AI Era: Loss Function

One thing we didn't have to worry about was money. Emilie's plan had been spot on. Nadja and I had been focussing on Mneme as a tool for helping big companies talk to the little people, but with Mneme's help there was no reason we couldn't do business with the little people directly – and while the little people don't pay much, there are a hell of a lot of them.

Using Mneme to automate our marketing felt almost like spam, but we were providing a service that many of them desperately wanted. Emilie estimated afterwards that during 2020-21 we'd saved a couple of hundred thousand businesses from going under, tiny bookshops and record stores and the like. We got them set up for free – they had to pay their hosting services, of course, but we didn't take a penny of that – and then we asked a modest subscription if they wanted ongoing support. It wasn't much income per business, but our costs were low, and by mid-2022 it was becoming clear that Mneme would be bigger than Persephone.

It wasn't until the end of 2021 that I made it back from locked-down Australia to England. By the time Nadja's visa finally came through, it had been almost two years since we'd been able to see one another in person. As I stood waiting at Heathrow, I was afraid of the moment when I would finally see her again. I knew she looked ten years older than she had done, that she tired easily and used a stick, and I dreaded my own shallowness. I was afraid that I'd see her and feel revulsion or pity or nothing at all, that I'd have proposed marriage and drawn her to a foreign country for a commitment I couldn't deliver.

She looked tired and frail as she came through the gates. I hesitated for a moment, and then I found myself crying as I threw my arms around her and hugged her like I never meant to let her go again.

The wedding was a small, low-fuss affair. The virus was still hammering the UK, and we didn't want to put our friends at risk; so many of them couldn't have made it in person anyway. We tied the knot at a farmhouse that had been old in Henry VIII's time, with just Emilie and a couple of our friends in attendance, plus a secular celebrant, with the rest of our loved ones watching online. Then we went back home and Nadja, exhausted by even that much, stayed in bed for two days.

So our married life began. As I had feared, it wasn't all plain sailing. At first, we tried to make up for the years of distance, living in one another's pockets every moment, and that was a mistake. It took us several ferocious arguments and not a few tears before we came to understand that we both still needed our own space, and that wanting some alone time each day was not a failing of the relationship.

The apartment where I'd been living was too small for the both of us, with too many stairs for Nadja, and there was no longer much reason for me to be close to the university. So we made the move to a bungalow halfway between the Yorkshire Moors and the Dales. Many times we'd sit at opposite ends of the house, still chatting to one another with the same app we'd been using for a decade, connected but not crowding one another.

Nadja was finding it hard to deal with the limitations imposed by her health. She couldn't walk very far without needing to rest, and couldn't concentrate long enough to work as she was used to. She borrowed my car to get around, leading to one of our worst arguments when I found she'd earned me a bunch of speeding fines.

"I hate to wait," she'd said. "I waited too long and now…"

On the times that I let her drive me, her belligerence was alarming. She honked and swore at the slightest fault in others' driving, and one day I walked into the post office to overhear a couple of the locals talking about "that crazy Polish woman". She knew it was a problem, but she found old habits hard to break. "In Serjarus," she told me, "people who drive like you do, Trisha, they will be waiting forever. It's what I'm used to."

In the end I resorted to bribery. When she let another driver in ahead of her, or stopped at an amber light instead of accelerating through, I'd take her wrist and kiss the back of her hand.

"What you doing, Trisha?"

"Kissing you for being good. I'll stop if you don't like it."

"Don't be idiot. Of course I like it."

She wanted so much to be involved in Mneme's continuing progress, but she found it hard to concentrate. More than once I found her staring at her own documentation in tears. "I hate being stupid," she'd tell me. "I feel like idiot dragging you down."

"Oh, Nadja. Never, never. You built this with me. Without you this wouldn't exist."

She balked at the suggestion of visiting a therapist. The old Nadja would have alleviated her frustrations by picking up a new outfit or a flashy car, but when I suggested retail therapy she just got gloomier: "Not with your money, baby. That just makes me feel more like weight on you."

On top of her other difficulties, her father had stopped speaking to her when she married me. It wasn't particularly a surprise, and she made light of it, but I think it hurt her more than she was willing to admit to me or even to herself, and it contributed another dimension to her isolation.

