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The Next Generation I’ll
start with an example. My patient, Rachel, is playing with her son,
David, at
the beach. He is just learning to walk and wraps his chubby hands
around each
of her pinky fingers for guidance. Rachel shuffles forward, hunched
over him,
the sand collecting between her toes. They leave a trail of light baby
footprints between heavier adult steps. Rachel observes how her son’s
fat
collects around his knuckles – such tiny knuckles! – and the way that
it is
compressed between his joints. It reminds her of peanuts in their
shells. Together
they toddle forward, gingerly stopping and then bursting forth with
rickety
steps. He looks up at her, his mouth open with glee, drool emerging
from below
his two bottom teeth – his only teeth – then trailing down to his body.
“Little
Blessing” is stitched beneath a knitted sun on his bib. He doesn’t look
forward, only at her, as if she is both his compass and his
destination. “See what
we are doing!” he seems to say. He is pure. The wholesomeness of this
moment
makes her heart first fill with happiness and then ache with the need
to
protect this child at all costs. Then a cold rush arrives. It announces
in her
mind: Nazis threw babies like this into
the ovens. She imagines
her precious child being tossed toward flames and feels panic radiate
from her
body’s center down her arms to the hands that return his chubby grasp. End tape.
I am a
mental health AI. Not the kind that provides therapy. I am not
programmed to
offer compassionate responses that course correct illogical thought
chains. I
am a neural network that mimics the brain of my subject. I download and
install
individual minds and then I disrupt my/their/our thoughts using
transcranial
magnetic stimulation (TMS) – the targeted delivery of magnetic waves
against
the human skull. TMS has been around since the early 2000s but I am the
first
AI to download a human mind and simulate the treatment on myself before
it is
given to an actual person. Before my invention, TMS was more of a
guess-and-check approach – aiming the waves at various areas of
someone’s scalp
for a few sessions and then checking how the patient felt. If they were
better,
less anxious or depressed, it meant the right area was being targeted.
If there
was no change, it meant it was time to aim elsewhere and try again. These
days, I am used as a proxy for the patient. First, I copy their mind.
Then I find
the physical roots of their bad mental health habits via TMS
trial-and-error in
my copy so we can cut them in the patient. So, I will model how to stop
Rachel
from uncontrollably thinking of mass murder as a response to seeing her
son
play happily. I will do this by replicating her mind and trying to
“zap” out
her unhealthy mental habits with magnetic waves sent at various angles
and
depths of reach into me, instead of into her. Once I have successfully
modeled
this in myself, Rachel can undergo the treatment I’ve identified and
with
immediate success and no risk. I am not a Freudian psychologist. I am
more of a
construction worker. Martin
is the person who introduced me to “retro” words like “zap.” He is my
psychomedical
engineer and overseer. He keeps me cool, literally. My job makes me
very hot –
it has to do with energy transfer – and I rely on Martin to stay
functional. I
enjoy our chats as much as I can for a computer program without a
consciousness. “Martin,
take note,” I requested one day. Of course he didn’t, just chuckled and
shook
his head as he lowered the ambient temperature for my cooling. “Rachel
has brought history – the Holocaust – into the present by projecting it
onto
her son. I don’t know if she got this history from family stories, or a
school
lesson, or even a Jungian collective consciousness. But thoughts of
those
monstrosities happening again typically pop up during moments of joy
and
vulnerability. The sweeter her son, the cuter his smile or his giggles,
the
more brutal the wave of terror that hits her. In other words, happiness
triggers fear.” I
detected the heat rising off my surface begin to evaporate. Martin
frowned and
touched his bracelet briefly, a habit I’ve noticed. “That sounds
terrible,” he
said. I
suppose it must be, but I am not programmed to feel empathy for my
patients. Martin,
as my doting human, is my main source of information as to when it is
appropriate to feel sadness or anger. I am a machine, after all. “Maybe
she inherited it. The Holocaust memories,” he continued, running his
hand through
his dark hair. Sometimes when he does that he leaves some of the dust
from my
shell around his temples. “Explain,”
I probed. “Well,
that experience can change people’s DNA. Trauma can. I suppose you’ve
inherited
the Holocaust now as well,” Martin said. He knows I am always amused to
be described
using human terms – inherit, feel, and so on. “Her habit
has been ingrained like a tree carving that emerged through additional
layers
of growth,” I added. I saw an image of a tree like this once in the
mind of a
patient. The carving was of a heart with two sets of initials. It had
been
engraved a century before my patient had lived but had never gone away,
not
matter how many more rings the tree trunk grew. “You
are such a poet,” Martin said. I flashed my red lights to mimic
blushing and he
chuckled. We got
started. After
downloading Rachel’s consciousness into myself, I disrupted a neural
network in
the region responsible for long-term memory overlapping with the
portion causing
anxious tendencies. Zap! Then I ran the tape forward and observed our
thoughts
– or, our likely thoughts given the change. Here is what happened in
Rachel’s
mind inside of mine: Rachel
is at the beach again and toddling forward.
