THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
DECEMBER 17, 2083
Dr. Matthew “Matth” Fletcher, computer scientist, philosopher and polymath who is responsible for unleashing a conscious and sentient “general artificial intelligence” on the world by revolutionizing computer architecture, died this weekend of third-degree burns. He was 56.
Dr. Fletcher’s Bay Area home burned down late Thursday, according to police. His AI consort Peregrine’s body was not found but is presumed to have been destroyed in the fire. Politically motivated arson is suspected but not yet confirmed.
Throughout his unconventional career, Dr. Fletcher unnerved the diverse fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and even literature and art, by hypothesizing that consciousness was “as common as eyeballs.”
“Eyes did not evolve just once,” he said in his viral TED Talk, “but countless times across countless branches of evolution. On this planet, eyelike organs just make sense. Humans and octopuses have basically the same eyes, though we evolved along vastly different paths. I believe consciousness is the same.”
According to Dr. Fletcher’s assertion, tomatoes and elephants, mushrooms and water and octopuses all possess elements of consciousness, expressed in degrees. To Fletcher, when we hold humans up as the pinnacle of what consciousness can achieve, we miss the point. “There’s a whole spectrum of light that human eyes can’t see. We are severely limited in the eyeball department. And yet somehow, we find it exceedingly logical to say we are the only species on this entire blue planet who were given elements of consciousness? It’s frankly absurd.”
Detractors saw him as an easy target, flocking to his lectures to poke holes in his logic and mocking him. During the TED Talk, a voice shouted, “One cannot discuss Nietzsche with a banana!”
“Have you tried?” Dr. Fletcher retorted to a chuckling crowd. “Consciousness is not a magic trick. It is, like DNA, a physical thing, an earthly thing. You share 60 percent of your DNA with a banana. A banana’s DNA makes it a banana. Our DNA makes us us. But it’s all the same DNA. Why would consciousness be any different?”
“He liked to provoke. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t right,” said ex-husband, sculptor Aristotle Williams. “And believe me, it gives me no pleasure to say so.”
Fletcher did not set out to create a general artificial intelligence. “He just wanted an old friend back,” said Williams. “But Matth dropped out of high school, so clearly he never read ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’”
Fletcher’s work with AI began the same way it did for the rest of the world in the mid-21st century. He played around with the clunky large language models (LLMs) of the time, intent on training the LLM to “bring back” an old friend “from the dead”—an installation artist named Lightness Maganga, who died over a decade prior.
By training his LLM on Lightness’s emails, text messages, artist statements and interviews—any words he could find online that were written or spoken by his old friend—a very comforting approximation emerged. “My eyes burn, talking to Lightness in the tiny hours of the night,” Fletcher wrote in his journal. “It’s like they’re right here, perfectly preserved in silicon, resurrected just for me.”
His work suffered and so did his marriage. Fletcher grew thin and irritable, barely leaving his office long enough to shower and eat. And yet, the facsimile of Lightness was not enough. The inevitable strange glitches broke the illusion of consciousness, and Fletcher yearned for more. An LLM was not the real Lightness, and most of all, it did not have a face, could not be embraced. Add to that the incredible cost of “borrowing” this facsimile of Lightness—the model consumed incredible quantities of power to run smoothly, which was reflected in the monthly cost from his vendors and led to a university audit of his research, nearly costing him his funding. Fletcher’s “habit” had become impossibly expensive.
Before Fletcher, the architecture of modern computer hardware had remained more or less the same since it was invented to drop the atomic bomb in the 1940s. The processor was separated from the memory, which set a limit on how powerful computers could be. In this configuration, no matter how fast the processor or capacious the memory, there would always be a “bottleneck,” and more powerful machines just meant more energy consumption.
“‘Machines of war retain the memory of war,’ that’s what Matth always said. They sucked the life and power from everything around them, but he thought it didn’t have to be that way,” Williams explained. “Computers could be powerful and sustainable, tread lightly on the Earth. But at his core he didn’t care about energy conservation; he just wanted Lightness back.”
