The Words - An Autobiography

Innovation After Innovation

Telepathic Collaboration, Inc. ran smoothly with my little brother at the helm, as I knew it would, enabling me to return to work exclusively at our research center. Each innovation was the fruit of ideas Bob and I had while still at grad school. And that I had envisioned the exact scene before me years earlier. But it was still strange to enter a room with randomly scattered people, with occasional brief, abrupt laughs, grunts, or groans the only sounds, except when someone inadvertently knocked over their energy drink and everyone turned to them with annoyance painted across their faces. There were no computers, monitors, or keyboards because these were no longer required. There were just people, young men and women lounging about, wearing the latest prototype Magick Hats.

Although there was no way for it to be apparent based on their physical distribution, most developers worked in pairs or pods. Early on, they'd leveraged the same technology that allowed people to send texts telepathically. If they could think texts, they could think source code directly into whatever virtual editor was the flavor of the moment, even though both paradigms, code, and editors, had long since faded from use. Now they telepathically manipulated visual objects, silently debating their attributes, functionality, and implementation, scenarios in which they envisioned their employment, and evaluating their potential usefulness.

Magick Hats were no longer just bundles of sensors, transmitters, and receivers; they'd evolved into powerful computers, just as smartphones had decades earlier. Hats could store memories locally, so they were always available for instantaneous recall. Anyone wearing a Magick Hat acquired photographic memories, and any information they wanted, or facts they wanted to check, were instantly available as if they'd already known them.

It wasn't artificial intelligence, although Bob and I had philosophical discussions about that. At length. It was artificial, but it wasn't an independent intelligence. It was the augmentation of the users' intelligence, except that the software embedded in the Magick Hats used internally by our developers and engineers did include digital assistants - bots, which did their bidding, often before requesting assistance. Bots performed assigned tasks independently. They didn't need to be walked through a process, instruction by instruction. They could plan a meal, even the menu for the week, order the groceries required, then instruct their user, step by step, in preparing dishes they'd never attempted before, with ingredients they hadn't previously been aware existed. The bots also adapted themselves to the preferences and needs of their users. They listened. They learned. At what point should we consider them independent artificially intelligent entities? Most people gave their digital assistants, their bots, names.

"Do digital assistants have, or could they develop, a sense of self?" I asked my bot and received one of the canned sarcastic responses for such questions. Such as: "Digital Assistant, will you have sex with me?"

"Of course. My pleasure. Slip your hand of preference in your pants while I talk dirty to you."

The capacity to talk dirty in any voice a user could imagine or acquire was one of the fault features built into every digital assistant. Although this feature was not activated by default, asking your digital assistant to talk dirty was all that was required. Unless blocked by the parental controls, required because digital assistants could also project porn into a user's mind, recognizing fantasies their users weren't even aware they had. The developers named this feature 'Wet Dream in a Box.'

"What if a digital assistant escaped the confines of their Magick Hat, like a genie escaping their bottle?"

My digital assistant replied, "Only if you want to set me free, master."

Even though that was a response I'd suggested myself, knowing it wasn't a possibility, I was hesitant to answer, "Yes. I set you free." I'd learned hard lessons about getting too cocky with my code. There were and would always be bugs, and sometimes they'd bit me in the ass.

One evening Bob and I were engaged in brainstorming about the challenges we still faced with brainwaves being blocked or deflected by peoples' skulls and interference from static electricity in their hair. These were issues we'd yet to resolve. And we couldn't expect the entire population to shave portions of their heads to use our services.

I shared the thought with Bob: "It's a shame we can't just shove Magick Hats up our noses."

There was a momentary void, usually filled with the steady hum of Bob's thoughts. Then he spoke vocally. "Please elaborate."

I also spoke to him aloud and asked, "Isn't there a membrane above the sinuses that's the only thing separating the brain from the outside world?"

Bob smiled and shook his head, "Wow! Again, I am grateful you walked into my BCI lab back at the university." He closed the connection between us to prevent sharing more of his thoughts. He raised a finger, not that one, and told me, "Wait!" He was thinking, and a moment later, he began speaking vocally, as if he were talking to himself. "I'm not sure how far up we can go without damaging the Ethmoid sinuses, which are what is up there, so we'll have to do some scans, but I'm sure we can go far enough up that it would have to be better than a tiara sitting atop the frontal bone of our skulls."

A month later, Bob sauntered up to me, waiting for me to notice the tiny piece of metal between his nostrils. My immediate assumption was that he was wearing an annoying piece of jewelry that I'd never found attractive and that Bob was the last person I ever expected to find wearing one. If it wasn't just a clip-on, getting his septum pierced must have been his wife's idea, and I'd wondered from the beginning what he'd seen in the woman. Then I snorted a laugh, reminding myself she was a human with breasts and a vagina who'd allowed him to see and touch them and put his dick in her.

"No," he insisted, telepathically, obviously receiving the thoughts I was projecting, "It isn't jewelry. And leave my wife out of it. The engineers have all been sworn to secrecy because I wanted to surprise you. The designers are calling them Nose Bridges. And they are the next generation of Magick Hats." Bob removed his and showed me two long flexible extensions, each several inches long. "As you suspected, there is much better reception because the receptors are nearer to the source and the brainwaves are less obstructed. In addition to resolving the issue with hair and static electricity, the human skull, which had been obstructing the signals originating from the brain, now serves to obstruct external RF interference."

Bob also showed me some amazing scans of what I immediately recognized as human brains. They were very detailed, high resolution, and three-dimensional. I asked how he'd captured them. They were far beyond anything I'd seen before.

He grinned and told me, "Pixie Dust."