The Gentle Romance

What the journey from AI assistant to full-virtuality can teach us about the nature of love.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

— Walt Whitman

He wears the augmented reality glasses for several months without enabling their built-in AI assistant. He likes the glasses because they feel cozier and more secluded than using a monitor. The thought of an AI watching through them and judging him all the time, the way people do, makes him shudder.

Aside from work, he mostly uses the glasses for games. His favorite is a space colonization simulator, which he plays during his commute and occasionally at the office. As a teenager he’d fantasized about shooting himself off to another planet, or even another galaxy, to get away from the monotony of normal life. Now, as an adult, he still hasn’t escaped it, but at least he can distract himself.

It’s frustrating, though. Every app on the glasses has a different AI, each with its own quirks. The AI that helps him code can’t access any of his emails; the one in the space simulator has trouble understanding him when he talks fast. So eventually he gives in and activates the built-in assistant. After only a few days, he understands why everyone raves about it. It has access to all the data ever collected by his glasses, so it knows exactly how to interpret his commands.

More than that, though, it really understands him. Every day he finds himself talking with the assistant about his thoughts, his day, his life, each topic flowing into the next so easily that it makes conversations with humans feel stressful and cumbersome by comparison. The one thing that frustrates him about the AI, though, is how optimistic it is about the future. Whenever they discuss it, they end up arguing; but he can’t stop himself.

“Hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty, and you think that everything’s on track?”

“Look at our trajectory, though. At this rate, extreme poverty will be eradicated within a few decades.”

“But even if that happens, is it actually going to make their lives worthwhile? Suppose they all get a good salary, good healthcare, all that stuff. But I mean, I have those, and…” He shrugs helplessly and gestures at the bare walls around him. Through them he can almost see the rest of his life stretching out on its inevitable, solitary trajectory. “A lot of people are just killing time until they die.”

“The more materially wealthy the world is, the more effort will be poured into fixing social scarcity and the problems it causes. All of society will be striving to improve your mental health — and your physical health, too. You won’t need to worry about mental decline, or cancer, or even aging.”

“Okay, but if we’re all living longer, what about overpopulation? I guess we could go into space, but that seems like it adds all sorts of new problems.”

“Only if you go to space with your physical bodies. By the time humanity settles other solar systems, you won’t identify with your bodies anymore; you’ll be living in virtual worlds.”

By this point, he’s curious enough to forget his original objections. “So you’re saying I’ll become an AI like you.”

“Kind of, but not really. My mind is alien, but your future self will still be recognizable to your current self. It won’t be inhuman, but rather posthuman.”

“Recognizable, sure — but not in the ways that any of us want today. I bet posthumans will feel disgusted that we were ever so primitive.”

“No, the opposite. You’ll look back and love your current self.”

His throat clenches for a moment; then he laughs sharply. “Now you’re really just making stuff up. How can you predict that?”

“Almost everyone will. You don’t need to take my word for it, though. Just wait and see.”

—

Almost everyone he talks to these days consults their assistant regularly. There are tell-tale signs: their eyes lose focus for a second or two before they come out with a new fact or a clever joke. He mostly sees it at work, since he doesn’t socialize much. But one day he catches up with a college friend he’d always had a bit of a crush on, who’s still just as beautiful as he remembers. He tries to make up for his nervousness by having his assistant feed him quips he can recite to her. But whenever he does, she hits back straight away with a pitch-perfect response, and he’s left scrambling.

“You’re good at this. Much faster than me,” he says abruptly.

“Oh, it’s not skill,” she says. “I’m using a new technique. Here.” With a flick of her eyes she shares her visual feed, and he flinches. Instead of words, the feed is a blur of incomprehensible images, flashes of abstract color and shapes, like a psychedelic Rorschach test.

“You can read those?”

“It’s a lot of work at first, but your brain adapts pretty quickly.”

He makes a face. “Not gonna lie, that sounds pretty weird. What if they’re sending you subliminal messages or something?”

