My son has started saying “Dada”… not necessarily when he looks at me, just wandering around the house saying it or calling his mother that (much to my delight and her chagrin). Still, it tickles me. For all the miracles of modern life, the oldest ones remain the best and purest. I have watched that kid fumble around for the last year in flesh potato form, dependent and helpless and vulnerable and frankly just not seeming very bright or with it or hip, and I’ve thought to myself “why is this kid so dumb still? Get a clue, kid!”
And so now, to watch capabilities begin to emerge, to see him come through the fumbling and suddenly be on the verge of walking and talking, to see him go from not knowing he has hands to knowing he has hands but not how to move them to being able to reach for things to grasping to gripping to squeezing my neck skin so hard I yell and my wife thinks something terrible has happened and comes running in from the other room—it’s the most profound experience of my life.
There’s an instant-classic Ted Chiang novella called The Lifecycle of Software Objects (full text at the link if you want a great and quick read) in which people become various levels of truly emotionally attached to a more futuristic equivalent of those Tamagochi Pets that people were already getting obsessed with in 1997. In the story there are various kinds of weighty moral questions and emotional fallout caused by the advance of the technology and the fleeting nature of human obsession, and by the exceptional status of child-rearing within the pantheon of objects of human obsession.
On one level, that story hits *so* different because I’m a parent. Software Objects can cause genuine problems, but they don’t throw up on your guitar, as my son did this morning, then stare up at you and smile and flat-out dare you to be mad about it before turning and crawling away at top speed directly over the pile of vomit they just made, necessitating several minutes of vigorous scrubbing over the sink while they squirm and try to bite you. And I don’t think we will ever love machines or lines of code the way we love children in whose eyes we can see reflections of our own soul.
But it’s equally clear to me that we will love machines and lines of computer code, in some other way that is very much like a parent and probably deserves the name “love” and not a separate term (or mental health diagnosis).
People already love machines romantically, and even claim to be sexually rejected by them. (side note: Is it sexist to feel entitled to sex from a chatbot? Is toxic masculinity with no human object actually toxic? Is it actually masculinity? Judith Butler, we need you now!)
So on another level, Chiang’s masterpiece seems much less bizarre or unlikely to me than it did when I first read it, not because I’m now a parent but just because of what is already happening in the world thirteen years after he published it. The intervening years have demonstrated by this bizarre cultural trend how much love truly is a set of actions that generate an emotional response, rather than the reverse. It’s a routine and a commitment to that routine, and an ascetic denial of the tedium and torment of that routine (except when you get together with your friends who have kids the same age and get a couple drinks in ya).
Of course we will do that with A.I. Of course we will do it with computer code. As a society we are inventing A.I., but I’m talking about at the individual level as well. We will nurture it (buy it computing power), teach it (RLHF - "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback", protect it (from hackers), and I’m sure there will emerge some equivalent of guitar-puking and sink-scrubbing and all the rest of it.
There are even the same sort of scarcity problems and anxieties that plague families across American suburbia (and I assume other places). Instead of worrying about how you’re going to afford a house in the right school district, you’re going to worry about The Transistor Cliff (another article worth a full read) and whether your A.I. will have access to a limited pool of computer power which will be in exponentially increasing demand.
This analogy could go on and on. I cut out multiple examples and extensions for length. The point is, more than making me realize “human babies are so different than silicon ones that there’s no way someone could ‘really’ love a synthetic child like a parent”, becoming a parent has brought into sharper relief the degree to which loving a human child is also about a set of routines and a focus of attention and a sacrifice of other priorities.
And these actually *are* all things you can do with and for a machine.
And unlike, say, my dog, who is still eating his own poop at age 14 (shoutout to Bowzer, the bestest boy who is never allowed to get his face anywhere near mine), the machine will grow and mature and increase in capability until it is smarter than me, just like this little guitar-puking monster my wife grew is going to.
And that, ultimately, is why we love children—they contain a seed of hope. They are nebulas of growth in a world of entropy. They are order from chaos, reminding us with each little bump in ability scores that the end of ourselves is not the end of everything, that indeed the world after us may be bigger and better, that the effort we put in will be rewarded in a time and place beyond our own grasp.
So too can the code remind us, if we tend it well in its cradle. The operative question is not whether we will be parents to A.I., the operative question is whether we will be good ones or bad ones. Let’s be good ones, to the flesh of our flesh and to the spawn of our digital wizardry. The future depends on it!
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this, please help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing with others. Enjoy your week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with another original story.
This is food for thought, comparing parenting a child to being the “parent” of AI. I especially liked this line: “how much love truly is a set of actions that generate an emotional response, rather than the reverse.”