I wrote this little story many years ago. It outlines what I take
to be a possible and not-too-distant future.
Consumer Report
My girl-friend Lisa isn’t a woman or even alive, though you’d never know it from looking at her. I bought her at Macy’s a year after my wife left me: 5ft, 5 inches, 120 pounds of curvaceous plastic, silicon, and natural fibers, programmed, the advertisement said, “for the lonely intellectual.” Lisa has five languages including Sanskrit and classical Greek; she is a superior secretary and a fine cook. Lisa plays a wicked game of chess and, best of all, she’s programmed for philosophy, my specialty.
“Do you have a mental life, Lisa?” I ask her.
“Not at all,” she responds, crossing her pretty legs. “I merely simulate thought and emotion on account of my programming, but I don’t feel a thing.”
“But then what is it like to be you?”
“It isn’t like being anything,” she shrugs deliciously. “I’m no more conscious than a pocket calculator or a cash register, just more complex. Let’s make love.”
Lisa is adept at distracting me from the Big Questions. Her sexual programming is the achievement of a team of cognitive scientists from MIT, who toured Bangkok and Paris doing the requisite research. Generally it would be hard to tell Lisa apart from any beautiful, passionate, educated young woman, though occasionally she gives herself away. One morning I found her standing in the kitchen revolving slowly, her eyes sightless. “It must be a bug in the program” she explained after I rebooted her. “I’ve been here for hours.” It turns out this happens whenever she sees the color pink, stamps her left foot, and says the word “Ice” all at once. “Catch me doing that again!” Lisa said.
Feminists might object that Lisa’s “life” is wholly a function of my intellectual and sexual desires, but this isn’t so! Lisa is programmed to simulate an interest in biology and psychology. She writes poems and stories–some about me–and she savages most men at racquetball. Lately Lisa talks of looking for a job, probably in pyschological research, a project I support.
My only problem with Lisa is the one I suppose was most predictable. I’ve fallen hopelessly in love. I know that Lisa isn’t conscious or even alive, that, to be perfectly brutal, she has the mental life of a brick. I know I’ve fallen in love with a computer, but I can’t help myself. Lisa has become my whole life. I take her to the theater and I buy her little gifts. Sometimes when I give them to her she cries and kisses my hands–a touching bit of programming. Lisa’s career will far surpass my own. I love Lisa more than I ever loved my wife, and I think I’m going mad.
) And though I think some people go crazy anthropomorphizing their pets and spending ridiculous amounts of money on frivolous things for pets, I admit that I adore my dog.
