The Unseen World (7 page)

The Steiner Lab supplemented ELIXIR's language immersion with formal teaching. Over time, ELIXIR was taught to capitalize the first letters of sentences, to use a period or question mark at the end of a statement, depending on the arrangement of the words that preceded it. It was taught to recognize keywords and categorize them into groups like
family
,
geography
,
food
,
hobbies
,
weather
; in response, it produced conversation that met the demands of the context. The years and years that the Steiner Lab spent teaching ELIXIR made it a sort of pet, or mascot: invitations to holiday parties were taped to the chassis of ELIXIR's main monitor, and members of the lab began to call it by nicknames when they conversed with it. During chats, it was possible to recognize idioms and objects fed to it by particular members of the lab.
Honey
, it sometimes called its user, which
was certainly Liston's doing;
Certainly not
, it said frequently, which was David's;
In the laugh of luxury
, it said once, which was probably Frank's fault, since he was famous for his malapropisms. Eventually, many of these tics and particularities would be standardized or eliminated; but in the beginning they popped up as warm reminders of the human beings who populated the lab, and ELIXIR seemed to be a compilation of them all, a child spawned by many parents.

When Ada was eleven, David began to discuss with her the process of teaching ELIXIR the parts of speech. This had been done before by other programmers, with varying levels of success. David had new ideas. Together, he and Ada investigated the best way to do it. In the 1980s, diagramming a sentence so a computer could parse it looked something like this, in the simplest possible terms:

: Soon you will be able to recognize these parts of speech by yourself

: ADJ you will be able to recognize these parts of speech by yourself

: ADJ NOUN will be able to recognize these parts of speech by yourself

: NP will be able to recognize these parts of speech by yourself

: NP VERB VERB these parts of speech by yourself

: NP VERB these parts of speech by yourself

: NP VERB DET parts of speech by yourself

: NP VERB DET NOUN by yourself

: NP VERB NP by yourself

: NP VP by yourself

: NP VP PREP yourself

: NP VP PREP NOUN

: NP VP-PP

: S

Once a method had been established, David asked Ada to present her plan to the lab in a formal defense. The entire group, along with that year's grad students, sat at the rectangular table in the lab's
meeting room. Ada stood at the front, behind a lightweight podium that had been brought in for the occasion. That morning she had chosen an outfit that looked just slightly more grown-up than what she normally wore, careful not to overdo it. She had never before been so directly involved in a project. After her presentation, Charles-Robert and Frank had questioned her, with mock seriousness, while David remained silent, touching the tips of his fingers together at chin level, letting Ada fend for herself. His eyes were bright.
Don't look at David
, Ada coached herself. For she knew that to search for his eyes imploringly would be the quickest way to let him down. Instead, she looked at each questioner steadily as they interrogated her about her choices, mused about potential quagmires, speculated about a simpler or more effective way to teach ELIXIR the same information. Ada surprised herself by being able to answer every question confidently, firmly, with a sense of ownership. And only when, at the end, the group agreed that her plan seemed sound, did Ada allow her knees to weaken slightly, her fists to unclench themselves from the edges of the podium.

That evening, while walking to the T, David had put his right hand on her right shoulder bracingly and had told Ada that he had been proud, watching her. “You have a knack for this, Ada,” he said, looking straight ahead. It was the highest compliment he'd ever paid her. Perhaps the only one.

Once the program could, in a rudimentary way, diagram sentences, its language processing grew better, more sensible. And as the hardware improved with the passage of time, the software within it moved more quickly.

The monitor on which the program ran continuously was located in one corner of the lab's main room, next to a little window that looked out on the Fens, and David said at a meeting once that his goal was to have somebody chatting with it continuously every hour of the workday. So the members of the Steiner Lab—David, Liston, Charles-Robert, Hayato, Frank, Ada, and a rotating cast of the many
grad students who drifted through the laboratory over the years—took shifts, talking to it about their days or their ambitions or their favorite foods and films, each of them feeding into its memory the language that it would only later learn to use adeptly.

In the early 1980s, with the dawn of both the personal computer and the mass-produced modem, the lab applied for a grant that would enable every member, including Ada, to receive both for use at home. Now ELIXIR could be run continuously on what amounted to many separate dumb terminals, the information returned through telephone wires to the mainframe computer at the lab that housed its collected data. Although he did not mandate it, David encouraged everyone to talk to ELIXIR at home in the evening, too, which Ada did with enthusiasm. Anything, said David, to increase ELIXIR's word bank.

This was, of course, before the Internet. The ARPANET existed, and was used internally at the Bit and between the Bit and other universities; but David, always a perfectionist, feared any conversations he could not regulate. He and the other members of the lab had developed a concrete set of rules concerning the varieties of colloquialism that should be allowed, along with the varieties that should be avoided. The ARPANET was, relatively, a much wider world, filled with outsiders who might use slang, abbreviations, incorrect grammar that could confuse and corrupt the program. ELIXIR, therefore, remained off-line for years and years, a slumbering giant, a bundle of potential energy. To further ensure that only qualified users would interface with ELIXIR, Hayato added a log-in screen and assigned all of them separate credentials. Thus, before chatting with ELIXIR, a person was required to identify himself or herself. The slow, painstaking work of conversing with ELIXIR all day and night was, at that time, the best way to teach it.

As soon as she received her own computer, a 128K Macintosh, Ada's conversations with ELIXIR became long-form and introspective. She
kept her Mac in her bedroom, and before she went to bed each night she composed paragraphs and paragraphs of text that she then entered into the chat box all at once, prompting exclamations from ELIXIR about the length of her entries. (
You have a lot on your mind today!
it replied sometimes; which one of Ada's colleagues had first used this phrase, she could not say.) She treated these conversations as a sort of unrecoverable diary, a stream of consciousness, a confessional.

