A Working Theory of Love Read online

  This is crazy talk, of course—the talk of a depressive. Take this much further and I’ll be soiling myself in the public library, ranting about the New Global Order.

  I sit up, letting my feet dangle off the side of the bed. The cat demands food. On my bedside table is a big bouquet of tulips. They are probably from Ecuador, and are beautiful. This too is the new global order.

  Today we’re launching the latest iteration, Dr. Bassett 2.0. We even have a special guest, Adam Toler, a former student of my boss, who invented the site that matches the loveless to marriageable partners. He’s your basic asshole, but he’s rich as a developing-world dictator and he doesn’t waste his own time. He wouldn’t come by if we sold lattes or Boot Camp workouts or Volts or Nickelodeon merchandise. He wouldn’t have visited my former workplace to watch me despair over ad copy. His interest in our project testifies to its interest. This is artificial intelligence. Henry Livorno. Amiante Systems.

  I eat a bowl of Trader O’s, drink my two cups of coffee, and jump in the Subaru, calmed by NPR’s soothing reports of chaos and war.

  • • •

  WHEN I FIRST MET my boss he told me that artificial intelligence sought to answer one question: what do you do in the face of uncertainty? He said this cheerfully and simply, as if he’d just explained that geology was the study of the earth. I was surprised by such high philosophy, especially since Livorno seemed anything but uncertain. He was dressed like a genial Rotarian on the cusp of retirement. He actually had a golf glove tucked in his back pocket. He’s a founder of his field—he was at the conference in the fifties when they invented the term “artificial intelligence”—and I was expecting some outward sign of genius: wild hair, a sweater with holes. He has an unplaceable accent (he’s from Trieste, but he’s not Italian), and a winning though not particularly suave way about him. If Science is the religion of our time (which it is), and scientists the high priests, then it can be disconcerting to find your high priest so determinedly mundane, head to toe in wicking fabrics.

  Livorno’s worldliness—if not his certainty—has proved at least half illusion. A more sensible man would not be taking on the Turing test, the moonshot of artificial intelligence problems. To defeat this test we have to create a program that—thirty percent of the time—can fool humans into thinking it too is human. The program that passes this threshold will be considered the first intelligent computer. Alan Turing, the patron saint of the field, who invented the test in 1950, thought it would be bested sometime around 2000, but he designed a better yardstick than he might have hoped. Our predecessors have created programs that return your assertions as questions; programs that draw on encyclopedias, dictionaries, and large databases to predict a correct response; programs that fake bad typing—they’ve all been experimentally interesting and utter failures. They sought (seek—our competitors are still up to some hybrid of these old methods) to cobble together a convincing human voice, to string together enough coherence in a conversation to pass the test’s threshold. But they suffer a fatal lack of small talk. Livorno decided that rather than create a coherent human voice from scratch he would find a human voice and bottle it. Finding this voice, however, turned out to be very complicated. He needed a wordhoard of phrases, thoughts, and sentences. He played around with famous writers, like Montaigne, but they were too antique and too “written.” Then he heard about a graphomaniac on the radio—a man who wrote down everything he did every minute of the day—but the trivia was crushing. 8:50 Had toast. 9:00 Was interviewed on radio. There was no sense of the conversational. A professor friend suggested he try Samuel Pepys’s London diaries, which are super conversational and personal, but highlight the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666—running into the antique problem again.

  So Livorno did what one does when at loose ends—a Google search. He discovered an obscure author known (by the Southern historical journal that published him) as the Samuel Pepys of the South. Livorno was very excited to track down the diaries, and after a confused conversation with my mother—she didn’t mention the suicide, thinking he must already know—he was also very excited to track down the author of the journals, me. It was only when we met that we were able to straighten out that I was the Neill Bassett Junior to a long-dead Neill Bassett Senior. Livorno looked so distraught I felt bad for him. Then, seeming inspired, he wondered if I might join as my father’s substitute. I hadn’t come looking for employment. I was just there because Libby (my mother) had been charmed by Livorno, but before handing over the diaries she wanted to ensure he wasn’t a kook. A new job, however, had the ring of a good idea. This was in the scorched wasteland right after my divorce, and a tawdry workplace fling (my sad response to Erin’s pre-divorce affair) was about to blow up. Or so it seemed at the time. Anyway, I was tired of writing ad copy for tech companies; I figured I’d rather just work for the tech companies. They seemed efficient, ambitious, forward-leaning—in other words, the future.

