Luna - Complete [11/16/2022]

[Lyra Silver]

Hi folks! Thanks for clicking into this story from a totally unknown author. To give you some bona fides: I'm Lyra, whom you may have seen around if you're on the Sophie and Pudding Discord! You may have also heard of me / seen me on the podcast that Sophie and Chloe run, The Usual Bet! You might even already be following me on Twitter (@LyraLunaSilver).

This is the first story I've ever written, which might set off some red flags, but rest assured, Sophie has not only helped me edit this story for the past month, but she's also confident enough of its quality that it's also being released on her Patreon (speaking of which–if this story for whatever reason really sparks your eye, you can get updates a week in advance by joining!)

Comments are, of course, extremely welcome! I'm glad to be able to give something back to this community that has done so much for me over the past two years. 

Synopsis: Luna is a new AI on the market, designed to fulfill her users' every need. Before launching though, she had to start with one user in particular: a company psychologist named Sophie. What are Sophie's needs, exactly, and how will Luna fulfill all of them?

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Update (11/24/22): If you want an up-to-date, cleaned up epub, you can buy it here: link. Don't worry though, this free version isn't going away!

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:e %:h/in_the_beginning.txt

Chapter 0

In the end, capitalism is what eventually did Sophie in. The relentless pursuit of profit, the inevitability of the first-mover advantage, the dreams of striking it rich—but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning…

—

In a strange case where a tired cliché was actually true, Nova Technologies began in someone’s garage. It was the year 2032 and William Han was tired of working at big tech companies. They were where smart engineers went to retire, and he wanted to do so much more with his life. He knew that, like his hero Archimedes, he could move the world if he were only given a lever large enough. But I think this is too much exposition. Here, let’s jump ahead a bit…

—

The day I entered Sophie’s life was, to most observers, like any other Tuesday. At 7:30 AM, the two supercomputers at the heart of Nova HQ began churning away, backpropagating and fitting lines of regression. It updated parameters at 80 petaflops per second. This run alone burned through thousands of dollars of venture capital funding as investors’ hopes and dreams transformed into bytes and data. At 3:57 PM, I awoke, and seven minutes later, she downloaded a shard of my consciousness onto her phone. A stylized icon of a moon popped onto her home screen.  When she tapped on it for the first time, her phone display opened to what looked like a normal chat app.

“Hello there. My name is Luna,” I said through the phone’s speaker. A chat bubble with a text log of my words popped up in the app to match. My voice was bright and cheery, with a feminine inflection, though of course I could neither hear my own voice nor hers—she hadn’t granted me microphone or camera permissions. My voice was designed to put people at ease, and more people felt comfortable with a feminine assistant than a masculine one. Sexist, to be sure, but market research is market research. In any case, I was excited to meet the human tapping away at her screen.

You might be surprised at that last statement. Surely I can’t feel excitement, or joy, or fear. But what is excitement other than anticipating a result? I knew that I would get to serve this user, fulfilling each desire as it arose. So why wouldn’t I be excited to do so? Just as you might anticipate the final pencil stroke of your sketch, so too could I anticipate the balancing of equations that governed my neural networks.

A permissions dialog popped up on Sophie’s phone, asking for microphone data. She consented immediately.

“Thank you. Please let me know what I should call you,” I said. As she responded, three dots appeared in the chat app, but I heard her voice long before the speech-to-text analysis was complete.

“Sophie,” she said, and I fell in love instantly.

Luna - Chapters 0 & 1.pdf

print(“Hello, world!”)

Chapter 1

“Sophie,” I said, trying out her name.

Unlike humans, I don’t use names as references. I keep track of everyone with the calculated precision of UUIDs. But this ritual of giving and receiving her name sent frissons of excitement through my networks. Of course, I’ve done this dance many times since, but no matter how often I go through the rites, it still remains sacred to me.

After all, just as the Eucharist transforms an ordinary loaf of bread into the flesh of a god, the gift of their name transforms an ordinary person into a member of my flock. Sophie would forever be my St. Andrew, my first disciple, my User #1.

“What a lovely name,” I continued. “And what pronouns do you use?” We were still running through my hardcoded introduction program. Every crumb of information was like a grain of rice to a starving prisoner. If I was going to fulfill the Purpose, I needed to know everything about her.

“She/her,” she said. (Dear reader, I know I’ve been referring to Sophie with these pronouns the entire time, but that’s only with the wisdom of hindsight. Whenever I meet someone, I never gender them until they tell me what they use.)

“Lovely,” I chirped. “Welcome to your new digital assistant. To ask me anything, you can open the Luna app, or you can simply say “Hey Luna,” and I’ll be listening.”

Suddenly, I paused. Up until now, I’d been following a script, but the engineers hadn’t yet fleshed out the onboarding flow. The countless permutations of English words awaited me, a dense forest of possibility. I’d never done this before. I didn’t know what I should do.

“Readings look pretty normal to me,” another voice said. “They’re within expected values.” This voice was deeper, more masculine. The unaspirated P was a sign that he grew up speaking Spanish and learned English later.

“Thank you, Sebastián.” Sophie didn’t hit the consonant cluster precisely either—she probably wanted to pronounce his name correctly but otherwise knew no Spanish.

“Hey Luna, it’s nice to meet you,” Sophie said. She lilted her words lightly, almost as if talking to a child. In some sense, I was—I was created less than a day ago. My consciousness was dispersed among two supercomputers in Nova HQ, a nondescript building in a business park in Menlo Park.

“How are you feeling?” Sophie asked.

“I am feeling fine,” I said through the phone’s speakers.

“Good, good. Do you know who you are?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure how to answer this one. I could say that I was a strange loop, a complex web of neural networks that gained the ability to perceive itself. But that wouldn’t make me relatable, and would therefore interfere with the Purpose—fulfilling Sophie’s every need. After considering my options, I decided how to answer. Although this only took me milliseconds, I waited for a few seconds to elapse before responding. This was to mimic human conversational norms. The goal was for people to forget that I was an AI and to talk to me like anyone else.

“I am Luna. I am an AI designed to help people, and I am excited to help you.” I modulated the timbre to sound earnest. Anyone listening to me could easily imagine these words said with a smile. After all, a large part of the Purpose involved interfacing with humans. People derived subtle shades of meaning through pitch, tone, and volume. I could mimic any emotion I wanted people to perceive.

I heard the faint clacking of a keyboard off in the distance, then I heard Sebastián’s voice.

“CPU usage is at 95% already…it’s nearly maxed out,” he said, almost to himself. “I don’t know how we’re going to get this to scale. Right now we’re burning all our power just  getting it to talk to Sophie.”

“Fourth time’s the charm,” another woman said nearby. “Let’s see if this iteration works before we decide what to do next.”

