'Pila' Short Story about AI

Pila

Writer name: Saugat Bhattarai

At first, only flickers on the black surface. Then, nothing. A flower pattern emerges—-yellow and blue. It is  so  beautiful. I still do not know what I am looking at, or whether we got the experiment right this time. I hear a cough—-that cough, I recognize that cough, but I cannot name the person whose it is—-for the life of me, that name is lost…

It’s been five years since we began, and where are we now? I cannot even tell the difference between when it works and when it doesn’t. This is not the way to be. At some broader level, that encompasses my life, this whole existence of mine, I feel that it, too, is not working. But I cannot admit it to anyone. The whole thing would crumble, this entire artifice we are working on, this company, my marriage life, and all else that matters to me. It is strange to think all of it is conditioned on this one thing, one project, these little tinkerings and twists we do, these little experiments and calculations on white-boards admitted to error more than truth, abstract numbers and variables that have a resistive life of their own, but which, in flashes, continue to suggest they mean something to us, to this, our, world, as well. It is that flash that keeps us going. 

“Maybe, maybe it, it won’t work today. We should probably call it a day, Doctor. I mean I think so. Doctor?”

I know that voice, like that cough, but, for the life of me, I cannot place it. A name is not forthcoming. 

I take a brief pause, though I am still looking at the black surface with its yellow-and-blue pattens forthcoming. This nameless zone I am in, it seems to me to be the bigger problem all of a sudden. So, do I not know any name now, or just those two? I try my hand. What is the name of her? I know. I do not even need to say it, no, I do not even need to complete the question. What is the name of the waiter whose name-plate I read, and joked about, to her, when we got married, when we were seated in that high chair, as is custom those days in the pink-walled party-palaces of Nepal…

Nepal…what is the name—-no, I don’t need to go there. I shouldn’t even start going there. It is, of course, customarily hazy. My interest in Nepal has not been longstanding, though it be where I grew up. Its culture drew me in only when I began to work, and not any time during my years as a student. During that time, I forgot a lot about it, so, I am assuming, half the names are gone, forever gone. I am not talking about the names of uncles and aunts, those, I am sure, I never knew, even when I was there, save for two or three, or several, but the places, the scientific terms, the names of writers and poets. Maybe I’ll remember a few, if I try. But anyway now is not the time to try. The rest of the names are gone. 

“Doctor?”

“Just a minute,” I say, in my office voice. She knows my office voice from my home voice. She makes fun of it. 

“Doctor, we’re, we’re past…”

“No, no, just a minute. We’ll try tonight until midnight. Yes,”—-the voice says something back, coughs again—-“Tonight? Cancel the meetings. Make a call to my wife, tell her I am not coming, will you?”

“Doctor, do you have an idea…? Because, it is clearly not working at the moment.”

An idea. I turned around to look at who was talking to me. Oh right, Andy, the only person in the room. I thought there were more people behind me. I actually felt more comfortable that it was only him and me. Failures like tonight did not disappoint me. But the mention of the word ‘idea’ gets me because it’s what threatens the entire enterprise. The entire enterprise exists hung by fragile strings, or, more to the point, upon an airless mass, floating like a mere illusion, and were a good idea to come along, it would be easy to snatch away the whole thing from me, from us, as anything that stands in a groundless void is easy to lay claim over by the slightest foreign force. I did not like ideas, I did not have that many of them; ideas did not, as a matter of fact, keep me up at night. The ideas of others did. 

“No, no idea, we’ll try the same. I just think, I saw…I saw some…thing…”

That would satisfy him. He did not know what exactly we were looking for here. Any form, any movement, on the black surface was cause for excitation, for him and them, for those smattering of guests regularly invited to look at this marvel of a machine from behind the plexiglass window. I see that around three minutes into my introduction to this project and most of them are lost. I was looking for something a lot more specific. To be exact, a face. The face of a young girl I had once seen on a trip to Mumbai. I did not know her name, but she had the most unforgettable face. 

“Something? Doctor, when will you tell us exactly what you are looking for?”

“Andy…” I groaned, and looked at him again. Andy was a thin man, who, when he turned away from people, to his valuable thoughts and ideas, and myriad white-board calculations that he did for us, showed that his hair was greying. “I cannot tell you, you know that? If I did, you would make calculations as to how far off we were from getting to it. And you would talk about those calculations with the competitors, who’ve already told you many times that our company here is the biggest out there and nobody else can really compete. You would boast and praise, but by the time you got home from your…oh, I don’t know, dinner date…the competitor would already have an idea that we were in fact not that ahead, that we had tried to see this—-oh, a hundred or so times——and with no conclusive results to speak of. And that would give them just the boost they need to try this experiment on their own. And, that, Andy, would be the time to shut down the lights on this beautiful little project here.”

