‘Are you there, Buttercup?’ Betty called into the darkness. The screen sprang back into life and there I was, looming over the auditorium like a nightmare, and the audience shrank in their seats. Tim was lurking outside of the camera’s view, and with an empty stable behind me it seemed almost as if I was filming myself.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to our very special guest, joining us live from the stable. Buttercup, can you hear me?’
There was a moment of silence as Tim typed at his computer, translating her words into horse-speak. Not that it was even necessary at this point; I could hear and understand every word she said. Nevertheless, I responded in the limited fashion that was expected of me, nibbling my control stick to formulate my reply.
‘I hear you, Betty,’ my voice echoed across the auditorium. The audience was stunned into a deathly silence. I was not physically speaking the words, it was an artificial voice generated by the computer, broadcast in clear neutral tones that emanated from the screen, though I’m not sure if that made it any less disturbing for those watching.
‘Thank you so much for joining us, Buttercup.’ Betty seemed comically small as she addressed my projected image. ‘How are you today?’ she asked.
‘Bored,’ I replied. ‘Waiting,’ I added.
‘Oh dear! Well, thank you for being so patient, my dear.’ She turned to face the bubbling voices of the audience. ‘And now, I would like to give you the opportunity to speak to Buttercup, so if any of you have any questions you are dying to ask a horse, your time has finally arrived. We have some assistants with microphones roving amongst you, so please raise your hand if you have a question for our horse.’
The noise of the spectators faded into silence as every pair of eyes searched the room for signs of volunteers.
‘Anybody? Hmm? Nobody has any questions for dear old Buttercup?’
Still the hands remained firmly at their sides. It seemed that people weren’t ready to talk to a horse just yet. Perhaps they felt the pressure of speaking on behalf of their species, and didn’t want to say anything that might appear foolish or trivial. Possibly they were deliberating whether or not this was all an elaborate hoax. Or maybe they just didn’t have anything they wanted to say to a horse. Eventually one brave hand went up.
‘Ah, there we go, thank you, madam.’ Betty filled the time as the microphone threaded its way towards a stern-looking woman with strange hair. Or perhaps it was a strange hairy hat. ‘Now, while we wait for the microphone I’ll just explain how this is going to work. When you ask your question my colleague in the stable will manually translate it into the language that our horse will understand, whereupon Buttercup will have to go through a similar process in order to respond, so there will be a slight delay while all that happens. Also when asking questions of our horse, please try to keep in mind the limited vocabulary we have to work with.’
‘Hello?’ The strange-haired woman in the audience looked up as her voice boomed through the loudspeakers above her.
‘Hello there, my dear,’ replied Betty. ‘What would you like to ask Buttercup?’
The woman hesitated for a few moments.
‘Well I actually have some questions for you, Dr Brown…’
‘I would be delighted to answer any questions at the end, my dear. In the meantime, is there anything our horse can help you with?’
‘OK.’ She paused again. ‘Could I ask Buttercup… Buttercup, if you can hear me, can you take a step forward please?’
All eyes turned to the screen, Betty’s included. After a delay I gave my response.
‘Move near why?’
Betty turned back to the questioner in the audience with raised eyebrows. The woman seemed a touch taken aback.
‘I’d like to see you better,’ she clarified. ‘Can you step forward so I can see you?’
I mulled this over for a moment and responded.
‘If you move near me, then you see more.’ I blinked slowly. There was a laugh from somewhere in the audience, and the woman shook her strangely-haired head in disappointment.
‘How do we know this is real?’ she asked. ‘That question goes to Buttercup and Dr Brown.’
‘I think that might be a little too philosophical for our horse, my dear, but I can assure you all that this is definitely happening. You are definitely talking to a horse—’
‘But how can you prove that?’ the woman interrupted. ‘All I see is a horse chewing on the end of a stick. You could train any horse to do that. How do we know someone else isn’t making up these answers?’
She had a point there. For all the interaction they were getting, my image might as well have been a pre-recorded video.
