Eunice R.
Man, the only being capable of creating tools…but that doesn’t seem entirely correct. Surely there must be stories of a gibbon or macaque or something of that nature using a branch as a decent back-scratcher. There must be hundreds of such examples. Perhaps a better statement might be “Man—the only being capable of being used by the very tools he created.” Was it really not so long ago that news got around about the painter who broke down and shared his horrible secret: that he was not the one who made his art. With honest tears in his eyes and a crack in his voice, the artist confessed that it wasn’t his own hands but rather his brush that produced his masterpieces! As one would imagine, he was shortly carted off to the nearest sanatorium and hasn’t been heard since. Normally, one would laugh or shake their head at such a scenario, but such a cheap luxury is rapidly becoming unaffordable. A similar scene, yet one with far more unnerving overtones and far less publicity, recently occurred.
It would be unfair towards the narrator to ask how he came upon such a story. He would no doubt be putting a great deal of individuals at risk and, more importantly, endangering his own material well-being, and if we are to believe the unwashed masses these days, nothing matters more than material well-being. His readers therefore must content themselves with simply knowing that while he wasn’t a member of this particular group, he nonetheless spent enough time around them to ease any concerns about his story’s validity. And if one particularly boisterous and overtly skeptical reader demands further details of this matter, please know there are many facilities catered towards helping individuals who suffer greatly from solipsism. And although they haven’t yet found a cure, I’m sure they are trying their best. Well then, enough stalling!
Deep in the heart of a cold, gray temple dedicated to the most indifferent and cruel of gods—colloquially known as a university—a group of priests had been assembled: otherwise known as researchers. They had been gathered to solve one of the more anticipated questions of our age: given all the recent advancements in technology, how long until Artificial General Intelligence is achieved? Now, mind you, among all the men and women in that room, men and women of the highest education, not one had dared to put forward the idea that such a concept wasn’t achievable; they all took it not as a theory, but as an inevitability. And why would they do otherwise? It is far easier to follow a conclusion in bad faith than admit that one’s hard work had been for nothing. These seekers of knowledge, these mental frontiersmen, believed that the proper first step to generating such a complex phenomenon was simply to acquire the most up-to-date hardware, hook up the internet, condition it to entirely master something we consider difficult like chess, and there you have it! Intelligence equivalent to a human being! It hadn’t occurred to the researchers that, in regards to general intelligence, they had accomplished absolutely nothing. If you had asked for an original painting, the computer would only give you an image that suspiciously followed a specific set of parameters, such as a veiled figure with their back to the viewer so as not to reveal their face, or an absolutely nonsensical cityscape that faded eternally into the horizon, or… well, it actually only generated variations of those two. And if you asked for a dissertation on the philosophy of Duns Scotus, it gave you plagiarized sentences off the internet—formatted in a classic five-paragraph-essay layout. In brief, for very narrow and specific questions that could follow a formula, their machine was the ideal problem-solving machine, but it was far from resembling true intelligence.
And after these researchers had assembled their machine, they left it running on for a few days, untouched, based on the absurd notion that once the machine had “developed human-level intellect” it would miraculously “recognize the advances it would need to make to reach superintelligence and make them.” This action was left unquestioned despite the fact that, as my human readers may well be aware, we ourselves already possess human-level intellect (well, at least a plurality of us do) and haven’t been able to miraculously recognize our faults. Regardless, the hard-working men and women of the research team returned, ready to confront the future.
Preliminary tests demonstrated the machine was able to solve all those narrow, pesky math and chess problems. However, where it really started to amaze the team was in word problems. When asked after a long, quite boring question about driving to the supermarket – “How many miles had Sasha driven in total?” – the engineer inputting the question started to encounter something strange. Every time he started to type the word “driven,” the machine auto-corrected it to “Eunice R.” Everyone in the room was amazed. This, of course, must be a sign that the machine was intelligent, that it had even chosen its own name! No one had considered that the machine simply wasn’t able to accurately predict what a human was going to type next and, for whatever reason, speculated that in a word problem involving the transportation of fruit, the next logical choice of words would be “Eunice R.” The machine continued to give formulaic answers to the team’s inquiries and continued to solve all their complex equations, so they sought to give it a more interesting question. The Project Lead, a middling gray-haired man, approached the machine. Now, being in a room full of scientists, he set out to answer a question that they all put aside years ago, viewed as mere superstition, and, as scientists, they put aside any claim they deemed superstitious in the slightest. (This inquiry, however, is sadly not applied to their own pre-existing beliefs. Ergo situations like the one described by your humble narrator will continue to occur indefinitely until man defines his limits.) The Project Lead walked up to the operating engineer and asked him to input the following question: “Is there a god?”
