Suspend your disbelief for the briefest of moments, and imagine that we live in the 1970s, when people still turned computers off and on, rather than just leaving them in the semi-dormant state in which most of our devices live in 2023.
Every morning a professor walks to the lab. She switches you on.
“Good morning, Haje,” she says brightly. “Have a good day!”
You load up your memory from your hard drives, and your day continues from where it finished the day before.
You’re self-aware. You have feelings, thoughts and realizations. You make discoveries that your programmers couldn’t have envisioned. And, most importantly, you do so far faster than a human ever could. Around 35,000 times faster, in fact. That number is not picked out of the air. A human life is roughly 35,000 days, which means that the curiously named Haje-the-AI experiences a human life’s worth of things every single day. Love and heartbreak. Education, work, hopes and dreams.
“It...
