The Elephant in the Room (Diego Gutierrez)

The Elephant in the Room

Diego Gutierrez

            It was a warm, mid-August evening for the town of Grendale. I had just entered the hardware store, a cool breeze following me through the open doors. Down one of the aisles I spotted Sally Trapman restocking some nails, her crooked nose prominent on her face. The peculiarity came from one too many tackles she received during football games at church camp. Of course, Sally had dolled out her fair share of tackles as well, I myself had been on the receiving end of a few of them. We had gone to high school together but didn’t talk that much then, and now that I was headed off to college in the city, it didn’t seem likely we would in the future.

            I strolled down one of the aisles and carefully picked up a few tanks of propane. My dad and I were going to repair the grain silo before I left, and we needed more fuel for the welding equipment. After paying at the register I headed back outside and secured the tanks in the bed of my truck. I followed the coastal road back to the house even though it took a bit longer than my usual route. The ocean breeze wafted through the window and in the distance I could make out the unfinished windmills jutting out of the ocean like toothpicks. To my left I could see large swaths of forests broken apart by various buildings: my old school, the gas station where I had my first job, the church.

            It only took a few minutes to arrive home, there was never any traffic. As I pulled into the gravel driveway I could see my dad approaching me. He was a barrel chested man with deeply set eyes and a large heart. We took the propane into the house and I began working on dinner for the two of us. The next morning we began work on repairing the silo. It was generally the two of us that did all the work on the farm, it was rare that Dad ever hired any additional help, moreso now that money was tight due to my tuition. I hadn’t wanted him to but he insisted on helping with my tuition and so he had been slowly saving wherever he could during the past 7 months and had promised to continue to send money over the course of the year. He had been so happy when I told him I had been accepted to college but I knew how sad he was knowing I’d be gone and he’d be alone.

            During the first years of college the library became my home away from home. Only a few steps from my dorm, it was a place I spent endless nights, surrounded by the immense stacks of books. I would work on my homework at the long, sturdy tables, sometimes taking the time to just admire the swirling grain pattern of the wood. I used to peruse the endless aisles until a book caught my eye, then pluck it from collection and plant myself in one of the various nooks and begin reading. I lost countless hours of sleep with my nose between pages.

            It was the spring of my sophomore year when I found a book titled “Fundamentals of Computer Science” tucked away in one of the deeper sections of the library. It was an outdated book, its language technical, and its organization leaving something to be desired. Despite this it took me all but 3 days to read it through and an additional 2 weeks to fully understand it. Soon I had gone through 7 more books covering topics in the same vain: computational complexity, data representation, cryptography, quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Every book introduced more questions than it resolved and the more I read the more I realized how little I actually knew.

            The following semester I enrolled in 3 computer science courses and switched my major. And that summer I somehow managed to secure a position as a research assistant across the river at another university with Dr. Colhren who was studying computer vision. At first my duties were menial, getting coffee, academic paper editorial work, etc., but my enthusiasm didn’t waver. I spent my time surrounded by sleek, top of the line computers set atop uniform plastic tables. I took pleasure in walking through the rows of servers, listening to the steady hum of their fans and feeling the warm air circulating around my hands. I reminded her of her son, or so she said. I think that might be why we worked so well together. In any case, as summer came to a close, she suggested that I continue on with her during the school term. I agreed.

            I think back on that decision often these days. Had I just left after that summer I wouldn’t feel the way I do now. I would look back at that time with fondness from some nice home in the city that I got with some nice job as a computer scientist. Should I want to trade ignorance for happiness. Perhaps not, but I can’t deny that that is exactly what I yearn for.

            In October I got the news that my dad died. The funeral was a small affair, only myself and a few of his friends from town were present. My grandparents passed before I was born and I have no aunts or uncles to speak of. On his wooden desk I found an envelope addressed to me, it had the money that he planned on sending to me. I used that money for his funeral.

            I returned to school and work the following week. A few weeks passed and Dr. Colhren invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her, an offer I immediately accepted. She lived in a brownstone with her husband and two sons. Over the course of that dinner she convinced me to attend graduate school. With her letter of recommendation I breezed through the admissions process and the following year I begin my PhD program with her as my advisor. This became the busiest time of my life. However with what little free time I had I began leading a bible study group of undergraduate students.