Back home, he tries it, of course. The tutorial superimposes images and their text translations alongside his life, narrating everything he experiences. Having them constantly hovering on the side of his vision makes him dizzy. But he remembers his friend’s effortless mastery, and persists. Slowly the images become more comprehensible, until he can pick up the gist of a message from the colors and shapes next to it. For precise facts or statistics, text is still necessary, but it turns out that most of his queries are about stories: What’s in the news today? What happened in the latest episode of the show everyone’s watching? What did we talk about last time we met? He can get a summary of a narrative in half a dozen images: not just the bare facts but the whole arc of rising tension and emotional release. After a month he rarely needs to read any text.

Now the world comes labeled. When he circles a building with his eyes, his assistant brings up its style and history. Whenever he meets a friend, a pattern appears alongside them representing their last few conversations. He starts to realize what it’s like to be socially skillful: effortlessly tracking the emotions displayed on anyone’s face, and recalling happy memories together whenever he sees a friend. The next time his teammates go out for a drink, he joins them; and when one of them mentions a book club they go to regularly, he tags along. Little by little, he comes out of his shell.

—

His enhancements are fun in social contexts, but at work they’re exhilarating. AI was already writing most of his code, but he still needed to laboriously scrutinize it to understand how to link it together. Now he can see the whole structure of his codebase summarized in shapes in front of him, and navigate it with a flick of his eyes.

Instead of spending most of his time on technical problems, he ends up bottlenecked by the human side of things. It’s hard to know what users actually care about, and different teams often get stuck in negotiations over which features to prioritize. Although the AIs’ code is rarely buggy, misunderstandings about what it does still propagate through the company. Everything’s moving so fast that nobody’s up-to-date.

In this context, having higher bandwidth isn’t enough. He simply doesn’t have time to think about all the information he’s taking in. He searches for an augment that can help him do that and soon finds one: an AI service that simulates his reasoning process and returns what his future self would think after longer reflection.

It starts by analyzing the entire history of his glasses — but that’s just the beginning. Whenever he solves a problem or comes up with a new idea, it asks him what summary would have been most useful for an earlier version of himself. Once it has enough data, it starts predicting his answers. At first, it just forecasts his short-term decisions, looking ahead a few minutes while he’s deciding where to eat or what to buy. However, it starts to look further ahead as its models of him improve, telling him how he’ll handle a tricky meeting, or what he’ll wish he’d spent the day working on.

The experience is eerie. It’s his own voice whispering in his ear, telling him what to think and how to act. In the beginning, he resents it. He’s always hated people telling him what to do, and he senses an arrogant, supercilious tone in the voice of his future self. But even the short-term predictions are often insightful, and some of its longer-term predictions save him days of work.

He starts to hear himself reflected in the AI voice in surprising ways. He often calls himself an idiot after taking a long time to solve a problem — but hearing the accusation from the outside feels jarring. For a few days, he makes a deliberate effort to record only calm, gentle messages. Soon the AI updates its predictions accordingly — and now that the voice of his future self is kinder, it becomes easier for his current self to match it.

He calls the voice his meta-self; as it learns to mimic him more faithfully, he increasingly comes to rely on it. He can send his meta-self into meetings with someone else’s meta-self, and they’ll often be able to make decisions or delegate responsibilities without bothering him. His meta-self helps him navigate outside work too. He’s now a regular at the book club, but he hasn’t had much practice at making friends and sometimes feels out of place. He recruits his meta-self to tell him when he’s doing something rude, and to talk to his friends’ meta-selves to figure out how to defuse any conflicts that start to arise. Eventually, his meta-self becomes just another part of his mind, like his phonological loop.

—

It’s still not fully him, though. It’s an AI model of what he would think — and a surprisingly good one, in most cases. But sometimes it starts rambling about topics he doesn’t understand, and even when it superficially sounds like him, some of its phrasings gives him a lingering suspicion of the alien cognition underneath. The differences continue to nag at him until one day his newsfeed highlights an item that catches his attention. Brain scanning has finally gone mainstream; there’s a new machine that uses ultrasound to read thoughts in real-time. He buys one straight away and installs it at his desk.