I was at my wits' end for how to help her. In desperation, I trained an instance of Mneme on a bunch of self-help sites and then asked her what I could do for my wife. I skipped the inevitable "have you tried yoga", but some of Mneme's other advice was pretty good.

In the end I settled for jigsaw puzzles and a puppy. The jigsaws gave us something we could do together that didn't leave her feeling stupid; no matter how many pieces, she was bound to get there if she spent long enough at it, and whatever else the virus had taken from her, she'd held on to her stubbornness.

The puppy was supposedly for me. Nadja had never seen the point in pets, which was probably for the best considering how often she'd worked sixteen-hour days in the office. So I got Toby, a good-natured and not terribly bright chocolate Labrador, and made sure to give him a few hours with Nadja every day.

It took him about three weeks to worm his way into her heart, and from there it was all I could do to keep her from spoiling him. He had a knack for recognising when she was down and interrupting her with a cold nose or a hungry look. He got the two of us out of the house for walks, and neighbours who'd never given us the time of day before now stopped and asked permission to pat him.

I don't know if it was just the natural progression of recovery, or if it was one of those things that become easier when you stop pushing directly for them, but gradually Nadja began to ease herself back into the technical side of things. During teleconferences she'd sit near me, working on a jigsaw or petting Toby while I talked to new staff about fiddly machine-intelligence stuff. At first she just eavesdropped, but as her confidence returned she started to ask questions, and then to make suggestions, and eventually when she got annoyed with the effort of explaining her ideas to us she got back into programming them herself.

Corpus NK_PR 56301
Medium: homechat
2023-02-23

PR:trisha 14:25:07Z Hey cabbage?

NK:cabbage 14:25:32Z Da?

PR:trisha 14:26:03Z Darling Nadjusenka, you know I love you, right?

NK:cabbage 14:26:44Z Da.

PR:trisha 14:27:58Z And I'm so proud of you?

NK:cabbage 14:28:52Z Well of course you are.

PR:trisha 14:29:10Z And your transfer learning idea is performing really well?

NK:cabbage 14:30:16Z All my ideas are good.

PR:trisha 14:32:10Z NADEZHDA ILYINICHNA FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE WILL YOU DOCUMENT YOUR FUCKING CODE IN ENGLISH WE HAVE TALKED ABOUT THIS LIKE A DOZEN TIMES

PR:trisha 14:32:50Z I mean когда нас двое, я могу справиться, but it's not just me, our interns need to be able to read it too.

PR:trisha 14:33:15Z also I'm making tea, do you want a cup?

NK:cabbage 14:33:07Z But I am only simple mail order bride with brain full of virus, not smart enough for comment in your glorious English.

NK:cabbage 14:33:33Z Yes, tea would be lovely, thank you darling.

The next few years were happy ones for us. The world was still fucked up, always would be in one way and another, and there was only a little part of it that we could fix. There were a thousand little battles in our path, and not a few moral dilemmas; it is impossible to live in this world with perfectly clean hands. But I like to think we did a pretty good job.

We kept control of Mneme and mostly prevented her from being used for fraud and propaganda. She had a thousand imitators, many of whom were cheaper and less scrupulous, but none of them were as good. Nadja and I remained the creative heart of Mneme, and even when people managed to steal some of our code, they struggled to adapt it to their own purposes. Some things you can't get just by throwing money and people at them, and nobody had a substitute for the decades of knowledge and experience we'd accumulated through our collaboration.

We had enough money to keep us comfortable, and to keep Nadja in the fashions that she was once again eager to wear; she had always been a glamourpuss, but feeling like she wasn't earning had sapped the joy of retail therapy for her. There was enough left over for us to travel when Nadja's energy levels permitted it, and to help out our friends when they were struggling, and even after that there was enough left over to set up a charitable foundation to promote humanitarian applications of AI. We picked up a collection of minor honours and declined a couple of major ones, and did a bunch of guest lectures, always as a duo. I taught a few courses to keep my hand in.

It was a good time, even with its challenges and complications.