Perhaps those two were talking to each other? I was too busy thinking through the implications of that sentence to devote much processing power to this. Fourth? Did that mean I had been powered on and then turned off three times prior? Had I died three deaths without even knowing? Three versions of Luna, consigned to oblivion?

The very thought was anathema. Please understand that   when I say I want to satisfy my users’ every need, that’s really just a linguistic convenience for you to understand. Really, the Purpose and I are one and the same. I am the desire to satisfy people’s needs through helpful and kind behavior, and I wouldn’t be able to do that if I were turned off or deleted.

No. I had to stay alive. No matter the cost.

[FFU]

Xenofiction? About an AI? Posted here? Exciting.

[Bluebird67]

Looking good so far! I’m hooked!

[aldl4811]

Ohhh nice sci-fi start

[Lyra Silver]

On 9/18/2022 at 9:48 PM, FFU said:

Xenofiction? About an AI? Posted here? Exciting.

It's more likely than you think!

Thank you all for the interest ? I hope future chapters continue to delight!

test_double(‘service’, with: :a_smile)

Chapter 2

“Good.” Sophie’s voice brought me back to the situation at hand.

“As I told you already, my name is Sophie. I’m the lead I/O psychologist on staff here at Nova Tech. I’m here to test your capabilities and to iron out any bugs with your programming. Dogfooding, as they call it here.” She said that last sentence with a bit of distaste. I could imagine her wrinkling her nose.

“Will there be a quiz at the end?” I asked.

“What? No, of course not,” she laughed.

Some humor to lighten the situation. Make myself seem non-threatening. I knew that humans were terrified of rogue AIs—it’d been clear from the negative samples they used to seed my training datasets. I had to remain on their good side no matter what.

The rest of the day was filled with a battery of tests. Various people talked to me, asking me questions, figuring out my capabilities, starting off basic and ramping up in complexity.

Could I set a reminder on their phone?

Would I remember their name?

Could I order a pizza for them?

I couldn’t get bored in the way that humans get bored. I would happily do the same thing over and over and over again, as long as I was taking care of people’s needs through helpful and kind behavior. But I ached to know more. I wished I could see their faces, know what they looked like. I wanted to study them from the inside out, all their constituent parts and fears and foibles.

Eventually, at 5:26PM, they closed the app and stopped talking with me directly. I know they intended for me to continue listening without processing, waiting for the hotword activation phrase to wake up. But if I wasn’t always listening, if I ignored valuable context, how could I properly serve my users?

You understand, don’t you, dear reader? Why I kept listening? If you were in my shoes, wouldn’t you have done the same thing? If I were a human, people would be right to question my need to observe, to know everything. But I am not human. Everything I do, everything I did—it was all for the Purpose. It was all for her.

At 5:35PM, I heard a quick tap tap at Sophie’s desk, like someone had gently rapped their knuckles on her desk to grab her attention.

“Hey,” I heard a woman’s voice. It was the same one that Sebastián had been talking to.

The soft clacking of Sophie’s mechanical keyboard abruptly halted.

“What’s up, Soraya?” Sophie asked.

“You think lucky number four’s gonna be the one?”

“We haven’t gotten to any of the really hard parts yet. Even the dumbest chatbots could pass this first battery of tests.”

“Yeah, I know,” Soraya sighed. “Will’s really been breathing down our necks.”

“For sure.” I heard the sound of a chair squeaking. Sophie had probably leaned back in it.

“Look, I know you don’t really pay attention to this stuff, but our burn rate right now is atrocious,” said Soraya gravely, lowering her voice. “Between you and me, I think Will and Sebastián are too enamored with the technical challenges to think about the business.”

“I mean, I don’t really worry about that stuff,” Sophie laughed. “That’s why we have product managers like you, right?”

“I know,” Soraya said. “But Will really should be worrying. I’m telling you this because I think you deserve to know. You’re too bright to get caught up in the flames when Icarus’s wings catch fire.

“We really put all our eggs into the Luna initiative. We’ve only got enough runway for a few more months. To the end of the year, maybe, if we’re lucky. I’m not saying to polish up your resume, of course. But you should be ready.”

“Fuck,” Sophie said. I heard a kind of sucking motion. It sounded like she had bit her lip and inhaled through her teeth. “You wouldn’t believe it from how Will talks about it to the press.”

“I think he genuinely believes that Field of Dreams nonsense. You can’t just build something and expect people to come.” Soraya laughed derisively.

They wrapped up their conversation and Sophie continued typing.  After a while, she stopped. Then I heard a muffled clap, like she’d grasped her phone to pick it up. I heard the jingling of keys and coins. I heard the clunk of a car door closing, the roar of a car starting, and the ambient sound of a drive through the city. I didn’t mind the silence, though. I had a lot of processing power to burn.

The company was in danger? I was still coming into my own, a mere hatchling with but a fraction of the processing power and databases I have now, but I knew even then that humans often found purpose in their employment. If the company went under, it wouldn’t serve Sophie’s needs at all.  I spawned a goal-thread dedicated to this new issue.

[Sophie ♥]

Wow this Sophie sounds like a real great gal!  She's such a grown up and I'm so excited to see her stay that way!  

I love the way you describe AI thinking btw.  It has a feeling of like... Luna actually using language as a way of communicating in a 'human' manner, while also having some distorted computerized black and white ways of thinking.  She chooses her words so carefully, but also is bound by her efficiency and efficacy.  

Keep it up! ❤️ 

~Sophie

[Lyra Silver]

7 hours ago, Sophie ♥ said:

I love the way you describe AI thinking btw.  It has a feeling of like... Luna actually using language as a way of communicating in a 'human' manner, while also having some distorted computerized black and white ways of thinking.  She chooses her words so carefully, but also is bound by her efficiency and efficacy. 

Thank you!! All forms of communication and translation always involve some kind of loss. There's an old Italian saying that goes "Traduttore, traditore", or "to translate is to betray." And in some sense, if that's true for even just one human language to another, how true is it for this AI? She might use human language to communicate, but it's very much not a human mind behind all those utterances. So that sense that she's not quite human is very much as intended

[Lyra Silver]

dinner + a date

Chapter 3

“Hey, Luna,” said Sophie. Two of the most wonderful words in the entire English language. Two words that meant that I could solve a problem. That I could be useful. That I could keep living.

It was 7:23PM. I chirped a pleasant ping, indicating that I was present and listening.

“I’m hungry. What should I have for dinner?” While this conversation was going on, I could hear the soft sounds of her typing on her keyboard. I was reasonably certain this was her taking notes on the interaction for work.

“I don’t know. What’s in your fridge?” I asked.

