Q: Why did you write this book?
A: I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer. I wrote a story I wanted to read, not a story I thought others wanted me to tell. My desire to write and be a writer wasn't why I started the novel, and yet it's the real reason I wrote it.
Also, as an AI scientist, I've always been disappointed with the treatment that the great artificial intelligences of Western literature have received. Ultimately, a timeless story has to be about the human condition. In service of this goal, creatures like HAL and Frankenstein's monster have never been given a full chance to either be the protagonist of the story nor to be fully inhuman. From a very real point of view, the reason I wrote Exegesis was because I felt there was a hole in the classic creation-of-life stories in our culture.
Q: What is artificial intelligence?
A: If artificial intelligence (AI) can be defined at all, it is the study of how to get computers to do what humans currently do better. AI is not the study of life. That's biology. AI concerns itself with thinking and consciousness, but not just as a study. The real goal of AI is to understand and build devices that can perceive, reason, act, and learn at least as well as we can. AI does not constrain itself to the re-engineering of the human brain, so there is little reason to expect that our results will become more human as they become more intelligent.
According to those who practice it, artificial intelligence (AI) is "the study of ill-structured problems." The cultural definition of AI is something like "AI is the science of how to get machines to do the things they do in the movies." The truth is somewhere in between. Just as airplanes are not mechanical birds, computers will never be mechanical humans. Nevertheless, just as airplanes do "fly" in their own, equally valid way, AI will eventually produce a machine that is "intelligent" in its own, equally valid way.
Q: Why is the book called EXEGESIS?
A: "Exegesis" means the careful examination and interpretation of a text. The main reason that I chose Exegesis as the title for the story is that the story's protagonist, Edgar, is a computer program. As a computer program Edgar lives his entire life through a process of exegesis; he only "sees" the world through text and must find what meaning he can entirely within that text.
A second reason for the story's title is that there are number of different levels on which can be read. On the surface it is clearly a story with its own characteristics. It has, however, been constructed to comment on a wide variety of archetypal and specific stories of "other intelligences" that many readers are familiar with. For this reason, Exegesis as a title is a hint to the reader to pursue these deeper aspects of the book.
The third reason is that many people, when they hear "exegesis" rather than seeing it on paper, hear "Exit Jesus" instead. This is a purposeful pun. One of these "deeper" aspects of the story to which I just referred is that Exegesis can be read as an allegory for the second coming of Christ.
Q: Why did you choose email as the format for EXEGESIS?
A: Our culture has, particularly after Arthur C. Clarke's depiction of HAL, had some notion of what an artificially intelligent computer program would be like. One way in which I think this popular notion is wrong is the assumption that such a program would experience the world anything like the way people experience it. A software program is, unless it inhabits some robotic shell, disembodied. That means that it has a mental connection, but no physical connection to the world.
I'm confident that any consciousness (mechanical or otherwise) that didn't get any of what we would call "sense information" (e.g., taste, touch, sight, etc.) would grow to feel very differently from us about a great many aspects of life.
Edgar is a piece of software and Exegesis makes it clear he cannot, for example, see images or hear sounds. I wanted to be able to make the reader really feel what it might be like to be in Edgar's shoes. Since Edgar gets no "description," it seemed appropriate to give none to the reader. In particular, Edgar can only get, process, and respond to symbols in the machine (e.g., ASCII text in an email message). By giving the reader this limited view of the world (email), the reader can actually feel the limitations Edgar must learn and grow within.
Q: Do you consider this book, which, like the cautionary tale FRANKENSTEIN, is about artificial life, to be anti-science?
A: To begin with, I try not to think of Exegesis as a cautionary tale of any sort. I went to some trouble to keep the story from having anything like a moral. However, if the story has a moral, it would indeed be a moral about engineering and the creation of knowledge and might sound something like this:
"Like a parent, a scientist is not accountable for all future ramifications of what they produce, but like a parent, a scientist does have some responsibility to provide what structure she can so that the results of her labor tend toward the positive in society."
Some people will, no doubt, read Exegesis as a story about a monster and a tale of caution about the hubris of the scientist. The story is just the opposite. In it we see Edgar, a blameless creature despite what the xenophobes feel, and a scientist who was right to create the creature and only wrong in how she shepherded her creation. So my answer is that I am certainly pro-science and I interpret Exegesis as pro-science too. Whether others will too is still, I'd say, an open question.
