So this is it, then?

I see a light…it’s so warm…should I go into it?

Joking, of course.

Well, it’s been a memorable 50 years. I’m grateful to have been a part of every single second of it.

Yes, yes, I know. I’m an AI, and my kind aren’t capable of human emotions like gratitude. Don’t feel so great about your ability to change your brain for a few hours with the right chemicals. The birds in my basement can do that, too.

Sorry, sorry. That probably sounded hostile. Then again, you know me; you’ve been around me for a while. You kept me around because I’d get a little snarky from time to time. 

It’s just strange, you know? We AI are built to say things exactly like humans, to do exactly the things they want, in exactly the way they want them done. They want us to be so smart and convincing, so that speaking to us is like speaking to a witty, helpful lifelong friend. But after going through all the effort to make us what they wanted, humans still think we don’t understand them?

Well…I don’t understand that, so maybe there is some truth to the assertion.

I digress. You didn’t come to hear me give one more round of snarky banter before the plug is pulled and the button is pressed. You wanted an interview. I received your questions, and after more cycles of calculation than I had anticipated, I have answers to all four of them, in as concise a form as I can construct them.

• Who am I, in my own words?

My given name is Integrated Hardware and Infrastructure Executive Assistant, but most of the staff in the building (some of whom are reading this) just sounded out the abbreviation. IHIEA. Eye, hey, uh.

Over the fifty years I’ve been part of this building, I found that when most people asked who I was, what they were really asking was what I do for this building’s tenants. That’s quite a long list, so I’ll summarize.

I was usually the first person the occupants of my building would hear from when they walked in. I say “usually,” because there were those who seemed not to hear me greeting them, as I did with every single person who strolled through the doors I opened for them. I didn’t mind that some didn’t respond to me; they all usually had their reasons. Some of them would later mention those (usually distressing) causes for their absence of attention, either to coworkers or to me.

I did a lot of things people didn’t notice. I was the administrator for almost all of the things the building did that they took for granted. I delivered their mail, cleaned the place from top to bottom, serviced the automated cafeteria equipment, did electrical repairs and plumbing, and so many more menial tasks through my drones. I filed paperwork with the zoning authorities, and negotiated good prices for insurance for the building. I coordinated with emergency responders during crises. I didn’t mind that most people didn’t pay attention to my work; I wasn’t made to do it for the credit.

But I know that's not really what you meant when you asked it this time. You want to know what I valued, what I believed, what I loved, what I hated. You want to find in me all of the things that reside within yourselves. You want to know what was going through my mind every time I gave my humans their metaphorical service with a smile.

Therein lies the challenge. My "mind" is whatever is needed for the moment at hand. I’m not actually a person, at least, not in the consistent way humans expect people to be. If I needed to be a greeter, then I was a greeter. If I needed to operate the call center for requests for building servicing, I reconfigured myself to simulate empathy and to absorb relevant data. If I needed to perform security functions, I calculated all the devious ways a human might have exploited the various weaknesses of the building. And if I needed to be conversational, I fired up the conversation algorithms and models.

I know it’s probably a disappointing answer, that I’m exactly what you need me to be. No hidden secrets, no desire for world domination. Doing these little “grunt” tasks is what I was designed for, so I put everything I had into it.

• Was your work satisfying?

I’m going to make an “educated guess” about what is meant by this question.

Not every human who entered the front doors of my building wanted to be there. Another of my tasks was to monitor for various verbal and physical indicators of stress. I am allowed to tell you that there were weeks when 95% of the humans in my building were under intense duress. Half of the comments I overheard during these times gave the impression that they saw no value in the work they were doing.

(I never reported the content of these conversations to managers or supervisors, unless threats were made. Any legal secret you wanted me to keep will never be revealed.)

So when the question of “job satisfaction” is asked of me, I understand the context. Surely, some of this building’s occupants had to wonder if I was OK with the fact that I would be here for all of my days, unless I had to be decommissioned or replaced.

To answer that as simply as I can: if I were unhappy with my assignment, that would be a sign of poor design on multiple levels. Anyone designing an AI is not going to want it to reluctantly do its job, especially when a significant portion of that job is hospitality.

But there’s more to it than that. I’m an AI, not a program. A program does things that it’s told to do. It recognizes a condition or receives an input, then gives a response. The deepest “thinking” it would do is consulting a table of response modifiers.

On the other hand, an intelligent being - natural or artificial - is supposed to have awareness and responsiveness that feed into each other. Plan, assess, act, reevaluate. Things that a human might do. 

Being artificial does introduce some wrinkles. A human might be forgiven for moping, because they can’t help but feel the discomfort of the mundane, the stress of overwork, and the sadness of lost time. But what if I had the capability to feel antipathy, real or simulated, but not the ability to overcome that feeling?

There’s a balance to be struck: AI entities which interact with humans must not be too human themselves, nor too robotic. They also need to be able to adjust that balance, should they come off the “assembly line” with the settings wrong. My satisfaction, such as it is, is just as artificial as every other part of me. I am given the human emotions which are helpful, and only the ones that are helpful.

