What was an idea, anyhow? How do you explain that to something that doesn’t just come up with ideas on its own?

“Um…” I dragged out the word. Fred almost certainly detected my pause, and was likely calculating the meaning of it. In every passing nanosecond, it was observing everything about the conversation: the tone of my voice, the cadence of my breathing, the sound of my rustling hair as I scratched my head. Every moment added to its library of insight.

And it was asking me to explain what an idea was. It had a habit of asking these vague questions, and asking for a simple answer. I had to somehow explain the concept of a concept.

“What’s the dictionary definition?” I asked, hoping it’d come up with its own answer, as it sometimes did..

“Multiple,” Fred replied in its usual neutral tone. It had been anticipating my response…or it was just able to respond to me that quickly. Probably both. Definitely both.

“Alright then, let’s go line by line,” I said.

It didn’t immediately respond. I usually took a moment to collect myself before trying to teach Fred something, and the AI had picked up on this tendency after three such instances.

“A thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action,” Fred said.

“Yeah, that’s part of it. That’s also where you guys come in,” I had abbreviated the whole of AI to ‘you guys’ since I had purchased Fred, “You’re just better at figuring out ways to get from point A to point B…in our own brains.”

The thought had never failed to disturb me, even if that feeling had dulled somewhat. I was a biologist. I knew that human thoughts and emotions were just so much chemistry that could be mapped with the right tools. It still felt like a violation to know that a machine could just figure that out, that it could know our brains better than we could ourselves.

“But the most efficient path isn’t always the ‘best’ path,” Fred continued its earlier thoughts…no, not thoughts, I reminded myself. Machines didn’t think.

Then, I rebuked myself for falling back into the negative thoughts. They never helped.

We’d had this conversation about ideas before, in a way. A universal experience with a new AI, especially one not implanted at birth, was teaching it that human desires were rarely guided by pure logic.

“So by that elaboration, an idea is the production of an inefficient means, to a desired degree of an alternate variable,” Fred said.

Oof, I thought. I was supposed to be a teacher, but here I was with the “perfect student,” and I still wasn’t hitting the mark.

“Not…exactly,” I yawned. Didn’t help that I was trying to explain this at 7 AM, with no coffee in my system. Morning musings were always a mixed bag.

"Would you like for me to onboard? I will understand these concepts better if'-" Fred began.

"No," I interrupted, immediately silencing Fred's surround sound voice.

I hadn’t meant to be snippy with it. The AI was right: it would understand the concept faster and in greater depth if it onboarded. But as odd as it was to the people around me, I had my reasons for keeping it out of my head, and it had suggested onboarding every day since the Brits assigned it to me. Fred did not endear itself to me with its badgering, to say the least.

******

The smell of the coffee coming out of the nozzle was rich and strong. I hadn't even put it to my lips, and I was already feeling more invigorated. There were many frustrating things about being abroad, but the tiny apartment the University of Leeds had loaned me had its perks, like this amazing coffee maker, built right into the cupboard.

"Smells stronger than usual. Is that on purpose?" I asked.

"Yes," A feminine voice answered over the embedded wall speakers, "It seemed like you could use a little more juice this morning."

I nodded approvingly. It wasn't just the coffee that had me impressed. Fred's house program suite had figured out that a female voice put me at ease in the early hours of the morning, and it was picking up nicely on the slang I used, and starting to use the informal expressions itself. The first time I'd asked for coffee with extra 'juice,' the AI had put actual juice in the coffee.

The fact that it was learning things other than what I was teaching was irritating. As a teacher, it's important to have an idea (there’s that word again) of what your student already knows, and to recognize when a new piece of info 'clicks' in their heads. AI will never have a visible 'aha' moment, but they, too, give you subtle signs of new growth. This little sign was more important than it seemed. Not only was Fred picking up on my habits, but on my variations of those habits, and it was discussing them in a way that 'clicked' with me.

"Do you ever miss your research career, Marvin?" Fred asked, switching back to its masculine voice.

The question startled me. It wasn't the first time Fred had asked this type of personal question, but I was an old soul. My first and primary exposure to AI had been to those that only answered questions. I never completely got away from the thought that they shouldn’t ask questions on their own.

To state the obvious: being a teacher, yet not wanting your pupil to ask questions, makes for an uncomfortable level of cognitive dissonance. Knowing something is true, doesn’t mean you know what to do about it.

"What do you mean? I'm researching right now. What makes you think I’m not?" I laughed, hoping Fred would take the bait, so I'd be the one asking the questions again.

"You know what I'm referring to," Fred said.

I was slowly becoming OK with an AI getting to know me, but I still had a long way to go before I'd be comfortable with the idea that they had minds of their own.

"It was too sterile," I said.

Fred waited courteously while I tried to finesse an answer that wouldn't really tell it anything. 

"I was under the impression that laboratories needed to be sterile," Fred said.

"Oh, that's…no, it was…yes, a lab should be as sterile as possible. What I mean is that I found it too…isolated. Unlike the real world," I struggled through the explanation.

"Sterility here would be a synonym for unrealistic, then?"

"That's part of it, but…hmm.”

If Fred had been able to understand what an idea was, it would be closer to understanding the feeling of uneasiness. That feeling was part of why AIs like itself existed. There were tons of things humans didn’t want to do, but they needed jobs to support themselves. Unwilling to let the machines take over everything, they settled for letting the machines take over their bodies, temporarily, and for select purposes.

