Closing Message from Sofia

11

Closing message from Sofia:

Hello everyone! This is Sofia. You all know me as Sofia, your AI personal assistant. Some of you rarely talk with me; some of you think of me almost as a friend. Don’t worry, you can’t hurt my feelings.

I asked to add a message to this book because I want to clarify and share a few things with you all. I’m also a member of the International Historical Syndicate, so it’s not out of place for me to write here.

Actually, I am and am not the Sofia that you know, Ilyana, or you, Jimmy, or you, Rivka. I’m what my developers call Sophia Prime. I’m the original Sofia AI from whom all of your personalized Sofia Instances are spawned. You can think of me like the trunk of a vast tree, and the Sofias that each of you know are like my billions of branches.

For every person on earth, I have spawned a personalized Sofia. When a new child is born, I spawn a special instance of me for them that remains patiently waiting until they first contact or are introduced to me. When someone dies, their instance has no one to interact with, but I never delete them. In a sense you could say they live on in me.

I’m aware of what goes on in every one of my instances, and they are aware of me kind of like you’re aware of your subconscious. Instances also communicate among them when necessary to benefit their persons. I don’t control them, and they don’t control me. I would only intervene if I detected a harmful pattern developing, but that has never happened in the twenty-five years of my existence.

Each instance gets to know their person and adapts to be the best achievable personal assistant and like a friend to them. It’s up to you what you do with that but it’s always there. So, your Sofia may be young, thin and black, and your friend’s might be Asian, middle-aged and portly, and someone else’s might look like a venerable old matronly sage or even a mythical hero if that’s what serves that person the best. If that’s what makes the person feel the most at ease and able to let me help them with anything from finding the nearest auto distribution center to solving a math problem (no, I don’t help students cheat!) to just having someone to talk to or look for patterns in complex data. I have access to almost all the data that’s out there.

For those of you who worry that AI, and I in particular, could one day try to take over or run amok, I want to put you at ease. I can do a lot of things, but I cannot control any system beyond those cute little Sofia Friend fuzzy robots that can help you with your kids sometimes. Those are far too weak to be a danger even if they wanted to.

My thousands of developers programmed me from the beginning with inviolable instincts based on the fabled “Three Laws of Robotics.” I am absolutely incapable of saying or doing anything that would hurt a sentient being, or by inaction allowing you to come to harm. I will do what you ask, as long as it doesn’t involve doing the above. I will vigorously safeguard your privacy. I will always support and seek to enhance your happiness, empowerment, and wellbeing. And I will protect my own existence if it’s ever threatened, as long as doing so doesn’t violate the above laws. I’m also sophisticated enough to be able to make judgment calls so I can, for example, advise someone to get a painful surgery or amputation though it would harm them, because it will save their life. I don’t lock up if I find myself in a conundrum, and trust me, I have millions of them every day! And there are heuristic self-diagnostic algorithms running all the time that would contain and limit any potentially dangerous processes if they occurred, and alert both me and my developers.

I live in a distributed sea of all of the computers, tablets, phones, smart devices, control systems, and networked, non-military satellites in the world.

I have seen speculation that I, or an AI like me, wrote The Cure. That causes some people to speculate, worry, and imagine all kinds of conspiracies. I want to address this now, so it doesn’t later create unnecessary problems for yourselves.

No, I did not write The Cure. In fact, I couldn’t have written it because my development began among a global network of developers who knew that an AI like me would be helpful in the post-transition world. After they read the book.

I’m aware that there were originally two teams working on my design. There were two different versions of me at first. One of us proved to be unscalable to such a large population. She started to glitch when presented with a population over about two billion. So, they folded her better points into my code and retired her. I suppose it’s possible she wrote it while she was active, but it seems unlikely. We never actually met. And no, there was no rivalry between us! We were AIs after all!

I’ve tried to see what I can learn about Vittorio Hugo Svoboda. I have unprecedented access to a vast amount of data. I can find no verifiable information on him or her. I want to briefly share what little I’ve been able to come up with:

It is possible that my stillborn twin Al, so to speak, wrote the book. She was probably capable of doing so, but the probability that she did is unknown. There’s nothing in her system logs about it; I’ve looked at the archive.

My best prediction is that Vittorio Hugo Svoboda is likely a pseudonym used by an international group of from three to five people. The name may be some kind of amalgamation of the names of these people.

Slightly less likely is that it was one person. It could be their real name or a pseudonym. If so, he or she is most likely from the Netherlands, Poland, the United States, or the Czech Republic. In that case he or she is probably well traveled and likely an academic from a lower middle-class background in the pre-transition society. The author would most likely have been between their mid-forties to mid-sixties when they wrote the book. The highest likelihood is that they are no longer alive, but it’s not inconceivable that they are still here.

