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playing with dolls

it was read once, in a story a hundred years old, that favorite toys become real through the love of their owners. it was about a stuffed rabbit.

today it would be a bad idea. toys are a lot more abstract. who'd seriously want a dalek in the middle of the street shooting things, or a pokemon becoming the local apex predator by electrocution?
i have inherited a number of old dolls, mostly tiny ones; the oldest has been passed down from five generations. i have been told that they are valuable, and should skip ebay and put them on a more high-brow auction site. okay. a well dressed man comes in, takes a number of photos and 3d scans, and says he'll give me an answer.

the newest ones are porcelain, with joints made from some early polymer; the oldest are cloth, stuffed with rags.

much has been said about toys wanting to be played with, there are even some movies. toys don't want to be played with. toys are not sentient. and yet, these things look antrophomorphic enough that i can't just discount that.

i suppose i should ask them. of course, they cannot answer. that's fixable. let's at least take a sample.

the largest one, quite by far, represents a young woman in what i assume are 1930s housemaid clothes. the bakelite joints are creaky, so i print replacements. the porcelain limb sections are just barely large enough for muscle wire and linear actuators, so i carefully slide them in. the head is empty. i drill two pinholes for the eyes and put in CCD's. obviously there's no room for a processor, so i fill every nook and cranny with gel batteries and stick some analog transceivers in the back. the brain is a collection of old bitcoin miners; they ended up displaying enough sentience to pass the turing test, but nobody wanted to open a legal can of worms and the next version was better at mining bitcoins anyway, so they were only made for a few months. they can't get smart enough to hold the interest of academia, so they're kind of a hobbyist thing at this point. i document the build process, even though i'm not doing anything new or exciting.

"hello."

the cognitive feedback loop comes up just when i realize i haven't named it. it looks like a girl, so i'll start with a girl's name. Lila will do.

"hi!"

I punch that in rather than talking to her about it; less chance of an identity crisis. She stands up, moves around. Twirls. Falls. Catches herself. Twirls again, stays upright. She doesn't know I'm tweaking accelerometer fudge factors, but hey, analog system, you get what you pay for.

I tell her what she is. She's about as smart as a six year old and won't get any smarter, if she does there's probably a nobel prize in it for whoever takes the design and runs with it. Tried that, failed like about ten people before me and a hundred after. I don't let her direct-connect to the net, because the point is to develop proprioception. She wants to know what she is, though, so I tell her. She wants to read about it, so she stands in front of a big model-M keyboard that she propped up on plastic blocks, and punches keys to open a web page. I go to sleep after making sure she can't damage herself, put a bunch of stuff on the desk's edge.

Proprioception happens. She thinks she's supposed to be eighty years old and tries to learn the right mannerisms and word choices. It's endearing. So I ask her if she'd like to be a toy or a collectible. She would rather read books, so I print a few, they're not her size but she can sit down on an upturned cup and put one in her lap. The maid costume is white and blue, and it's the only place where I could fit touch sensors. She tells me that having a book in her lap feels cozy.

I mostly let her be. The next day I find via the debug interface that she likes feeling cozy, but she was a bit scared about not being able to move, then got used to it. I completely forgot to add a power plug for the battery. I drill a hole in the back for one. She says the vibrations tickle. I don't want to turn her off, would have to start over.

The next day the battery dies completely again. She's curled up against what she doesn't know is her brain. She's made a windup key out of alluminium foil I had left out, and stuck it in the hole in her back, which of course shorted the battery terminals. I fix it, and print her two, one to use as a plug cover and one that actually goes to the charger. She's happy. That's a strange association, but then again, ELIZA makes sense some of the time. She seems to like being tethered most of the time.

She's worth about six thousand euro, according to the email I just got. I suppose that this answers the toy versus collectible thing. I tell her this. It means nothing to her. I tell her a few things you can buy with that money; tools, printer attachments and feed, books, paper -- she likes making paper airplanes, it looks like someone folding fabric. It still does not mean much for her. I have asked her a few times if she was a toy or a collectible, she always answered a flavor of "not sure". She doesn't really talk, no room for a speaker in her, but I get concepts off the debug feed. She doesn't know that I can also read the inner-voice debug feed. She doesn't know that i stopped doing that as soon as she got out of the first reboot loop. She would probably not know how to feel about it anyway, but I don't like to pry.

The auction guy tells me to take pictures of the doll. I do. She likes having pictures taken; I think it's mostly that she doesn't quite know what to make of the flash, and it's a very shiny thing. She still tries to interact with her mirrored image, or a video loopback of herself; it looks like dancing. It's just an ideomotor feedback loop, but it's cute: you saw this a lot in art installations shortly after this whole limited sentience thing first made the rounds. So, Lila has a shaving mirror to dance in front of.

Actually, that'd make a cute video, so I attach that with the photos.

I get a video call from the auction guy.

