I’ve read stories in which people argue that AIs deserve legal rights, but in focusing on the big philosophical question, there’s a mundane reality that these stories gloss over. It’s similar to the way movies always depict love in terms of grand romantic gestures when, over the long term, love also means working through money problems and picking dirty laundry off the floor. So while achieving legal rights for AIs would be a major step, another milestone that would be just as important is people putting real effort into their individual relationships with AIs.
And even if we don’t care about them having legal rights, there’s still good reason to treat conscious machines with respect. You don’t have to believe that bomb-sniffing dogs deserve the right to vote to recognize that abusing them is a bad idea. Even if all you care about is how well they can detect bombs, it’s in your best interest that they be treated well. No matter whether we want AIs to fill the role of employees, lovers, or pets, I suspect they will do a better job if, during their development, there were people who cared about them.
Finally, let me quote Molly Gloss, who gave a speech in which she talked about the impact that being a mother had on her as a writer. Raising a child, she said, “puts you in touch, deeply, inescapably, daily, with some pretty heady issues: What is love and how do we get ours? Why does the world contain evil and pain and loss? How can we discover dignity and tolerance? Who is in power and why? What’s the best way to resolve conflict?” If we want to give an AI any major responsibilities, then it will need good answers to these questions. That’s not going to happen by loading the works of Kant into a computer’s memory; it’s going to require the equivalent of good parenting.
In general I’m incapable of writing a story around a specified theme, but on rare occasions it works out. Jeff VanderMeer was editing an anthology built around museum exhibits of imaginary artifacts: artists would create illustrations of the artifacts, and writers would provide descriptive text to accompany them. The artist Greg Broadmore proposed the idea of an “automatic nanny,” a “subrobotic machine, designed to look after an infant,” and that felt like something I could work with.
The behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner designed a special crib for his daughter, and there’s a persistent myth that she grew up psychologically damaged and eventually committed suicide. It’s completely false; she grew up healthy and happy. On the other hand, consider the psychologist John B. Watson, known as the founder of behaviorism. He advised parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” and he shaped views on child-rearing for the first half of the twentieth century. He believed that his approach was in the best interests of the child, but all of his own children suffered from depression as adults, with more than one attempting suicide and one succeeding.
Back in the late 1990s I heard a presentation about the future of personal computing, and the speaker pointed out that one day it would be possible to keep a permanent video recording of every moment of your life. It was a bold claim—at the time, hard disc space was too expensive to use for storing video—but I realized he was right: eventually, you’d be able to record everything. And even though I didn’t know what form it would take, I felt certain this would have a profound impact on the human psyche. Intellectually we are aware that our memories are fallible, but rarely do we have to confront it. What would it do to us to have a truly accurate memory?
Every few years, I would be reminded of this question and think about it again, but I never made any headway on building a story around it. Memoirists have written eloquently about the malleability of memory, and I didn’t want to simply rehash what they’ve already said. Then I read Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, a book about the impact of the written word on oral cultures; while some of the stronger claims in the book have come under question, I still found it eye-opening. It suggested to me that there might be a parallel to be drawn between the last time a technology changed our cognition and the next time.
There are actually two pieces titled “The Great Silence,” only one of which can fit in this collection. This requires a little explanation.
Back in 2011 I was a participant in a conference called “Bridge the Gap,” whose purpose was to promote dialogue between the arts and the sciences. One of the other participants was Jennifer Allora, half of the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla. I was completely unfamiliar with the kind of art they created—hybrids of performance art, sculpture, and sound—but I was fascinated by Jennifer’s explanation of the ideas they were engaged with.
In 2014 Jennifer got in touch with me about the possibility of collaborating with her and her partner, Guillermo. They wanted to create a multiscreen video installation about anthropomorphism, technology, and the connections between the human and nonhuman worlds. Their plan was to juxtapose footage of the radio telescope in Arecibo with footage of the endangered Puerto Rican parrots that live in a nearby forest, and they asked if I would write subtitle text that would appear on a third screen, a fable told from the point of view of one of the parrots, “a form of interspecies translation.” I was hesitant, not only because I had no experience with video art, but also because fables aren’t what I usually write. But after they showed me a little preliminary footage I decided to give it a try, and in the following weeks we exchanged thoughts on topics like glossolalia and the extinction of languages.
The resulting video installation, titled “The Great Silence,” was shown at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum as part of an exhibition of Allora & Calzadilla’s work. I have to admit that when I saw the finished work, I regretted a decision I made earlier. Jennifer and Guillermo had previously invited me to visit the Arecibo Observatory myself, but I had declined because I didn’t think it was necessary for me to write the text. Seeing footage of Arecibo on a wall-sized screen, I wished I had said yes.
In 2015, Jennifer and Guillermo were asked to contribute to a special issue of the art journal e-flux as part of the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale, and they suggested publishing the text from our collaboration. I hadn’t written the text to stand alone, but it turned out to work pretty well even when removed from its intended context. That was how “The Great Silence,” the short story, came to be.
What we now call young-earth creationism used to be common sense; up until the 1600s, it was widely assumed that the world was of recent origin. But as naturalists began looking at their environment more closely, they found clues that called this assumption into question, and over the last four hundred years, those clues have multiplied and interlocked to form the most definitive rebuttal imaginable. What would the world have to look like, I wondered, for it to confirm that original assumption?
Some aspects were easy to imagine: trees without growth rings, skulls without sutures. But when I started thinking about the night sky, answering the question became significantly harder. Much of modern astronomy is premised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism. Even Einstein’s theory of relativity, which presupposes that physics should look the same no matter how fast you’re moving, is an outgrowth of the Copernican principle. It seemed to me that if humanity really were the reason the universe was made, then relativity shouldn’t be true; physics should behave differently in different situations, and that should be detectable.