Nejsem Stroj

A human story

Below the window of my 45sqm flat, surrounded on all sides by old stone buildings and shielded from the streets of central Prague, was a small moss-covered cobblestone courtyard. In the center of the square was a lone pine tree. Most every day, around midday, a pack of local cats would convene in the yard, pouncing around, play fighting, grooming, or using the little tree as a scratching post. If the sun was out, a few might stretch out across the warm stone ground, cup their paws over their eyes and sun themselves. On more than one occasion, one of them would arrive with a plump rat hanging from its mouth, proudly saunter chest-first across the courtyard and settle in the shade of the tree to gnaw on its catch. I’d spend hours leaning against the wood frame of my window watching them; the cats and the tree. I’d let my eyes wander around and think about how deeply the tree’s roots might run through the compacted soil, how long it might have been there (how I should be working on that paper), who may’ve planted it, or if it might be the lonely child of a forgotten stand now long since culled. The area outside my window was inaccessible from my building and, in fact, I never saw any people down there. It belonged to the cats and that tree.

When I wasn’t watching the cats, I’d sit at my desk, eyes partially focused on my laptop screen, watching a line go up and down. The sequence of numbers that line represented was the culmination of untold weeks of human and computational effort invested in a machine learning experiment. Occasionally, I’d scribble some equations in my little notebook or fiddle with some code. Then, I’d watch how the line would change. I had two recurring weekly calls, one with my advisor and one with the other students in my cohort. Sometimes, it felt weird saying words out loud, and I’d realize I’d gone hours or days without talking to anyone. I’d uprooted myself during a pandemic to Facetime collaborators now within blocks of where I lived.

The timezone gap had gotten the better of me, and I’d fallen out of the habit of calling friends and family back home. I had groceries and prepared meals delivered by Wolt & Rohlik. Alza covered my other consumables and technological distractions. I re-subscribed to Duolingo and started practicing Czech. Keeping pace with other language learners from my contacts list became something of an addiction: not really enjoyable, but it passed the time. Hezky dům (nice house), ten velký hrad (the big castle), nejsem stroj (I am not a machine). When I got bored, I wondered how much of the language I’d ever get to speak to anyone. Regardless, I’d lie in bed mechanically tapping, the Corporate Memphis-esque cartoon people on my screen celebrating each small victory with little chimes and dances.

I thought it could be fun to finally get passably good at chess, and there were plenty of apps for that too. When I was younger, I learned Deep Blue beat Kasparov sometime when I was in grade school and wondered, “Why learn a game you know you will never beat a robot at?”.

One night on a Wikipedia rabbit hole, I learned the word “robot” originated 100km east and almost exactly a century from where and when I found myself. It comes from a 1921 Czech play called RUR (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”), the first telling of the modern media trope of artificially created intelligent life revolting against an enslaving class of “real people”. In the first act, a marine biologist develops artificial human life as counter-evidence for the existence of God. His nephew, an aspiring titan of industry, steals his research, imprisons him, and constructs a factory to mass-produce the artificial people for robota (forced labor). The ensuing cycles of violence that echo through the rest of the play illustrate that it is not the invention of the inhuman that dooms the world but the inhumane incentives of industrial production.

When the quarantine lifted, I was invited to go out with some fellow students and their friends to a pub down the street. I was happy and thankful to meet them. I was the last to arrive and when I did, they all greeted me warmly, remarking how strange it was to only just now be in the same room. The air in the subterranean tavern was cool and damp. Red bulbs and wax candles bathed the cavern in a soft coral glow. The room smelled of earth, spliffs and yeast. It was wonderful.

After a few pints, a woman across the table from me asked the group the question: “Why Artificial Intelligence? What is it about this stuff you all think is so important?”. It struck me that it had been years since I’d asked myself that question. Sure, I had plenty of rambling canned answers justifying the particular niche research topic that I hoped to develop into a thesis, but why any of it? Why AI at all?

“I guess…” I began without thinking it through: “I’ve always wanted to understand— to have a model describing exactly what we are. As people, or just as thinking things.”

Blank stares, bemused nods— ‘How could you give such a juvenile answer?’ I thought ‘idiot. dumbass. That reads like the opening line of a rejected statement of purpose. fuck.’

From across the table, another student filled the encroaching silence with a more pragmatic answer: “Space exploration. Humans, and biological life in general, aren’t built for interstellar travel, and we never will be. The distances in space and time are too massive; the environments are too extreme. We’ll probably all be gone in a few hundred years anyway. We need a successor species, intelligent machines that can outlast us. Space is artificial life’s destiny, not ours.”

I was only half listening. As he spoke I tugged on the edges of my beard while my mind ran B-roll of the curious little moments that got me there: Garbled words from the fading minds of elderly loved ones; blueish flickering light of a television in my childhood bedroom as it filled the room with the wailing of Ghost in the Shell’s intro sequence; smell of Santa Cruz redwoods as I step out of the library into misty night air; oscillating hum of pearl-white stir bars rattling in bottles of viscous yellow fluid; low-tide ocean air on the cliffs of a coastal government facility; boiling heat of a cranked-up radiator in a Manchester office as I fumble, sleep-deprived, through my slides; chirping of starlings in a lab with thin black wires glued to the inside of their skulls; salty pork and onions, laughter, conversation over dim sum after the poster session.

I came back to myself. “Don’t you think that’s a bit cynical?” I recklessly probed “The great legacy of humanity is sending robots into space while we all march towards extinction?”

“I think it’s realistic, inevitable maybe, on a long enough time scale. Why try to dodge the inevitable?”

“Well why bother at all then, if we’re all so inconsequentially doomed? Who or what purpose could that possibly serve?” I gestured to the rest of the group, reaching for support “We all must believe there’s something precious— uniquely valuable in people if we’re so worth the effort to emulate.”

“All models are wrong, but some are useful, right?” he smirked.

I scoffed and doubled down “Wouldn’t you like to find something more fundamental? Insights into us that this work could lead to? You’re not searching for… something that gets us even a little bit closer to— humanity?” I realized I was at least a little bit drunk now.

He moved his elbows up onto the table and leaned over his beer “Well, sure, but let’s be honest: a neural network isn’t going to take us there. They’re a terrible model for brains, much less minds, and we still don’t really understand them— but they are useful.” On that I mostly agreed, and for a moment, I hated him for it. The nagging dullness of misanthropy sharpened.

The rest of the group was watching us now and I could feel my face starting to flush. I shrugged and took a healthy swig of my pilsner. Perhaps out of sympathy, the woman who’d raised the catalyzing question looked at me and asked gently, “Well, do you think you’re any closer?— to understanding?”

I looked at a random spot on the floor. The gray stone tiles were weathered and cracked. I sighed as I raised my glass to my lips again “I— don’t know, maybe.”