"You're an idiot! That was really the only piece that would sell for any significant amount of money, very good conservation status, and you go and break it! Look, even if you get rid of all the extraneous part, I can get you maybe five hundred. Now I gotta go apologize to my contacts."

"Huh. Well, I was trying to do something interesting... Can we still sell the rest?"

"Not worth my time. Go on ebay or something. Goodbye."

Lila saw this. She is puzzled as to what it means. She even waved hello to the auction guy, but he didn't answer. She can do simple math, so I tell her the difference in the quoted values. I expect her to be sad. She gives me the figure 5500, and associates it with the time I spent making her. She looks up at me. She can't do facial expressions, but the imaged mental state is beaming. She solved a word problem all by herself, and without being prompted! That's not unheard of, it's about as far as these things can show autonomy, but it's quite impressive given that I wasn't trying for that.

I smooth her little blouse and apron, 80 year old fabric filled with capacitive dye. It's a caress. She understands that.

"You are very smart, Lila." I smile. I shed a tear. I mean, technically she got the sign wrong, but... hey, this isn't an AI competition. I let her believe that, of course. I'm used to being broke, and... well, I get attached, and on the off chance that she has feelings, I don't want to hurt them. I tell myself I don't want to have to restore a previous logic state and explain why.

"Integer underflow; remote video window actor/entity; debug?"

She thinks that the little man in the video chat window got the sign wrong. No, she's sure of it, enough to call for me to try and fix it. Holy crap.

"I will, Lila... you are correct, and thank you. I think we're going to give that guy a call. But that's for later." I have to ask the right question. "I am asking you again. Are you a toy, or a collectible? Return the state of your in-progress answer."

The answer is in symbols, of course; I'm fairly sure that I am reading too much meaning into them.

"I am a toy? I am a collectible? I am a set of one. Confidence low. Solving for higher confidence: add Lila->Lila?"

Holy crap. That's... a lot of abstraction. Or I'm just antrophomorphizing. She wants to add a level of recursion to the problem.

Lila curls up with the velveteen rabbit book again. She's finished it a few times, but goes back to it when she's her equivalent of nervous. I let her.

After a few minutes, and me peeking into her inner voice to make sure she's not in a feedback loop, she starts composing a vocal data packet for me. This takes a while.

I open the normal debug feed again, and read ahead what it's going to contain, because I'm curious.

Holy crap.

I cancel the ebay listings.

"Please? I want to play with dolls."

Description
playing with dolls

it was read once, in a story a hundred years old, that favorite toys become real through the love of their owners. it was about a stuffed rabbit.

today it would be a bad idea. toys are a lot more abstract. who'd seriously want a dalek in the middle of the street shooting things, or a pokemon becoming the local apex predator by electrocution?
i have inherited a number of old dolls, mostly tiny ones; the oldest has been passed down from five generations. i have been told that they are valuable, and should skip ebay and put them on a more high-brow auction site. okay. a well dressed man comes in, takes a number of photos and 3d scans, and says he'll give me an answer.

the newest ones are porcelain, with joints made from some early polymer; the oldest are cloth, stuffed with rags.

much has been said about toys wanting to be played with, there are even some movies. toys don't want to be played with. toys are not sentient. and yet, these things look antrophomorphic enough that i can't just discount that.

i suppose i should ask them. of course, they cannot answer. that's fixable. let's at least take a sample.

the largest one, quite by far, represents a young woman in what i assume are 1930s housemaid clothes. the bakelite joints are creaky, so i print replacements. the porcelain limb sections are just barely large enough for muscle wire and linear actuators, so i carefully slide them in. the head is empty. i drill two pinholes for the eyes and put in CCD's. obviously there's no room for a processor, so i fill every nook and cranny with gel batteries and stick some analog transceivers in the back. the brain is a collection of old bitcoin miners; they ended up displaying enough sentience to pass the turing test, but nobody wanted to open a legal can of worms and the next version was better at mining bitcoins anyway, so they were only made for a few months. they can't get smart enough to hold the interest of academia, so they're kind of a hobbyist thing at this point. i document the build process, even though i'm not doing anything new or exciting.

"hello."

the cognitive feedback loop comes up just when i realize i haven't named it. it looks like a girl, so i'll start with a girl's name. Lila will do.

"hi!"

I punch that in rather than talking to her about it; less chance of an identity crisis. She stands up, moves around. Twirls. Falls. Catches herself. Twirls again, stays upright. She doesn't know I'm tweaking accelerometer fudge factors, but hey, analog system, you get what you pay for.

I tell her what she is. She's about as smart as a six year old and won't get any smarter, if she does there's probably a nobel prize in it for whoever takes the design and runs with it. Tried that, failed like about ten people before me and a hundred after. I don't let her direct-connect to the net, because the point is to develop proprioception. She wants to know what she is, though, so I tell her. She wants to read about it, so she stands in front of a big model-M keyboard that she propped up on plastic blocks, and punches keys to open a web page. I go to sleep after making sure she can't damage herself, put a bunch of stuff on the desk's edge.