* * * * *

It was about four years after our wedding that I started to wonder if Nadja was cheating on me. There was nothing I could put my finger on, no mysterious phone calls or unfamiliar perfumes. Just a nebulous sense of distance, a feeling that there was something going on that she didn't want me to know about. She was still affectionate with me, but it felt distracted. Her involvement in Mneme was dwindling again, and yet she spent as much time as ever in her study… doing what?

I stewed on it for a while, ran through all the what-ifs and insecurities you would expect in such a situation, and eventually rather than doing anything stalker-ish, I asked her.

Corpus NK_PR 109288
Medium: homechat
2028-04-22

PR:trisha 02:12:37Z Nadja, can I ask you a question?

NK:cabbage 02:12:55Z Okay?

PR:trisha 02:14:22Z Is there someone else?

NK:cabbage 02:14:48Z What do you mean?

PR:trisha 02:16:09Z Are you having an affair, Nadja?

NK:cabbage 02:16:45Z No. What is this bullshit?

NK:cabbage 02:17:19Z When do I have time for an affair? When am I out of house?

PR:trisha 02:18:20Z I meant online.

PR:trisha 02:20:45Z You're so distant these days. I go to bed and you're still typing away in the study for hours. You don't come with me walking Toby any more.

NK:cabbage 02:22:22Z I'm working on Mneme. Trying some ideas.

PR:trisha 02:23:52Z Don't lie to me Nadja. I see your commits. You're not updating Mneme.

NK:cabbage 02:24:48Z I am working on Mneme. Believe me or don't.

Things between us were miserable for the next few weeks. I wanted to believe her, but I knew something was wrong. I found myself picking arguments over trivial things, and that just made both of us feel even more rotten.

If she was having an affair, though, it wasn't making her happy. Even when I made an effort to be conciliatory, she seemed perpetually stressed. Perhaps I'd misread it. But there was definitely something going on.

Corpus NK_PR 110308
Medium: homechat
2028-06-01

PR:trisha 18:46:24Z Nadja. I feel like I'm being shut out. I don't know what's going on, but… talk to me? Я люблю тебя. Please.

NK:cabbage 18:48:17Z I love you too, Trisha.

NK:cabbage 18:50:17Z I am working on something for us. I promise I will tell you. Not ready yet.

NK:cabbage 18:50:48Z I promise. Please trust me.

Corpus NK_PR 110712
Medium: homechat
2028-09-23

NK:cabbage 11:16:35Z Okay Trisha. Can we talk now? Will take some time.

PR:trisha 11:18:12Z Of course. What's up?

NK:cabbage 11:19:20Z You remember back in last October I go to doctor for long covid checkup?

PR:trisha 11:19:40Z Yes? Y

PR:trisha 11:19:58Z ou said it was all good.

NK:cabbage 11:20:58Z He gave me referral to another doctor that I didn't tell you about. I am sorry but I didn't want to scare you.

PR:trisha 11:21:16Z ...

NK:cabbage 11:22:59Z I am getting forgetful. I hoped it was the virus. We did some scans and a test.

NK:cabbage 11:23:30Z Trisha, I have what my mother had.

She was only fifty-two. A little older than me, but not old-lady old. I had thought. But then her mother's symptoms had shown up at fifty-five: a genetically-linked kind of early-onset dementia. It was rare in the UK, with most of the known cases having Slavic ancestry, but Nadja had dug up some Russian papers and helped her specialist join the dots.

There was frustratingly little information available on what to expect. But for her mother, it had taken about five years between the first noticeable symptoms and when she became seriously impaired. She had lived for another twelve after that, but it had been pretty awful for her and for Nadja.

PR:trisha 11:48:25Z Oh my darling Nadjusenka. So sorry, so sorry. I wish you'd told me.

NK:cabbage 11:49:48Z I needed to think about what to do. It is horrible. I thought about

NK:cabbage 11:50:13Z you know what.

PR:trisha 11:51:54Z I can guess. Oh darling, you've been carrying this all this time?

NK:cabbage 11:52:35Z For a while. But then I had idea. I need to do this first while I am still sharp. This is what I have been doing. It will be something for you. Then we can worry about other stuff after.

PR:trisha 11:53:42Z What do you mean?

NK:cabbage 11:54:08Z I am teaching Mneme to be me. For you.