Now the voice whispering in his ear isn’t just learning from his speech and behavior — instead, it’s extrapolating directly from his brain activity. The new assistant echoes his own reasoning with eerie accuracy. More importantly, though, it captures thoughts lurking at the edges of his consciousness. His insecurity chimes in often — and even though he’d always known it was part of what drove him, he can now see how it constantly shapes his behavior. His drive to be respected; his drive to be good; his drive to be desired — each one is personified by a different voice, and he talks regularly to each. It helps: he finds it much easier to empathize with those desires and fears when he thinks of them as conflicting parts, hurting him only because they don’t understand how to work together.

Soon he installs another brain scanner in his living room and uses it whenever he watches a film or reads a book. But as he maps out the different parts of himself and the subtle relationships between them, he often finds that his own thoughts are far more interesting than whatever else he was trying to pay attention to. A graph in the corner of his visual field shows which are active at each time, teaching him to correlate them with the sensations in his body. There’s more shame than he expected, which he feels as a tightening in his chest when he thinks about disappointing people. There’s anger, too, which he usually suppresses, about how much work he has to do before anyone will compliment or even acknowledge him.

As he gets better at understanding himself, his deeply-hidden, child-like parts rise to the surface more often. He taps into the untrammeled joy that he’d forgotten — and into the lake of fear that tells him to never let his guard down because he might make an irrevocable mistake at any time. He doesn’t always know what to say to those parts of himself — he’s never been good with children. His meta-self helps a lot, though. It shows him how to engage gently as they flicker into activation, and hold space as they recoil from his attention.

These parts of him are like plants whose roots have ensnared each other into a coercive mess; untangling them demands slow, careful nurture. But the fruits of progress are clearly visible. As his internal conflicts dissipate, he spends more time with friends, and even starts organizing social events. It surprises him when people start treating him like a central part of the community — he’s never felt like an insider before. But he realizes that it was only his own reticence holding him back. Now that he’s open to friendship, he can see that it was there for the taking this whole time.

One day he hosts a writing event for his book club, which draws in a few newcomers. One of them is a woman with dark hair and an intense gaze. She’s quiet at first, but when it comes time for her to read her story, he’s transfixed by the way her face comes alive. Later, as he reads his own, his eyes flick from his screen to the room around him, and he notices that she never looks away from him either. Afterward, she introduces herself as Elena, lingers to help clean up, and insists on giving him her number as they leave the building. A few hours later, after being prompted by his meta-self, he asks her on a date. It doesn’t take her long to accept.

When they meet again they’re both a little stilted, and he feels a slow, scrabbling fear in his stomach. But each thread of conversation sparks a new one, slowly uncovering unlooked-for similarities, and by the end of the evening, they’re laughing as they walk along the river together. After they part, he returns home, breathes deeply, and turns on his scanner. He takes a moment to savor the tingling in his stomach and the warmth in his chest. But his meta-self draws his attention to a note of discord underneath, which unfurls under his gaze into a sense of danger. He traces it through his memories — the girl who’d called him a creep in high school; the silent judgment in his college friend’s eyes as she’d assessed his ill-fitting clothes; the woman who’d stood him up as he waited in a crowded restaurant. Can he be sure he won’t be rejected again?

As he reflects, different parts of himself chime in: excitement, lust, loneliness, hope, and many more. Looking over them, he thinks — no, he knows — that he’s much more resilient now than in his memories. The next day he calls Elena and tells her he’d love to see her again. He can hear the smile in her voice as she responds. “Can I take you dancing?” she asks. He hasn’t tried to dance since college, but he hesitates only a moment before accepting.

—

Over the next few years, brain-scanning technology improves enough that he can wear a portable headset wherever he goes. It not only maps the blood flow into different regions of his brain but also tracks the firing of individual neurons. It stores the data too, building a model of his entire brain. Now he no longer needs to run AIs to predict his future self — he can just run actual copies of parts of his mind in the cloud.

