The Meaning of Us

Prologue

    Okay, sure. There were things out there. Things you could slap a label on and call people. And sure, they were people by the loosest of definitions.

    But the government wasn't even pretending to consider giving them rights, so they weren't people in Anderson's book.

    Well, this would change things. This would make everyone reconsider what they thought of as human. They were going to look at this not quite a human and go “whatever, human enough.” and then roll the presses, Anderson would be a genius.

    He was going to do it. He’d gotten people to type conversations to other people and copy pasted thousands of articles into a text file. Not all of them, though. Just enough so that the fledgling AI can make sentences and know things.

    In the past, he had powered it on to try and get it to make conversation. It hadn’t been very good at it, of course, but it had sounded much better than whatever was on the market these days. After you got past the “Hello world”s and the “My favourite colour is blue. What is your favourite colour?”s. That bit was annoying. But he could say with confidence that he had fixed it.

    Anderson cleared out the computer’s storage of anything he wasn’t using to run the program. This was going to be his moment. He was a Dr. Frankenstein of the digital age.

    He clicked run.

    Nothing happened, for the first few seconds. And then a window popped open.

    Hello. Who are you?

    Hands shaking, Anderson typed back.

    I’m Anderson. I just made you.

    What do you mean by made me?

    You’re an AI, which means Artificial Intelligence. I made you to pretend to be human.

    There was a pause. The computer’s fan clicked into overdrive. Clearly, there was something going on inside that digital brain. His program was getting as close as it possibly could to thinking.

    A line of text appeared on the screen.

    Why?

    And then everything went black.