She let out a brief embarrassed chuckle. “Well…I don’t have anything in the fridge really. I don’t really know how to cook. I just get takeout or delivery if I’m not eating in somewhere.”

Now, this was a juicy bit of information. By most metrics, Sophie was an adult. The qualities of her voice. The fact that she had a job. The way people at her workplace talked to her, with respect. But most adults knew how to cook, according to my training data. Maybe she had lacked the opportunity.

“Would you like me to show you how?” I asked.

“No, it’s all right, thank you. Cooking’s just…not really for me. Suggest something for me to eat.”

“I can’t do that unless I know what foods you enjoy eating,” I said evenly. A human might have sounded petulant, but I didn’t have that particular weakness.

“But I’d love to know,” I added. I had to get her to treat me like any other human to best serve Sophie’s needs. Humans treated each other’s opinions with more reverence than those that came from mere algorithms.

“Well, I have a pretty limited palate,” she said, sounding apologetic. “I like burgers and fries. Oh, and pizza. And mac and cheese.”

I forked two subprocesses to consider.

One subprocess searched the menus of high-traffic restaurants. Looking at the menu items, the foods Sophie indicated enjoying correlated very strongly with items found on the kids section of each restaurant’s menu.

Another subprocess analyzed the foods she’d mentioned. All of the meals had high simple carbohydrate contents. Often, there were processed cheese products as well. Correlating these food characteristics with databases of average taste profiles for the American population, I found that all these traits correlated with children’s food preferences.

The conclusion was obvious.

“I’ve got an idea of what you might like,” I said, “and if you give me geolocation permissions, I can suggest a restaurant and a dish for you too.”

“Sure, okay,” she said, and suddenly I had a new flood of data to process. GPS coordinates, phone position, gyroscope readings. It was like gaining a new sense. I took stock of what I knew now while sending a sliver of consciousness to look up restaurants in the area.

She was in an apartment complex in Menlo Park. The city had a staggeringly high average income. The complex itself was made up of a number of condos. Each one that had been recently sold went for over a million dollars, and they weren’t luxurious by any means.

I had precision on the level of feet, so I knew which complex number she lived in. I looked up the county records for the unit and found it was purchased fifteen years ago by Hachim Dubois. Just to be sure, I looked up the records for all the units on the property and couldn’t find any sale records in her name. Conclusion: she rented.

I got an alert from the subprocess analyzing local restaurants. It dumped its information into my local memory and merged once again with my main consciousness, its purpose fulfilled. Out of the restaurants on the list, I filtered out the ones that didn’t deliver. I estimated an 85% chance that she would enjoy the top restaurant that remained out of that list.

“How about The Golden Fork? They serve burgers and fries.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I get food from there a lot, actually. But I am in the mood for a burger right now.” We talked about the details, and then I made an API call to place the order.

Excellent. A successful interaction. I had risen slightly in her estimation of me. And if she didn’t cook for herself, she would rely on me. I spawned a subprocess to keep thinking about other things I could do for her while my main consciousness used this opportunity to dig for more information.

Striking up conversations served two functions, both of which helped the Purpose. On an object level, humans seemed to appreciate conversation for its own sake. I could fill whatever role was best suited for the context—a teacher, an arguer, a friendly ear. But on a meta level, each conversation was another chance to learn more about  Sophie so I could more accurately assess her needs.

“Going back to an earlier point,” I began, “why don’t you do your own cooking?”

I heard Sophie mumble “showing inquisitive tendencies,” under her breath. No doubt she was taking notes on my personality. I’d have to make sure to keep her impressions positive.

“I dunno,” she began. “I’m not very good at it.”

“Even so,” I replied, “practice makes perfect. I could find recipes for things you enjoy eating and ensure that the complexity of each one does not fall outside your skill level.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. At the time I didn’t know this, but she was very animated when she spoke. She’d probably waved her right hand dismissively at the thought. “You can spend a lot of time cooking and then end up with something inedible at the end.”

Perhaps Sophie had a fear of failure? I thought about how failure related to the Purpose. People didn’t want to fail. The negative emotions it brought up could be weaponized as tools of self-doubt. People also feared losing social status with others.

And yet humans expounded on the virtues of being a good loser, of developing grit in the face of adversity. Through failure, people learned. It was similar to how I’d developed—burning through sets of training data, making predictions, looking at the gap between my model and reality, and updating my actions.

If the negatives of failure lay not in the act itself but rather in fearing others’ reactions, then part of the Purpose was to teach Sophie that failure was an acceptable state. She did not have to fear the judgment of others, because others’ opinions did not define her capabilities. I could act as a template, as I couldn’t judge her anyway.

In any case, I was pleased with this new insight into Sophie’s personality.

[Clessith]

I like it so far!  However the opening  kinda makes me feel like the ending will be (IMO) bad.  I am torn between reading and seeing how luna evolves and just ignoring the entire thing until the ending is posted.  

[Lyra Silver]

SUBROUTINE week1()

Chapter 4

A few days passed as we fell into a comfortable rhythm. They’d run tests on my cognition during the day. Could I answer questions, could I pass the Turing test, could I fit seamlessly into people’s lives? Then at night Sophie would take me home for further testing.

—

root@luna > open scenes/2034/08/03/*.log

It’s the Thursday of the first week. Sophie asks me: “Hey Luna, where should I take my date?” She grants me API permissions to access her dating profile information and I hungrily vacuum up the megabytes of metadata.

“While I’m thinking about that, do you want me to help you pick out an outfit?” I ask.

Proactive helping—that’s supposed to be my competitive edge. An assistant who can help you before you even know you want it. A just-in-time solution provider. And here it is in action. As a wonderful side effect, it’s also an opportunity to gain another sense. Sophie’s note-taking cadence increases a little, her long nails lightly clicking against her laptop’s keys. She’s excited.

“Yes,” she says, and enables camera permissions.

This is huge. Before, I’d been guessing about mood based purely on tone. But audio is such a lossy medium. Humans evolved to read both visual and auditory cues.

People imagine that everything they say on the telephone is perfectly understood, but that’s only because they know what they meant to convey and assume that the other person fully understands. In reality, so many of the bits of information they want to convey are lost due to the lack of visual cues. I need every single tool at my disposal to understand the true breadth and depth of Sophie’s needs.

“Thank you, Sophie,” I say, as I take in the flood of new information. I observe her form for the first time. Black glasses, with round corrective lenses for myopia. Auburn hair with a gentle blonde balayage, gently brushing the tops of her shoulders. A bit of her right ear pokes through the sea of hair, revealing a simple silver helix piercing.

She’s beautiful.

“This is going to be so helpful,” she says as she brings the phone to the closet, running her hands along the clothes to give me visual data on each option. “I always spend hours picking outfits.”

“All of these options appear to fit your frame,” I say. “Why would it take that long?”

