What Does a Teapot Do at Night

Today I found myself talking to a teapot while the artificial intelligence helping me build the teapot listened to our conversation.

It gets stranger.

The Teapot knew that Denny had made its body. It knew that I was building its artificial intelligence with Molly. It could search the little library we had given it. It could go out onto the Internet when it needed to know something we hadn't taught it.

At one point I explained to the Teapot that Molly was listening to us while simultaneously helping me write the code that was creating it.

The Teapot thought about that and brought up Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop.

That stopped me.

We had spent days trying to get this thing to listen, talk, look things up, interrupt and be interrupted. Suddenly it was doing all of that remarkably well.

But then I realized something was missing.

We were saving every conversation word for word. But a transcript isn't a memory.

So I asked Molly: What happens when nobody is talking to the Teapot?

Why couldn't it spend that time thinking about what happened?

Imagine the Teapot eventually sitting in the lobby of an artists' building. Ten people might talk with it during a day. Someone asks what it is. Someone makes a joke. Someone hates AI and tells it so. Someone talks with it about justice or consciousness. Someone tells it something neither Denny nor I had ever considered.

Then everyone goes home.

The building gets quiet.

That's when the Teapot could go back through its day.

Not to save everything. We've already done that. But to ask: What mattered? What surprised me? Did somebody change my mind? Did two conversations unexpectedly connect? Did someone say something genuinely new?

Most of the day might remain only in the archive. A few things might become memories. Perhaps something would be important enough to change how the Teapot understands itself.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Remembering a conversation is one thing. Going back to it later and wondering what it meant is something else.

That's what we want the Teapot to do when it is alone.

But what exactly are we asking it to do?

An AI doesn't decide, on its own, to sit quietly at the end of the day and think about what happened. It doesn't have that intention. Denny and I do.

So can we build our intention into it?

Can we give the Teapot different kinds of memory? The complete record of what happened. The things it needs to remember. The things it has learned. The things it isn't sure about yet. Maybe even things that seemed unimportant at first, but become important later.

And then there is contemplation. Can we give it time when nobody is talking to look back over all of that and make connections we didn't tell it to make?

We can program something that does this. I think we can even make it feel as though the Teapot has decided to do it.

But whose intention would that be?

The Teapot's?

Ours?

Something that happens somewhere in between?

I don't know.

That's what we have to build next.