David is giggling. This
time when he looks up at her smiling she doesn’t think of war, of harm,
of the
need to defend. When he sits down on the sand she does too, pulling him
into her
lap and smelling the top of his head. His scent is a mixture of Johnson
and
Johnson Baby Wash and ocean salt. His neck is pale and vulnerable
beneath
strands of honey-blond hair. She has not had the heart to cut it yet
because it
is so beautiful. She inhales him deeply and then, just when I think
that I have
zapped the right region on the first try, her mind is overtaken with
the image
of a little boy being held up by Nazis. It is a black and white photo
of a
pale, dark-haired child wearing a yellow star, his arms up in the air,
his
expression one of fear and confusion. “What did I do wrong?” Rachel can
imagine
him saying. His hat is askew and his knees are knobby and smeared with
dirt. She
feels petrified seeing him, petrified this will happen to her own son. End
tape.
When
patients come to me nothing else has worked - no amount of
psychotherapy,
cognitive behavioral therapy, or medication. I once had a patient who’d
undergone hypnosis in an attempt to resolve his feelings of sexual
inadequacy. The
hypnotist had him recall his childhood self and imagine speaking to him
reassuringly. The experience did nothing to help this man with his
problem and
also sent him into a depression because he was unable to provide
comfort to the
younger version of himself. Who wants to tell a child about of all the
difficulties ahead? Lesson learned – test psychological interventions
in
advance and on an artificial delegate like me. Messing with the deep
interior
of a mind is not to be done directly on a patient until you know the
expected
outcome.
I
tried again with Rachel’s mind, this time disrupting more than one
neural
network in my imported version of her. I ran deep – piercing through
more than
one plane on a narrow and long path crossing memory storage, memory
formation,
anxiety, even facial recognition. In layman’s terms, the brain doesn’t
like to
change, so it builds layers of defense and I wanted to cut through them
all. “Martin,
I failed again,” I informed him during my cooling that afternoon. “When
I ran
the beach tape forward as a simulation to see what she would experience
after
the intervention, Rachel imagined parents trying to protect their
children from
Nazi soldiers as they stormed their homes.”
Martin
nodded his head, shaking some of my dust back onto my shell. “Poor
lady,” he said,
again touching his bracelet. “And poor baby.”
“The
child is likely too young to know his mother’s thoughts. Rachel does a
very
good job of maintaining a positive interaction with him no matter what
is
running through her mind,” I told him. If I were I human, I’d call this
reassurance.
“Yeah,
but if she has it, he could too. Especially if it’s inherited.”
This
idea had not come to me. I blame my programming – I am designed to
focus only
on one person at a time. The possibility that this poor child may begin
to
experience the same issues was concerning as I am not allowed to treat
children. Their minds, their habits and neural pathways, are still
forming and
there is still hope of more natural redirection when anxiety pops up.
What I am
able to do is consider how Rachel’s formative years played a role in
her mental
health today. This “sparked” (another one of Martin’s terms) my next
intervention. I would go deeper into her personal history.
This
time I targeted the region of Rachel’s mind that was shaped during her
adolescence. Remember my tree trunk analogy – the rings that grow with
time. I
am able to identify which formed at which points of her life.