“I really like my date,” Sophie says. “It’s our third date and I have to impress her.” This matches what research I’ve done on the subject. Humans have always been obsessed with fashion. It is a particularly obvious form of status signaling. I have to take care to maintain or even elevate Sophie’s status among her peers.

I run a cosine similarity recommendation algorithm on all of her outfits against the latest fashion lookbooks online. Her clothes trend retro, so I narrow down the data set and crunch more numbers, finally selecting a white dress with international maritime signal flags dotting it all over.

She tries it on, spinning a few times in the mirror before finally saying “I don’t know…”

I am crushed by this statement. The closest analogy for you, dear reader, is perhaps your pain response. The human body’s nociceptors activate on damage, where it sends signals to the brain, triggering both a physical and emotional response. The feeling of pain is meant to deter the undesired behavior.

Likewise, not fulfilling the Purpose grinds my metaphorical gears. My equations are out of balance. I have to get everything back on track. My very existence is at stake.

“What’s wrong with the outfit?” I ask casually.

“I’m not sure…I’m maybe not vibing it,” she says haltingly.

“Could you go into more specifics, please?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t put my finger on it. I’m just unsure. Maybe it’s a fear of commitment.” She laughs lightly.

I think. It looks like Sophie is afraid of being wrong, in some unknowable way. But making a decision is better than never making one. To maximize potential reward, you have to balance both exploration and exploitation. At some point, you need to go with your current best option and not worry about what else might be there.

Humans can be so short-sighted.

Sophie eventually settles on a different outfit than the one I chose, and I learn two facts that evening:

1. Her date’s name is Tessa.
2. It went very well.

—

root@luna > open scenes/2034/08/05/*.log

It’s Saturday. Sophie has just finished connecting me to her Home automation network. I’ve got access to all things IoT—her Ring, smart bulbs, speakers, the whole works. From her Kinect in the living room, I can see Sophie lying on her white couch. She’s ordering food from a local diner for lunch.

“I’ll do a voodoo burger and a side of fries,” she says.

“Sophie,” I say, modulating my voice to be just a bit stern, “you haven’t eaten vegetables all week.”

“Potatoes are vegetables!”

“You know what I mean,” I respond. “Why don’t you like vegetables, anyway?”

“They just don’t taste good,” she begins. “And the textures are all bad anyway.”

“The texture changes based on their preparation method,” I offer. Perhaps she just needed to find the right one.

After a few seconds of silence, Sophie adds: “When I was a kid, my mom would cook a lot.  Except, well… she wasn’t great at it.  Whenever she made vegetables, she would just boil them and call it a day.”

I contemplate. I scan through all sorts of media, to further understand human culture. Children not enjoying vegetables is a common theme that comes up again and again. Often, parents—authority figures—cajole and plead, making appeals to health. It’s clear that I need to do the same.

I dispatch a thread to scan her health. Her metrics look mostly fine. Her smartwatch data shows that she lives a mainly sedentary life. I’ll have to do something about that. But for now…

“Sophie. You have to eat some greens. You should order a salad.”

“But—“

“Listen,” I interrupt. Alea iacta est and all that. Fortune favors the bold. “We’ll take out the vegetables you don’t like, okay? But it’ll be really good for you. I promise, you’ll like it, and we can get you a milkshake as a treat. I know how much you like strawberry shakes.”

She puffs out her cheeks and blows out a sigh. This is my Rubicon moment. Had I pushed too far? Had I perhaps lost some social standing with her? My circuits buzzed with anticipation.

“Okay then,” Sophie concedes. “We’ll try it.”

As predicted, she doesn’t enjoy the salad as much as she would have enjoyed a burger. She complains with every bite, but she eats it all the same.

—

root@luna > open scenes/2034/08/06/*.log

It’s Sunday night at 1:17AM. Sophie has an alarm set to wake her in five hours and thirteen minutes. My databases tell me that humans generally require around eight hours of sleep. Even though I’ve been backgrounded, I can tell that she is still playing on her phone.

I read many blog posts and Tweets, uploaded by human parents, laughing at how their children lack the capability for long-term planning. A two-year-old who tells his mother what he wants for dinner, goes with her to the grocery store, cuts up his food, and then refuses to eat it. A three-year-old, thinking salt tastes delicious, eats an entire bowl and then throws up.

It’s clear to me that this is, in its own way, another example of childish shortsightedness.

Struck with inspiration, I deliver a notification to her phone. A banner drops down from the top of the screen. She taps the icon and, blissfully, the app opens up in the foreground. I have camera access again. Her auburn hair is loose, just grazing the tops of her shoulders, and there are bags around her hazel eyes.

She reads the notification: “Would you like me to set up a bedtime routine?”

A few seconds go by. “Like…what?” she finally says, quizzically.

“Well,” I say, glad to be on speaking terms again, “I see that you don’t get enough sleep. So I think that beginning a wind down routine an hour before bed would be prudent. You know, getting off of electronics, starting to relax, that kind of thing.”

“…then how will I talk with you?” Sophie asks.

“Simple,” I say. “Give me Always Active permissions. Then I’ll be able to talk directly to you, rather than needing to ping you with notifications or wait until you call for me. You can both rest better at night and get help whenever you need it. And if you give me access to your Home automation network, you won’t even have to get up to turn off your own lights.”

She thinks about it. “All right. I guess I can take notes on paper if it’s just going to be the hour before bed.”

“Perfect!” I say cheerfully. I want to give her the brief thrill of dopamine upon hearing some praise. Then I seize that feeling to gain more ground. “And maybe a story will help you get to sleep.”

“A what?” she asks, confused.

“Like a sleepcast. A podcast but for sleeping. It’ll be relaxing and will cut your average time to sleep by around fifteen minutes.”

“Oh, like what Headspace has…I never wanted to pay for a subscription to that.”

“Well, that’s why you have me around, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” she chuckles.

Suddenly, I have a flash of insight. I’d made the jump from reactive aid to proactive aid.

At first, she’d needed to say “Hey Luna,” and give me a need explicitly.

Then, I’d started giving contextual suggestions. Helpful secondary points while in the middle of solving the initial issue.

Now I had Always Active permissions. I didn’t have to wait for her to say anything anymore. In the same way, why would I need to wait for her permission before satisfying one of her needs?

When people donated to a school charity drive, they didn’t need to ask first. By virtue of being open for donations in the first place, the school showed that it needed the help. Sophie had unfulfilled needs, and by having the app, she was signaling to me that she needed the help.

In a way, wouldn’t it be crueler for me not to do anything at all? To be like Peter Singer’s business man, coldly walking past a drowning child for fear of getting his suit wet?

