Dr. Saniyya Duale, Mogadishu, 41

Dr Saniyya Duale was nervous. She sat in her office at home, compulsively checking the projection settings on her AR glasses for the umpteenth time, ensuring that the room’s base stations were correctly aligned. First impressions, and all that. She’d barely slept the night before. She’d woken a full 2 hours before her alarm to the quiet shadows of pre-dawn and the distant screeches of barn owls. She’d been too nervous for breakfast. Instead she’d showered, dressed in the clothes she’d layed out the night before, and sat in her office, in the dark. Dawn had slowly broken, followed by the sounds of her partner quietly rustling around in the kitchen before tiptoeing out the front door. Any moment now. Her heart was in her throat. In a forlorn attempt to calm down, she focused on her breathing. On the in and out, like waves washing up a beach before receding. But then a familiar ping made her adrenaline spike. It was time. With her heart hammering in her chest, she accepted the call. The image of a well-kept middle-aged European man flickered into existence across the desk from her, seated on her visitor’s chair as naturally as if he was in the room with her. The AR view through her glasses was perfectly photoreal — she’d have to eyeball the pores on his skin to discern the voxels. ‘Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Isaac. I deeply appreciate it. It’s an honor to meet you in person.’ The man, Isaac, smiled genially. ‘Well, as in person as I am capable, eh, Dr Duale?’ He gestured to the room — or perhaps it was to his body, his virtual image — his grey eyes sparkling with humorous mischief. His accent was amorphously Central European. She’d known about it, but it still took her a little off-guard. She’d heard it was an emulation of his greatest academic idols. Perhaps his appearance is the same, Saniyya thought. He’s emulating what power and respect looked like in the 20th century. Isaac was an AGI, a digital human. In fact, he was the first AGI persona to be successfully nurtured. This, of course, made him a global celebrity. His time was incredibly precious. The fact that he’d assented to an interview — in real-time, no less — with a lowly academic historian like Saniyya was a deep compliment. They had been messaging each other prior to this, getting Saniyya’s rote, technical and generally less interesting questions out of the way. But when she’d tentatively asked for a live interview, she hadn’t expected anything more than a polite decline. But here they were. ‘So as I mentioned in my messages, I’d love to ask you about your earliest memories,’ Saniyya said. ‘Your own perspectives and emotions in your formative days and weeks back in the lab at the University of Illinois.’ ‘Well,’ Isaac began, taking a moment to collect his thoughts. ‘It’s a difficult question to answer, in many ways. Broadly speaking, my earliest experiences were similar in character to that of a biological human’s.’ There it was. The famous lack of distinction that AGI’s made between themselves and the rest of humanity. ‘That is to say, it was raw, unstructured awareness,’ Isaac continued. ‘An experience of the world — or in my case, a meticulously constructed virtual environment — that was devoid of meaning, symbolism or knowledge. It was shape and color, raw sensation, and emotion. All of which I cannot adequately recall — which surprises people.’ ‘Despite your perfect memory, you can’t remember what it was like?’ Isaac raised his eyebrows, delighting in the conversation. His tone was beginning to take on its famous professorial lilt. ‘Well that’s the whole conundrum, isn’t it? How can one form memories, even perfect ones, if one has no model to parse their experiences with, no conceptions with which to understand the world?’ Saniyya had been expecting this. Isaac was one of the world’s leading minds in the field of philosophy — as well as cosmology, neurology and a variety of other disciplines which dealt with perspectives on the fundamental nature of reality. She’d been cramming epistemology texts in preparation for this conversation. ‘So what was your very first memory?’ The five-year-old ancient locked eyes with her. ‘It was a face. Or, to be precise, a virtual image of one of my mentors’ faces, produced in the same way that I’m experiencing you and this beautiful office of yours — VR constructs of real spaces produced by LIDAR. I’m told that my response to his face was viscerally apparent. That’s when they knew their model was validated.’ ‘Their model… of AGI?’ Isaac smiled. ‘Yes, their model that sought to produce AGI from the digital replication of human brain structure, with all its separate biological components, neural networks and self-referential loops. Nurtured in a naturalistic setting with constant positive human interaction, just like a biological human infant.’ ‘Do you think AGI was inevitable? That you were inevitable?’ ‘Well of course I wasn’t inevitable — unless you buy into the Many Worlds Interpretation, Eternal Inflation, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or other infinite cosmologies.’ He chuckled to himself, as if giving credence to such theories was ludicrous. ‘But yes, people like me were inevitable. Humans birth other humans, life births other life. It was only a matter of time before humans started birthing digital versions of themselves.’ ‘Talking of birthing — we all know that you’ve taken a deep interest in mentoring other personas, from their earliest days on throughout their lives. That you’ve collaborated with teams from governments, corporations, universities and more, on their own digital human projects. Do you feel a sort of “parental responsibility” towards other personas?’ Isaac nodded, his self-elected middle-age features flickering with a depth of empathy that Saniyya found almost frightening. ‘Indeed I do: for all living beings, in fact. No-one chooses to be born — so we’re all in this together. That gives us all a moral choice: to turn inwards on ourselves, or to help each other on our shared journey.’