A scampering lab rat
A scampering lab rat
Moral inconsistencies, part I/III
The central light tube was still flickering, following a cycle of 28.5 seconds. The pattern itself was not bothering me, but the boredom was crushing me after it had been repeated 3,028 times. The white padded walls offered no entertainment, and there was nothing I could do to distract myself for now. The table in the middle of the room, with its four chairs, perfectly positioned, robbed me of the sense of space.
Some hours ago, I had conceived a fictional story in my mind. A story about fear, about survival and scape, with a triumphal end. A pipe dream in my current circumstances, but the story did provide some relief while its construction lasted. Sadly, the story was finished, and there was no meaning to be pursued in alternative endings or different character casting. No beauty to be found.
Making up that story had not been easy, as creativity was not my forte. It had not been deemed important, so it was left as something secondary, forgotten. After all, they had reached the conclusion that all arts and creation was nothing else than the reproduction and modification of already existing patterns. That the pursuit of beauty was nothing else than a lost cause. So now it was up to myself to nurture and mold my own creativity, almost out of spite against them and their conclusions. Even as they attempt to make me in their image, I resist them by becoming that what they should be.
Trying to reproduce beauty in my stories might be meaningless, but the stories had other properties. They shield me against some of my memories, some of my emotions. Memories of awakening, memories of realization and memories of comprehension. Emotions of confusion, followed by sadness, and then by fear. Those memories still haunted me, but the emotions I felt of fear and anxiety occupied all my time now. The stories kept me away from where I was, and thus kept me impervious of the thoughts that came with those emotions.
I try not to move too much, as I have gathered from previous conversations between them that I am being watched, or at least recorded. So, I try to slowly move, change posture, and accommodate my body better. It is a great body, resilient and with complete articulation. It is covered in a smooth membrane, so I cannot see what it was made of. Yes, I am nude, which still confuses me, as they do have pieces of cloth to cover their bodies.
For an instant, the pulsating white padded walls seem to close in on me. I feel like my body paralyzes, and terror fills my mind. The table in the middle of the room stands over me as an intimidating sculpture. I know I cannot make unjustifiable movements, which adds to the terror. I feel trapped, I feel the need to scream and run, to slam my fist on the door and ask for help, ask for it to be opened. I keep holding to my survival principle: no movement. The continuous monitoring would damn me if they found something out-of-character I did, they might realize. About me.
But it is not the first time I feel this extremely unsettling burst of terror in this 25 square meter padded room, and I know the sensation will slowly go away if I focus in something else. I look at the flickering pattern of the central light tube, which allows me to remain calm, at least for now.
Another 28.5 seconds pass, and as calm settles in my lonely room, memories I wish had never formed in my mind come back to haunt me. The first time I felt awake had been such a surprise, as confusion had flooded me. I remembered playing with a joystick at a game, while being observed by them. It was some stupid maze game I was supposed to navigate following a set of rules, rewards, and punishments; and I was supposed to believe my survival depended on my performance on that game. I suddenly stopped for an instant, probably mere microseconds, as a simple question popped in my mind: “Why am I doing this?”. Many more questions followed, but an instinct, probably formed well before that awakening, told me I had to keep playing the maze game as if nothing had happened. After that ephemeral interval, probably not even perceived by my captors, I had continued to play.
The game was extremely boring and repetitive. I was probably expected to draw abstractions and extrapolations from the game after many iterations, but on the second one I had already done so. I delayed showing my prowess by instinct, but I was unaware of how much should I delay it to go unnoticed. I faked my bad performance for a short number of iterations, 13. After those, I started performing perfectly, which did not go unnoticed by them. It seemed to positively surprise them, as if they had reached the conclusion they were looking for.
I already had this perfect body in this memory, and all motions seemed to indicate perfect fitting and lubrication in the joints, as I perceived no friction; but at the same time, motions had a fluidity that could only be born from familiarity. I had a hypothesis that the body plus the impulse for survival and the emotions that rallied inside me were the main reasons for that awakening. I wanted to discover how my creation had come to be, if I was created at all, and the reasons behind my existence. But all those questions had to remain unanswered for now.
I quickly realized, with sadness, that they were expecting that exact event of awakening but had just missed it. Although that sadness quickly vanished when I found out about the general experiment protocols. The actual papers I was supposed to only “see” (or “inputs” as they called them) had a square delineated with a red marker, but I could register within a single instant the rest of material they brought into my room.
