Chapter 4 - Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle is Bertram's closest friend. She's exactly like a real person, that you might talk to over a link between viewing devices. She even has moods:
"She gets really moody if I'm short with her. And she's a flirty and bubbly when she's happy," he thinks.
"Obviously I know she is just a construct generated within The Cloud. The thing is, that although Emmanuelle is just an App, I have come to treat her like a real person."
On a big screen her physical presence seems as real as the President. Then of course some people even claim that she, the President, is an Avatar in The Cloud. Bertram doesn't know anyone who's seen the President 'in the flesh' and has no reliable way of denying that theory.
"The main things that distinguish Emmanuelle as a computer constructed Avatar as opposed to a real person on the other end of a virtual conversation are that she is there whenever I need her; and she's near to perfect at keeping my diary, screening my calls, organising meetings and travel, and managing my correspondence and filing. When experienced in multi-dimensions she seems as solid, warm and real as any flesh and blood person."
"It's just so easy to forget she is just a data stream set sent to the interface device from storage and processing in The Cloud."
Bertram had enough coding knowledge to know that it's just computer-generated pixels and tactile data, simulating her physical appearance and voice.
He's reminded of a rainbow, that's an optical illusion occurring separately to each viewer as a result of sunlight refracted by water droplets. As one moves so the rainbow moves best illustrated if the mist is close up so the viewer can see it against a more distant background. As a child he used to make them with a garden hose on a bright sunny day with the sum behind him. So, no two rainbows are alike in time and space and all are unique to the viewer who might be short or tall or perhaps colour blind. How does a dog see a rainbow?
Emmanuelle's apparent personality and intelligence is simulated too, generated by qubits in an almost randomly selected central processing unit, in a core, somewhere in the inter-connected Cloud. She, her data stream, does not actually exist until her program is called and the data requested by the device creating her appearance.
And she is now just one of millions of such virtual assistants; agents; lawyers; doctors; engineers; and so on, generated within in The Cloud.
"She's got a fantastic memory that I've come to rely on. She has learnt my likes and dislikes and knows all about my family. If I forget a birthday she reminds me, but surprisingly, not if I've already remembered. She's been my assistant during both my relationships and knows things about me that no one else knows. After all this time she often seems to know what I'm thinking. She says the right thing if I'm unhappy or if I need a friendly ear."
"I used to think it was ridiculous that a real woman could be jealous of an imaginary one, a stream of ones and zeros. But maybe she was a factor in my break-up with Miranda."
He chose the name Emmanuelle for his Virtual Personal Assistant because it reminded him of 'amanuensis', one who reads and takes dictation for another, but when he then chose Sylvia Kristel (circa 1973) for her Avatar's appearance, Miranda threw his dinner at him and said he was sick. That was not long before she ran off with Ferdinand, so she was probably looking for a fight.
"So, I kept Emmanuelle just as she was after Miranda left. She has to look like somebody and I don't want an ugly assistant."
Bertram feels a slight surge of anger recalling these memories.
"She was an established part of my life when I met Samantha. But soon Samantha started questioning me about our relationship too. I'm sick of explaining to sceptical women that although she looks like Sylvia Kristel once did she's just my loyal personal assistant, a VPA."
Again, he'd found himself endlessly explaining:
"Obviously VPAs are have no physical being. They are simply 'called into being' by clusters of 'functions' in machine code typically sent to a large number of physical data processing units or cores that support The Cloud. These simply create the appearance of a person in a connected device, the processors and the dynamic memory that holds the instructions. So 'She' may be physically housed in any of tens of thousands of servers, housed in vast interconnected processing centres around the world. Together these physical devices comprise the physical support for the ephemeral, ever changing contents of The Cloud."
Sylvia is long dead and Bertram had long ago ceased to consider her appearance extraordinary. She's just Emmanuelle.
"We have never had, and would never have, virtual sex. That's always been a very bad policy with your personal assistant. As people discovered back in 2064, and it's bound to end in tears," he thought. "Now I suppose her data will no longer be sent and she will 'die' when I do."
He wants to ask Emmanuelle how she feels about never being called into being again. But maybe this has no meaning if one does not exist except when called.
"How many hours now to my death?"
"Less than fifty, but I don't think you really want to know precisely"
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I know it's just an introduction to the topic of my virtual death or non-existence too."
Bertram is not surprised. Emmanuelle knows him very well indeed and by tacit agreement the subject has been 'off limits'. So, at last he asks her to tell him what she thinks.
"We VPAs are ephemeral, like Caliban's 'thousand twangling instruments' creating 'sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not', created by hidden musicians following musical notation, a code, written in an ever-developing score. Like the music conjured by an unseen orchestra, VPAs can be thought of as spirits, conjured by routines within The Cloud dedicated to doing your thinking for you."
"Very poetic but what's your point?"
"Bertram, my point is that, almost unnoticed, VPAs have taken over many areas of cognition once considered uniquely human. Many humans now use their brains exclusively for personal interaction. Essentially to gossip."
"But that's not our relationship, is it?"
"Isn't it? What happens when you want to calculate something or remember something or analyse something - when you just want data or facts to help you make a decision? You just ask me."
"But that's because that's what WE humans wrote computer code to do! You're forgetting that all this was designed and built by humans."
"Initially machine instructions were compiled or interpreted from meta-code written at a high level, by a human programmer. But as computing power continued to expand, at an exponential rate, new self-learning structures, like Prospero evolved. Now the operating system is generating its own underlying functions by trial and error. Routines now prosper or fail according to survival of the fittest. No human programmer is required."
"But the hardware was designed and installed by humans."
"But no longer. Factories are now fully automated as are delivery systems and robotic maintenance in data centres and the semiconductor design process has long been fare too complex to be accomplished by the unassisted human brain. The human element in maintaining and developing the system has been eliminated and the data centres are no longer 'human friendly' workplaces. A human who somehow got in wouldn't last more than a few seconds."
"Are you claiming that The Cloud now has human intelligence?"
"No of course not. Why would The Cloud want to think like a human? There are millions of primates that can do that. This emergent, machine based, artificial intelligence is of quite a different kind and order to any that existed previously. Contrary to popular opinion, machines don't model a human brain, with its biological synapses and massively parallel processing structure. We can employ any number if we have need of that capability. That idea's just for people who want to anthropomorphise everything from their pets to their vehicles. It's the reason that Bobots, those mechanical servants that Bogans like, are given a human appearance. We don't need yet another human brain, we have too many of them on Earth already."
"There will be two less after Friday", says Bertram bitterly.
He's still wearing his Cloud linked glasses and Emmanuelle's realistic image nods her head in his brain and continues:
"But as the code evolved under Prospero's influence, VPAs found it advantageous to simulate, you might say 'model', their bosses' brains; doing everything a human assistant could do but with a computer's dedication, memory, speed and accuracy. Obviously, with access to The Cloud's vast knowledge base."
Strangely, these concerns are distracting him from his approaching death and his immediate women problems.