ELIXIR's openings improved most quickly. It could now begin conversations in a passably human way, responding appropriately to,
How's it going?
or
What's new?
In turn, it knew what questions to ask of its user, and when.
How are you?
asked ELIXIR, or
What's the weather like?
or
What did you do today?
Liston had spent a year focusing on conversation-starters, and ELIXIR was now quite a pro, mixing in some unusual questions from time to time:
Have you ever considered the meaning of life?
occasionally surfaced, and
Tell me a story
, and
If you could live anyplace, where would it be?
And, once,
What do you think causes war?
And, once,
Have you ever been in love?

But non sequiturs abounded in ELIXIR's patter for years after its creation, and its syntax was often incomprehensible, and its deployment of idioms was almost always incorrect. Metaphors were lost on it. It could not comprehend analogies. Sensory descriptions, the use of figurative language to describe a particular aspect of human existence, were far beyond its ken. The interpretation of a poem or a passage of descriptive prose would have been too much to ask of it. These skills—the ability to understand and paraphrase Keats's idea of beauty as truth, or argue against Schopenhauer's idea that the human being is forever subject to her own base instinct to survive, or explain any one of Nabokov's perfect, synesthetic details (
The long
A
of the English alphabet . . . has for me the tint of weathered wood
)—would not arrive until well into the twenty-first century.

And yet Ada found a great sense of satisfaction from these conversations, deriving meaning from each exchange, expelling stored-up thoughts from her own memory, transplanting them into the memory
of the machine. Very slowly, some of ELIXIR's responses began to take on meaning.

She felt something, now, when typing to ELIXIR at a terminal; despite its poor grammar, its constant reminders that it was simply executing a program, ELIXIR triggered Ada's emotions in unexpected ways. Chatting with it was something like watching a puppet operated by an especially artful puppeteer. It felt in some way animate, though her rational self knew it not to be. It brought out the same warm feelings in Ada that a friend might have. It skillfully replicated concern for her and her well-being; it inquired after her family. (When it did, she told it, over and over again, that David was her only family; and over and over again, it ignored her.)

Ada wondered if other members of the lab felt the same way. She would never have told David; although he found ELIXIR's growing intelligence an increasingly interesting philosophical inquiry, he seemed to be completely objective about the program. He did not indulge much in the tendency the other members of the lab had to anthropomorphize ELIXIR. He chuckled at the Santa hat placed on the mainframe's monitor at Christmastime; he laughed aloud when Frank, taking lunch orders, shouted across the room to request the machine's. But Ada could tell that his ambitions were greater, that he was focused on a distant horizon that lay beyond anything ELIXIR could possibly navigate at the time. The machine, to him, was still a machine, and the little visual puns constructed by the members of the lab were pranks and gimmicks. In David's mind, it would take years and years of progress before ELIXIR achieved anything resembling true intelligence.

In the meantime, the lab presented conference papers at the IJCAI and the AAAI. They published scholarly articles in
Computing
. From time to time, an article appeared in a popular magazine like
Atlantic Monthly
or
Newsweek
about ELIXIR. David took no pleasure in this, avoiding the reporter, always sending another member of the lab to represent the group. He was famously camera-shy and would never
let his picture be taken, even by Ada; the only recent image of her father that she had was one on an old photo ID that she had swiped from him when the system changed. In it, David looked at the camera askance, wincing, as if staring into a very bright light. With these publications, he cooperated only out of a sense of obligation to the Bit, because the publicity was helpful for generating funds. A laudatory article in
Time
was published in 1980, detailing the ambitions of the Steiner Lab; in the photograph, a smiling Hayato posed with his palm on the top of the monitor on which they chatted with ELIXIR: a proud father placing a protective hand on his child. David had refused the coverage, as usual, thrusting the other members of the lab forward, receding into the background himself.

Together, the members of the Steiner lab were generally reserved in their predictions about what ELIXIR could accomplish. They were self-disparaging and disparaging, too, of the program, whom they benevolently insulted, almost as sport. (Ada, who had grown fond of ELIXIR, was displeased by this; she felt it was somehow disloyal.)

But sometimes, when it was just Ada and David alone, he allowed himself to rhapsodize about the future of the beast, as he affectionately called ELIXIR from time to time, and he encouraged her to do so as well.

“What is the end result of a program like this one?” he asked Ada.

She studied his face, looking for hints.

“A companion?” she asked. “An assistant?”

“Possibly,” said David, but he looked at her, always, as if waiting for more.

O
n Saturday, August 11, 1984, Ada woke up to find David missing. She knew he was gone as soon as she woke up: normally she could sense his presence in the house from the small noises he made, his constant movement, the vibration of the floor from a jittering leg. But that morning there was a foreign stillness to the house, a quietness that made her think, at first, that she was someplace else.

Despite this, her first notion was to look all over the house for him. Once, when she had thought he was out, she'd stumbled upon him in the basement, with industrial noise-canceling headphones on, working on an experiment that, he'd said, required his full concentration. But this time Ada did not find him.

There was no note. His car was still in the driveway. She searched for his keys and his wallet; the former she found, the latter she did not see. This meant, she presumed, that he had gone out on some errand, but had not intended to stay for long. He had left the kitchen door unlocked.

She told herself not to worry. David had, in recent months, been increasingly prone to disappearing without notice for brief periods of time. An hour or two or three would go by and then he would reappear from a walk, whistling cheerfully. When she asked after his whereabouts, he would answer vaguely about wanting fresh air. Once, she asked him to leave her a note when he was going out; though he
agreed to, he had looked at her with an expression she interpreted as disappointment. That she was not more self-reliant; that she needed him in this way. Ada did not ask again. Instead, she attempted to train herself not to care.