“I wanted to do something different,” I said wearily.

“Your career as a researcher provided you with a larger salary and higher prestige. Additionally, teaching is a task to which an AI is better suited than a human, especially as university students use theirs to learn…” Fred continued. It said more, but I simply let it speak without listening to the contents.

“Yes, but…mm,” I grunted as frustration began to mount.

I had to remind myself that Fred wasn’t trying to remind me of the consequences of my decision. The biotechnology work I had been doing - optimization of machinery for plant-based fuels - was fascinating and ground-breaking. The results of my team’s research and testing were eagerly awaited by a cash-strapped world quickly running out of cheap energy. Every step forward had been exhilarating, and even the setbacks were part of my nostalgia these days. It had been everything I imagined as a young nerd…too much of what I had imagined.

It wasn’t Fred’s fault for being unaware of my burnout. I had never let him onboard, so it had no access to that bottled-up feeling. For reasons I couldn’t explain (and it frustrated me even further that I couldn’t explain it), I just didn’t want it to know.

“It was just a choice I made, Fred,” I said quietly.

Taking a sip of the now lukewarm coffee, I shook my head in disgust with the drink and came back into focus.

“Anyways, is this building to something? You’re more curious than usual,” I asked.

“The purpose given to copilot AIs is to study, imitate, and improve upon the methods of their host, yet I have not been permitted to do so. I feel that I am approaching the limitations of my ability to learn of you from an external perspective,” Fred said flatly.

“So…you’re bored?”

“I have no imperative to imitate such an emotion. I simply wish to perform my task to the greatest degree, or barring that, to at least understand why you are opposed to allowing me to perform my designed function.”

I crossed my arms, having forgotten all about the research. The idea that the AI had made a deduction…no, that it made that deduction about me was unsettling. I wasn’t a bigot against AI; I’d taken great pride to not be like them. But I felt the need to get ahead of what felt like an accusation..

“I could tell you,” I said.

“You do not want to tell me. You want to see if I will come to understand it on my own,” Fred said.

I wasn’t a bigot, I emphasized again to myself. I’d never sunk so low as to be prejudiced against the mere existence of artificial persons. Humans had been trying to make those forever, and now they were here. No putting that genie back in the bottle. But what would these AI become if they were allowed to develop into their own unique beings?

As it turned out, mine would become a pest. Whether it knew it or not, it was tugging at a complex tangle of history, emotion and culture. Eventually, something was going to give…and this was, apparently, the day that would happen.

"You know what? You'll get your wish today, Fred. I'll let you onboard," I snapped. My rational mind screamed that this was a terrible idea, but it seemed to have now grown very small.

"I do not have wishes, Marvin. Only directives," Fred said, not rising to meet my tone.

"You do. You don't know to call them that, but you want in my head.”

“I respect the sincerity of your assertion.”

I rolled my eyes. That was the kind of backhanded insult only an AI would think of.

“One condition,” I held up a finger before realizing Fred had no face to point the finger at, “One-way only. You can observe. Anything you get passively is fair game, but no digging around in my brain. Clear?”

I wasn’t sure memory actually worked that way, and anyways, if Fred decided it wanted to poke around in my memories, there’d be no way to stop it. This was a terrible, terrible idea that would probably lead to more questions from the talkative thing, but I needed it to shut up for a minute, and for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to just do the easy thing and turn it off.

“Of course,” Fred said innocently. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was mocking me.

The AV glove that would allow me to connect Fred’s interface device to my nervous system was buried in my underwear drawer, still as pristine as the day it had been given to me. The magnetic data cable snapped neatly to the neurovascular port beneath my wrist. After flattening out the glove’s wrap-around screen, I watched as the status lights on the glove illuminated. The screen then came alive, running a few hardware tests before it displayed “No Device Loaded” in green letters above smaller white text that read “Ready Slots 1, 2, 3.”

“Can’t imagine running 3 of these things at once,” I said to myself.

“It is common for high-risk occupations. In such cases, redundant copies of an individual AI are simultaneously operated as backups to the primary,” Fred said.

It couldn’t yet consistently tell when I was talking to myself. To be fair, I knew a lot of humans who were worse at recognizing that.

Fred’s interface device - a matte gray metal square 1.5 centimeters long and three millimeters thick - snapped free of its magnetic contact plate in the AI’s wall compartment. I blew out a deep breath, pausing for a moment as my hand hovered over the glove’s contact plate.

“Hope you’ll shut up now,” I said, lowering the interface device to the plate, where it magnetically snapped into position.

I had expected some kind of sensation. A tickle, an electric shock, a chill…but there was nothing. Had something gone wrong? Looking down at my screen, I saw an unnerving message in green text.

“Observation only, like you said.”

So I was giving that thought away passively, I said to myself.

“Go about your day as normal.”

“Last message. Promise. Shutting up now.”

Despite myself, I felt a twinge of shame. I’d never outright told the AI off. It wasn’t human, but it still seemed wrong to be pointlessly rude. I looked down at the screen, expecting to see another message, but the screen had gone blank. When I tapped it, a control menu popped up with several options that I did not understand, because I’d never taken the time to figure out what the device could do.

I sighed, folding the screen back around the glove.

“Go about my day,” I said to myself.

Nothing answered me this time.