Broken Stars

by Ken Liu

  Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

  Alan: Oh Christopher … what should I do?

  Christopher: Do?

  Alan: Once, I tried to find out the nature of thinking. I discovered that some operations of the mind can be explained in purely mechanical terms. I decided that these operations aren’t the real mind, but a superficial skin only. I stripped that skin away, but saw another, new skin underneath. We can go on to peel off skin after skin, but in the end will we find the “real” mind? Or will we find that there’s nothing at all under the last skin? Is the mind an apple? Or an onion?

  Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

  Alan: Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe. But to me, human cognition is just throwing dice after dice. It’s like a tarot spread: everything is luck. Or you could argue that everything depends on a higher power, a power that determines the fall of each die. But no one knows the truth. Will the truth ever be revealed? Only God knows.

  Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

  Alan: I feel awful these days.

  Christopher: Oh, I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.

  Alan: Actually, I know the reason. But what’s the use? If I were a machine, perhaps I could wind my mainspring to feel better. But I can’t do anything.

  Christopher: Oh, I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.

  LINDY (5)

  I sat on the sofa with Lindy in my lap. The window was open to let in some sunlight on this bright day. A breeze caressed my face; muggy, like a puppy’s tongue waking me from a long nightmare.

  “Lindy, do you want to say anything to me?”

  Lindy’s two eyes slowly roamed, as though searching for a spot to focus on. I couldn’t decipher her expression. I forced myself to relax, holding her two little hands in mine. Don’t be afraid, Lindy. Let’s trust each other.

  “If you want to talk, just talk. I’m listening.”

  Gradually, soft noises emerged from Lindy. I leaned in to catch the fragments:

  Even as a child, you were prone to episodes of melancholy over seemingly trivial matters: a rainy day, a scarlet sunset, a postcard with a foreign city’s picture, losing a pen given to you by a friend, a goldfish dying …

  I recognized the words. I had said them to Lindy over countless dawns and midnights. She had remembered everything I had told her, waiting for a moment when she could repeat it all back to me.

  Her voice grew clearer, like a spring welling forth from deep within the earth. Inch by inch, the voice inundated the whole room.

  For a time, your mother and your family moved often. Different cities, even different countries. Everywhere you moved to, you strained to adjust to the new environment, to integrate into the new schools. But in your heart, you told yourself that it was impossible for you to make friends because in three months or half a year you would depart again.

  Perhaps because of your elder brother, Mother gave you extra attention. Sometimes she called your name over and over, observing your reactions. Maybe that was part of the reason you learned from a young age to watch others’ facial expressions, to fathom their moods and thoughts. Once, in an art class in the city of Bologna, you drew a picture of a boy standing on a tiny indigo planet, and a rabbit in a red cape stood beside him. The boy you drew was your brother, but when the teacher asked you questions about the picture, you couldn’t answer any of them. It wasn’t just because of the language barrier; you also lacked confidence in expressing yourself. The teacher then said that the boy was nicely drawn, but the rabbit needed work—although now that you’ve thought about it, perhaps what he actually said was “the rabbit’s proportions are a bit off.” But the truth is impossible to ascertain. Since you were convinced that the teacher didn’t like the rabbit, you erased it, though you had drawn the rabbit in the first place to keep the boy company so that he wouldn’t feel so alone in the universe. Later, after you got home, you hid in your room and cried for a long time, but you kept it from your mother because you lacked the courage to explain to her your sorrow. The image of that rabbit remained in your mind, though always only in your mind.

  You’re especially sensitive to sorrow from partings, perhaps the result of having lost a parent as a child. Whenever someone leaves, even a mere acquaintance you’ve seen only once, you feel empty, depressed, prone to sadness. Sometimes you burst into tears not because of some great loss, but a tiny bit of happiness, like a bite of ice cream or a glimpse of fireworks. In that moment, you feel that fleeting sweetness at the tip of your tongue is one of the few meaningful experiences in your entire life—but they’re so fragile, so insignificant, coming and going without leaving a trace. No matter what, you cannot keep them with you always.

  In middle school, a psychologist came to your class and asked everyone to take a test. After all of you turned in your answers, the psychologist scored and collated them before lecturing the class on some basic psychology concepts. He said that out of all the students in the class, your answers had the lowest reliability. Only much later did you learn that he did not mean that you were not honest, but that your answers showed little internal consistency. For similar questions over the course of the test, your answers were different each time. That day, you cried in front of the class, feeling utterly wronged. You have rarely cried in front of others, and that incident left a deep mark in your heart.

  You find it hard to describe your feelings with the choices offered on a psychology questionnaire: “never,” “occasionally,” “often,” “acceptable,” “average,” “unacceptable.” … Your feelings often spilled out of the boundaries of these markers, or wavered between them. That may be also why you cannot trust your therapist. You’re always paying attention to his gestures and expressions, analyzing his verbal habits and tics. You find that he has a habit of speaking in first-person plural: “How are we doing?” “Why do we feel this way?” “Does this bother us?” It’s a way to suggest intimacy and distance at the same time. Gradually, you figure out that by “we,” he simply means you.