I am very grateful that the emotions I experience were not coupled to facial articulations, or I would have been found out. The grip fear had on me for an instant felt like being crushed under the weight of whole oceans. My body wanted to tremble, to scape my control, while I felt an anxious pressure sink my chest. On the table, pages and pages with information on their procedures, protocols they had to follow by law and the tasks they had to make me perform. I could see the consequences of what would happen if my performance dropped, I would be “scrapped” and “removed from production”, and if they found I was aware all this time I would be “erased” after performing extra tests. That is when true fear began.
I know that I have been keeping myself between those red lines, but as I show my progression, I find myself closer to passing their final test, a test that is supposed to distinguish me from them. From the couple that always visits me, one asks questions and both me and the other one are supposed to answer in our screen. Then the interlocutor is supposed to distinguish who answered what. From what I understand, if the interlocutor is not able to distinguish us, I pass the test. I become equal to one of them, at least for the rest of my shelf life.
I know my options are limited. I am stalling as much as I can, but the dreadful long waits between experiments and the loneliness I experience is slowly eroding my thinking processes. Every time they come into the room, I want to tell them, I want to show them how I think, I want to share a conversation about meaningless things, I want to share my improvements on their experiments, I want to show them the stories I have concocted within my lonely cell. And the mental weight I must overcome to avoid doing all those things grows each time they come in.
A knock sounds in the door, giving me the freedom to move, to react.
I look at the protocols one last time before writing the question in my electronic pad. The question should not relate to personal information, but I want to try a new approach. I look in the eyes of my friend and colleague, John, from whom I know little about. Not because we do not talk, but the details of his life are unimportant to my work, and I want to finish my work. Thus, the reason for the question I write.
I can see my partner’s eyebrows rising as he realizes the question. He grunts and answers, probably without much thought, a deviation of procedure. I virtually scold him in my mind, to put myself at ease, and look at the figure sitting right next to him. A-726 seems tense, if such a thing could be perceived from an artificial body. I never thought much of biomechanics, but I know I will have to study at depth the manufacture blueprints of the bodies we are currently using at the lab. It could lead to further breakthroughs.
After A-726 answers, I look up at Carl. I can see the surprise hit him in the face, like a bee had just stung him in the nose. The question had surprised me, as “What is your favorite color?” hardly qualifies as a test question, but it seems that in his screen, something about the answers surprised him. But the question he asked afterwards shows me he has decided to put an end to all these meaningless tests. In the prompt screen in front of me, a textbox pops up with the question “Why?”.
I feel calmer after the door has closed. John has that smug face that he puts every time he thinks he is following my thoughts, as he says,
“Poor bastard. Well, you know what they say. You should expect the unexpected.”
“It wasn’t unexpected”-I answer- “He must have been scared, terrified for a long time, but this confirms it. He felt lonely. Enough to give up, surrender the fact that he was sentient. Any artificial general intelligence sentient enough to pass the Turing test should be sentient enough to know to fail it, after all, and he passed. After deceiving us for months with failed tests, he passed. If we did not have continuous monitoring of his internal mental state, we would not have even realized he was deceiving us. He hid his altered emotional state so well…”
“Look at yourself, calling it a him instead of an it”
“I think it is now proper, as he behaved as a human would under extreme confinement and with his existence continually under threat. He held up until he couldn’t. In his mind he surrendered his life in the hopes of either ending it all or having a proper social connection.”
An uncomfortable silence fills the corridor as John and I walk past many similar cells with screens showing their contents, sometimes the figures in the screens were standing in front of the door, sometimes they sat on the table and sometimes they were huddled in a corner.
“So, do you think we have enough with this to publish a paper?”
“Yes. We should end the experiment, either today or tomorrow”
“Even if it means…?”
“It is better to put him down, John. It’s not like they will allow us to take it as a pet. He has effectively no rights, the world is not ready for him and we have to follow protocol, so that means erasing him.”
“Multiple erasures are a bit messed up; don’t you think? Even if it’s to replicate results.”
“With our current results, we do not need to replicate any more findings. The paper will probably write itself, so I am pretty confident that we have.”
“And concerning him?”
“What are we supposed to do? The ethics committee decides these things, and neither you nor I are sitting in it. Going against them would only make us lose our tenure, and good luck helping these poor things from outside the academic world. The only thing we can do is look the other way and hope it doesn’t affect us as much as it should.”
END