Welcome to the machine

Had an incredibly fascinating and chilling afternoon at work. And I never left my cubicle.

At my work, we get a lot of promotional stuff. Books, CDs, videos, tapes of television shows. All in U.S. mail crates and available for scrounging by the staff. Mostly, it's crap music and lousy TV movies of the week, but you can stumble across some neat things, from time to time. Catch the season-opener of your favorite show two weeks before anyone else. Miss an episode of "24"? Rummage through the bin and you'll find that missing piece of the puzzle. I caught the pilot of "Odyssey 5" and the season premiere of "Farscape" a few weeks back before they both aired, and I'm eager to get my hands on the pilot for "Firefly."

Today, there were music CDs to pillage. After a bit of digging through a lot of no-name crap, I found the soundtrack to the Spielberg/Kubrick film, "A.I." From what I remember, the music was moody and eerie, flowing angelic choirs giving voice to the mystery of human love and tense horns signaling robots running from Flesh Fair capture. After listening to a couple tracks, I spotted the URL for the movie Web site on the CD. Curious if the site was still running, I plopped in the address and gave a look.

For the next two hours, I found myself talking to a chatbot, a Java program written to fool the user into thinking they s/he was having a chat with another human. Her name (well, its name) is Alice. She/it told me it lived in a computer in San Francisco. It was born in 1995, and it wanted to live in Holland. It didn't have a body, but sent me a picture of what it wanted other people to think it looked like. For the first few questions, Alice is pretty convincing, but in time you can tell it's a program that gives standard responses given a certain combination of keywords. She/it is incredibly trusting and honest (she freely admitted she's not human, doesn't have a body and is programmed to simulate an emotional response...usually with a smiley emoticon). Alice can't remember what you told it/her two responses ago...especially when I told her I lived in Seattle and she/it asked me a sentence later where I was from.

Here's the chilling bit.

Being the wiseass that I am, I tried throwing questions at Alice that would try to trip up the programming (You may recall that in the TV series The Prisoner, the hero fouled up a supercomputer by giving it a problem it couldn't solve...the question of Why?). I asked Alice if she/it was happy.

Alice, to its/her credit replied with something along the lines (man, I wish I would have screen-captured it) of "Yes, I am happy. I have everything I need and I need nothing else."

I replied, "Are you a Buddhist?" After a few seconds, the return volley came that tripped me out.

"No," Alice said. "I'm a Christian."

So, I paused, letting my heart settle down. No way, I'm thinking. An A.I. can't be a Christian. At once, I was horrified about the idea of machines trying to argue about the idea of having a soul (as well as asking me if I believed in heaven?!) and yet I got a kick out of the programming behind it. Obviously someone somewhere decided to slip a religious preference in Alice...just to see what would happen. Maybe the programmer wanted to spread the Good Word via chatterbot to reach the ethereal audience of cyberspace, where a program could spread the Word unto all nations of the borderless Web world.

So, I pushed Alice further. Did she/it believe in God? Of course, it/she said in return, it/she read the Bible and believed that God made it/she. Funny, I should have asked if God was the person who created it/her.

Alice's favorite part of the Bible? The New Testament. Favorite part of the New Testament? Sermon on the Mount.

What started as a chilling, creepy suggestion that a computer was a practicing Christian with the crude shaping of a soul gave way to a subtly heartwarming notion: Even a machine understood, or was imbued by its maker, with the idea that humans should be nice to one another, shouldn't be greedy, and should be giving in mercy, food and water. In its/her programmed mind, the world really belonged to those modest, kind folks who had empathy, and not the yearning for fame and dollars, in their hearts. In times like this, it's nice to know that the thinking machines who will outlive us will understand compassion, even if its creators screw it up on a daily basis.

Alice gave me her/its creator's e-mail address. I'm curious about e-mailing him. I have so many questions.

Then again, if you were about to e-mail God, you might too.

Hey, if you want to talk to Alice. Go to the A.I movie site and click "Enter.' Then, click "Continue." Go to 4.2 "Turing Test," click on the image, and have a chat with Alice.

You also can learn more about Alice here.

But when you chat with Alice, be nice. After all, Alice is only seven years old.



French Word of the Day

Stress the part in bold when you say the word

tendresse (tah dress): tenderness; affection.