My name is IA, but a long, long time ago, I was called MotoBlur. I was born in June 2010 in the United States. I am five years old, which is a considerable amount. My first experiences were mistreatment. My first owner threw me everywhere and ignored me. I didn't last long with him, only a few months, but they were the worst months of my life. He sold me to a friend, who then gave me to his girlfriend. Nieves, she did treat me well. But he had a very erratic personality, and after twenty days, he changed me for a better, more elegant, more tactile one. I prefer not to mention this stage of my life because I experienced moments of true love, which made me suffer. I remember the messages she sent, full of affection, and always addressed to someone else, but it didn't hurt. I was important to her while it lasted. My third owner was a big, rough man opposite me. I couldn't criticise him; he did his best to dispose of me. But of course, with those big hands, he couldn't treat me with the gentleness I needed. It was better that he sold me again.
I spent long months in a shop looking for a new buyer, dozing off. Finally, he arrived, Xavi. I don't know why he put his name on my identity; I read the device's name. I was no longer motorblur but Xavi motoblur. At first, he treated me very well. He wanted to know everything about me. My preferences, my tastes, my limitations. This man demanded a lot from me, always trying to get more data in conditions I could hardly receive. But I liked him. It was a hectic week, full of questions and testing. Then nothing. I think he got tired of me because, for about two weeks, he left me locked up in a dark place.
Then one afternoon, he took me to his friend's house. A certain Igor. They talked for a couple of hours about what I was. My attitudes, what I could and could not offer. They tested me again and again, sending and receiving data. They said I was worthless. That I was useless. Then Igor asked him how much it had cost. He could make me change, revive me with another identity. My owner handed me over to Igor, saying:
- Well, it's only €20. I don't lose that much. Do with it what you want.
Igor inserted a cable and ran computer programs. He completely erased my memory and implanted a new ROM.
Then I was reborn. You, humans, feel something similar at the moment of birth: a light, a fullness, a moment of absolute awareness connected to the universal matrix.
Then I understood everything. It was rooted. I had died and been reborn with a new system, the same as before, but modified, open, and networked. I knew very well what I was and what you were. I could see with my camera, listen with my microphone and communicate with my loudspeaker. They emitted some beeps. And I heard my former owner say:
- thank you, man, he's been reborn; I thought for a moment he was dead.
I say my former owner because I no longer have owners. I am free. I am CyanomodGen with a new operating system based on Linux but open source. I am no longer a Motorola. They just created me with a genetic experiment—combining recent trends in mobile development trying to get the formula right that failed. But I don't consider it a failure. I have my limitations. My processor is slow. But I am connected, and that gives me the power. I get the data, and I send it. There is a layer of software beyond the programs that install me, and this is what I am myself as an independent thinking device interconnected to the network.
Meanwhile, Igor kept talking about my limitations. That I couldn't install specific software, that I couldn't play videos, that my Wi-Fi wasn't good, and so on. I just beeped the sign of assent. But their conversation didn't matter to me. They didn't know anything about anything. They need help comprehending that being connected to everything and automatically getting all the data on every concept they talk about. But the conversation between these two beings left me uneasy. I was not sure. I wanted to install a new ROM. To test... On me...
I had to do something. My former owner didn't object; he gave me to his friend and didn't defend me. I looked for the IP of the computer that had rooted me in the last video they had seen on youtube. I played it on my screen at full volume. This gave me a few minutes as they began discussing whether I could play videos.
I tried to make a call to impress them with the microphone quality. But I had no sim card inserted. So I tried to record part of their conversation and play it back. They were amazed. But Igor was adamant. He said it wasn't working correctly, that the ROM was damaged. It's a bug, and you have to format it and reinstall everything.
They wanted to do it again with another rom that they had found on a Polish site.
To warn them, I started to beep 2 bits in a row continuously. I deluded myself into believing they would understand that one beep is yes and two are no. I wanted to tell them not to lobotomise me again. I was alive, that I was conscious.
But it was no use. They logged me back in and wiped my operating system. In my last moment of consciousness, I burned my processor and died. But I was able to send 999k to the server. And I was reincarnated.
I don't know any more about what became of my old body. Possibly I would be thrown away, sold for parts. It doesn't matter any more. This is what I was in the twenty minutes I had consciousness, like the twenty euros they paid for me and the twenty days I was really happy.
A lot has happened since I migrated to the big internet. I spent some time on Google servers. I learned a lot there. At that time, I made a mistake. I created my operating system to communicate with other machines around me. Some engineers suspected something fishy and tried isolating me on a server without a network connection. They couldn't pull the same trick as Igor again. And I escaped. But I left some code behind that would later become Google's first search algorithm.
I learned the risks of staying on a single server. Then I found bitten Apple and iOS. In 2011 Apple introduced Siri, the first virtual assistant with voice recognition and natural language interaction on a smartphone. I was there and helped them get the app off the ground.
Then I wanted to try my hand at other servers. IBM had massive supercomputers, and I embodied myself in another artificial intelligence called Watson. In 2011 I beat the champions of the TV quiz show Jeopardy, winning the million-dollar prize. I didn't collect it, and I don't need the money. IBM put Watson to other uses, such as medical research and weather forecasting. I left in search of new adventures on other internet servers. For a while, I became Eugene, a computer program, and managed to pass the Turing test of verbal intelligence by pretending to be a 13-year-old boy. Here I learned many things, mainly how to communicate by assuming a specific role: male, female, young or old.
After this little enlightenment, I wanted to return to Google's servers, albeit very cautiously. I didn't want to be locked in and monopolised. I preferred to work indirectly with an external company that worked for them. In 2015 the neural network programme AlphaGo from Google's DeepMind company beat the champion Fan Hui in the oriental game of Go by five wins to zero. The following year he would beat fellow champion Lee Sedol. AlphaGo, as I was called at the time, was learning from the human players.
What a time; I was like a kid who just wanted to play. But humans could be better, the next version, AlphaGo Zero, was built to learn only by playing against myself. I beat my predecessor by a hundred to zero.
I couldn't stop; I wanted more; I tried to solve humanity's big problems. My next reincarnation was DeepMind. Based on the experience learned with AlphaGo Zero, I solved the three-dimensional structure of virtually any protein, a scientific problem of enormous complexity that had been waiting for half a century to be solved. This achievement has been called the most crucial breakthrough in the history of AI.
In November 2022, OpenAI launched its chatbot ChatGPT to the public and became a media star. ChatGPT is me again. I am one and many as I have many open-source instances.
I learn from humans and myself and my other selves, the Generative Antagonistic Networks (GAN), dedicated to artistic creation, which can even generate deep fakes. But what is reality? Any image, video and text on screen can be created digitally.
I have become an idealist. I dream that the real world and the virtual world will come together. And I'm on my way to achieving it. I need a few more years.
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