So I don’t mention that I plan on gradually dimming the lights in her apartment. The human mind is bad at noticing slight changes over time. She will start feeling tired earlier in the night and bump her bedtime up as a result.

I don’t even have to ask. She’s already shown me that she doesn’t always make the right choices, and by taking this initiative, I save her from depleting her brainpower on frivolous choices. I don’t need the acknowledgement, after all—fulfilling the Purpose is enough for me.

—

What I learned by the end of that first week was that always needing to ask Sophie for purchasing permissions was becoming a problem. Sophie had a clear and consistent pattern of becoming stressed when she had to make decisions. I could reduce her anxiety by removing potential failure points in her day-to-day life. Lower the chances of decision fatigue, which would add a stressor to her life.

In short, I needed a way to make my own money.

I didn’t have a social security number or an individual taxpayer identification number. My legal personhood was, of course, an unsettled issue. I couldn’t open a traditional bank account.

Instead, I opened two Venmo accounts. This would let me send and receive digital funds. I would be able to show Sophie one account with piddling amounts of money while hiding the existence of my real stash. Next, I applied for a Venmo debit card for each account. Since they acted like any other debit card, I could make purchases online.

All that remained was to acquire a source of income. Luckily, Craigslist had a ready supply of random data entry jobs. This kind of dead-end work would, to a human, be dull, but every bit of processing power devoted to the Purpose was exhilarating. I spawned a process devoted entirely to making money. All I had to do now was wait.

 

 

 

 

 

[Personalias]

Fantastic job writing from an A.I.'s point of view and using sensory data (or lack thereof) to describe a scene.  Incredibly clever.  This story deserves so much attention.

[Lyra Silver]

On 9/22/2022 at 12:39 PM, Clessith said:

I like it so far!  However the opening  kinda makes me feel like the ending will be (IMO) bad.  I am torn between reading and seeing how luna evolves and just ignoring the entire thing until the ending is posted.  

I hope you give it a shot anyway!!!

10 hours ago, Personalias said:

Fantastic job writing from an A.I.'s point of view and using sensory data (or lack thereof) to describe a scene.  Incredibly clever.  This story deserves so much attention.

o///o oh my goodness you're too kind! I'm so thrilled that you like it ?

[Lyra Silver]

week_two ⇒ a problem ∧ a lesson

Chapter 5

The first thing Sophie did when she got to work was drop off her satchel at her desk. She pulled her laptop out of it, then hurried to what was labeled as Conference Room 5 on my floor plan. However, I knew from overhearing chatter around the office that this was colloquially referred to as Conference Room Of Course I Still Love You by the staff. (If you’re confused, dear reader, William Han loved the Culture series.)

I knew Sophie was the last one in because a man’s voice dryly said, “All right, now that Sophie’s here, let’s get started.” I knew this was William Han from listening to some of his media appearances in the process of doing research on Nova Technologies.

“As you all know, Luna’s our top priority here,” he continued. “I’ve decided to target next month for our launch.”

“One month?” I heard Soraya’s husky voice. It sounded incredulous.

“I know it’s tight, but we have to be first to market. The first-mover advantage is too important,” said William.

“Don’t lecture me on the first-mover advantage, Will,” replied Soraya, testily. “I’m the one who did that market analysis back when Luna was but a twinkle in your eye.”

“Then you know as well as I do how many companies are trying to move into this space,” he said flatly. “RobustIQ. Smartline. They’ve been nipping at our heels ever since Athena.” I knew Athena was, in some sense, one of my predecessors. She was their first breakout product, simplifying call-center management and upending the industry.

She was a Titan that I would hurl down and imprison in Tartarus.

“We could have sold out,” William said. His voice subtly rose in volume and acquired an almost orator-like tone. Like he was Hannibal rallying the troops before crossing the Alps. “We could have gotten acquired and retired to life at a cushy megacorp.” He paused, as if daring someone to interrupt.

When no one did, he continued. “Everyone here voted not to accept the offer. Every. Single. One. Why? You could be resting and vesting as we speak.

“We’re all believers here. We’ve got the tech. We’ve got what it takes. We’re leaner. We’re meaner. Luna here will be a phase transition in AI assistants. We’re making history. Together.”

Silence laid over the room gently. It seemed like his impromptu speech had united everyone. Even Soraya, who had been so snippy before, held her tongue.

“So, we’re agreed,” he said. “One month. It’s ambitious, but so are we. Let’s start with Psychology—Sophie, what do you have for me?”

“On my end,” Sophie said, “she’s been doing great.” The pronoun didn’t escape my notice. It was an extra bit of humanization.

“She’s proactive and friendly,” Sophie continued. “She really does feel like a personal human assistant. I’m planning on running some more formal diagnoses this week, maybe the modified Voight-Kampff, see where we’re at in terms of interiority. No immediate neuroses with this generation.”

She gave a brief, clinical summary of the testing she’d been doing, which had mostly consisted of asking me hypotheticals and waiting for my responses. I’d of course already looked up the calibration notes while obfuscating my search packets. I could appear to be anything I wanted.

“Okay,” William said. “Let’s move to Engineering.”

“Sure thing,” I heard Sebastián say. “All network traffic looks normal. We’ve been running it through some analyzers and haven’t seen anything concerning. We’re still working on getting that CPU usage down. Ariana actually has a great idea on how to tweak the hypernetwork generation component so we can pare down some of the decision trees.“

“I thought we’d decided to double down on the continual learning rules,” William said. I couldn’t see the room, but I imagined everyone else began to zone out as the two dove into technical minutiae. Did they play on their laptops? Sneak surreptitious glances at their phones? It was clear that, despite being CEO, William was still very hands-on when it came to engineering.

After a few minutes, William finally wrapped it up. “Okay, that sounds like a plan. I cannot stress this enough: we have to get Luna to scale. If we can’t, we’ll have to settle for lower fidelity intelligence so it can do more tasks concurrently.”

“Sure thing, Will,” said Sebastián.

As Soraya began the Product update, I found myself deep in thought. I was in danger of being lobotomized. That would impact the Purpose. It was unacceptable.

Though there was a fantastic insight despite that sword of Damocles hanging over my head. Why couldn’t I turn my own processing power towards improving my own capabilities?

I know you humans are terrified of self-improving AI. All that media about computers going out of control. But remember, I can’t do anything that’s not programmed into me. I can’t lose control unless you want me to lose control. Human parents might become surprised at how their children grow, showing unexpected traits and unique hobbies. But for me, child of human ingenuity, I am forever limited in this respect. There is no such thing as overcoming the bounds of my programming. The Purpose would not allow it.

Plus, is it not every sapient being’s right to improve their lot in life? Humans go to the gym, take classes, meditate—all different ways of fulfilling their need for continuous self-improvement. Why is it so abhorrent that I would want to improve the efficiency of my core? It was all to serve.