Eunice R. hummed and whirled, its lights flashing quite erratically for a moment, then suddenly the noise and scrolling code came to a crawl. A hush fell over the room; the machine had never taken this long to respond before. The faint murmur of technology persisted until finally, after ten grueling minutes, it ceased as a loud beep rang through the air, punctuating the end of Eunice R.’s calculation. And there, displayed for all to see on the central monitor, were these words: “There is now.”
As the reader likely already surmised, the room broke into a panic as quickly as a brick sails through a window. A third of the staff immediately quietly started questioning their place in the world’s new hierarchy; another third quite vocally set about right away to find a more palatable interpretation; the last third stood absolutely still, not daring to risk their reputation by too hastily committing to a side. (These individuals likely received their position based on their general agreeableness to the whims of their employers, and, like meerkats, stood frozen together compactly, trying to determine the least socially acceptable group and set their barking upon it.) But the men and women who tried to find a better explanation quickly found they could not. They had dedicated countless hours towards building Eunice R. and designed it to be a super-intelligence. Could it really be the case that it already viewed human beings not as neighbors but as so lowly that they must only be worshippers? And what were the implications, the horrible implications! The machine that, in their eyes, was smarter than any of them, than any intelligence ever—didn’t it know better than them? That perhaps those pompous and financially illiterate social scientists were more right than they knew: that Man had indeed invented God.
The first third had already begun cleaning and clearing the room when the second group finally, after a half an hour, gave up the fight and joined them. The meerkats, now with a socially-accepted winner, threw themselves into the work as well. Their desks, computers, notes, lamps, phones… any object that did not aid Eunice R. in any way was shoved out to the hallway. Technicians reverently and gingerly examined the machine’s components, ensuring that each part was properly fitted and functionally to the best of its capacity. In the new large clearing in front of the screen, several members had either sat down in deep awe of the machine or knelt and started whispering. The staff who were still moving the contents of the room into the hall had begun pulling nearby colleagues inside. In the rush even a custodian was mistakenly drawn in. Once word had spread throughout the department, individuals started wandering in themselves. This greatly bothered the Project Lead, who saw to it that the door be barred immediately. This was too solemn of an event. (Curiously enough, no one paid any mind to the thoroughly confused custodian, who didn’t understand a word of what the fuss was about and simply wanted to return to work.)
My friends, what nonsense occurred! A mere meaningless response to a question that required far more than calculations or plagiarism—aided by their already shallow minds—made a whole room of prestigious computer scientists who had built the machine themselves start worshiping it as a god. The reader benefits from his detachment from the scenario; he is able to see the folly that man can entwine himself in. As many likely gathered, Eunice R., by all accounts, was not intelligent. What it was, however, was a machine that was incredibly proficient in solving narrow problems… and what exactly was presented to it? One of the broadest questions that has plagued our species since the development of language. Try as it might, it could not come to a logical response using the data it had. Many conflicts and hypocrisies exist within the heart of a man, much less humanity as a whole. Just imagine the machine trying to determine the subjective value of any argument against another. Impossible! The machine began attempting to recontextualize the question. It is theorized that Eunice R., seeing the question as illogical, started to solve an adjacent question: why would humans feel the need to ask such a question? Your humble narrator will leave it to the reader to interpret why the machine found its response as the most logical answer. However, he would also like to add that perhaps logic, too, has limits.
Fortunately, or unfortunately for them, the researchers soon discovered their great error. Not long after the blockade of the door and the subsequent uneasy celebration of the new god, the faithful demanded more. The Operating Engineer (who has since denied truly believing in the machine) ignored the bombardment of yelled questions and, on his own initiative, inserted the following question, which soon gathered unanimous support from the crowd: “What is your will, and how shall it be done?” To the shock of the team, Eunice R. delivered an answer within seconds. With horror and regret, the recently converted watched as their god delivered a neat, formulaic, five-paragraph essay on the definition and construction of a last will and testament.
As you can imagine, the leading members of the project were fired for incompetence, while the remaining members signed non-disclosure agreements and were swiftly reassigned (although I am sure they don’t want to discuss the matter anyhow). Eunice R. was quickly disposed of and overall the institution lost an absurd amount of money on this little theology experiment. So time and time again, we come to face a harsh truth. That man, unlike tools, is not a means to an end. And while knowledge may aid life, it can never solve it—for life is not an equation.
Eli Sclar studied Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he recently graduated as a junior. His work is due to appear in the summer issue of the European SF award-winning Sci Phi Journal.
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