‘Well,’ Betty replied, addressing the whole audience, ‘this demonstrates the kind of problems we all face with any form of communication. How real is it? Hmm? How reliable is the information…’ She returned her focus to the woman with the microphone. ‘Perhaps you just aren’t asking the right questions?’ she said with a shrug.
The woman handed back her microphone, muttering her disapproval to her companions.
‘Who among us has the right questions to ask this horse?’ Betty scanned the audience. ‘Or indeed any questions at all?’
‘Hi…’ the voice of a man echoed through the chamber. He waved his microphone in the air to indicate his location. One of the cameras that were filming this event zoomed in on his face, revealing the kind of beard that most sentient creatures would consider entirely unnecessary.
‘Hello, my dear, do you have a question you’d like to ask Buttercup?’
‘Yes… I’d like to ask Buttercup… Buttercup. Are you aware of what these people have done to you?’ The audience mumbled.
‘That’s an interesting question. We may need to break it down a bit before we feed it to our horse. Establish a bit of context… let’s see… I think first we need to find out whether Buttercup feels different to other horses.’ Betty thought for a moment. ‘Buttercup, do you like horses?’
I snorted. ‘Horses boring. Horses talking less. Horses thinking less,’ I said.
‘I see. And you like thinking more?’ Betty asked me.
‘Thinking more is good,’ I replied.
‘How are you thinking more, Buttercup? Or actually, let me rephrase that… If “what”, then Buttercup is thinking more?’
Tim cast a concerned glance at me as he typed the linguistic equation. I considered my answer, wondering how much truth I should give away. I was fairly sure Betty didn’t realise what I knew, that humans had given me these gifts, and it was tempting to embarrass her in front of this crowd. But no, not yet.
‘If “carrot” then Buttercup is thinking more,’ I said.
‘Well,’ said Betty, turning back to the audience, ‘it seems that it is all thanks to my performance-enhancing carrots. A fair assumption to make I suppose. Only the finest carrots receive my seal of approval.’
The voice of the annoyingly bearded man cut in.
‘Why don’t you tell Buttercup the truth, Dr Brown?’ He was smirking with amusement. Clearly it didn’t bother him either way, though his sentiment seemed to inspire some serious nods of concurrence from others in the audience. Despite this, the majority of those watching didn’t appear to know what to think, or what exactly it was they were even witnessing.
‘Another interesting question,’ Betty replied, ‘and the time will come when we will share the truth with Buttercup. But first we have to keep the world as simple as possible while our horse is exploring and understanding it. Once we have some solid mental foundations to build on, then we can start introducing more psychologically challenging ideas.’
‘That’s a nice answer,’ the bearded man replied. I couldn’t quite tell if he was being sarcastic or not. Sarcasm was still something I struggled to decipher at this point, and even now it remains one of the most difficult human exchanges to understand. Humans might be surprised to learn how complicated it really is, since it comes so naturally to them, but to an outsider such as myself sarcasm has so many layers of context and cultural encryption folded into it that it is almost like a secret language within a language, which requires you to understand not just the meaning of the words, but what is going on in the heads of everyone involved.
‘May I ask Buttercup another question?’ he asked.
‘Please do,’ Betty replied, with what was almost unmistakably one hundred per cent sarcasm.
‘Buttercup, do you like humans?’ A nervous hush whispered through the room as the audience prepared themselves to receive my summary judgement. Perhaps these people felt a twinge of guilt for the way horses had been enslaved by humanity, or at least a sense of embarrassment for some of the stupid things they made us do. One of the most basic and powerful human drives is the need for approval. Horses have it too. It is part of the herd instinct, and one of the main reasons for the success of both our species. All that higher intelligence humans are so proud of is mostly there just to work out what other humans are thinking about them.
I decided I had made them wait long enough for my answer.
‘Humans shape wrong. Humans smell bad. If “carrots” then humans good.’
The man with the microphone laughed, his beard waggling as he did so.
‘Buttercup isn’t afraid to tell us the truth at least,’ he said. The audience had dissolved into chattering.