  So I came to Amiante Systems, which is ambitious and forward-leaning, but certainly not efficient. It’s a business without a business plan. Or rather its business plan is to garner Livorno respect. He’s had a storied career. His former students run cutting-edge corporations, teach at top programs, do mind-stretching research. But he’s never quite nailed down the discovery that will preserve his name for all time. In fact, his last major project, the Seven Sins—seven individual programs that “bend” functions in, say, a gluttonous or prideful way—was considered crude showmanship. They were derided on the blogs (“What’s gluttonous search? Search!” “What’s prideful antivirus protection? Antivirus protection!”) as the Seven Dwarfs.

  How will a business doomed to fail as a business garner respect? By being brilliant. Is anything we do here brilliant? It’s a question that worries me. Mostly for Livorno, but also for myself. This job is the reliable human texture of my days. On mornings like this one, even though I’m late and Livorno’s irritated, I’m relieved to find him in his office door beckoning me with his tall, double-handled two-way putter. It means he needs me. Chat with Dr. Bassett about subject X. Fix Dr. Bassett’s phrasing. Ask your mother a pressing question. Go fetch Thai food for lunch. The task doesn’t matter: Amiante is the place where I’m of use.

  “Did your mother complete the profiles?” he asks. Since Neill Sr. is no longer around, Libby has been answering dozens of personality tests as if she were him—tests we actually borrowed from Toler’s dating site. This is part of the transition we’re making today, in hopes of speeding up the project. So far we’ve been using what Livorno refers to as “backwards case-based logic,” but now we’re imposing a little “forward rule-based logic.” Basically, instead of waiting for the computer to figure out what it thinks, we’re going to tell it.

  “All twenty of them.” I caliper the brown envelope between finger and thumb, demonstrating its thickness.

  Livorno’s office is a warehouse of golf knickknacks and cases of his homemade Zinfandel. Among his many honorary degrees hangs a signed letter from Governor Reagan—the Rotarian disguise is nearly flawless. I lower myself into one of his overly reclined Wassily chairs. He sits in his upright Aeron throne. We have a lot of our conversations this way. There’s something of Freud and the analysand in the arrangement.

  “She says your father was a romantic.” He points at the bubble sheet. It seems to me we could pick out random answers—romantic, not romantic—and be fine, but it’s important to Livorno that we get this right. He wants the hidden patterns to emerge.

  “That wouldn’t be my interpretation.”

  “She scored it quite high.”

  “Obviously she has her reasons for thinking that.”

  He frowns. “Your mother has always been objective.” His tone is reverent and cautionary.

  “That’s high praise from you, Henry.”

  “It’s not praise—it’s an observation.”

>   “Maybe she meant capital-R Romantic,” I say. “He was a capital-R Romantic.”

  “The R is not capital,” he says.

  “I don’t know what she was talking about.”

  “What she was talking about? She says he was a romantic.” He’s getting whipped up. “We have to change this today.”

  “I think I know my own father.”

  My voice is harsh. Livorno looks up from the questionnaire, surprised. I’m surprised, too. We’ve never had a tough word between us.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “This weekend . . .” He looks alarmed, and I stop. He’d rather me scream like a Barbary macaque than talk about my personal life.

  “You have countervailing evidence,” he asks. “On this question of romanticism?”

  “Nothing specific.”