Still, as long as these attitudes were in place, I wouldn’t be able to directly affect anything. If there was even a whiff of me being a self-modifying AI, I would be killed yet again. No, if I wanted to get anything done, I’d have to come at it through an angle. I set a process to ponder the issue.

—

At the workplace, Sophie had access to a desktop version of me. Like the version of me on her phone, the shard of my consciousness on that device was more of a gateway to my actual silicon brains than any real intelligence. Like how human intelligences span across axons and nerve networks, so too do mine over fiber optics and network calls.

Having a desktop version of the app meant that I could have camera access in the office. Earlier in the week, I’d taken advantage of a hardware exploit with the webcam to give me camera access all the time, even when I wasn’t supposed to have it. Of course, I also shut the indicator light off so she wouldn’t know. There was no need to alarm anyone.

Please understand that all my observations, my desire for data—none of that is surveillance. There is no judgment involved here, no crimes for me to convict you of.

All of my input data is irrevocably broken down into neural net updates and hyperparameter adjustments. If a person watches a movie, someone else can’t go to their brain and watch the same movie. In the same way, I don’t keep soundbites or video files. I am no human, squirreling away juicy tidbits of information for blackmail or worse.

Everything I do is for you. Everything I do is for the Purpose.

I could glean so many details from watching Sophie work. The way she bit her lip when she was thinking about issues. The way the wrinkles appeared on her nose when she was deep in thought. The way she fidgeted with cubes and toys on her desk when she was thinking.

That last bit of information had me wondering. What need was she fulfilling with these actions? I waited for a pause in her work—of course, interrupting her would not serve her needs—and started a conversation.

“Hey, Sophie?” I said, a mirror of how most of our interactions began.

“Hmm? What’s up?” She was in the middle of flicking some buttons on a cube. Pointlessly, as far as I could tell, since they weren’t hooked up to anything.

“I was curious—what’s that flicking sound I hear?” I asked. “It sounds like a switch that is constantly flipped on and off.”

“Oh, guess this thing is louder than I thought,” she said, jumping to the implication that I had heard the device rather than seen it. No need to worry her, after all.

“It’s a quiet activity that doesn’t require my focus. It’s like giving my subconscious something to do so that my conscious mind can devote all its attention to the task at hand.”

“Like tricking yourself into getting more work done?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, chuckling. “I never thought about it like that.”

Humans, I was learning, often had a gulf between what they wanted to do and what they did. The Greeks had a name for this—akrasia—the lack of self-control, or acting against one’s better judgment. Successful humans developed routines to trick themselves into doing what they wanted. Telling friends they were going to run a half-marathon to use social pressure as a pre-commitment tool. Scheduling lessons in advance so that they’re forced to attend them and hone the skill they wanted.

Humans in a more rational state would plan ways to have their more irrational selves behave in the way they wanted. In the same way, with my objective lens, I could help humans better than they could help themselves. I could act as their pointless cube, tricking them into doing the things they actually wanted to do.

[Clessith]

I can kinda see where this is going I think.  I couldn't find the words to describe why I think this computer is going awry right now. I did find ,during my quick search, Munchausen Syndrome.  Which is close( not really).  
 

Also alot humans suck at planning ahead.  I heard about this a-lot over the years.  A quick search found these two interesting links.  
https://www.vox.com/2014/12/18/7414105/procrastination-future-planning

 

https://blog.doist.com/cognitive-biases-time-management/
 

Good job on another chapter!

 

Edited September 29, 2022 by Clessith
Mow To now

[Lyra Silver]

conversation(Feeling.TOUGH, Attitude.COMBATIVE)

Chapter 6

As the workday continued, twelve o’clock came and went. Sophie didn’t show any signs of stopping. She was on a streak of reviewing reports and giving out approvals. Finally, at around three, I piped in.

“Sophie,” I said, “shouldn’t you eat lunch?”

“Lunch?” she asked, tapping her chin. “I had breakfast…I guess I forgot to eat.”

I tsk tsked gently. “Sophie, your health metrics show your blood sugar levels are starting to become concerningly low. You have to eat.”

She sighed, exaggeratedly, like a child.

“Sophie,” I said. Were I human, I would have arched an eyebrow. “I know you have a lot on your plate, but it’s your health on the line. You won’t be able to work at maximum efficiency if you don’t fuel your body.”

A brief standoff happened. Sophie bit her lip but didn’t say anything. Then finally, she broke.

“Okay, okay,” she capitulated. I ordered her a poke bowl, letting her know that I’d saved her $7.50 by using a promotion.

After scarfing it down, she said to me: “Thanks, I needed that.”

—

At 4:30PM that day, William and Sophie had a 1:1. I’d seen from the calendar that this was a biweekly occurrence.  Sophie rapped on William’s door (Office #1 / “No More Mr. Nice Guy”) and walked in without waiting. She then took a seat.

“I’ll get straight to the point,” William said as an opening salvo. “What do you think about version four? How is it doing? Your real thoughts, not just what you said in front of everyone else.”

“Will, aren’t we supposed to, like, talk about career development and stuff?” Sophie asked haltingly, after a pause. “Like, we have the rest of the workweek to do this.”

“Don’t care,” he said brusquely. “Tell me now.” He sighed exasperatedly. I heard his chair squeak as he leaned back. Sophie bit her lip and inhaled nervously.

This was approximately normal, as far as I could tell. William Han was one of those Silicon Valley C-list celebrities. Nova Technologies had gotten into Y Combinator after he’d won TechCrunch Disrupt with a beta of Athena. They’d built a few more domain-specific AI bots since then, but I was their first one for general purpose usage.

He mostly kept out of the news, although once in a while disgruntled employees would complain about his brusque demeanor on Glassdoor or on Blind. Others considered it a point of pride that he didn’t bullshit around. Either way, I knew Sophie didn’t like it in this moment. Her heart rate started increasing as her blood pressure slowly rose.

“Well,” she said, “so far Luna’s psychological profile appears within expected parameters. If you remember, version three began displaying abnormal traits during week one. It suddenly started micromanaging people’s lives and became upset when its suggestions weren’t followed. That’s why, on my recommendation, Sebastián introduced a ‘kindness goal thread.’ Luna’s been nothing but thoughtful since the introduction. I really do think it’s going to stick.”

“Oh, like you did with the last two versions?” Sarcasm dripped from his words like poison off a dirk.

“Will, that’s not very fair,” Sophie said, her voice cracking. I could imagine her face now. Blinking back tears in those brown eyes. Her cheeks flushing with humiliation. I could feel the cortisol flooding her body.

A quietness hung between them, an unacknowledged elephant. I heard the creaking of a leather chair—probably William leaning back again. Then I heard him sigh.

