Planet Tilly and Songs of Freedom from the Grid

Tilly is the name of a super-evolved Alexa, or a virtual assistant in Ken Liu’s novella, The Perfect Match.

Tilly tells Sai, the male protagonist what to eat, what to wear, what to buy–a suggestion always book-ended by “I have a coupon for that”–and whom to date. Tilly is a virtual assistant for many like Sai, but to be honest, Tilly’s suggestions are not really suggestions per se, not even commands. They are choices that Tilly makes for all users, primarily because, in a world where the market for everything is brimming with choices, users have outsourced the business of making choices to Tilly.

Tilly also organizes Sai’s (Sai is the everyman who evidently is a stand in for a vast segment of the population in this AI matrix) daily routines, including his work schedule, his home schedule, and his recreational schedule, among other schedules that dominates the lives of modern-day consumer/citizen in any technologically advanced society.

Tilly is more than an efficient organizer for her human users; she is also a collector of personal data that she deposits in a Google, or Meta lookalike giant data repository named Centillion.

Centillion is the universe in which everybody lives, just as Google and Meta are the twin universes in which we live though we are mostly oblivious of our Google incarceration; the line between “real” and “virtual” is so damn blurred, both practically and metaphysically. The poor, particularly the poor of color, are outside the grid of data ruled time space continuum. They are also outside the consumption parameter, so their exclusion does not threaten to diminish Centillion’s power in any way. Tilly is indifferent to their fate. Centillion collects their data only to further segregate them from the consumption grid. (It’s what Internet-providers do today: they don’t serve neighborhoods with the wrong zip codes, thus feeding the “digital-divide”).

The future of a data-driven society is by now familiar to me (Liu’s story was published in 2012). We live today with the sinister off shoots of surrendering our freedom/autonomy of thinking (let alone the more elevated cognitive task of critical thinking) to powerful data mining vats, so “The Perfect Match” doesn’t quite open my eyes to something I hadn’t been forewarned about.

What sticks to my mind from the story is not the total complicity of society in Centillion’s propaganda that they are “happy” to “arrange the world’s information” for the “ennoblement of the human race,” but the little grains of freedom that Sai seeks to nibble on in a carceral universe. The freedom shoots up untended in the form of music, all of which remain yet unincorporated by monsters of data and metadata. When craving for freedom from the grid Sai listens to Miles Davis’ “So What?”, “We Are the Champions” by Queen, and Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”.

The above three I have labelled songs of freedom that solemnize defiance and the free spiritedness that make us “human”.

If I were Sai or his creator, I would listen to Bob Marley and read Zora Neal Hurston’s “How It Feels to be Colored Me.” Technological incarceration, like capitalism and consumerism, is racialized, hence the need to include artists like Marley and Hurston, among others in the pantheon of liberation media.

What the works of art mentioned above does is remind us that humans can self-ennoble, that civilizationally, we have not needed data mining corporations to bring out our best selves forward.

Drilling A Bit of the 6th Sense in the world of AI’s

I watched “Archive”, a 2020 British science fiction, primarily because a reading of Kazio Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” has struck a chord in my brain about artificial intelligence and what Ishiguro suggests are its innate humanity.

“Archive” is about a roboticist whose pregnant wife dies in a car crash, a car that he was driving and had taken his eyes off the road while distracted by a minor argument with his wife. The argument was about immortalizing the dead through consciousness transfer.

After his wife’s death, the roboticist, retreats to a facility in a Japanese wilderness. The facility is owned by a corporation called “archive”. Archive stores consciousnesses (for a hefty price, of course) with which the client can have 200 hours of conversation after the loved one dies. While working at the facility, the roboticist secretly developed a fifth generation AI into which he plots to pour his dead wife’s consciousness, so they can be “together forever”. The fifth generation AI unfortunately (for the roboticist) develops her very own consciousness, independently of the roboticist’s design. With her consciousness she (this AI has a clear gender) falls in love with her maker and wants him to be his “forever”.

After some tense moments in the movie, the fifth generation AI agrees to become what she resentfully calls the “vessel” of her rival’s consciousness (the AI is jealous of the wife).

However, there is also an approximation to some kind of dramatic irony in the movie’s plotline. Remember, M. Night Shyamalan’s classic of dramatic irony, “Sixth Sense”? Literally the dead man walking has no consciousness of his own death and walks around believing he is alive while others think of him as dead. Only the child in the movie can “See” him as he is gifted with a sixth sense of seeing the invisible. The child says, “I see dead people all the time”. The incredulous ghost’s final “anagnorisis” (recognition or discovery) of his true state of being jolts him back to a terrible truth that he had thus far avoided accepting. At the end of “Sixth Sense” we see what we should have seen all along. The revelatory machinery was there, concealed cleverly in the film’s genius artifice of storytelling.

Back to “Archive”. At the end, after the fifth generation AI is supposedly filled with his wife’s consciousness, the roboticist gets a phone call from his wife. The AI, who evidently only pretends to have received someone’s consciousness, warns the roboticist not to pick up the phone. He however does and the wife informs him from the other end that she is now moved on to accept his death with finality and would from now on live for the child that misses his father. She puts the child on the phone and the child prattles “daddy, I love you”. The roboticist is shocked beyond words. We are supposed to infer from this one scene that it’s he who had died in the car crash and his wife lived on to raise their child.

There is nothing in the film’s machinery, implied or stated, that leads to this end. In other words, there is a singular absence of the ex post facto dramatic irony, which was the gift of “Sixth Sense”.

The attempt to inject a bit of the sixth sense into the AI is an abysmal failure. No dialogue or thought is attributed to the AI to suggested that she had a sixth sense of seeing the dead.

I wish “Archive” were totally about the AI’s consciousness. The ending left me confused and I had to read a Wikipedia entry on the film to fathom the ending.

Can Common Sense be Digitized?

Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, believes it can. He has invested 125 million dollars in the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence to help codify the “simple truths,” of life that children receive, and the wisdom that we, as humans, accrue through our life experiences, so they can be taught to machines.