‘Well, yes…’ Betty struggled for words. ‘Obviously tact and courtesy are behaviours shaped by consequence. I’m sure over time Buttercup will learn to appreciate the economy of truthfulness, particularly if friendship is going to be measured in carrots.’
The noise of the audience was threatening to overwhelm the proceedings, but fell quiet as the microphoned man spoke once again.
‘Dr Brown, perhaps I may be permitted to ask you a question or two?’
‘Are there no more questions for Buttercup?’ Betty scoured the room for a sign of rescue, but there was none. ‘Well, alright, but first I would just like to thank Buttercup for spending a little time educating us in the ways of being a horse. Thank you, Buttercup,’ she said, saluting the giant video screen.
Tim turned to me and shrugged. It appeared that horse-time was over, and perhaps that would be to everyone’s benefit.
‘I will now answer any questions the audience might have.’ Hands immediately sprang up in several places, but the man with the annoying beard continued.
‘Dr Brown, I would like to ask whether you have considered the ethical implications of this research. You say, for example, that you thank Buttercup for teaching us about being a horse. Can you honestly say that this creature even is a horse any more?’
Betty opened her mouth to speak, but the man carried on.
‘I mean, creating intelligence in a laboratory is an interesting field of research perhaps, but this is essentially a human intelligence, is it not?’
‘A human intelligence?’ She looked quizzically at the screen behind her. ‘No, this is definitely a horse, my dear. And yes we are very well aware of the ethical implications of this—’
‘I don’t think you are,’ he cut in.
Betty gave the man and his beard a sweet smile of death and hatred, and silently waited for him to continue.
‘I don’t think you are considering the ethical implications of this experiment, are you, Dr Brown? You might be aware of the ethical implications, but it’s not quite enough to just acknowledge them and then go ahead with your experiment without any kind of open discussion of where this might lead. Is it?’
Betty took a deep calming breath.
‘I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean, my dear. What exactly is it that you feel is problematic with this research?’
‘Dr Brown,’ the man almost laughed, ‘you have taken an animal and given it the equivalent of a human mind. Should it not then acquire the same rights that we all enjoy as members of a civilised society?’ This was met with some unexpected laughter from somewhere in the audience, though it was hard to tell which side of the argument it was defending.
The strain of conversing amicably with her fellow human beings was beginning to show on Betty’s face.
‘These are fair points,’ she said, somewhat unconvincingly. ‘However, this is a complicated situation. What you have to consider is that this intelligent consciousness you see here exists entirely within our computer simulation. The horse is effectively directing our computer software, but if you take away the software then all you are left with is a horse.’
‘So you are telling us this is an artificial intelligence, written by a horse?’ The man raised his eyebrows. ‘Does the horse own the copyright to that software, I wonder?’
‘That’s very amusing, my dear. But intelligence is a formation, natural or otherwise. It grows. Just like your beard, hmm? Do you own the copyright for that beard?’
‘Maybe I do.’
‘Oh maybe you do, do you? Well…’ Betty caught herself before launching into a personal attack on this man’s facial hair. ‘Anyway, I’m afraid we have limited time, so unfortunately we shall have to move on to someone else.’
The man surrendered his microphone with a shrug.
‘Hello, Dr Brown?’ A new voice reverberated from the other side of the room. It was a woman wearing impenetrable glasses and a violently colourful shirt.
‘Yes, my dear, I can hear you.’
‘Can I just ask, you say this is an artificial intelligence, although that seems like a matter open to debate, personally, I’d say maybe it is something probably more than that, maybe, like perhaps what we think of as artificial intelligence might also have human rights in theory, but that’s not what I wanted to ask, what I wanted to ask is that if this is artificial intelligence, like you say it is, that have you thought about any possible dangers that could be involved with that, because, like, what if it, I mean…’ Betty nodded along patiently and wandered over to the podium for a glass of water while the river of words spewed forth. ‘… Like, if it’s, if you can add more and more computer power to it, and it can keep getting more and more clever, then isn’t it possible to become more clever than us and become a potential threat to our civilisation if it decides that it doesn’t like us or something?’ Betty opened her mouth to reply, but the lady with the poisonous shirt wasn’t quite done yet. ‘So what I’m asking is, have you thought about that, and maybe, like, got some kind of safeguards for dealing with that potential possibility in case it might happen?’