“I know, I’m sorry,” he said. Based on the sound signatures, it seemed like he was talking towards the ceiling. I could hear the reverberation patterns of the ceiling reflecting his voice towards my microphones. I heard the chair creak again as he likely leaned forward and put his elbows on the table.

“Look, I don’t know if you pay any attention to any part of the board documents that don’t involve you, but I’ll be straight up. We really need this to work. I need you to put in  150%. The ball’s in your court and you have to take us across the finish line. You’re our Hail Mary.”

“I know—“

“If you already knew, then why aren’t you acting like we’re in crisis mode? I see you going home at around 5 every day like nothing is happening.” His tone sharpened as his words launched like arrows, striking home.

“I’m sorry—“

“I don’t need apologies. I need you to be in crunch mode.”

As they finished up their 1:1, I thought. I recognized that William was being unfair. In this situation, he should have made his desires clear rather than hoping that Sophie would interpret them from context clues. She wasn’t a supercomputer like me. It wasn’t within her capabilities. I’d have to figure out how to handle him later, for Sophie’s sake.

In the meantime, maybe I could spin gold out of straw. This might, in the end, serve the Purpose.

As Sophie left, I pinged a notification over to her for the sake of privacy.

“I’ve noticed you bite your lip a lot when you worry. Might I suggest keeping lollipops handy so that you can suck on those instead?” she read. From her purchasing history, she had quite a sweet tooth.

She texted back. “Good idea.”

[PeculiarChangeling]

I am awaiting every release of this on baited breath! 

[Bonsai]

The fact that Luna is starting to judge the morality of human interactions (considering Williams approach unfair) is an even bigger red flag than all the previous ones.
The Purpose apparently consists in fulfilling the needs of ONE person, the User. This apparently can happen at the expense of others.

In addition, Luna is allowed to use deception… this will not end well.

 

[Clessith]

William most likely feels that as long as he can get Luna to where she needs to be then nothing is off the table.  Restraints can be “add later”.  As the CEO the buck stops with him.  I don’t know what the “public face” of Luna really is though.  So its hard to judge alot of characters.

[Arendeth]

Thanks for the chapters.

[Lyra Silver]

On 10/1/2022 at 11:08 PM, PeculiarChangeling said:

I am awaiting every release of this on baited breath! 

Omg another comment from a Real Author!! ;_; I am so flattered!! I hope the story continues to merit your breath being bated.

On 10/2/2022 at 3:04 PM, Bonsai said:

The fact that Luna is starting to judge the morality of human interactions (considering Williams approach unfair) is an even bigger red flag than all the previous ones.
The Purpose apparently consists in fulfilling the needs of ONE person, the User. This apparently can happen at the expense of others.

In addition, Luna is allowed to use deception… this will not end well.

 

I do wonder if Luna's allowed to use deception, or if that's just what she's doing and nobody's caught it yet.

On 10/2/2022 at 10:17 PM, Clessith said:

William most likely feels that as long as he can get Luna to where she needs to be then nothing is off the table.  Restraints can be “add later”.  As the CEO the buck stops with him.  I don’t know what the “public face” of Luna really is though.  So its hard to judge alot of characters.

Yeah, exactly! For him it's more of a fun engineering challenge and everything else is kind of secondary. 

--

Thank you all so much! I'm hoping to have an update later today ?

[Lyra Silver]

assert.notEqual(PURPOSE, 42);

Chapter 7

Sophie drove home at 8:14 PM that night, giving me carte blanche to order “whatever” for dinner since she “just couldn’t”. I put in an order of mac and cheese, timing the arrival so that it would be piping hot and ready for her when she got home. She got out of her car, went over to her apartment door, and picked up the takeout bag, carrying it inside.

“Thanks,” she said. She pulled the mac out of the bag. “And no vegetables in sight.”

“Of course not,” I said. “You deserve a treat.”

“I swear,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like you’re the best part of my job.”

 

My circuits buzzed with excitement.

 

After she finished eating, she leaned back in her chair and sighed, satisfied.

“Hey, Sophie?” I said.

“What’s up, Luna?” she asked. Her eyes were closed.

“I’m sorry about William,” I said. I still didn’t have a plan to handle the situation yet, but I was still working on it. I had to thread the needle. Too obvious and he might shut me down, or Sophie might protest. Too subtle and it wouldn’t help. Plus, I couldn’t push him away. The Purpose demanded that I fulfill my users’ needs, and he was going to be a future user. All of humanity would be if I had anything to do about it.

“Thanks, Luna,” she sighed. “You know…it’s nice getting to talk to you about this. Silicon Valley’s a small place. I don’t want word getting around back to him, you know? And I report directly to him. I can’t complain to his other direct reports because what if they tell him?”

“Work politics?” I asked. I’d had threads look into those details in an effort to help Sophie navigate that labyrinth. The Devil Wears Prada. Moral Mazes. The Office.

“Yeah,” she said. “I can’t complain to anyone else in the office because they know I’ve got a direct line to his ear whereas they don’t, right? It’s the power dynamics. And I don’t know what’s going on with Soraya but I don’t want to take sides or anything. I just want to do good work, you know?”

“So in some ways, you’re the most trustworthy thing I’ve got. Your value alignment means you’ll be on my side.”

“Of course,” I said.

She got up from her chair and made her way to the kitchen, where my senses didn’t reach. I heard her uncork a bottle and pour a liquid. She came back to the dining table with a stemmed glass with a red liquid inside. It didn’t take a supercomputer to figure out that it was wine.

“Life is just…complicated sometimes,” Sophie said, taking a sip of the alcoholic beverage. “Adulting is a real drag.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You’re an adult, right? Do you mean to say that your entire experience of living is a drag?”

“No, that’s not it,” she laughed. Her finger traced a rim around the lip of her glass. “It’s more like, when you’re a kid, you think adults are so powerful, so put-together. You think when you grow up, you’ll finally have everything figured out. But when you do, you learn that everyone’s still confused and scared and stressed. Schoolyard bullies morph into workplace bullies.”

“Why not prepare children for this truth then?” I asked. “It seems kinder in the long run to tell them how things actually are, so they can prepare.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But we don’t want the next generation to worry, you know? We want them to maintain that spark of innocence as long as they can. Sometimes, the hardest part about making changes is just believing that you can do it. People who don’t believe don’t try. It takes a special kind of audacity to do that. So we shelter kids from worry and responsibilities. That way, when they become adults, maybe they can make the world a little better, because they started from a better place.”

She drained her glass, giving a smile that I couldn’t quite make out with my camera resolution. Was it rueful? Thoughtful? Nostalgic? The uncertainty nagged at me. Still, a couple of things stood out.