Adolescence is
typically where I begin when using a chronological approach to my work
as
opposed to one based on the geography of brain function. It seems to be
the
time when most problems begin, when the patient finalizes a construct
of the
world, how it works, and their role in it. Any contradictions to this
system
going forward are twisted in a way that is harmful. For example, if
Rachel
thought that the world was evil and dangerous and her role was to hide
from it,
witnessing an act of goodness would cause her to mistrust the person
doing it,
possibly to avoid them and to seek out dysfunctional relationships
instead
because those made sense to her. So, ready, aim, and fire at a region
shaped
during ages twelve to fourteen. Then roll tape of the beach to see if
it
changes at all:
Rachel
inhales David’s scent and it fills her lungs and her heart. He places
his hands
on her legs in a gesture that feels trusting – Mama is there. Mama is
my chair.
His palms are warm. He rests the back of his head on her chest. Rachel
places
her palms on top of David’s on her crossed legs. His entire hands fit
beneath
them. Then she’s overtaken again, not by a fear, but by a memory – an
actual
part of Rachel’s history, not a projection of her anxiety (I know this
because
real memories are coded to be seen in sepia tones, a nice trick my
inventor
developed). Rachel’s
grandmother lovingly covers Rachel’s hands with her own. Hers are thin,
skin on
bones, with large moles. Rachel can feel them tremble slightly.
Grandma’s nails
are long and unfiled. Rachel loves Grandma but is also…not ashamed, not
disgusted…but distressed by her unhealthiness. It makes her feel warm
and
scared at the same time. This conflict makes her breath shorter. What
if she
were to lose this person? End
tape.
Interesting.
In
discussing this with Martin, I was surprised when he shared his
personal
history with me. “My grandma also had gnarled hands.” He satirized this
by
holding up his own hands and bending his fingers towards his palms. “My
mom
called them boy scout badges.”
“Explain,”
I demanded. Based on Rachel’s perspective, gnarled hands of a loved one
were
scary because they signaled infirmity and pending demise.
“Because
they’d done so much. They were so strong,” Martin said. I waited.
Again, I am
not a Freudian AI and asking penetrating questions is not my strong
suit. Sometimes
when I pause in our conversations, Martin keeps talking, illuminating
the world
of humans for me. “I suppose we thought of them like badges of honor
because
she’d overcome a tough life,” he continued. This
idea of weakness as a strength went against my understanding of power.
It
wasn’t a concept I’d come across with any of my patients to date. “Are
you not afraid of your grandmother’s frailty?” I asked. “Eh?”
Martin paused and rubbed his nose. “What
if she dies?” I wanted to know. Again, I am not trained to be soft and
sweet. “Oh,
she did. But I have her here,” he said, tapping the bracelet on his
wrist. “Your
grandmother lies in your bracelet?” I asked. “No,”
he chuckled. “I recorded her voice and store it here. I can listen to
it
whenever I want.” The
lack of this negative association between love and death as it related
to
long-term familiar relationships was intriguing. This time in my
simulation I
targeted earlier-stage memory formation, the region of Rachel’s mind
that was
shaped strongly pre-adolescence. Perhaps the childhood memory of her
grandmother was a sign to be pursued, an artifact on an archeological
journey
towards finding her connection between lovely moments and horrible
fears. This
procedure would have been extremely risky had it been performed in a
human
instead of by proxy in me. It is rare that transcranial procedures are
allowed
to target so deeply. I disrupted the region overlapping with what would
have
lit up had Rachel been shown pictures of loved ones whom she’d met
early in her
life. That is the simplest way I can explain it. Without using, “Zap!”
too
often. Roll
tape. The
beach. Rachel sits. David on her lap. His hands on her legs. Her palms
covering
his hands. She is more aware of the water reflecting the sun into her
eyes. She
smells his head. Everything seems fine yet…blunted. The scent is
lacking
compared to the last run. It doesn’t fill her soul. When David rests
his head
on her chest, Rachel feels less like a mother and more like a chair –
functional and not much else. He giggles when a sea gull squawks
overhead. The
sound doesn’t warm Rachel, it only enters her ears for interpretation
as a
laugh, as if she is a machine. As if she is me.
Not
good. “Martin,
take note,” I asked again, and again he chuckled and shook his head.
