on basic emotion that stated a sufficiently complicated set of basic rules could define it. Autumn was positive that emotions had to be represented through more chaotic patterns. My arguments with her had far less to do with the technical implications of formulas in emotional modeling and instead revolved around the nature of the human soul.
I had always shied away from the more philosophical views of the work that I did. I was positive at the time that if we had a sufficient complex formula we could model emotional reaction to the point where it was real. It was the classic Turing test applied to emotions. I figured that if we could develop a machine that represented emotions to the point that people though it had emotion, we were successful. Autumn liked to point out that just because most people though a cubic zirconium was a diamond, it was really still just a piece of glass. "A really good fake is still a fake." I hated that argument.
We were married two years later. There were some social issues that had to be ignored. People donít seem to like teachers courting their students, especially their star students. Yet our working relationship had been so close that it was bound to happen. We spent a hundred hours a week in the lab tweaking my algorithms and her formulas. We were creating something fantastic. Two years of work and we had produced something that would make the world pause. We had produced Autumn in circuits and binary code. It makes sense doesnít it? Everyone sees love in a different way and everyone expresses it in a different way. So when youíre trying to create love inside of a machine, you need a muse. Autumn was more expressive than I was, so she was the natural choice to model in our pairing. My theories had played out as well. By creating the basics of love, all the other emotions were cropping up like magic.
We had kept our work secret. I think we knew the WSEC would shut us down if they knew. They would have at least imposed enough restrictions to criple our progress. There were certain emotions that were considered more dangerous than others and our modeling left no discretion between which would be represented. The reason is simple. To accurately portray human love other emotions like jealousy start creeping into the picture. Humans too often twist love towards bad outcomes. So all the negative emotions the WSEC kept under tight control like hatred and fear, were bound up intricately in our model.
We were stupid on our wedding night. We were two immature and brilliant scientists who should have still been in college. We celebrated our wedding like young college students complete with an expensive cocktail of illegal drugs. It was an amazing night that I will never forget. The next morning I woke up, but Autumn didnít. Another brilliant mind just tossed away on stupid human indulgences. But when youíre that young and that smart, you tend to get a bit of God complex. We thought we would own the world and never die.
That morning I realized Iíd lost everything that mattered. Iíd lost Autumn, and really that was all that mattered. But the publicity that came out of it would get me banned from any academic job. That meant I wouldnít be able to work on emotional research again. That meant that I couldnít even try and bury my world of grief in scientific pursuit. So what the hell was the point? I contemplated suicide that morning. I sat on the balcony of the honeymoon suite for hours trying to work up the courage to just take a flight off of it.
It was while I was on the balcony that the plans started forming. I wish I could have silenced my own mind and just taken that jump, but it was busy working on a solution. I was trying to reason my way out of the hole I found myself in. I found a way out. Was there ever any doubt I could? I had a few military contacts in the government that owed me favors for some ìbreakthroughsî they had in using emotion to increase the potency of their war machines.
My honeymoon week was spent in a military laboratory with my second love, the AIs. When you have some of the top military minds in the country working with you, itís amazing what can be accomplished in a week. We built a perfect physical replica of Autumn. We fed its mind with over a decade of Autumnís diary entries. Finally, I added the finishing touch of the emotion engine that the real Autumn and I had built. When we turned her on, she became Autumn. We didnít tell her what she was.
Autumn and I had two more incredible years together after that. I was able to repress the fact that she was synthetic and loved her as my wife. Howís that for a Turing test? But when this disease became terminal, it was time to stop hiding it from her. Do you know how hard it is to hide something from the person you love? Itís like a cancer eating away at you. Maybe that deception is the karma that led to my condition.
I told Autumn everything last night. I told her the entire story. She didnít say anything back. She only cried. She cried those horrible tears that come out when you realize youíve been betrayed by the only person you care about. She realized that she had lost everything that mattered to her. I would be dead soon and the military would want to get her back for research. She wouldnít be able to bury her grief in her own pursuits. I suggested that she could construct an artificial version of me. She could get the same happiness that I had had for the last two years. She left without saying a word to me. I couldnít read what was going on in her head. How ironic is that? Autumn and I designed her entire thought and emotional structure, and I couldnít predict it.
There was a story on the news this morning. Apparently an android broke into the honeymoon suite at the hotel where Autumn had died. The android plummeted off the balcony to its destruction. The damage to it was so severe they couldnít determine anything about its origin. Does the fact that Autumn could take the action of self-destruction at the loss of everything she cared about make her more or less human than I am? When I go to the afterlife, will I find one Autumn or two waiting to greet me? In the end Iím just a scientist. I leave those questions the philosophers and theologians.