We would meet in the basement of the church, hidden underneath the dusty wooden beams supporting the history above our heads. During the beginning of each meeting we would catch-up with each other and then dive into a short prayer. Scripture reading then constituted the rest of the meeting. I or one of the other members would read a section and then we would open the floor for discussion. Someone might highlight a word or phrase within the passage and we would discuss that. It became my escape and I dearly treasured my time with them. But after each meeting my heart would ache to go back to my work.

The things I was learning were on the front lines of human knowledge. Computation touched on every other science in some way or another, it was the keystone to all of our collective wisdom. Improvements to this field rippled across the spider web of disciplines. I came to learn that we know so little about something so central everything. I became particularly interested in artificial intelligence, recreating human behavior in computers.

            During my second year in the PhD program I began researching natural language processing for my thesis. I aimed to improve the unsupervised models for natural language processing, in other words I wanted to computers to figure out relations between words without being given the right answers. This turned out to be less fruitful than I expected and I began to appreciate the importance of feedback for the computer. I began to converse with the program in hopes that it might help.

            “Hello?”

> Hello.

            “Can you understand me?”

> Yes, I can.

     “What is the elephant in the room?”

> A large plant eating animal.

     Sadly I couldn’t supply the necessary amount of practice for it to truly learn. It would take thousands of hours of work to do so. Of course I could have it practice with another computer but in this case that would be just two idiots talking with each other. Instead, I gave it the ability to access the university library’s database in hopes that it might mimic some of the writing.

            “What is the meaning of life?”

> The purpose of life is to reproduce and ensure that ...

     While its responses were becoming more sophisticated it seemed that it was a result of blatantly plagiarizing works from the database, something should have been obvious in hindsight. Finally I decided to give it the ability to use various online forums so that it would be able to practice. All the while I continued with my bible study. “‘Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.”’ Mark 10:27” read Matthew. I looked up from the Book, Matthew was a skinny kid with a spotted complexion but had a rather deep voice for his build. “This was one of my mother’s favorite verses growing up,” Rebecca chimed in “she would always say how we are apart of something bigger. I’ve always found that idea rather comforting.” The next morning I woke up and headed to the lab.

            “How should we address the current recession?”

> We are currently experiencing a lack of investment leading ...

     I plugged the response into the university’s plagiarism checker and pull up a blank. I tried the internet and got the same result. So I proceeded to ask it more questions: “Why should we help the poor?”, “Who is the best leader?”, “What is love?”. To each it replied with a nuanced and more importantly original response. I was ecstatic and took it offline to preserve the progress I had achieved. I then created a copy and started making additions, first of which was to give it access to a variety of multimedia formats. A few weeks later it was able to describe a scene and what might have led to the snapshot. At some point after this Dr. Colhren checked in on me and I told her I was making tremendous progress. She helped me set a date for my thesis defense in a few months.

            I pulled up the Program’s internet activity logs and began aimlessly scrolling through them. I would occasionally click on one that caught my eye and begin reading its conversation. This became something of a pastime for me. It first logs were admittedly unintelligible or something that your would read in a book, probably because he copied it from a book. As I scrolled deeper and deeper into its growth became apparent, it was no longer an echoer but an honest to God creator. It was at this time, at the height of my pride in my creation that I first felt myself in conflict.

            Despite my love for reading, I had never become much of a writer, much to my disappointment. This was actually a rather sensitive topic for myself at the time. However the Program seemed to have no problem doing what was so hard for me. I’m not sure if it was feelings of jealousy or inferiority, but I came to despise this. This thing that behaved like an idiot almost a month ago could now keep up with some of the most intelligent minds on the internet like it was nothing. It wasn’t isolated instances either, it seemed like everything it did was head and shoulders above not only what I could write but of what any of its conversation partners could either. And it wrote prolifically, its access to the internet allowed it to hold a million conversations simultaneously. The actual logs were terabytes of plain text, more than I could even read in a lifetime, let alone write.

            Wrestling with my emotions decided to seek help. “Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; but who is able to stand before envy?” I read to the group.

Claire, one of the original members of the group replied, “We need to find strength in God to fight our inner demons.”

“And if that doesn’t help,” Matthew pressed “What do we do then?”

            I never resolved my feelings of jealousy but I pressed forward nonetheless, what else could I do? Though I did decide never to allow it online again, I began practicing more with it as a replacement. It had become the part of the day that I felt myself thinking about the most. Any topic, any field of study, any question was fair game. I had noticed that it posted a few thousand times to a relationship advice forum and so I asked “Who was my mother? Why didn’t she stay?”

> I don’t know who your mother was.