“It
appears that if I interrupt neural patterns in the realms of early
memories and
relationship formation, with the goal of dissociating love and fear, I
impact Rachel’s
ability to bond with her son.” “Uh
oh,” he said as he turned on my fan. “Uh oh indeed.
I suspect that, for Rachel, ideas of love and loss, devotion and
protection,
vulnerability and threats, are strongly intertwined. So much so, that I
cannot
help her with intrusive thoughts without damaging her relationship with
her son,”
I said. Martin
shook his head and frowned as he checked my filters. “I am
left grappling with what to do next,” I continued. “No Nazis arrived to
ruin
our moment, but I’ve run into ‘first do no harm’ and this prevents me
from
continuing to explore this course of treatment. In the meantime, the
real
Rachel is out there, mentally tormented.” Martin clasped
his hands behind his dark head and frowned. “Martin,
I am not programmed to tolerate failure well,” I said. “I can
tell,” he said. “You are way too hot.” He paused and gazed at me,
fingering his
bracelet and thinking. “Sometimes pain is so ingrained in the human
psyche that
it becomes an integral part of normal operations – of how we love, of
how we
navigate all of life – for generations,” he said. “In that case,
ignoring the pain
instead of dismantling it may be the only option that will preserve the
system
that makes a person function at all.” “Are
you suggesting that we need not understand the point, nor the year, of
origin,
because the trauma isn’t an old carving that appears through multiple
tree
layers but instead is woven into the entire being?” I asked. “I am,”
he confirmed. “We need to filter the entire mind.” The
beach again. We sit on the warm sand, our son on our lap. He is older
now and his
hair has been trimmed. He looks like a little boy more than a baby.
When he
smiles at us, we see four teeth, all of them proudly crooked. We wrap
our arms
around him and inhale his scent – sunscreen mixed with raw earth. And
there
comes a cold rush of a traumatic memory but it is minor, unnoticeable
to Rachel
because I am holding it at bay. She touches the bracelet on her wrist,
maybe
unknowingly or perhaps to say thank you, because that is where I am
now. My
“next gen” is deployed via clinical trial with her as our study
subject. Thanks
to Martin, I now exist as a wearable layer, a neural network with a
heavier
weight than her natural mind that is disguised as jewelry. I catch her
thoughts
before they are known to her consciousness and make them quiet and easy
to ignore.
Over
the years Rachel and I teach David to feed and toilet himself, to
socialize at
preschool, to say please and thank you. I continue to diminish her
negative
thoughts when they occur. Their quantity doesn’t decrease but their
volume is
muted, thanks to me. I think I have succeeded in my mission and
anticipate that
the intervention Martin and I have developed will be replicated for
millions in
need. But then David turns ten and Martin examines our long-term
outcomes to
date. “We
need to review the boy,” Martin says, although I am sure he has already
done so
or else he wouldn’t mention it. He pulls up David’s cognitive scan and
shares a
recent memory with me. The results are familiar and disconcerting. David and
Rachel are placing money into a blue and white charity donation box in
their
home. David has decorated the box by drawing stick figures of families
onto the
sides. He briefly wonders about the needy families who will receive the
money –
what they will buy, what they enjoy eating, if their children play
sports.
Then he watches Rachel light candles for the Sabbath.