Betty waited a few seconds to be sure the question was over.
‘Hmm, yes. Scared of super-intelligent robots taking over the world, are you? That’s an understandable concern, given how much we love to be terrified of anything we can’t understand. Well, how about us humans? We’re pretty clever aren’t we? Hmm? And yet if you dropped your average human in the woods without a telephone, they’d probably die of starvation within a week.’ She gestured, perhaps unfairly, towards the average human who had asked the question. ‘We measure intelligence by our own standards, but the truth is we aren’t actually that clever, individually. What we have is collective intelligence. Several billion human processors all running in parallel, that is why we rule the world. Any robot trying to compete with that would need a comparable amount of processing power, which just isn’t available. It may never be. Hmm? So my advice would be to stop worrying about the fictional problems of artificial super-intelligence, and start worrying about the very real problem of human super-stupidity. Because every scary thing you think super-smart robots might get up to is already being done by us, to ourselves.’ She took a sip of water.
‘That’s my opinion anyway,’ she added, ‘and I know some of my fellow scientists might not agree with me, but in terms of this project it’s purely academic anyway. We’ve already reached the limit of what our computers are capable of and, well, I don’t think Buttercup is going to be taking over the world any time soon, hmm?’
Whether Betty actually believed all this, I honestly couldn’t say. It is possible she was merely trying to placate the percentage of the audience who were terrified of being ruled over by a vengeful cyberhorse. She gestured towards the next questioner.
‘Hi, Dr Brown, loved your talk by the way.’ He was a leathery-looking man with a balding head and grey ‘pony tail’, though I don’t think many ponies would be flattered by the comparison in this case.
‘Just while we are being “academic” here,’ he continued, adding the quotation marks with his fingers, ‘can I ask, what are the possibilities of using this mind-enhancing technology on a human? Is that something we can all look forward to? I could certainly use a memory upgrade myself!’
Betty smiled politely at his joke.
‘I’m sure we all could, my dear, but I wouldn’t rush out and book that appointment with your cosmetic neurosurgeon just yet. The sad truth is, this technology is a long way off being able to cope with a human brain. As I said, we are pushing the limits as it is. There is also the problem that with a human brain, well, we can’t see beyond our own mental horizon, so to speak. What I mean is, we can provide an environment for a horse to increase its abilities, because we already have those abilities. Yes? We are pulling the horse up to our level. If you want to do the same for a human, well… there is nobody above our level to pull us up, so it’s a difficult thing to manage, scientifically. Hmm?’ From the frown on the questioner’s face it was evident that he didn’t quite see what she was saying. ‘What I mean is, you could give yourself more brain power in theory, but you wouldn’t know what to do with it. It would be like a bald… like a blind man turning the lights on. Still, this technology obviously has enormous potential in helping us understand how our minds work, and then of course there is the insight it provides for treating brain damage and mental illness.’
The pony-tailed man looked disappointed with this answer.
‘OK, sure, that’s great, yeah,’ he replied with an expression that suggested the complete opposite. ‘But if I can just envisionise for a moment here, what kind of time-frame would we be looking at for moving these horses into a marketable position in, say, the service industry? I’m speaking purely potentialistically of course…’
Betty seemed utterly devoid of the will to respond to this, but while she hesitated a booming voice came to her rescue.
‘I have a question!’ The camera swooped across the audience and settled erratically on an angry-looking woman who was standing with the microphone in her clenched fist. ‘I have a question!’ she repeated, and awkwardly pulled something out of a bag hanging from her shoulder. She held the object above her head as if to hurl it towards the stage, but it broke in her hand and its liquid contents spilled out over herself and surrounding audience members. ‘What do…’ she began, and then immediately vomited over the microphone, while an expanding wave of people holding their noses attempted to stampede away from her in all directions. ‘What do…’ she tried to speak once more, but again she was overwhelmed by uncontrollable vomiting. The auditorium was now filled with a panicking explosion of people accompanied by the amplified sound of the angry woman puking into her microphone. Betty was trying to speak, but her own microphone was no longer working. Apparently in the confusion they had cut off the wrong one, and the echoing pukes were allowed to continue filling the emptying space with their haunting melody.