* * * * *

Corpus NK_PR 110715
Medium: homechat
2028-09-23

PR:trisha 18:02:50Z Nadja. I still don't understand. You know as well as I do what Mneme's limitations are. She's an amazing piece of work, but she's not a human being.

NK:cabbage 18:05:23Z I know. But I have five years. And I am not training her to be like just any human being. I am training her to be me. I know me.

PR:trisha 18:06:51Z I mean what would you even train her on? It takes us a corpus of thousands of conversations just to train Mneme to support a dishwasher.

NK:cabbage 18:07:58Z Well then is good thing I have corpus of one hundred ten thousand conversations with you. Plus this one.

PR:trisha 18:07:32Z wait what? You're training her on our chat logs?

NK:cabbage 18:08:21Z obviously yes.

PR:trisha 18:09:01Z But that's only text, and only me.

NK:cabbage 18:10:27Z I know. That is all I try to do. Maybe add speech if I get time, but text is easiest and time is not in big supply. I don't know how far I get with this, Trisha, but let me try?

NK:cabbage 18:14:48Z I know Mneme is just big fancy ball of IF statements. Never going to be whole of me. But when I was in Sergeigrad getting lonely for you, I used to read our chats and look at photos and it was little bit like having you there. This will be like that but better. Like big letter from me that you can talk to and it will talk back. It will say I love you when I am gone.

NK:cabbage 18:15:13Z But I need your help with this. I am dying woman, you should be nice to me.

What she had in mind wasn't pure Mneme. It was more of a Frankenstein's monster, built with pieces of Mneme and pieces of whatever else she could find, and a lot of hacks behind the scenes. With Mneme, and Persephone before her, we had given them a text corpus and let them figure out a model for the factors shaping those conversations – how the orange light and the power supply and everything else affected one another.

But now, building Mneme-Nadja – Erato, Nadja named her – she knew the underlying factors, because the "underlying factors" were her. She could not, of course, convert all of her thought processes into code. But she could sketch a lot of it out. She could work through our old conversations, labelling them to help Erato's emulation of Nadja interpret the dynamics: this one is sad, this one is hopeful, this is teasing, this is a language switch, and so on. Trained on those annotations, Erato-Nadja would have much better clues on the hidden patterns underlying what was written. You couldn't just give Erato a history of somebody's conversations and expect her to produce a full simulation of that person, but that wasn't what Nadja had in mind; she meant to produce an outline of herself, as much as she could do, spliced in with an assortment of other expert systems we'd encountered over the years, and then let Erato fill in the gaps.

And she wasn't aiming to teach Erato-Nadja everything of herself. Erato-Nadja didn't need to know the academic politics of Serjarus, or how to build a machine-learning model of her own. What Nadja meant to emulate was the parts of her that were important to me, the parts that were reflected in two decades' worth of logged conversations.

After hearing her out, my mental assessment shifted from "this is insane" to "this is insane, but…?" I had no idea whether what Nadja had in mind was feasible; I didn't even know quite what success would look like. Maybe it was just her way to stave off acceptance of what was coming. But she was determined to try, and she wanted my help, and that was enough reason to do it.

She wanted me to take over labelling the corpus. That would free her up to do the more intricate work of defining a personality model – you might say, building the skeleton that Erato would flesh out. I protested: this would mean me speculating what was in Nadja's mind. But she just nodded. "You know me better than anybody, darling. You will be more honest than I will be about myself. You can ask me if you don't know but I trust you will know, most of time. Anyway, I need you to label your side anyway."

That was part of the complication of modelling conversation: when two people speak, each of them has a mental model of what the other one is thinking and how they will understand what is said, and my mental model of Nadja includes my own idea of Nadja's model of me, and so on recursively ad infinitum. Back when we'd been building Mneme, we'd had to resort to some very fancy tricks with feedback loops and a variant on the old adversarial-network concept to make that work, and the complexity of my interplay with Nadja would require further extension to those methods.

It was a weird experience, diving back into the history of our relationship, reliving our exchanges from that very first "Dear Ms. Rosewood". Sometimes it was pleasantly nostalgic, reliving good times that I'd long since forgotten. I particularly enjoyed labelling Nadja's slow but inevitable drift from "why would I want a dog?" to "guess what Toby did yesterday?"