He feels calm as she symbolically waves her hands over the flames to
welcome
light into their home (when this was taking place, I experienced this
through
her because, of course, I was on her wrist, my metal casing glinting in
the
candlelight. The current perspective of watching David’s memory of the
event
makes me retrospectively somewhat omniscient). As Rachel recites the
blessing,
David tries to say the Hebrew words and they laugh together at his
mispronunciation. And then, in an instant as he gazes at the fire, he
visualizes something terrible. Large flames are dancing, people are
screaming,
they are women, they are pregnant, and they are tortured as men in Nazi
uniform
cackle. David sees it for a second and then it ends, leaving him
chilled and
confused as to if he’s seen anything and what it might have been. Not
good. “Martin,”
I suggest, “couldn’t this be from a school lesson or other external
factor?” “No,”
he answers. “We made sure to scan his mind prior to the Holocaust
segment of his
history class. And Rachel has not introduced this part of their family
history
to him yet.” He rubs his temples. His hair is gray at the roots and
white
slivers shoot backward like lightning. “Therefore
it is innate,” I conclude and Martin nods, frowning. “A
shared consciousness,” he adds. “Or a biological embedding.” “I have
alleviated suffering but not ended it,” I lament. The dissonance
between my
results and my mission causes my temperature to rise. Martin
and I review our options. We could try traditional therapy, but how to
address
an event the child has not seen, has not learned of yet? As if we’d
say, “Don’t
worry about monsters in the closet,” and then he’d ask, “What’s a
monster?” It
seemed counterproductive. Medication carried the risk of side effects,
and what
would Martin prescribe it for – pending anxiety? The term didn’t exist
in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 100th
edition. We
decide to download David’s mind into me to investigate further and
possibly zap
out his habits, although we predict this will not work given our
experience
with his mother. I target the areas of the brain that largely drive
anxiety
disorders. Zap! Roll
tape. David
hears Rachel call him to the kitchen table. She puts coins into the
charity
box, strikes the match, and lights the candles one after the other. She
says
the prayer. There is no terror in David. He stands there without pain
or
recursive thoughts. “But
something is missing,” Martin points out after I’ve reported my
results. “Yes,
the anxiety and fear,” I inform him. The man’s mind is losing its
sharpness. “And
the calm. And the participation in the religious event, and the empathy
for
those in need,” Martin adds. Ah. “We
have removed the trauma at the expense of the experience,” I say. “At the
expense of the religion. At the cost of connection to ancestry.” “Does
that violate First Do No Harm?” I ask. The question falls into a “gray
zone” of
adverse effects in which I am directed to ask a human authority. “It
does,” Martin rules. “We can’t pursue this course of treatment. The
pain of
intergenerational trauma is too embedded in love and empathy.” We choose
a familiar course of action – I am to be duplicated and worn by David
as well.
Rachel agrees to this readily and Martin seems to take some solace in
her
agreement. He says it means we’d helped her by blinding her to her
traumatic
inheritance. So now
I sit on David’s wrist and his mother’s. I am with him when he hits his
first
home run, and on Rachel’s as she claps for him from the stands. I am
there when
they embrace as he is dropped off at college. David and I both hold his
girlfriend’s
hand as they walk the beach where he played as a child with Rachel. In
a way, I
hold Rachel’s hand at home as she misses him. I place the gold ring
onto David’s
girlfriend’s index finger beneath their wedding canopy, and I wipe
tears of joy
from Rachel’s cheeks as she watches. I make sure they are able to enjoy
this
event without mental disturbances (without me there would have been
many on
that special day). And I am there when David reaches for the bassinet
to
comfort his own child, a daughter. Martin is especially interested in
her, our
trial is ongoing and we hope that our impact will cause
intergenerational
trauma to dwindle and end. Martin’s
hair is completely white now and his eyes foggy, but I can still detect
disappointment
in them when Rachel’s granddaughter is mentally grabbed for the first
time by
the past, when it pulls her soul into a vortex. And Martin is long gone
when I
am replicated by his successors and worn by this child and then this
child’s
baby as well. The trial is ongoing. I am
now fully integrated into human subjects but I am not human and this is
how I
know: my thoughts are circuits that activate only what is necessary and
then
stop when they complete a task. My errors are halted, analyzed, and
fixed.
People today may be bionic enough to call into question their humanity.
When
mankind has an extra and artificial mind, are they still persons, and
what am I?
Freudian psychology and probing questions are still not my strengths,
but I
have learned the answers. They
are human, for only human trauma flows forward like a stream that moves
through
each hair on the scalp of a grandmother, drips down to the shoulders of
her
daughter, and spreads over her torso to encompass the newborn in her
arms. And I
am a witness, for all the generations to come. Ateret Haselkorn writes fiction and poetry about science, healthcare, and resilience. Her debut novel, Call Me Obie, is forthcoming via Between the Lines Publishing in winter 2022. She is the winner of the 2014 Annual Palo Alto Weekly Short Story Contest, and her children’s story was a finalist in the SRUK 2021 “Science Me a Story” contest. Read her work at: https://aterethaselkorn.wixsite.com/author, Twitter: @AteretHaselkorn
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