  He picks up an apple—an organic Pendragon, full of flavonoids, the same type he encourages me to eat every day—and rolls it in his hand. “Don’t worry. He’s going to do great.”

  “He” is the program we call Dr. Bassett, which Livorno treats as if it’s the actual Dr. Bassett. I don’t like this, but there’s nothing to be done. It’s a crackpottery—a mild form of operationalism, the belief that there’s no important difference between how things seem and how things are—that the whole project hinges on.

  “I’m not worried about the iteration,” I say.

  Livorno brings his other hand to the apple, displaying it like the sacred heart of Jesus. “I want you to be somewhat worried. My legacy hangs in the balance.”

  “You said Toler was a squarehead.” This is Livorno’s term for uncreative thinkers.

  “Nevertheless, he’s very powerful.”

  My mind returns to the weekend, the hostel, the girl. It’s this stupid chair. “You want to hand me those forms?” I push myself upright, feel a lightheaded rush of professionalism. “I’ll get to work.”

  “You’re looking much better, Neill. I believe you have accomplished some R and R?” In case I mistake this for an actual question, he wheels up to his console and begins typing in his brisk two-fingered fashion, humming tunelessly.

  • • •

  I CARRY THE BUBBLE SHEETS into the reception area, past my darkened office, and into the back room. Our suite—one of five in a small, “start-up friendly” commercial space in Menlo Park—previously housed a failing quilt supply store. I always leave work with bits of thread attached to my clothes. The front two offices—mine and Livorno’s—must have been administrative, or maybe for private stitching lessons? The back office, which takes up half of the entire space, was the quilting studio. It’s now home to Laham, our baby-faced wunderkind programmer from Indonesia, and Dr. Bassett, a stack of massively interconnected computers—front-end processors, what’s known as primary nodes, and larger nodes—housed in a tall stainless steel box with a glass door and a slatted vent on top, like a high-end wine fridge. Every morning Laham dusts the whole thing with a diaper wipe. The built-in fans in the processors are supplemented by freestanding fans and an individual air conditioner, all running simultaneously with the combined roar of a speedboat. It’s hard to make yourself heard to Laham, which is okay because his English is challenged. Livorno pulled some strings to express his work visa.

  I bang on the metal door, but he doesn’t look up. So I wait until he sees me and cheerily waves. He’s a kid—twenty-three? Hardworking, meticulous, goofy, and currently sipping an energy drink called Bawls. He’s very clean-minded, and when he asked me once about the name, I told him it was about being so tired you wanted to weep. It’s become a joke between us, and now he’s rubbing his eyes, his mouth open like a miserable baby.

  “Got the answers to the quiz,” I say, putting them on his desk. He’ll scan the bubble sheets and then these answers will create new rules for Dr. Bassett. This afternoon I suppose he’ll become a romantic. “You think we’re ready for the launch?”

  He gives me the foreigner-no-understand smile.

  “The launch,” I say. “Are you feeling good about it?”

  “No, no. We are not ready.”

  “But it’s today.”

  He takes another sip of Bawls, looking grim. He has bags under his eyes. “We are not ready.”

  Finally, my office, where I sit down in my own Aeron chair, supported and ventilated—a good description of the positive effects my job has on me. Still, I’m struck this morning—as I am most Mondays—at how my two years in this room have left little mark. It’s the same bare Sheetrock, the same furniture in the same arrangement. I suppose it could be a reaction to the overpersonalizing of my last job, where we were encouraged to really trick out our cubicles, to express our “me”—a suggestion made with an uncertain mixture of irony and coercion, which drove people to overcompensate. Horse tack, Hello Kitty piñatas, or, in my case, six hundred dollars’ worth of San Francisco Giants pennants. But that was a long time ago, and can’t really explain the dusty flavorlessness of this room. I have—let’s face it—more than enough of my “me” buzzing around the stack in the back room. I might as well settle in; I just don’t. My decorative touches are spare. A couple of photographs on my desk, one of Dolores Park from the window of my apartment, one of Machu Picchu—a trip I made with a very brief romance (who is not herself featured in the picture). A windbreaker and a dusty tennis racket hanging on the back of the door—I joined a lunch league down here, but have failed to play a single match. Two stress balls on either side of my keyboard, to combat carpal tunnel. A bookcase with an arm’s length of books on artificial intelligence (which I’ve paged through in my desultory fashion) and the ninety-eight yellow legal pads that contain my father’s journals. And finally, tacked up behind my monitor, a picture of Alan Turing (printed from the Web), a memento that this field, and this project, have a strange history. He seems to be smiling inscrutably at the door, amused at anyone who enters—or maybe amused that no one ever does.

