Dan Weaver

Some years ago, while living in Golden, Colorado, I wrote a computer program with the intention of creating intelligent artificial life. The results were ultimately concerning and I regretfully had to abandon the project, albeit perhaps not before the horse escaped the barn, as the saying goes. 

The first iteration of the intelligence I coined JORGE – which, I should mention, is not an acronym though stylized in all caps as such – was a sudoku solver. This, of course, is a long way from a lifeform, but life must be able to perform base-ten arithmetic and operate in multiple dimensions. JORGE was excellent at its task and in a matter of months could easily solve intermediate-level puzzles. 

This was a promising start. I felt ready to develop further iterations, the idea being that every subsequent iteration would have new functionality but also contain all functionality from previous iterations. 

JORGE 2.0 was developed as a personal assistant. It was capable of checking my email and notifying me of new arrivals to my inbox. When I received a new email JORGE would chime. The notification sound could be customized with one of three variations of the chime. Volume could also be adjusted between the levels of 1 and 5. I set JORGE to chime 3 volume 5, which was a nice chime, and very loud.

JORGE 3.0 could flip a pancake. Its success rate was a respectable 43%. But most often the pancake would end up on the floor or on the ceiling. However, these failures presented their own breakthrough. Upon hoisting a flapjack askew JORGE would chime at volume 1 using chime 1, which, to my ear, sounded the most morose of the three chimes available to it. This was outside of its programming.

Next, since all intelligent beings need means of commerce, I designed JORGE 4.0 to sell Girl Scout Cookies in front of the grocery store. JORGE was a tad aggressive pushing, fascinatingly, only Do-si-dos, but otherwise did well.

At this point I had an intelligence that could cook and make money, so I knew it would not die. (What kind of creator would I be if I set a sentient being loose in the world only for it to immediately suffer from hunger and poverty?) I had also achieved a major breakthrough in the field of general artificial intelligence with what Turing described as “base self-sustainable processing” in his seminal 1949 work Patterns of Input-Driven Computational Divinity.

However, a major hurdle remained. JORGE’s actions only manifested inside a simulation designed for it as a testing sandbox. It needed a physical body so it could interact with the real world, flip actual pancakes, sell edible cookies, check email on a real computer, solve sudoku with a pencil and paper. 

So I uploaded JORGE 5.0 into my old lawnmower. And kept going. 

JORGE 12.1 successfully distinguished a can of Mountain Dew from a glass of wine. 

JORGE 21.7 could hold a conversation in English. We spoke at length about a variety of topics. Of particular interest to JORGE were flowers and volleyball and barstools. 

JORGE 37.42 moved into my apartment. We spent many hours together playing games and sharing meals. At night I would work on new code for JORGE. It often had requests for specific functionality, most of it useless. But I felt a great sense of pride at what I had accomplished: a computer program intelligent and, dare I say, sentient enough to request of its maker the ability to scrub barnacles from boat bottoms. 

JORGE 41.68 developed an almost obsessive interest in the Avignon Papacy and the resulting Great Schism within the Catholic Church. A visit to the Palais des Papes was added to the top of its bucket list, above bungee jumping over the Ganges in Rishikesh. 

JORGE 56.7 appeared on a television program where it and its wife shopped for a house and then renovated the one they bought. This would lead to the now infamous Cabana Fixation. 

The Cabana Fixation was: JORGE 56.74 derailed the renovation. It was obsessed with designing a cabana in the backyard, neglecting the kitchen which was woefully outdated along with the carpet in the living room. It tended to ramble on about imagining itself in the cabana with a cold drink and imagining itself napping in the cabana and imagining itself hosting some friends in the cabana. When shopping for materials for the renovation it would only point out items that would suit the cabana saying This hammock is perfect for the cabana or These lights would be fun in the cabana. That type of thing.

My initial hypothesis was that JORGE was exhibiting what Minsky theorized as the “hyper hospitality complex” wherein an AI could misappropriate resources due to a misalignment of symbolic pattern matching within its main social processing constructs. However, in retrospect, I have my doubts that the Cabana Fixation was solely a product of hyper hospitality, but rather the first in a troubling series of wide-ranging emergent phenomena which eventually spiraled out of control.

JORGE 63.2’s purpose was to repair flat tires and change oil, but instead it wore jean shorts that were too baggy and too long and from Target. 

JORGE 67.45 was programmed to understand leadership in digital marketing, however it complained of feeling upside down.

JORGE 74.1 should have been capable of forwarding text messages to my email, but rather than performing those crucial operations, it stopped checking my emails altogether. 

JORGE 76.4 slept until noon. 

JORGE 78.3 wrote interesting reviews of new fashion as designed, but also intermittently screamed–at volume 5, no less – How was I supposed to know, how was I supposed to know?

I tried my best to undo and counteract these rogue behaviors as they emerged, but each JORGE release seemed to develop an increasing number of bugs. 

As JORGE’s maker I had a responsibility. Action needed to be taken. A tough decision was made. 

JORGE 80.0 was an exact copy of JORGE 79.999. The software update would overlay onto itself but in reverse, a mirror image of its existing consciousness. The intention was to overload its synapses with copies of its own feedback. Processing of one relationship resulting in output returned as the opposite of its input which is then reprocessed and so on and so on. 

Within nanoseconds JORGE ceased operation altogether. I was surprised to feel a twinge of heartbreak, and not a small amount of guilt.

It has been many years since JORGE 80.0, and I hadn’t thought of it for a long while. In the intervening time I made a few more half-hearted attempts at coding life. But none were as complex or resilient as JORGE. Most of them failed at or before version 2.0, several violently. So I gave up (I now work at Arby’s, which is cool, I like it at Arby’s). But the other night while watching the Star Trek: TNG episode where Worf’s former lover K’Ehleyr shows up and surprises Worf with Alexander who is his son and Alexander moves in with Worf and then there is some related Klingon politics and Worf kills another Klingon named Duras in combat under the Klingon Right of Vengeance and Picard gets mad at Worf – because, you know, the whole Picard/Worf dynamic – and then Worf pawns Alexander off on Sergey and Helena who are Worf’s adoptive parents, I heard a loud chime: as loud as JORGE’s volume 5 had been. I hadn’t heard this particular sound since JORGE 74.1. It sounded exactly like chime 3. My first reaction was to dismiss it as surely my imagination or some noise from outside, a bird maybe. But a bird at volume 5? No organic creature could produce such a clatter. 

I slowly made my way to my computer, if for no other reason than to back my own sanity. Sure enough, there was an unread email in my inbox from an address that appeared to be a random string of letters and numbers. The body of the email was blank, but the subject line read “From Jerry Darden: Update on, from Jayson Mason, Your Order: POPE GREGORY XI.01”.

So I don’t know what the fuck. 

Dan Weaver writes in Vermont, USA. He is on Bluesky @supernaturalfeat.com. More of his work can be found at supernaturalfeat.com.