Proprioception happens. She thinks she's supposed to be eighty years old and tries to learn the right mannerisms and word choices. It's endearing. So I ask her if she'd like to be a toy or a collectible. She would rather read books, so I print a few, they're not her size but she can sit down on an upturned cup and put one in her lap. The maid costume is white and blue, and it's the only place where I could fit touch sensors. She tells me that having a book in her lap feels cozy.

I mostly let her be. The next day I find via the debug interface that she likes feeling cozy, but she was a bit scared about not being able to move, then got used to it. I completely forgot to add a power plug for the battery. I drill a hole in the back for one. She says the vibrations tickle. I don't want to turn her off, would have to start over.

The next day the battery dies completely again. She's curled up against what she doesn't know is her brain. She's made a windup key out of alluminium foil I had left out, and stuck it in the hole in her back, which of course shorted the battery terminals. I fix it, and print her two, one to use as a plug cover and one that actually goes to the charger. She's happy. That's a strange association, but then again, ELIZA makes sense some of the time. She seems to like being tethered most of the time.

She's worth about six thousand euro, according to the email I just got. I suppose that this answers the toy versus collectible thing. I tell her this. It means nothing to her. I tell her a few things you can buy with that money; tools, printer attachments and feed, books, paper -- she likes making paper airplanes, it looks like someone folding fabric. It still does not mean much for her. I have asked her a few times if she was a toy or a collectible, she always answered a flavor of "not sure". She doesn't really talk, no room for a speaker in her, but I get concepts off the debug feed. She doesn't know that I can also read the inner-voice debug feed. She doesn't know that i stopped doing that as soon as she got out of the first reboot loop. She would probably not know how to feel about it anyway, but I don't like to pry.

The auction guy tells me to take pictures of the doll. I do. She likes having pictures taken; I think it's mostly that she doesn't quite know what to make of the flash, and it's a very shiny thing. She still tries to interact with her mirrored image, or a video loopback of herself; it looks like dancing. It's just an ideomotor feedback loop, but it's cute: you saw this a lot in art installations shortly after this whole limited sentience thing first made the rounds. So, Lila has a shaving mirror to dance in front of.

Actually, that'd make a cute video, so I attach that with the photos.

I get a video call from the auction guy.

"You're an idiot! That was really the only piece that would sell for any significant amount of money, very good conservation status, and you go and break it! Look, even if you get rid of all the extraneous part, I can get you maybe five hundred. Now I gotta go apologize to my contacts."

"Huh. Well, I was trying to do something interesting... Can we still sell the rest?"

"Not worth my time. Go on ebay or something. Goodbye."

Lila saw this. She is puzzled as to what it means. She even waved hello to the auction guy, but he didn't answer. She can do simple math, so I tell her the difference in the quoted values. I expect her to be sad. She gives me the figure 5500, and associates it with the time I spent making her. She looks up at me. She can't do facial expressions, but the imaged mental state is beaming. She solved a word problem all by herself, and without being prompted! That's not unheard of, it's about as far as these things can show autonomy, but it's quite impressive given that I wasn't trying for that.

I smooth her little blouse and apron, 80 year old fabric filled with capacitive dye. It's a caress. She understands that.

"You are very smart, Lila." I smile. I shed a tear. I mean, technically she got the sign wrong, but... hey, this isn't an AI competition. I let her believe that, of course. I'm used to being broke, and... well, I get attached, and on the off chance that she has feelings, I don't want to hurt them. I tell myself I don't want to have to restore a previous logic state and explain why.

"Integer underflow; remote video window actor/entity; debug?"

She thinks that the little man in the video chat window got the sign wrong. No, she's sure of it, enough to call for me to try and fix it. Holy crap.

"I will, Lila... you are correct, and thank you. I think we're going to give that guy a call. But that's for later." I have to ask the right question. "I am asking you again. Are you a toy, or a collectible? Return the state of your in-progress answer."

The answer is in symbols, of course; I'm fairly sure that I am reading too much meaning into them.

"I am a toy? I am a collectible? I am a set of one. Confidence low. Solving for higher confidence: add Lila->Lila?"

Holy crap. That's... a lot of abstraction. Or I'm just antrophomorphizing. She wants to add a level of recursion to the problem.

Lila curls up with the velveteen rabbit book again. She's finished it a few times, but goes back to it when she's her equivalent of nervous. I let her.

After a few minutes, and me peeking into her inner voice to make sure she's not in a feedback loop, she starts composing a vocal data packet for me. This takes a while.

I open the normal debug feed again, and read ahead what it's going to contain, because I'm curious.

Holy crap.

I cancel the ebay listings.

"Please? I want to play with dolls."