A Working Theory of Love (3 page)

“Are you sad she’s gone?” she asks.

“Who?”

“Good answer.”

I stand up and flick off the light switch. In the sudden, blue darkness, the weak
glow of Sausalito comes into focus, bobbing in the tree branches. I approach the window,
lean my forehead against the cool glass. It’s just a little town across the bay, but
right now it looks like a holy city in the distance, a mirage.

“Your computer,” Rachel says. “Does it have a weird robot voice?”

“He doesn’t actually talk. He text chats.”

“Do you tell him everything? Are you going to tell him about your trip?”

“I don’t know.” The wind whips reedlike through the trees, a thousand knives on a
thousand whetstones. Sausalito is erased. I turn to look at her. “What’s there to
tell?”

“You could tell him you met a really cool girl,” she says. “Moving to California to
start a new life.”

“You’re moving to SF.”

“Bolinas. I’m going to live with my aunt and uncle in Bolinas. I’m going to finish
high school.”

The wind stops, turned off like a spigot. The noises of the hostel clarify—the mumble
of the television, the clinking of bottles.

“Jesus. How old are you?”

“Twenty. Don’t ask me why I haven’t finished already.”

“Twenty,” I say.

She collapses back on the mattress with a thump. The springs wheeze. “Promise me you’ll
tell him that. A really cool girl moving to California. New start on life.”

“New start on life.”

“You got it.” She pushes herself up, reaches a hand out for me, signaling for me to
come over. “I need to tell you something.”

“I hope I can share it with my computer.” I push off the window. She’s a warm dark
form on the white bed, and this close I can smell her, touch her wavy hair. She looks
up at me, serious, as if we’re about to make a pact.

“First, you have to tell me your fantasy.” She speaks quietly but firmly—not ashamed,
not abashed. In the dark, her body is a monochrome ivory, clearly visible. Her small
breasts, the slight chubbiness at her waist, her long legs, the dull maroon flash
of her underwear. But I can’t discern her face. Above the neck, she’s all shadows.

“You can tell me anything you want,” I say. I’ll carry her secret—it’s something strangers
can do for each other.

“Your fantasy. Tell me
yours
.”

I lean in close. There’s no blush of blood in her cheeks; her eyes are not green.
Her face is white, black, grey—a mask. A fantasy, I think. Any old fantasy. Just one
thing I dream about in bed alone, one way I want to be touched. Where I want her hands,
where I want her mouth, what I want her to say. Something. I just have to come up
with something.

2

L
YING IN BED
M
ONDAY MORNING,
the idea of work—work, with its immense banality—strikes me as so absurd I wonder
how the economy lurches on. Does anyone, anywhere, perform daily tasks of value? Even
doctors treat boredom and loneliness as much as any real physical complaint. What
do the rest of us do? Make useless shit to sell to each other so we can buy more useless
shit. I buy a venti latte so the Starbucks employee can buy Billy Blank’s Boot Camp
workout so Billy Blank can buy a new Volt so a GM exec—my brother, for instance—can
rent a Yo Gabba Gabba bounce house for the kids’ party. And so on. Where along this
line is anything necessary, anything of true human benefit, accomplished?

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.

•   •   •

W
HEN
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.