I'm getting ready to leave the Lab for the evening, when I see a striking female looking at me. She is wearing a white fitted stretch shirt and blue trousers. Her chestnut hair is softened into curls. She smiles at me, and I wonder what I've done.
"Hello," she says, with a slight French accent, "You are Oliver Wells, aren't you?"
I nod.
"You joined our lab today, but I've missed you because of my work. Can you come along with me for a short time? So that we can get introduced? My name is Juliette Häberli."
How could I refuse?
"We'll go to a bar on the lake. Afterwards I can drive you back to your apartment. I assume you are staying where they put the new people, in Rue de la Confédération?"
"That's right." I'm a little shell-shocked after the full day in the lab and now what seems to be extending into the evening.
We drive to the bar in her fast car and she ensures we have a good table, with a view that looks across the lake and back to the Jet d'Eau fountain.
I tell her some things about myself, who I have already met and what I think I'll be doing. Juliette responds by telling me about her role and how it changed when she moved to Brant. She's been in Geneva for more than a year and seems to know everyone. We order drinks and share an octopus salad.
"You know the best places," I say, "It almost feels like a date!"
"Non, this is a fact finding mission," she explains, "But I thought we could still go somewhere pretty."
"I wasn't..I didn't mean anything.." I splutter.
"Désolée, I didn't mean anything either. My self-protection sometimes kicks in. It's because of my psychiatry work, dealing with lots of vulnerable people who mis-read my friendliness. It's only happened a couple of times since I've been over here when I've really fallen for someone."
This is the bit where she tells me something and then hopes I'll disclose something back.
She continues, "I'd been with a boy - Jacques - for two years, but it wasn't going anywhere and we both knew it. There needed to be a catalyst to change everything, and the new job at Brant was it. I wound myself out of my relationship with Jacques, got a new apartment through Brant, and changed everything. I haven't looked back."
I'm still trying to work out what she wants to find out about me.
She nibbles at the salad, "Now this could seem unprofessional, but it was a Brant person that suggested the job to me. He was a was a senior guy at Brant, a native of Tel-Aviv named Levi Spillmann who changed to working at Brant and ended in Geneva. He was off-the-scale bright and he brought half the Intellectual Property for the RightMind combat helmet when he transferred to Brant. It was called Createl."
"Intriguing," I said, "Is Levi still at Brant?"
"That's an astute question! But the answer is no. Prepare to hear something gory. He was a boating nutcase and kept a yacht on the lake here. One day they spotted his boat becalmed in the middle of Lac Léman, by Thonon-les-Bains, which is right in the middle and at the widest point. They sent a rescue boat out to him, but he wasn't on board. His body washed up in Evian, France, around two weeks later. They recorded it as misadventure."
"How awful," I shuddered.
"It was. He was one of my 'couple of times'.
"What you and Levi?"
"Yes. We lived together and I carry scars from that misadventure."
She move her arm toward me and showed me the underside of her wrist. There was a small tattoo. Some kind of insect.
"It's a scarab. They are Mediterranean, like Levi. It represents protection and is also a powerful symbol.
"What's that circle above it?" I ask.
"That's the midday sun. A similarly powerful symbol."
"You had those done afterwards?" I ask.
"Yes. Levi was one of a kind."
I decide to tell her my story about being discovered by a friend of a friend and added to the Bob Ranzino itinerary. It seems far less dramatic than her time with Levi The Brilliant Scientist Who Died In A Lake.
She smiles pleasantly throughout, but I can almost sense that she has heard it all before.
"So, no love interest?" she questions.
"Not in this story. It is what made it so easy for me to leave Ireland."
I pause and then ask, "What can you tell me about the rest of our team?"
"The rest you will need to find out for yourself," answers Juliette, "Let's just say we are a close-knit team and watch out for one another. They usually give Amy the tough demands by Kjeld Nikolajsen, and she acts as a deflector for the rest of us. You know. Keeps us protected.
"Like the scarab?" I ask. I see her react by pulling an annoyed face.
"Oh, sorry, I didn't mean anything by it. My sense of humour is so out-of-tune."
She brushes it aside and answers, "The thing to remember is that we all try not to over-promise and under-deliver. It's a Germanic work culture. Detailed, accurate and well-planned, but we say when we think things are going to be late. Amy and Kjeld handle the upstream manipulation of 'facts' to the American bosses."
"What to people like Bob Ranzino?" I ask.
"Yes, there's also a few 'fly-bys' from Corporate head office. You must know how to treat them. They are all quite smart, but relatively unsophisticated in the ways of Europeans. You'll have a natural advantage with English and your command of 'awesomeness' and understatement, which can completely bypass American brains."
"But wait, aren't you being over stereotypical?" I ask.