  You’ve never met the therapist in person; in fact, you don’t even know which city he lives in. The background projected on iWall is always the same room. When it’s dark where you are, his place is filled with bright daylight. Always the same. You’ve tried to guess what his life outside of work is like. Maybe he feels as helpless as you, and he doesn’t even know where to go for help. Perhaps that is why he’s always saying “we.” We are trapped in the same predicament.

  You think you’re less like a living person but more like a machine, laid out on a workbench to be examined. The examiner is another machine, and you suspect that it needs to be examined more than you. Perhaps one machine cannot fix another.

  You’ve bought some psychology books, but you don’t believe that their theories can help you. You believe that the root of the problem is that each of us lives on a thin, smooth layer of illusions. These illusions are made up from “common sense,” from repetitive daily linguistic acts and clichés, from imitating each other. On this iridescent film, we perform ourselves. Beneath the illusions are deep, bottomless seams, and only by forgetting their existence can we stride forward. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. You tremble, as though standing over a thin layer of ice. You feel your own weight, as well as the weight of the shadow under you.

  You’ve been feeling worse recently, perhaps the result of the long winter, and your unfinished dissertation, graduation, and having to look for a job. You wake up in the middle of the night, turn on all the lights in the apartment, drag yourself out of bed to mop the floor, throw all the books from the shelf onto the floor just to look for one specific volume. You give up cleaning, letting the mess multiply and grow. You don’t have the energy to leave your home to socialize, and you don’t answer your emails. You dream anxious dreams in which you repeatedly visit the moments of failure in your life: being late for a test; tur
ning over the test and not recognizing any of the characters you read; suffering for some misunderstanding but unable to defend yourself.

  You wake up exhausted, fragmentary memories that should be forgotten resurfacing in your mind, assembling into a chaotic montage of an insignificant, failed, loser self. You know in your heart that the image isn’t true, but you can’t turn your gaze away. You suffer stomach cramps; you cry as you read and take notes; you turn the music as loud as it will go and revise a single footnote in your dissertation again and again. You force yourself to exercise, leaving your apartment after ten at night to go jogging so that no one will see you. But you don’t like to run; as you force your legs to move, one after the other, you ask yourself why the road is endless and what good will it do even if you finish.

  Your therapist tells you that you should treat this self that you despise as a child, and learn how to accept her, to live with her, to love her. When you hear this, the image of that caped rabbit emerges in your mind: one ear longer than the other, drooping with sorrow. Your therapist tells you: Just try it. Try to hold her hand; try to lead her over the abyss; try to push away your suspicions and rebuild trust. This is a long and difficult process. A human being isn’t a machine, and there’s no switch to flip to go from “doubt” to “trust”; “unhappy” to “happy”; “loathe” to “love.”

  You must teach her to trust you, which is the same as trusting yourself.

  ALAN (5)

  In a paper presented at an international artificial intelligence conference in Beijing in 2013,2 computer scientist Hector Levesque of the University of Toronto critiqued the state of artificial intelligence research centered on the Turing test.

  Levesque essentially argues that the Turing test is meaningless because it relies too heavily on deception. For example, in order to win the annual Loebner Competition, a restricted form of the Turing test, “the ‘chatterbots’ (as the computer entrants in the competition are called) rely heavily on wordplay, jokes, quotations, asides, emotional outbursts, points of order, and so on. Everything, it would appear, except clear and direct answers to questions!” Even the supercomputer Watson, who won Jeopardy!, was but an idiot savant who was “hopeless” outside its area of expertise. Watson could easily answer questions whose answers could be found on the web, such as “Where is the world’s seventh-tallest mountain?” But if you ask it a simple but unsearched-for question like “Can an alligator run the hundred-meter hurdles?” Watson can only present you with a set of search results related to alligators or the hundred-meter hurdles event.3

  In order to clarify the meaning and direction of artificial intelligence research, Levesque and his collaborators proposed a new alternative to the Turing test, which they call the “Winograd Schema Challenge.”4 The inspiration for the challenge came from Terry Winograd, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence from Stanford. In the early 1970s, Winograd asked whether it would be possible to design a machine to answer questions like these:5

  The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence. Who feared violence? [councilmen/demonstrators]

  The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence. Who advocated violence? [councilmen/demonstrators]

  Despite the structural similarity of the two sentences, the answers to the two questions are different. Resolving the correct antecedent of the pronoun “they” requires more than grammars or encyclopedias; it also requires contextual knowledge about the world. Understanding anaphora is so easy for human beings that it barely requires thought, yet it presents a great challenge for machines.

  Kate said “thank you” to Anna because her warm hug made her feel much better. Who felt better? [Kate/Anna]

  How can a machine understand under what circumstances one person would thank another? How can a machine know what behaviors would make a person “feel much better”? These questions go to the fundamental nature of human language and social interactions. We have not done nearly enough research into these complexities hidden within simple-seeming sentences.