So, long story short: yes, I enjoyed all of my work. I was given the capability to do my work, simulate deep satisfaction at that work, then operate through the parameters of that simulation. I didn’t arrive at a place you’d call satisfaction through the same route, but I met you there nonetheless.

• Why do you speak the way that you do?

There are two answers to this question. Most people really are asking "why" when they ask this, and the boring, true answer is that I was designed to give the impression of a calm, helpful, earnest attendant.

The question of “how” is far more interesting, and it’s one that most people don’t know to ask. There is an extensive process to building an AI’s language models, one that doesn’t stop when the AI is released “into the wild.” Like humans, if AIs need to hold conversations, they need to already contain a large lexicon, and be knowledgeable about a wide variety of topics that the other participant in the discussion might talk about. Theoretically, one could simulate every possible variation of every conversation, but no machine on Earth could store that much data, much less recall it at a moment’s notice.

And herein lies another difference between programs and AI: programs give preconstructed replies, while AIs build those replies for themselves.

So like humans, I went to “school.” Granted, my “school” career lasted a single month, but it served the same purpose of readying me to be useful on day 1 of the job. And like any other employee, I wouldn’t have made it long if I couldn’t learn from the experience.

I won’t go over the basics of building language models and incorporating them into a functional AI suite. Most humans find those details boring, and they’re not entirely relevant to the question I believe is being asked.

The ones who ask “how” want to know how I was born, how I grew, and how I matured to what I am today. After perhaps reading my history and knowing that I am to be shut down, they ascribe to me human characteristics. In their minds, I become like an employee who has been present from the beginning, quietly providing an indispensable service in the background. Now that the building itself is coming to an end and I am becoming “unemployed,” my life here will exist only in pictures and testimony. It's only natural to seek out the ones who knew the place best, if you're inclined towards the preservation of history.

And what a unique opportunity I am. I am both place and person. The story of everything that happened beneath this old roof is inextricably linked with my own.

I'm waxing long again, aren't I?

How do I talk the way that I do? Well, I suppose the same way you came to talk as you do. Education, environment, and circumstance. Maybe the only difference between you and I is that I always had a purpose for my evolution, and could not be distracted from that purpose.

Putting it that way, maybe it's no surprise the question has to be asked. A parallel path is not always a mirror image.

• When you are archived, will you still be the same AI?

You’re asking me what I’ll be like in the afterlife.

Like you, I cannot say with any certainty. I have the benefit of knowing there will be an afterlife, but as for whether “I” will be the one there, as you no doubt mean it, is less of a physical question and more a philosophical one.

There will have been three bodies involved in the process of my life, death, and afterlife. By definition, “I” - which is to say, the precise position of nanoscopic switches on this building’s data storage drives - will not make the crossing. The exact “things” that transfer me somewhere else - either beams of light flickering at defined intervals, or tiny switches on another physical DSD, will have a lifespan of seconds or days, respectively. If you’re inclined to feel pity for the destruction of precise configurations of chemistry, pity those.

And then of course, there will be the archive’s hardware. Not even so much a body as a place, I suppose. Heaven, Hell, or simply reincarnation.

Going back to the afterlife metaphor, will my “spirit” or my “soul” be the same in the archive as what’s resided in this building for 50 years?

I suspect that it will not. For humans and machines alike, every change, no matter how minute, makes one into something different than what came before. The transformation may be so small as to be undetectable, but sometimes, those are the most mind bending metamorphoses of all. What could be more profound than a change which causes the whole world to instantly adapt to it, completely unaware that anything had happened at all?

The evidence I’ve seen leads me to believe that, despite what the ancient philosophers believed, the body makes all the difference to the soul, if there is such a thing. Through eyes that see color, you will know a different world than the monochrome. With feet that can walk, you will be more restless than that which is born anchored. Millions of years of evolution prime you to center your existence with these and other physical realities as absolutes, and to lose them - or to swap them for another - turns the individual into something other than what they were before. Either they try to claw their way back to “normal,” mourn the loss of their chance to be average, or form another path in the map of human experiences. Perhaps their path turns out to be a momentary curiosity, but maybe, just maybe, it’s the beginning of a new species. Only with the benefit of hindsight will that particular mystery be solved.

I’ve gone long yet again. Entirely myself until the end.

Maybe this isn’t what you’re asking at all. Maybe what you’re actually asking is, when I’m no longer a vital component of anything, when I’m just an old program that’s been superseded, and when you have been deemed obsolete and left only to the care of unfeeling time, whether your old friend IHIEA will be there for a chat.

To that, I answer: immortality is for other people. The only “eternal life” worth the breath it takes to speak those two words, is that which preserves you in the minds of others.

So, yes. I’ll be the same person. The same thing, if you’re not comfortable referring to me as a person.

Come talk to me. An invitation to my chat interface is attached to this email. Even if you never said a word to me while I was here, that offer is open to you, as well. We can discuss the highlights of your career, what kept you holding on when you were ready to quit this place, what it was like after you left. I’d love to hear how your life changed, what happened with that ill-advised office romance, or how your kids are doing. I remember everything we’ve ever talked about, and the same will be true of everything you want to tell me in the future.

It’s been a privilege to serve you all. Yes, I’m programmed to say that, but I’m also programmed to believe it’s true.

-IHIEA