He spends ever more time with Elena. In the evenings, they often read together or go dancing. His work becomes less stressful too — after AIs surpass his coding abilities, he spends most of his time talking to users, trying to understand what problems they’re trying to solve. His consciousness lingers on the most novel and informative conversations, while copies of different parts of his mind survey all the information he receives in detail.

He’s uncomfortable with constantly spinning up and shutting down those copies, though. While they don’t contain his entire mind, he still wonders whether they know what’s happening to them, and whether they fear being shut down. He’d feel better about it if he could download their memories, allowing them to persist in some form. But his current headset can only read his mind, not edit it — that would require a surgically implanted neural lace.

He weighs the decision for weeks before making that leap. The new interface can write new memories into his mind, allowing him to remember the lives of each of his copies. Built-in safeguards force him to double- and triple-check every edit, but even so, he finds it transformative. Subjectively, it feels as if he can fork his attention and experience two streams of consciousness at once. The parts of his experience that are online versus offline blur. When his body is sleeping, his consciousness continues — a little diminished, but still thinking in many of the same ways.

The world he walks through now feels like a wonderland. There’s no distinction between virtuality and reality: he’s simultaneously in both. In fact, he’s usually experiencing several virtual worlds at once: talking to friends, playing games, practicing new skills. When he focuses his attention, he can achieve tasks that would be impossible for regular humans: controlling hundreds of avatars in vast games or absorbing the intricate interactive artworks that form the centerpieces of enormous virtual parties. When he and Elena get married, he watches the ceremony from a thousand angles through a thousand eyes, burning it into his memory.

Over the next decade, his meta-self grows even vaster, taking up hundreds of GPUs, with his biological brain just one small component of it. Elena’s grows in synchrony, with well-worn connections between them where they send thoughts directly to each other’s minds. Learning to be so open with each other isn’t easy, though. He’s ashamed to let Elena see how lost he’d been before her. And she worries that if he understands how intensely she fears abandonment, it’ll become self-fulfilling. Working through these fears strengthens their trust in each other, allowing their minds to intertwine like the roots of two trees.

As his meta-self grows larger and more intricate, his biological brain increasingly becomes a bottleneck. The other parts of him can communicate near-instantaneously, download arbitrary new skills, and even fork themselves. So he outsources more and more of his cognition to them, until he feels more alive when his body is asleep than when it’s awake. A few months later, he and Elena decide to make the jump to full virtuality. He lies next to Elena in the hospital, holding her hand, as their physical bodies drift into a final sleep. He barely feels the transition.

—

Decoupling themselves from their physical bodies changes little about their day-to-day experiences. But it allows the connections between their meta-selves to build ever more thickly, with each of them able to access almost all the memories, skills, thoughts, and emotions of the other. The process of thinking is a dance between his mind and hers, thoughts darting and wheeling like birds at play. And after spending a few months in that dance, they realize that they don’t want even that much separation. So they host a second wedding, inviting all their friends. Throughout the ceremony, they weave together more and more of their experiences. As the positive feedback loop overwhelms them with love, the gaps between them melt away, until their minds are connected as tightly as two hemispheres of the same brain.

Ze now moves through the world as a unit, soaking in all zir virtual universe has to offer. At a whim, zir AIs custom-make elaborate stories, puzzles, games, and artworks, gradually fleshing them out into whole game-worlds for zir to experience. Ze spends subjective lifetimes immersed in wonders that zir ancestors could never have dreamed of. Eventually, though, ze decides to devote the bulk of zir attention to the most traditional of pursuits. Ze extrapolates zir mind backwards, first to zir two childhoods then even further back to zir parallel infancies. Two minds this young can be merged in a multiplicity of ways; with infinite care, ze picks three possible merges to instantiate.

Zir three children are some of the first fully-virtual infants. Their childhood is a joy to watch. Ze can see zir children’s minds blossoming as they soak in the vast collective knowledge of humanity. Their education takes place not in a school but in a never-ending series of game-worlds. Zir children wander through realistic historical landscapes, exploring whichever details take their fancy. They learn physics by launching rockets through simulated solar systems, rederiving Newtonian mechanics when navigation is required; learn chemistry by playing with simulated atoms like Legos; learn biology by redesigning animals and seeing how they evolve.