"Maybe!" replied Juliette enigmatically.
"So, what are you researching, then?" I ask the question to bring the conversation away from washed up bodies, boyfriends and my bad sense of comedy timing.
Juliette smiles, "Theory of Mind and its applicability to Human Computer Interfaces."
"Interesting," I say, "Kjeld Nikolajsen spoke about that. You know, a question about whether a cyber-operated robo-cockroach will run from flames when commanded to walk into them."
She smiles, "He asks everyone that question, I doubt there can be an original answer remaining."
I realise I'd accidentally turned the conversation from washed-up bodies to burning cockroaches. Hardly appropriate when eating an octopus salad.
"I remember Theory of Mind as being about the assessment of an individual human's degree of capacity for empathy and understanding of others. One of the patterns of behaviour exhibited by the minds of both neurotypical and atypical people, is the ability to attribute mental states such as beliefs, intents, desires, emotions and knowledge."
Juliette smiles; she could tell I only had rudimentary knowledge.
"Yes, you are right. And I'm looking at whether machines can possess similar attributes, or whether those attributes in an animal can override a machine - Just like the burning building scenario you referred to. Theory of mind as a personal capability is the understanding that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own."
"For a being or a machine, possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions and used when analysing, judging, and inferring others' behaviours."
"I guess it is more behavioural," I hazard in a vague hope that I could keep up.
Juliette continued; she was still looking at me intently. "You could say that. Theory of mind is distinct from the philosophy of mind. Deficits can occur in people with autism spectrum disorders, genetic-based eating disorders, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, cocaine addiction, and brain damage suffered from alcohol's neurotoxicity; although deficits associated with opiate addiction reverse after prolonged abstinence."
"Cocaine, alcohol, opiates; that's a toxic list, where chemistry has been introduced which upsets the balance?"
Juliette continues, "Consider what the mind does as an output from a process. The output such as thoughts and feelings of the mind are the only things being directly observed so the existence of a mind is inferred. It's like those old fairground attractions where you ask the puppet fortune teller in a glass case a question and he spins around with an answer. The oldest fairground machines in the late-1800s used a selection of cogs and a man would sit behind the machine in a tent, listen to the questions and make up an answer. It served well as an illusion of a mind in the machine."
"I see it is like the question of what is the mind?"
Juliette continues, "Exactly. The presumption that others have a mind is termed a 'theory of mind' because each human can only intuit the existence of their own mind through introspection, and no one has direct access to the mind of another so its existence and how it works can only be inferred from observations of others."
"Mind theory based upon inference and introspection?" I ask, aware that this is getting deep, "But does that mean that a machine could also have a theory of mind?"
Juliette answers, "We're straying into Artificial Intelligence now. Theory of mind appears to be an innate potential ability in humans that requires social and other experience over many years for its full development. Different people may develop a more, or less, effective theory of mind. Theories of cognitive development maintain that theory of mind is a by-product of a broader hyper-cognitive ability of the human mind to register, monitor, and represent its own functioning."
"Hyper-cognitive?" I ask. We'd finished the salad and the server was clearing the table.
Juliette looked at the waiter and then at me, "Consider the concept of empathy, meaning the recognition and understanding of the states of mind of others, including their beliefs, desires and particularly emotions. This is often characterised as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes". Can a machine do this? Can a machine understand the ideas behind this?"
I look at the server who is still quietly clearing things away. I feel as if I'm in his shoes puzzled by this conversation.
Juliette continues, "We attribute human characteristics to pets (like Fido the dog), inanimate objects like Henry vacuum cleaners, and even natural phenomena like Old Faithful water geysers. Most car Sat Navs get given a name.
"It's like taking an 'intentional stance' toward things: we assume they have intentions, to help us predict their future behaviour. However, there is an important distinction between taking an 'intentional stance' toward something and entering a 'shared world' with it.
That's the area that the HCI must cross. Will the machine believe it is sharing the mind of the human, or will it simply piggyback to accept human commands? An intentional stance is detached, and we resort to it during interpersonal interactions. A shared world is directly perceived and its existence structures reality itself for the perceiver. A shared world is the melding of the information space between the machine and the human."
"And such a shared world could be one inhabited by lovers?" I ask.
"Yes," answered Juliette, "Our server just now was intentionally detached. He just needed to clear the food away. But two lovers...such situations produce many of the hallmarks of theory of mind, such as eye-contact, gaze-following, inhibitory control and intentional attributions. It's the same for mother and child."
"That would have some deep implications for an AI device hooked up to a human," I said, "The machine would have to love the human or treat the human as its child."
"Yes, we must find another model," said Juliette, "or else we need to make Richard Brautigan's poem come true: 'I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labours and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.' "
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