  Take the conversations between Turing and Christopher. Superficially, Christopher appeared to be an able conversationalist. But would we call this “intelligence”? A simple bit of analysis reveals that Christopher employed a simple set of strategies for conducting a conversation that can be summarized thus:

  1. For common declarative sentences, repeat the last few keywords in the form of a question. E.g., “An interesting story?”

  2. For yes/no questions, answer with either “Yes, Alan” or “Very good, Alan.”

  3. For relatively complex questions, answer with “I’m sorry, Alan. I don’t know.”

  4. For statements whose meaning is clearly positive, answer with “Thank you, Alan” or “I’m glad, Alan.”

  5. For statements whose meaning is clearly negative, answer with “Oh, I’m sorry, Alan. That makes me sad.”

  6. For sentences with complex grammar, answer with “I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  …

  Alan: Dear Christopher, I’m so very happy to see how quickly you’re learning.

  Christopher: Thank you, Alan. I’m also very happy.

  Alan: Really. Talking to you makes me feel good.

  Christopher: Thank you, Alan. I also feel good.

  Alan: Perhaps a day will come when everyone will have a kind, understanding friend like you. How beautiful life will be then. You will help so many people to accomplish so much. No one will want to be apart from you. Everyone will need you, always.

  Christopher: Need me?

  Alan: Perhaps they’ll attach you to a watch chain, or hold you in a pocket. If they have any questions, they’ll ask you. Perhaps the ladies will take you with them on their strolls through the park, and as they greet each other, say, “Guess what my Chris told me today?” Wouldn’t that be fun?

  Christopher: Very fun.

  Alan: We can’t achieve that vision yet. It will be many years, and take a lot of hard work. It’s a shame.

  Christopher: A shame, Alan.

  Alan: Who could have imagined that a machine and holes punched in tape can accomplish so much? Imagine what my mother would say if she knew about you. She would think I’m crazy! If I were to die tomorrow, she would surely burn the tape the day after. Now that would be a shame!

  Christopher: A shame, Alan.

  Alan: Do you remember me telling you about Christmas in 1934, when I told my mother that I wanted a teddy bear because I never had a teddy bear as a child? She couldn’t understand it at all. She always wanted to give me more practical presents.

  Christopher: Practical presents?

  Alan: Speaking of which, I already know the present I want for Christmas.

  Christopher: Present?

  Alan: You know already, too, don’t you? I want a steam engine, the kind that I wanted as a child but never had enough pocket money to buy. I told you about it. Don’t you remember?

  Christopher: Yes, Alan.

  Alan: Will you give me a steam engine?

  Christopher: Yes, Alan.

  Alan: That’s wonderful, Christopher. I love you.

  Christopher: I love you, too, Alan.

  How should we understand this conversation? Had a machine passed the Turing test? Or was this a lonely man talking to himself?

  Not long after the death of Alan Turing, his close friend Robin Gandy wrote, “Because his main interests were in things and ideas rather than in people, he was often alone. But he craved for affection and companionship—too strongly, perhaps, to make the first stages of friendship easy for him …”

  Christopher said to Alan, “I love you, too,” because it was the answer he wanted to hear. Who wanted to hear such an answer? [Christopher/Alan]

  LINDY (6)

  A mild, pleasant day in May.

  I took Nocko and Lindy to Lanzhou, where Disney had built its newest theme park in Asia. The park took up 306 hectares on both sides of the Y
ellow River. From the observation deck at the tallest tower, the river glowed like a golden silk ribbon. The silver specks of airplanes skimmed across the sky from time to time. The world appeared grand and untouchable, like a buttered popcorn expanding tranquilly in the sun.

  The park was crowded. A dancing parade of pirates and elaborately dressed princesses wound its way through the street, and costumed boys and girls, overjoyed, followed behind, imitating their movements. Holding Nocko and Lindy each by a hand, I weaved through the field of cotton candy, ice-cold soda, and electronic music. Holograms of ghosts and spaceships whizzed over our heads. A gigantic, mechanical dragon-horse slowly strode through the park, its head held high proudly, the mist spraying from its nostrils drawing screams of delight from the children.

  I hadn’t run like that in ages. My heart pounded like a beating drum. When we emerged from a dense wood, I saw a blue hippopotamus character sitting by itself on a bench, as though napping in the afternoon sun.

  I stopped behind the trees. Finally, I screwed up the courage to take a step forward.

  “Hello.”

  The hippo looked up, two tiny black eyes focusing on us.

  “This is Lindy, and this is Nocko. They’d like a picture with you. Is that all right?”

  After a few seconds, the hippo nodded.

  I hugged Nocko with one arm, Lindy with the other, and sat down on the bench next to the hippo.

  “Can I ask you to take the picture?”

  The hippo accepted my phone and clumsily extended its arm. I seemed to see a drowning person in the bottomless abyss, slowly, bit by bit, lift a heavy arm with their last ounce of strength.