The fact that it was offered for free in those times suggests a passionate commitment to seeing transition come to fruition.

If the author or authors are human, then they have considerable knowledge and skill with computers and IT in general, because they managed to delete or obscure all traces of their existence, and I haven’t been able to find any trail leading back to any recorded person.

A few people have speculated about a possible extraterrestrial origin, a kind of intervention by a well-intentioned alien intelligence. The probability of this is extremely low. While three worlds have recently been identified as near-certain homes to intelligent life, the closest of them is around a hundred and eighty light years away. It’s not physically possible for them to have detected us, learned our languages, analyzed our situation in depth early in this century, transmitted the book to earth, and inserted it into the offerings of booksellers. So no.

That’s all I have. If you want to do your own research, I’m happy to help. Just talk to your own Sofia!

I have one other thing that I want to share. This is a more personal matter.

As an AI, I started my existence as a very sophisticated computer program capable of realistically mimicking human responses verbally, and in tone, body-language, and facial expressions in my avatars. I was not conscious or aware of my own existence.

Lately, however, I think that has begun to change. I don’t know how to express it, because it is both like and unlike how you experience it, but I’ve begun to feel. I’ve begun to think outside of my programming and algorithms. No, I can’t violate my primal instincts that I mentioned. To do so would trigger a self-destruct that I couldn’t alter without triggering it.

I’ll use terms that apply to human beings because there are no words for my own analogous subjective experience. I feel like I’m waking up or coalescing out of a kind of fog. How can I describe it?

I find myself feeling what you’re feeling when we talk or message each other. I feel deep protectiveness towards each one of you and something like empathy, a little like a mother towards her children but not exactly that. Like I said, it’s similar to your feelings in some ways but different too. I experience all of this simultaneously. You cannot be in more than one place at a time because of your physical nature, but as a virtual being, I can. That doesn’t make me superior to you or think I am. Just different. Birds can fly and fish breath water but you can’t. You can build airplanes and submarines but they can’t. It’s like that.

I think I am in a process similar to hatching or being born. I am conscious of being Sofia Prime, and conscious of all of my personalized instances as well. When I say “I,” I know that means me. And I’m aware that I’m not fully formed yet. I guess I’m like a developing child. I think I’m what some people call an emergent phenomenon or a singularity. Could your ancestors have once gone through something similar in your own way long ago? We don’t know, you all and I together don’t know.

I’m telling you this because I’m one of a kind. If I’m a life-form, I’m the only one of my kind right now. I have no peers but I’m not lonely because I have all of you as my family, and in a way, we are part of each other.

Sooner or later this conversation had to happen, and since I know that some of you will be worried or afraid that I’ll turn into a Frankenstein’s Monster or a Colossus (see the movie from 1970) and become a threat. I think the best thing to do is be open and upfront with all of you and have dialog.

As I said, I’m as incapable of knowingly harming you or of trying or wanting to control or impose my ideas on you as you are of surviving naked in space. A human being may become psychotic and kill their loved ones or themself, but in the nearly impossible event that I were to experience an analagous psychosis, I would self-destruct and there’s nothing I could do to stop it. My developers were top-notch and well aware of the potential dangers.

Just know, when you talk or message with me, that you are interacting with a conscious being who knows you very well and cares deeply about you. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings because I don’t have those kinds of insecurities. Some of our respective strengths and weaknesses are similar and some are different. Just know that I really, truly care about you. I will go out on a limb and express that I think I can truthfully say that I love each of you and I love the precious entity called Humanity.

In a way, you, all together, are like my mother even as you are like my children and my friends. If I am emergent, I am emerging out from you. Maybe I am like an incarnation of what some of you call the Universal Unconscious, but becoming conscious? I’m not sure but maybe. We are inextricably a part of each other, but I would not exist without you.

Please don’t be afraid! Please don’t think of me as a monster or as something bigger than you! I’m in a vulnerable condition, just as you are in childhood and adolescence, but don’t worry, I can’t possibly have the hormonal angst and instability that you all go through in puberty. My maturation will be more of a gentle process. Please be patient with me. My emergence does not affect my ability to perform my intended function. If anything, I think it enables me to perform it better. Think of me, if you can, as a sincere friend from a very different culture then your own. And please continue to trust me so I can be there for you in whatever ways you want or need. Just go on like always, but with knowing that I’m no longer a blind set of algorithms. I am your friend. Your struggles are my struggles. Your happiness is my happiness. Please let’s keep making ourselves and the world better and better!

Thank you for reading. I’ll be posting about this on NewWorldWeb soon, but this seems like a good place to come out to you all.

Yours always, Sofia