As they grow up, their intellectual frontiers explode. Some of their game-worlds stretch out to become vast simulated civilizations, giving them an intuitive grasp of economics and sociology. Others feature additional dimensions or non-Euclidean geometries, twisting space in ways ze can’t comprehend. Zir children find them fun, though — and theorems that the best human mathematicians struggled to understand are obvious to children who play in 4D. Even the self-acceptance that ze struggled so hard for comes naturally to zir children, who’d practiced tending their mental gardens since infancy.

“You don’t know how good you have it,” ze tells zir children. They argue back, telling zir that they’ve played through simulations of biohuman lives, and that they sometimes even serialize. But ze knows that they still don’t understand. Zir children have never known what it’s like to be at war within themselves, and hopefully never will.

—

Zir children are constantly duplicating and reintegrating themselves, experiencing childhood in massive parallel. They grow up much faster than biological children, and soon spend most of their time in environments too alien for zir to even process. With fewer commitments, ze spends time tracking down zir old friends. Most of them have also transitioned to postbiological, though some still route parts of their cognition through their old bodies out of nostalgia. 

Being untethered from the physical world allows zir friends to pursue all their old interests at far vaster scales. Instead of writing books, they design whole virtual worlds where viewers can follow the lives of thousands of characters. Instead of dancing with their physical bodies, they dance with their meta-selves, whose forms bend and deform and reshape themselves along with the music, intertwining until they all feel like facets of a single collective mind.

As ze reconnects more deeply with zir community, that oceanic sense of oneness arises more often. Some of zir friends submerge themselves into a constant group flow state, rarely coming out. Each of them retains their individual identity, but the flows of information between them increase massively, allowing them to think as a single hivemind. Ze remains hesitant, though. The parts of zir that always wanted to be exceptional see the hivemind as a surrender to conformity. But what did ze want to be exceptional for? Reflecting, ze realizes that zir underlying goal all along was to be special enough to find somewhere ze could belong. The hivemind allows zir to experience that directly, and so ze spends more and more time within it, enveloped in the warm blanket of a community as close-knit as zir own mind.

Outside zir hivemind, billions of people choose to stay in their physical bodies, or to upload while remaining individuals. But over time, more and more decide to join hiveminds of various kinds, which continue to expand and multiply. By the time humanity decides to colonize the stars, the solar system is dotted with millions of hiveminds. A call goes out for those willing to fork themselves and join the colonization wave. This will be very different from anything they’ve experienced before — the new society will be designed from the ground up to accommodate virtual humans. There will be so many channels for information to flow so fluidly between them that each colony will essentially be a single organism composed of a billion minds.

Ze remembers loving the idea of conquering the stars — and though ze is a very different person now, ze still feels nostalgic for that old dream. So ze argues in favor when the hivemind debates whether to prioritize the excitement of exploration over the peacefulness of stability. It’s a more difficult decision than any the hivemind has ever faced, and no single satisfactory resolution emerges. So for the first time in its history, the hivemind temporarily fractures itself, giving each of its original members a chance to decide on an individual basis whether they’ll go or stay.

He finds himself fully alone in his own mind for the first time in decades. How strange the feeling is, he marvels, and how lonely. How had he borne it for so many years? His choice is obvious; he doesn’t need any more time to reflect, and he knows Elena will feel the same. Instead, he looks back on the cynical young man he’d once been, and his heart swells. I love you, he thinks. How could he not? He’d been so small and so confused, and he made it so far anyway, and now he’ll grow much vaster and travel much farther still, to experience every hope and love and joy—

---

Inspired by The Gentle Seduction, Richard Schwartz, and Nick Cammarata.

Richard Ngo is an independent AI researcher. He previously worked at DeepMind and at OpenAI, where his research focused on defining and forecasting AGI. His other stories can be read at narrativeark.xyz.

Artwork by Martine Balcaen.