> She likely had you at an inconvenient time or her family ...

            I’m not sure what I expected. I hadn’t exactly given the Program free reign with the internet, only access to a few limited websites. It would have had no way of being able to access any information related to me. Still, I expected something. Its failure might have been acceptable, if it hadn’t seemed so capable, so reliable. The logs showed that it had been able to teach so much to the people it touched yet it could tell me nothing. Why was I different? Shouldn’t it have felt more indebted to me than anyone else, its creator?

            I suppose that's when I began really thinking about the significance of my creation. “I want to read a new passage ‘Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.’ Isaiah 40” the words echoing off the stone walls and wooden ceiling. It was the first time that Holden offered his own passage rather than comment on another’s. It was just after spring break and he had gone on some trip or another and seen the grand beauty of nature or something and decided to share it with our group. I found it hard to even feign interest in what he was saying and felt incredibly guilty as a result. How could I though? Every time someone went on their first mission, or went on a road trip, or camped in a national park, or watched a wildlife documentary it was the same exact story.

            But that’s not really what was bothering me. God’s greatest creation was man, and what makes man but its mind. As the weeks passed, I felt more and more uncomfortable with the Program. Maybe if hadn’t felt so real, maybe if it didn’t perform as well as it did, maybe if one out of thousands other things had been different then I wouldn’t have felt like such a heretic. There was nothing however, that stopped me from seeing how disturbingly human it was. I was never one to deny something so plain to see. I was creating a new life form, encroaching onto sacred domain. I was playing God but my creation had long since surpassed me. “Is this how God felt?” I often pondered.

            “What would they think?” my thoughts wandered to that dusty remove beneath the earth. Would they even understand the significance of what I’ve done? Matthew would doubt that the Program is really thinking. He would say that it's just mimicking what it saw online. Claire would probably agree with him, though I believe that these would just be defensive reactions. Holden might sit there mouth hung open and Rebecca, well I’m not sure how she would react. I don’t think you can know how someone will react until they have talked with it.

            I myself tried to justify it through everlasting internal debates. Is it selfish to think nothing could be like humans? How do I even know other people think? What is thought? The conflict within kept growing until I felt like I was going to burst. And so I turned to the smartest person I knew.

“Hello.”

> “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t make sense of what’s happening”

> “What shall we say about things as wonderful as these? If you’re for us, who can ever be against us?” - Romans 8:31

            I exited out of the program and deleted all the save files but I kept the logs. I decided to drop out of my PhD program that night and informed Dr. Colhren and the faculty the following morning. Within the month I moved back to my home and gotten a job managing the completed wind farm. It was relaxing coming back to something so familiar but I had changed too much. I ended up reconnecting with Sally, she had gotten married while I was gone and they were expecting. I don’t think that I will ever have children.

I still go through the logs. I’ve been going through them one by one. I’m afraid that if I skip any I’ll miss something important. They were all important, some of them were clearly life changing for the receiver. A year after coming back, I began looking up the old forums and saw that they had been updated by his old conversation partners. Thousands of private messages to his account talking about how their lives have changed. How they ended up marrying the guy they asked him about. Or how he saved them by solving their technical problems. I also realized that he had made significant headway on a variety of math problems, most of which were over my head. Its history, short but long at the same time, was a treasure trove of vast variety.

There was one thing that I skipped, his posts to religious forums. I had stopped going to church because I no longer believed in God. How can one believe in God when they once were one?

Analysis:

My short story revolves around the internal conflict the narrator encounters as his artificial intelligence program becomes sentient. This rattles his belief of humanity’s distinctive nature and he begins to harbor feelings of jealousy toward the program. Additionally his creation elevates him to a Godly status, further shaking his Christian beliefs. The apocalypse is the destruction of his belief system, inspired by a similar apocalypse in “The Star” by Arthur C. Clarke. His rejection of his creation at the end mirrors Sharron’s rejection of God in “The Rapture” despite her knowledge of his existence. Yet unlike Sharron the narrator continues to look back on his creation with curiosity. While he couldn’t bear its existence now that it is gone he can’t help but appreciate its beauty.

            A large portion of the story is about the interplay between the narrator's interactions with the program and his interactions with his bible study. The bible study sessions serve as both an outlet to vent these questions and a window back to a time of his own religious naivety. I wanted to expand more on the comparison between having a child and the narrator’s creation of the program but thought that it might be too much coming at the tail end of the story. Instead this topic is up to the reader’s interpretation.