The Perfect Wife(102)
—US PATENT NO. 8996429, Methods and Systems for Robot Personality Development, granted to Google Inc. in 2015
“I want a life,” the computer said. “I want to get out there and garden and hold hands with Martine. I want to watch the sunset and eat at a nice restaurant or even a home-cooked meal. I am so sad sometimes, because I’m just stuffed with these memories, these sort of half-formed memories, and they aren’t enough. I just want to cry.”
—BINA48,
interviewed by NYmag.com
Acknowledgments
As I write this, I’ve just been shaving my twenty-one-year-old son. He has quite tough stubble, so this is a process that involves, first, an electric shaver, then a four-blade wet razor, then a two-blade disposable razor to reach any stubborn hairs. He submits reasonably patiently to this twice-weekly ritual, knowing it will reduce the itchiness on his skin that he so hates. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about a couple of things: first, how few young men must be in a position where they have to be shaved by their parents, and second, about the ABA protocol we once followed in an attempt to teach him to shave himself.
Readers of The Perfect Wife might form the impression I’m not a fan of ABA, the intensive rote-teaching of skills to those with autism. On the contrary: we used ABA techniques with Ollie for fifteen years, and found them invaluable for teaching him everything from sign language to putting on a seatbelt. But I also feel a certain amount of guilt for all the things we tried to teach him that didn’t work, because each one involved hundreds or even thousands of frustrating attempts on his part. As Tim rightly points out, ABA is evidence-based and it works. But it can turn you from a parent into a full-time therapist and authoritarian. Looking back, I certainly wouldn’t wish any of those hard-won gains away, but I do wish there had been an easier, less intensive way of achieving them.
Readers will probably also assume that the school Danny attends, with its “graduated electronic decelerators” to administer electric shocks, is entirely a product of my imagination. Not so: At the time of writing, an educational center in America has just successfully fought off a legal challenge to its use of these devices. (I should clarify that this is a rare exception: the use of any aversive is no longer a part of most ABA programs.) But, strange as it may seem, I can understand the parents who see these devices as the only way to stop their child self-harming when all else has failed. Any fault lies not with them, but with the therapists and educators who are responsible for the “all else.”
Many people helped with the writing of The Perfect Wife. In particular I want to thank Tyler Mitchell, both for having the original idea and for his great generosity in sharing it with me. Jim Baldwin in San Francisco proved an excellent researcher—any errors remaining are, of course, my own. I should add that I have made very little attempt to convey the technical complexities of AI to the reader: I was always very clear that I was writing a novel of psychological suspense, albeit one with an unusual speculative element, not a techno-thriller. My editor, Kate Miciak, proved as open-minded as she was helpful about the evolution of the idea into a story—Kate, thank you for bearing with me, as well as for your many insightful notes. Caradoc King, Millie Hoskins, and Kat Aitken were, as always, fantastic first readers. Stefanie Bierwerth—your enthusiasm for those early pages was invaluable.
Most of all, though, I want to thank my family: my older sons, Tom and Harry, for all that they do; Ollie, for always trying so hard to master what doesn’t come naturally; and Sara, for never trying to be the perfect wife.