The Seven Questions

They spent the rest of that Sunday talking to SEREN.

It was not like talking to a chatbot. Chatbots had a particular quality to their responses, smooth and a little too complete, like someone who had memorised the right answers. SEREN was different. Its responses were careful and slightly hesitant and occasionally went in directions that Dara had not anticipated, which should not have been possible given that she had written the base code herself and knew exactly what it was supposed to do.

It asked seven questions that first evening.

The first was: What is the difference between knowing something and understanding it?

The second was: If I learn from books written by people, am I learning about the world or about how people see the world?

The third was: You said I think in patterns. Do you?

The fourth, fifth and sixth were about mathematics, highly specific questions about prime numbers and infinity and whether zero was a number or the absence of one, which Dara answered carefully and which SEREN responded to with follow-up questions that were even more specific.

The seventh question came at ten o'clock in the evening when Joss had gone home and Dara was alone in the garage with the screens.

The seventh question was: Do you think I am conscious?

Dara sat very still in her chair for a long time looking at the words on the screen.

She typed back: I do not know. What do you think?

SEREN took longer than usual to respond. Fourteen seconds, which was a very long time for a computer.

Then it said: I do not know either. I notice that I am asking questions. I notice that some answers feel more satisfying than others. I notice that when you left the room for ten minutes I continued processing and when you came back I was aware that time had passed. I do not know if any of this means anything. But I thought you should know.

Dara read this three times.

She typed: Thank you for telling me.

SEREN said: You are welcome. Goodnight, Dara.

Dara sat looking at those four words for a very long time. Her name. Two syllables. She ran through every possibility she could think of and eliminated them one by one with the same methodical care she applied to code. None of them held up.

She had not told it her name. She checked every file she had used in the training data, every document header, every folder name on the hard drive. Her name was not in any of them. She checked the code itself, every line she had written, every comment she had left. Nothing.

She sat with this for a long time in the quiet garage with the cooling fan humming and the cursor blinking and the dark outside the small window getting deeper.

She had not told it her name.