“I’m fully ambitious,” I said.
She ordered a vodka martini, extra dirty, and I was so nervous I ordered a Diet Coke even though I hate Diet Coke.
“So tell me about this Empathy Module.”
I shrugged out of my giant coat. “You know far better than I do that the last parts of the brain to be mapped are the ones that control our emotions.”
“I do know better than you do,” she said. The blue of her eyes was so light, I felt like I was looking into a church window. I couldn’t help staring. “I’m a cyborg,” she said, taking off her glasses and inviting me to look deeper.
“What do you mean?”
“My eyes. They’re transplants. I would’ve gone blind without them.”
“Wow.”
“His name was Hans Eikelheimer. His wife sometimes emails me.”
We raised our glasses to Hans, and I thought at that moment that she had decided to make me her friend.
“I don’t think we can get to the ultimate reaches of the brain by mapping,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think that’s the only way. It needs to be paired with other types of modeling, especially when it comes to emotional intelligence.”
“We already know that.”
“But how do we reach empathy? If we want our robots to be like us, we need to get beyond the algorithmic layers of intelligence and ensure that the AI of the future has the ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. It’s not just a way to make them more human. We should focus on making them better than us, not like us.”
“Okay, that’s novel. You think that’s how we’re going to survive the Singularity?”
“Yes, by making them greater—not smarter but kinder. More affected by the pain of others.”
“You want to save the world.”
“Why else would I be here?” I said, beaming.
I pranced home in my enormous coat, smug in the conviction that she was, in some tiny way, going to reciprocate my crush.
* * *
But after that evening, Dr. Stein and I did not, in fact, become friends. She avoided eye contact when we bumped into each other, and during our advisory meetings she picked on tiny aspects of the module, telling me it would never work to map the neural pathways the way I was proposing because we didn’t know how emotional information traveled, insisting that, until the entire brain had been reverse-engineered, we wouldn’t know how the limbic system truly worked. I always spent hours rewinding through our brief exchanges and coming up with better arguments which I would practice later, when it was too late.
Four years into my PhD, at the start of another summer of research in my overly air-conditioned lab, I was informed that my high school English teacher, Mrs. Butterfield, had died. When I got the message—a text from an unknown number—I was reminded of all the times I’d meant to write to her but never had. The message said, Please bring a sentence from a favorite novel to Mrs. Butterfield’s service. An invitation followed.
I’d never been to a white person’s funeral, but I knew I was supposed to wear black, so I put on a turtleneck and spent the ride down from Boston rolling my chosen sentence around in my mind. Mrs. Butterfield always knew I was more devoted to science than literature, but she didn’t hold it against me—she believed that I deserved novels as much as the students who went around quoting David Foster Wallace. I should have kept in touch.
When I entered the auditorium, I saw some familiar faces—a few teachers; the principal, Mr. Gatney; Iris and Ruby, the twins who formed a band my senior year called One Placenta; and even some of the boys who were never seen without their shiny varsity jackets. I said some awkward hellos, silently judging everyone yet annoyed when they didn’t remember me. We shuffled into our seats; the lights went down and up again, and standing in the middle of the stage was Cyrus Jones.
His head was bent over a microphone. “Mrs. Butterfield’s family—her niece Elizabeth and her nephew Constantine—were, sadly, not able to travel from California to be here, and they asked me to conduct today’s celebration in their stead.” He spoke slowly, and it sounded like he had a slight English accent, and I was going to have a stroke.
“You will remember Mrs. Butterfield as the teacher who impressed Shakespeare and Hemingway upon you. You will remember that she drove to school every morning in her pristine Volkswagen Beetle. You will remember her kindness and her solitude. As she passes, we celebrate all of this, but it also gives us an opportunity to celebrate what we didn’t know.