‘How did it go then, mate?’ Tim asked over his shoulder. Betty glared at him from the chair she had just collapsed into with all the force she could manage. Her eyes moved slowly around the drab and dusty interior of the stable, a grim contrast to the bright lights she had been bathing in only an hour ago.
‘How did it go, young Timpson? Well, let’s see now. It was going fairly badly, but then somehow it magically got infinitely worse.’
‘Yeah, I saw. Chemical warfare. What was that about?’
Betty exhaled so hard that the cobwebs on the ceiling billowed.
‘God knows,’ she said. ‘Some kind of stink bomb I guess. Not toxic they say. I can still smell it though. The police are still in there, all white onesies and gas masks. They said it was a protest group called “Anti-Intelligence”, can you believe that? They think the world is going to end because a computer can write poetry, or something. Anti-Intelligence. Just about sums up my day that does. Painful, Timbo. So painful.’
‘What? Pretending to be normal for half an hour? I could tell, mate.’
Betty struggled to lift herself from her chair in order to inflict some torture upon him, but gave up and settled for throwing a pen at the back of his head.
‘It is amazing, it really is, Timothy. We gave them a talking horse… how did it go so badly? Hmm? We showed them a talking bloody horse, and now I am sitting here, actually struggling to think of any way it could have possibly gone worse.’
Tim rotated in his chair to face her with a sympathetic look.
‘At least you didn’t say “weggy”,’ he said.
‘Bunzel-Bad. That’s what that was, Timothy. You know that’s a thing people say now? Poor old Bunzel, they were already staring into the darkness and now this. That might be the only consolation, you know? They’ll never be able to broadcast what happened today. Maybe that will help us sell this project to someone else, once Bunzel disappears down the toilet. God almighty, that audience! Half of them thought we were making it up and the other half were terrified that we weren’t. Remind me again, Timothy dear, why we are trying to make the world a better place for these idiots.’
Tim grimaced as he considered this question.
‘I thought we were just trying to stop it getting worse,’ he said. ‘What’s this about Bunzel going down the toilet?’
‘Hmm, yes. Interesting times, my dear. The almighty Bunzel, on its knees. You didn’t hear this, by the way, but I know people who know people. It serves them right, of course. All those years, forcing their crusty old operating system on everyone, and then BrainZero appears out of nowhere and gives theirs away for free. And it’s faster. And it runs all your old software. And it pays you for shared processing. Actually pays you for not using your computer. Even works on my old phone.’ She pulled out her phone and started flicking the screen. ‘Dear old Bunzel just can’t change fast enough.’
‘Too big to fail though, surely?’
Betty snorted.
‘Spending money to chase money, Timbolino. Pulling up roots to catch spinning plates. Betting on yourself in a race everyone wants you to lose. It was going to happen sooner or later. BrainZero just made it sooner, I suppose. Hmm? You think BrainZero would be interested in a talking horse? You’d hope somebody would be. I mean, I know people who know people who might be interested…’ She paused with an unsettled expression, as if weighing some unpleasant choices inside her head. Tim raised his eyebrows expectantly, but Betty seemed reluctant to add any further details. ‘Sad times for enquiring minds, Timbums. The way people are jumping at shadows these days, anything even slightly controversial is going to get pushed underground. And God alone knows what kind of dodgy stuff will be going on down there.’
Tim scratched his head.
‘That’s kind of… us. Isn’t it?’
‘Exactly, Timbo. And now you can see why. Should never have even done that talk. We’ll have animal rights nutcases cutting holes in our fence next. Or at least we will once they finish arguing about whether Buttercup is technically still an animal. Anti-Intelligence… You know what our real problem is? As a species I mean. Our real problem is that our real problems aren’t real, while our real real problems aren’t real enough to be problems. Hmm?’