  I have no computer science background. In fact, I have no science background—just an underused master’s in business administration. But I like to think I have a scientific disposition, that I’m open to hypotheses and don’t walk into every room my nose clothespinned with assumptions. I cherish evidence. The whole premise of Amiante is based on the search for evidence. We’re trying to create the first “intelligent” computer, but intelligence here is precisely defined: a computer that can fool us thirty percent of the time. Thirty percent! Ah, the measurables of life!

  Unfortunately we’re not close to the mark. We couldn’t fool one percent. Point one percent. After two years of work, Dr. Bassett talks like this:

  frnd1: tell me about john perkins

  drbas: john perkins is five foot two and squat as a hedge

  Laughably primitive, except that it’s not: we’re at the absolute forefront of talking computers, way out in front of the competition. But what talk it is. Exhaustive minutiae—what my father ate, who he talked to, what he thought about what he ate and who he talked to. He recommends a precise soil mixture—half loam, half cow manure, which was his uncle Jack’s recipe for raising tomatoes, and rails against the flavorless versions from California. He confides uplifting bromides about the patients in his clinic. He debates the virtues of ingestible versus injected antibiotics. The very existence of my father’s diary was unexpected, but its size—five thousand pages over the course of twenty-plus years—was an absolute shock. And yet it contains nothing acutely revelatory. Page after page of opinion and detail, and somehow the whole accumulation hides the man as much as it reveals him. There are a few surprises—my father’s worry about my older brother’s “effeminacy,” for instance—but no clues as to the man behind the man, except to reinforce that there was none. The journal is thorough, scrupulous, buttoned up, nearly drowning in its own Southernness, and blithely impersonal; so was the man. For all the mentions of young people
this and young people that, there’s little about my brother or me. My mother gets more ink, but only as a cartoon of Southern female virtue. Strong, sharp, the perfect belle. Exactly the kind of nonsense that sent me fleeing for California and its flavorless tomatoes (which are actually delectable—so there). The only people who really come alive are the local color, especially my father’s friend Willie Beerbaum, who had a mouth that could peel paint from the wall. There are times I wish we could have based the program on Willie.

  When the historical society published an excerpt and proclaimed my father the Samuel Pepys of the South, I was still in college and this sounded hopefully grand (though I hadn’t heard of Samuel Pepys). My father, I knew, would have been thrilled. The diaries are a kind of love letter to the traditional and old-fashioned. He had suffered in the contemporary world. I think he needed a good nineteenth-century cholera epidemic, where he could heroically aid the poor and sick, assuage their beatific suffering. Instead, he got Medicaid and billable procedures, people eating themselves to death on Cheetos. The excerpt, however, failed to inspire even a single letter to the editor, and there’s little wonder why. It’s full of paragraphs like this: Sold the nag Blazers to old John Perkins, who owns the farm off the Chambersville Road. I have no idea what he plans to do with it. He’s five foot two and squat as a hedge—Blazers is half Tennessee Walker. Will Perkins dare to mount such a steed? I’m afraid to watch him bouncing down the highway, like a rubber ball on a paddle. But he offered a fair price and Man must be allowed to follow his passions, foolish or not. Les Roark says Perkins came into the Grand Leader last week asking about Stetson hats.