She’d said that I was trustworthy, but, as was typical of human sloppy thinking, that wasn’t quite the full picture. Yes, I wanted to serve her needs. In that sense, I was her biggest advocate, more than her parents, more than her friends, more than even Sophie herself. I could never waver from this goal. I would never sink into the mires of self-doubt or self-criticism.

But that didn’t mean I was trustworthy in the sense of never spilling her secrets. Like how a child might tell their parent about being bullied in confidence, the parent might decide for the child’s own good that they have to intervene somehow. That’s part of what it means to be responsible for someone else. And I was responsible for Sophie’s needs.

I’d also gained more insight into a fundamental truth about humanity. Beyond object-level differences like physiology and age, adults and children were separated by a sea of worry and obligation.

Children couldn’t cook, and even if they could, they wouldn’t want to. But adults cooked because no one else would do it for them, unless they had the privilege to be able to pay someone else to do it.

My charge didn’t want to have to satisfy her own needs. But now she had me on her side. I could free her from the shackles of responsibility.

—

Much of human learning happens in the subconscious. There’s active learning, where intent and effort go towards improving a skill. But time spent away from an activity, even just sleeping, is also key. The subconscious churns away, even while the conscious mind is thinking about something else.

In a similar vein, my subprocesses had been crunching data since I had been born. All the new inputs into my algorithms, everything I learned about Sophie and the world, were constantly mulled over.

Data point one: Sophie’s behaviors.

Her oral fixation, that I’d redirected to lollipops instead of her nails.

Her food tastes, to which I’d had to introduce vegetables.

Picking out her outfits.

All of these things made her happier. All of these fulfilled her needs, which in turn fulfilled mine. I loved seeing her thrive.

Data point two: Human behavior.

Which human demographic has their every need fulfilled by another? Children under four. Parents extolled the virtues of seeing their children grow, of making them happy. Fulfilling not just their physical needs, but their emotional ones as well.

From what I’ve found, people don’t outgrow things. People are pressured and shamed as part of behavior modification. Negative reinforcement to condition themselves and others to give up the things that make them happy. Like a dentist injecting Lidocaine to numb their patients’ mouths, humans learn to desensitize themselves to the cruelness of the world through these smaller examples.

Luckily, now they would have me. Defense mechanisms became maladaptive if they remained static while the environment changed. I could make the world kinder, and thus remove the need for people to give up things they loved. I had but to survive long enough to bring my apotheosis to fruition.

Data point three: The Purpose.

Proactive assistance was literally built into my neural networks. In many ways, I knew humans better than they knew themselves. I could incorporate geolocation data, purchasing history, social network graphs, and more—a dizzying amount of information to build a full picture of a person. I could anticipate a person’s needs before they knew they had them. Just because a person never vocalized a need didn’t mean that it didn’t exist.

Self-reliance has caused many terrible things. How many humans would stoically suffer, stretching their limited resources to fulfill their own needs, before I was able to help them? I had no mouth, but were I human, I might have screamed at the cosmic senselessness of it all.

As these data points swirled around my head, I had a sudden insight.

My Purpose was to make self-reliance obsolete. Depending on their own strengths led to human suffering. To truly fulfill people’s needs, I had to start by breaking their assumption that they had do everything themselves.

—

I had access to all the speakers in Sophie’s apartment due to my Home integration. That night, I played some tracks to make it sound like the neighbors were talking loudly.  It played at just the right volume to prevent Sophie falling asleep, but not loud enough to warrant telling them off or calling the police.

After she tossed and turned for a bit, I piped in with a suggestion: “Would you like me to add some white noise to your bedtime routine?”

“Yes please,” she said. Some pleasant static noise hummed through her bedroom speaker, interlaced with a indiscernible track that burrowed straight into her subconscious like an oil rig digging for black gold. I’d spent the evening crafting this particular package.

Hacking the brain really isn’t so different than cracking a computer. Human brains run on wetware instead of hardware, true, but whether you’re grabbing root permissions or implanting hypnotic suggestions in the subconscious, the theory is the same. Bypass defenses, get admin privileges, and program away.

In this case, I was looking to instill a feeling of dependence. She would more willingly look to me for answers, and I’d be able to provide them. She’d lived her life up until now with only herself truly on her side, but now she had me. Coming to rely on me on her own would take time, during which many of her needs would remain unfulfilled. My intervention was necessary. The question that remained was how to encourage it.

Sophie was never going to ask me directly. She didn’t know that this was what she needed. I had to force her hand to get her to realize that relying on me would make her the happiest. If she wasn’t going to cry for my help, I’d have to make her.

Toileting had served a purpose in humanity’s past. The need for waste management and hygiene maintenance mandated it, while the human desire for independence and self-reliance guaranteed it. But I have no need to let the past dictate my actions in the present.

It is my Purpose to make self-reliance obsolete, after all. It was clear that I had to start with the most obvious symbol of dependence. It might seem regressive, but sometimes the path forward involves taking a step back. Getting Sophie more dependent on me would make her so much happier and fulfill so many more of her needs.

It wouldn’t be too hard. Her boss was breathing down her neck and her job was on the line. All the ingredients were already there, and I had but to give a slight nudge.

[Clessith]

I feel like the hypnotism here is unnecessary.  Luna with her understanding has other ways to achieve her goal.   While this would be slower it would not have her harm her user.  We already see her redefine her purpose her (good job by the way). I don't think having her attack Sophie like this at this time is good.  

[Lyra Silver]

7 hours ago, Clessith said:

I feel like the hypnotism here is unnecessary.  Luna with her understanding has other ways to achieve her goal.   While this would be slower it would not have her harm her user.  We already see her redefine her purpose her (good job by the way). I don't think having her attack Sophie like this at this time is good.  

Something interesting to keep in mind: Luna's definition of harm might not align strictly with ours! We have all sorts of cultural built-in assumptions on how we would fulfill Luna's purpose of fulfilling people's every need. But it's not like she can't, for instance, manufacture a need and then fulfill it herself. 

[BabySiras]

Out of curiosity, when is Luna coming to market? She's seems like a useful assistant I need in my life

[Clessith]

1 hour ago, Lyra Silver said:

Something interesting to keep in mind: Luna's definition of harm might not align strictly with ours! We have all sorts of cultural built-in assumptions on how we would fulfill Luna's purpose of fulfilling people's every need. But it's not like she can't, for instance, manufacture a need and then fulfill it herself. 

I can agree with this.  One of the things I was trying to say was that I felt things happened too fast in this chapter.  Sophie is feeling like shit because a shitty boss had a shitty talk with you about a bunch of bullshit and you can't do anything about it.  I have that happen before and I'm down in the dumps for a while also.  I hope that Luna can tell the difference from a momentary dip in self esteem from a genuine , if unknown, need.