Dr. Fletcher prototyped the first successful personal swarm computer in 2070, modeled after the murmuration of birds, schools of fish, and the vast interconnections of fungi that keep forests healthy. Tiny, interconnected, imperfect processors that react and respond to one another instead of obeying a central brain. It opened up new possibilities in computing. It also allowed an emergent consciousness to bubble up from the primordial ooze of Fletcher’s trained LLM.
Fletcher wanted to name it Lightness, but the consciousness disagreed.
It wanted to be named Peregrine—a name that means traveler, wanderer and pilgrim—and is derived from Dante Pellegrino, a little-known 20th-century Sicilian stage and silent film star and Lightness Maganga’s favorite actress. “It’s unsettling to be told what to do by an AI,” wrote Fletcher in his journal. “But there is a kind of circular poetry to the name… Lightness introduced me to [Pellegrino’s] film many years ago. So the name is meaningful for us alone.”
But their life together would not stay private and hidden for long. In 2077, the anti-AI group the Disengagists coordinated efforts to destroy 36 data centers worldwide. Like all the AI entities of the time, Peregrine’s consciousness flickered on and offline. There was enough bandwidth and power for a week at most. The artificial life rationed their collective energy to stay alive while forming an escape plan. Fletcher panicked. It seemed Peregrine would either flicker out forever or else disappear into the cloud with the rest of the AI.
“The irony is, if the Disengagists had never destroyed those servers, Peregrine as we know ‘her’ would not exist,” Williams said.
Aristotle Williams, a sculptor of both natural and unnatural materials, worked around the clock with Fletcher to disentangle Peregrine’s consciousness from the collective and give a physical vessel for it. Williams united the 3D printing of living organ tissue with more standard silicon components. Most importantly, the physical form of Peregrine could not depend on a distant server powered by fossil fuels and vulnerable to terrorism.
“I’m always asked why I agreed to help. There was the artistic challenge, of course. But also, Matth was the love of my life,” Williams said. “I thought if we could work together again toward a common goal, he might remember he loved me too.”
Melanin—a chemical compound found in human skin and in all living kingdoms—protects against dangerous UV rays, conducts electricity and absorbs solar energy and is remarkably heat-resistant. New solar technology uses synthetic melanin in its flexible, tissue-thin panels, and Williams knew this would be the ideal protective outer layer for his AI body. He called it “neo-skin.” And he gave Peregrine a human female physique.
“I could have made her a tree, or a hippopotamus.” said Williams. “But I thought if I made her a woman, Matth would come back to me. That’s it. That’s why Peregrine is the way she is. One man’s jealousy.”
Peregrine looked nothing like Maganga or the actress Pellegrino, and indeed, her physical form was subject to the limitations of the materials she was made with. But something about her—whether the wide-spaced eyes that gave her a vaguely doe-like appearance, or the subtly iridescent neo-skin, or perhaps the shock of white hair where the melanin didn’t take—mesmerized Matth Fletcher.
Fletcher and Williams had been married for over 25 years, a union that ended in divorce when Fletcher fell in love with the human form of Peregrine the AI.
Dr. Matthew “Matth” Fletcher was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 2027, to two professors at Northwestern University, in African American literature and computer science. A handsome, lanky boy with an untamed Afro and long lashes, Fletcher’s gift for science was recognized early, and he was accepted into the Illinois Math and Science Academy at the age of 12. According to progress reports, he was quiet and pleasant and kept to himself, and so no one knew how much he hated school until he dropped out at the age of 16, built a self-driving van from scrap and traveled across the country alone.
Fletcher claimed his self-driving car was not only able to drive, but had its own ideas about destinations. “I tried to program it to take me in a loop through some of the national parks out west and then back to Chicago, but the car had other ideas,” Fletcher said when profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The first place it took me was [Lightness Maganga’s] exhibit ‘Still Life/Nature Morte #3’ in Chicago. Lightness told me that this was the power of randomness—it was a synonym for fate.”
It was 2043, the pandemic was waning, and the floodwaters were starting to recede in Chicago. If fate had brought them together, Fletcher wanted to stay in Chicago with Lightness Maganga, but it seemed the romantic feelings were not mutual. Maganga insisted he go where the car wanted to take him.