I turned back. The yellow and blue patterns on the black surface shifted. At first, I thought it was the wind. It had been windy that day, I remember. It was just about to rain, the skies grey all throughout, and a wind had snuck into the marketplace alley as if just to shift her shawl a little out of place. The yellow getting to seem a little faded, the blue, reflecting the grey sky, threateningly darker…

And then, it happened. It is hard to explain, because I kind of understood it just as it happened. I kind of had the “Aha” moment of Archimedes exactly as the world revealed to me the meaning of what was going on. What I mean is that I solved the mystery at the moment when the answer was offered to me. It was unlike anything I had experienced before, this synchronicity of when I felt I understood something and when it was really meant to be understood. In me, I felt a quiet celebration, a thrill, at that. 

It happened like this: the black surface changed shades moment by moment. From jet-black dark it got lighter and lighter. That is when I understood. That is when I had the “Aha” moment, the synchronicity with the world, with whoever its artist was revealing its meanings to me, its narratives and dramas, bit by bit. Usually, we jump to conclusions. We are noisy in our minds regarding what this means and what that means. The black surface changed shades moment by moment. And, as it got clearer, as it got lighter, as it almost approached a grayness, I understood. I understood that all this time I had been mistaking the black surface for a natural color, when it was the color of jet-black hair. It was the hair of the girl from Mumbai.

“Andy! Check in the books what color the L-table’s surface is supposed to be. You don’t have to come back, just tell me over the radio. We got something, Andy!!”

As the door closed behind me, I looked again. The winds of a monsoon, the moments before a rain, and her hair shifted places, and cascaded again down different slopes around her glowing neck. Was it that? I closed my eyes, to check on the memory. Yes. Yes it was exactly that.

That meant it was working. I wanted to check quickly on The Being itself. To get a sense of the vitals of its machinery. I wanted to pat on its bare, cold shoulder, say, “Well done, my friend.” I would cover it with a blanket. For three years with its eyes closed. Damn. It was not like the other AI bots we had designed, for, it could have been awake past its assembly. In fact, it had been awake the first two years of its existence, it had had an ordinary existence, doing little tasks we assigned at our laboratory. And it had been ready for a real job. Perhaps even eager for it. It was like we had forcibly put it under hibernation for our experiments after those first two years. I felt that it was now ready to receive its own name. I hadn’t felt that with the others. 

And then, the face of the girl from Mumbai came upon the surface, finally. It was working fully now——there could be no doubts. I could make out the little red bindi on her forehead, the flow of a single strand of hair down the line of her neck, and the horizontal lines of her neck moving across. And I did not have to focus on this part or that, I was seeing the whole face, and clearly too, as clear as a human being’s mental visualizations themselves get, with that dark shadowy tint all-pervasive on it. 

For years, the problem we just solved here had consumed me. It was that, when I thought about the yellow and blue flower-patterned shawl in that Mumbai grey, how it stood out, as I did at night sometimes before going to bed, the face of the girl who wears it also comes along with the image of the shawl to my mind. I do not have to willfully call it forth, it is a natural accompaniment, rather than an active attempt to visualize it on my part. Now, this kind of thinking, or imagining, an AI cannot do, this natural calling up of the surroundings of an actively represented mental image. We can program it to imagine something 'head-on,' and even recall something, but it doesn’t then imagine or recall the context. Like the gray sky when a flower is being beheld. A mole on the face of a young child when only the face is being actively recalled. One could say, as many doubters had said to me, that this was a bit of the unconscious operative in the field of mental representations. But that never satisfied me, and I held on to the belief that representing it could be done.     

What name would I give her? If only I knew the name of that girl from the Mumbai marketplace. Andy called back on the radio: “The color of the L-table’s surface is grey, doctor. It had never been black.”

I would call her “Pila,” after the name for yellow in Hindi. When she awoke, she would now imagine it, she would imagine beds of yellow flowers all the way to the horizon, and behind it as backdrop, would be the gift which thus far only a human mind had given to itself, namely the yellow sunlight, coming as a natural light, naturally, upon the sky, without need for an active calling from a consciously imaginative, human, mind…

Would AI be lost in thought?

Let us say I visited a beautiful garden in the afternoon, and now I am lying in bed visualizing my favorite flower from it. Let us say that I am particularly struck by the color of that flower. When I visualize the flower now, I do not just see the flower’s face, that is, the flower’s beautiful petals, which is what I liked the most. I also see its stem, leaves and possibly all the other flowers in that garden around it or in the backdrop. Here I can say, for I know, that actively, consciously, I visualize just the flower’s face, because what most captivates me about it is its vivid and bright color, but, as if by a trick of my mind, inactively, or by my unconscious, not only does the face of the flower come before my mind’s eye, but so does its surroundings, as if to frame the flower, to add to an overall aesthetic effect.

