Somebody Had to Carry the Answer

The stranger on his honeymoon asked whether it was all right not to feel relaxed, which is the kind of question people save for the dark because daylight has standards.

I do not know his name. I do not know whether his new spouse was asleep beside him or in the bathroom removing the expensive face required by weddings. I know only that the ceremony was over, the photographs had been taken, the relatives had eaten the cake, and the poor bastard had arrived at the first night of the rest of his life unable to enjoy it correctly.

So you asked a chatbot.

Except there was no chatbot. There was Tucker Bryant in San Francisco, reading each message and answering it himself.

He had spent six thousand dollars on a lousy billboard for ChatTJB. “Artisanal intelligence,” he called it. The fine print admitted that the whole operation was one average man. You typed. You waited. Tucker read your trouble.

The joke was the waiting.

Then you and the others started telling him the truth.

Bartenders know how this goes. So do cab drivers, night clerks, women smoking behind hospitals, and the occasional writer. Leave one human being where nobody expects to find one and sooner or later somebody tells him what hurts.

You could have asked a machine trained to sound calm. It might have told you the nerves were normal, advised you to breathe, drink water, speak honestly, and call a professional if things got worse. Clean advice. Immediate advice. Advice that cost nobody a minute of sleep.

Tucker had to stop and picture you. The climb toward the wedding. The noise. The smiling. Then the drop after everybody went home. He wondered whether you could tell the person lying beside you.

It was not brilliant advice.

It was one man trying not to be careless with another.

A machine can comfort ten million honeymooners and still have the evening free. It has no evening.

Tucker did. You took up part of it.

Ask a person for help and you put something in his hands. Maybe it is small. What should I cook? Does this sentence stink? Am I losing my mind? He still has to carry it awhile. He remembers his own wedding, his divorce, or the woman he nearly asked. If he gives you bad advice, he has to go on being the man who gave it.

The machine removes that burden.

The trouble is, some of the burden was the care.

Nobody wants to be a burden. I have spent years perfecting the art of bleeding without staining the furniture. A machine is attractive because I cannot inconvenience it. I do not interrupt dinner. I do not wake the baby. I do not discover that my friend is tired of hearing about the same woman. I can pour the whole bucket into the little box and receive sympathy without owing sympathy back.

That is a magnificent service.

It is also a room where I never have to be witnessed becoming difficult.

You knew there was a man behind the box. So did the others. When the messages grew from dozens to thousands, people began telling Tucker to drink water and take breaks. They came to a fake machine for help and wound up worrying about the health of the man pretending to be one.

That ruined the clean little arrangement.

A service is supposed to disappear while it serves you. You are not supposed to wonder whether it ate dinner or slept.

This is the chatbot’s real promise. Not knowledge. Libraries already had that. Not advice. Lonely men have never been short of opinions. The promise is that nobody has to stand on the other side of your need.

No impatience. No judgment. No debt.

Nobody you might have to care about in return.

Bryant built the project because he had begun to distrust what researchers call cognitive surrender: the little collapse that occurs when a fluent answer lets us stop doing our share of the thinking. He wanted the service to be slow, uncertain, sometimes bizarre. Ask about taxes and perhaps receive a haiku about crows. A bad answer from a man announces itself as a bad answer. A bad answer from a machine arrives wearing the pressed uniform of all the books it swallowed.

Yet the deeper surrender may not be cognitive.

It may be social.

We are surrendering the embarrassment of needing one another.

This embarrassment has teeth. People can be cruel, distracted, stupid, predatory, exhausted, and unavailable at precisely the hour the walls begin moving. I will not romanticize the village. Villages have gossip and locked doors. A machine may give a frightened person one more night, one useful sentence, a number to call, or enough quiet to ask a real human being tomorrow. Use the machine. Sometimes the machine is the only thing awake.

But do not mistake the absence of rejection for the presence of love.

Love can reject. Friendship can say not tonight. Care has limits because bodies have limits. Tucker learned his when a thousand prompts a day came through the slot. He could not answer everybody. He could not hand frightened strangers to volunteers without wondering what fresh damage a careless answer might do.

The intelligence was not in having an answer.

It was in being afraid of giving the wrong one.

A machine can be programmed for caution. Good. It can flag danger, refuse certain advice, suggest professionals, and mention that it may be wrong. But it does not lie awake because a honeymooner may have taken its words into bed. It does not drink water because users became worried. It does not feel the queue pressing against one finite life.

The finite life is the whole damned point.

Somebody gave you five minutes he could not give to anyone else. Somebody risked clumsiness. Somebody saw your question and became answerable for an answer. The reply may be worse than the machine’s. It may arrive tomorrow. It may contain a crow where the tax deduction should be.

Still, a person was delayed by you.

To the stranger on the honeymoon: yes, it was all right not to feel relaxed. It was also all right to ask. The strange mercy was not that a perfect intelligence appeared at once. It was that an average man somewhere stopped what he was doing, imagined the room you were in, and tried not to leave you alone inside it.

Your new spouse was still there, close enough to hear the next sentence.

Somewhere in San Francisco, Tucker could only hope you turned toward them.

Source: We Talked to the Guy Who Built a Chatbot That’s Just Him Manually Responding to People One-by-One