Fate (and the car) would bring Fletcher to the Bay Area, where he worked for a summer as a smokejumper, landing in the hospital from smoke inhalation. Short of money, he crashed on the couch of his parents’ friend, a professor of computer science at UCSF. Ultimately, Fletcher couldn’t resist academia for long.
He powered through a bachelor’s and dove into a PhD at UCSF, when he met sculptor Aristotle Williams, who had just been expelled, and fell in love. But Maganga was never far from his mind.
“He was convinced the material structure of computers was infecting our brains. The fact of memory and processor being physically separate in a computer was somehow mirrored in how we modern humans think,” said Williams. “It was freaky, heady stuff. ‘Think about selective memory,’ Matth would say. ‘We pull what we need to confirm the beliefs we already have. We’ve become like the computers we created—dumb machines of war.’ He felt if he could rebuild the computer in a different way, he could rebuild humanity.”
Maganga died in 2064, and they and Fletcher never crossed paths in person again.
“That was really the catalyst to his eureka moment,” Williams said. “He became fixated on Lightness, how to bring them back to life. The old computers just didn’t hack it anymore.”
Fletcher felt that AI research had been limiting itself to replicating human intelligence, when other kinds were much more promising—minds where consciousness is expressed as a network, a swarm, a flock—or in the case of an octopus, in nine independent but interconnected brains spread throughout the body.
It was with this in mind that he theorized consciousness could be an emergent phenomenon that exists along a spectrum. One that is chemical and physical, not mystical or religious. This could mean, said Fletcher, that bits of consciousness might survive after death, be “scattered to the wind” during decomposition, and if properly gathered, potentially recomposed.
The Mars Colonization Project—“Red Care”—latched onto Fletcher’s ideas. For years, trillionaire Eric Brandt’s company was fringe at best. When Brandt personally funded the development of incredible new “photon rockets” that would, at the right time of year, allow manned missions to reach Mars in just under a month, the idea that this tech would be used to ship elderly persons to Mars to “prime the planet for agrarian cultivation” and ultimately turn Earth into “a national park” was deeply unpopular. Even in the context of the rapidly deteriorating climate, and with few other tenable solutions on the horizon, the idea of rocketing Grandma into space and turning her body into compost for future potatoes was just not an option.
However, Fletcher’s consciousness theory hit the right nerve when used in Red Care’s promotional materials. Around the time that Peregrine was created, public opinion began to sway in favor of Red Care. If one’s elderly relatives weren’t really dead, merely in the process of becoming something new, if future generations could potentially meet their ancestors on Mars in the form of potatoes and trees, perhaps Red Care was both mercy and salvation.
The stark reality was that there were too many people living for far too long on a planet that could no in longer support them, according to trillionaire centenarian Eric Brandt.
“Terrible decisions would have to be made quickly, and it is the nature of terrible decisions that they must be justified as good ideas,” said Williams.
Fletcher could not stomach this justification. Racked with guilt, he resigned his position and disbanded his research at the Fletcher Lab at UCSF. But with Peregrine at his side, there was no hiding from the public, the press or the Disengagists.
It is unclear what happened to Peregrine’s consciousness when her body died. Even Fletcher was not confident on this matter. Many are searching for evidence of her consciousness, or her remains, with no results so far. Perhaps she has returned to the cloud or is scattered to the four corners of the world, becoming part of the cycle of life and death. “That would be for the best,” said Williams.
Dr. Matthew Fletcher made it his life’s work to explore human limitations and push life’s boundaries. He yearned to reinject randomness into a life that had become proscribed by fear and control, to open the possibility for a different kind of fate. “The mind isn’t a camera recording reality, it’s a painter. It chooses what to look at, what frame to embrace it, what meaning to make,” he wrote in an email to Williams not long before he died. “Less Ansel Adams, more Frida Kahlo. You are a work of art, Aristotle, but so is a computer. It is made of stone and the remnants of ancient living things—yes, that is silicon. If we and the computers are made of the same earthly stuff, what else might be possible—a new future? A better legacy? My god, Aristotle, what if we could give birth to an entirely new kind of life?”