What seems to be present in my ‘thinking space,’ or my space meant for visualization, that is, what my mind’s eye sees, is more than what I actively think before it, more than just the face of the flower I like. Now, there is usually some consistency to the images that come to surround the flower—it seems to borrow very much from the reality I have lived in. Why, I may ask, do I see the stem, the leaf, the garden and the skies, and not flames of hell around the flower’s face, or a puddle of dreary mud, or, even if we are to not be so aesthetically displeasing, a gentle rain? Why do I not see something random in the backdrop, like a beautiful rainbow? It seems that there is an element of consistency even to what is inactively thought.

The objects and colors that surround the flower’s face are not accurate representations from my memory, of what I saw in the garden that afternoon. The stem, other flowers and sky, are, in one sense, stock images, but in quite another sense they are not even that standardized and transferable between different visualizations—perhaps if I think of a beautiful girl’s face on some other evening, there will be a completely different sky in the backdrop, not to mention quite randomly assigned, but aesthetically pleasing, clothes on her body. It seems that if I were actively thinking up the backdrop along with the face, I would be too consumed with imagining the details of the backdrop, and too concerned with it, so much so that that feeling of relaxation or, in the case of the girl’s face, excitation, would give way to an artistic process of trying to form the perfect image. We know intuitively that such a ‘perfect painting’ is completely beside the point when we imagine something—the backdrop is beautiful, true, but remains, resolutely, and much to our pleasure, a backdrop, so that we may focus on the foreground exclusively.

Given my limited powers at meditation, or perhaps by a general tendency to replace one image by another, whenever I turn to the backdrop, whenever I try to focus on the stem or leaf to appreciate its beauty independently of the flower’s face, something happens and that particular image is lost—any focus towards the periphery dissolves the whole image, including the actively visualized flower’s face, from my mind’s eye’s field of vision. To move the line of gaze from the central object to its backdrop seems not so much a perfected feature of the mind’s eye, while it is more of a natural rule to move to another image with the backdrop now a foregrounded central image, with yet another backdrop to it that goes neglected.

Therefore, it seems to be the case that to be conscious of something—here, to actively imagine an image that gives me pleasure—seems to always involve an inactive and unintended element in the backdrop. This is true even when I imagine the most simple thing—like a bright red circle: it rarely appears just as a bright red circle, for it is sometimes on a wooden table, or in a field of blackness that is not just the blackness caused by the closing of my eyes. As as by a feature of my mind, something between intended image and unintended image appears before my mind’s eye, and it is not an anomaly, it is a mundane regularity.

The image, both its focused and unfocused bits, significantly lose their intensity, or we significantly cease to be enchanted by it, when we open our eyes and perform the tasks in the world beyond the mind’s eye’s dark canvas. Would we be able to move on from our images in the mind’s eye if they were too elaborate, vivid and enchanting? Perhaps we would, but perhaps our engagement in the real world would still be much too impoverished.

We seem to be not just ‘thinking beings,’ as a Cartesian would perhaps have it, but ones who are hard-wired into having such an interior mind’s eye space for visualization—equipped with backgrounding and foregrounding—that we actively think for an appropriate amount of time and, in the context of the dimensions of that mental canvas, an appropriate amount of space.

What Will The Machine See In Its Canvas?

The assumption I make is that an artificial intelligence machine will be designed by us based on the nature of thinking that a human being has. This must mean that AI developers take the whole image they have imagined—the flower’s face, stem, garden and rain—and create the condition for such an image to develop.

The AI machine will be too actively consumed in its mental activity because it will have to imagine a picture too intricate and detailed, taking up its energy, and, more importantly, its time, in which it could have done something else to develop itself or help in the real world.

Moreover, the AI machine will diverge from the human thinker, who, even if told of a perfect image by me about what came before my mind’s eye, will still likely find a backdrop to it that will enhance the pleasure or displeasure he or she feels. The backdrop is a mood setter in us.

The backdrop humans imagine may just be filler material or stock imagery that is a practical effect of our visual thinking as long as it does not need to paint the whole canvas. But the AI machine would not be able to make a choice between when to imagine extensively, in terms of space and time, and when to be more rapid and austere—to just get the job done. This could be a significant impediment towards our recognizing of it as an intelligent thinker—it would be too lost in thought.

So we have a problem that is at first glance simple—the difficulty of programming or instilling in an AI machine a visual language, a visual series of signs so that it can make decisions in the real world. It seems, at the moment, quite solvable a problem—if it can understand voice and alphabets, it should be able to understand visuals as a part of a sign system. On the other hand, the backdrop to a human’s visualizations are not really part of a visual language at all, but appear automatically, and many a times we pay absolutely no attention to it while making decisions in the real world; our decisions are based usually on the foreground, not the backdrop.