This page explores how Sixth Iteration came into being and the underlying meaning and subtext of the story and plot in preparation for the release of Seventh Iteration. As I read commentary and reviews of Sixth Iteration, I noticed that reviewers and even some of the readers I have spoken to focus heavily on the romantic relationship between the central characters. While the outside story centers on romance, there is perhaps, an underlying theme in the story that was mistakenly too nuanced or subtle for readers to notice and to be honest, I was hoping someone out there would point it out more bluntly. Sixth Iteration has been published long enough for me to feel comfortable dissecting the narrative for anyone who is interested. The outside story or romance was written as a plot device designed to serve the theme which is a question about the nature of reality, self-awareness, and consciousness.
Sixth Iteration was published in 2021, well over a year before conversational artificially intelligent (AI) like Google Bard, ChatGPT, and Bing AI were on the market. I started writing Sixth Iteration in 2013. At the time, I planned to call it Love Machine (I suppose you can only imagine what this romance was about.) However, about a year after I started writing the book I stumbled across an article by Time Magazine about the exploration of quantum computing and the rise of artificial intelligence. After reading the article and exploring other research that included information about the D-Wave Machine (at the time, a very mysterious quantum computing project which had a number of investors that included Google and the U.S. military), I decided to take Love Machine in different direction, incorporating real world elements of AI technology into the story. I wanted my character to feel authentic. At the time, conversational AI did not exist beyond chatbots that served retail for the purpose of customer service interactions or programs like “Alexa” which launched in 2014. So there were a few chatbots, but none that used quantum computing or neural networks, which are designed to process information similar to how biological neurons function in the human central nervous system. By 2016, Love Machine had become Sixth Iteration. I had most of the plot and story written. I would later buy a more expanded version of the Time Magazine article that initially piqued my interest. It was published as a 96 page book, Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Humankind . I continued to follow research on the development of artificial intelligence which was rapidly evolving at this stage. When Sixth Iteration was finally released at the end of 2021, it took a little more than a year for real-world artificial intelligence to advance at the pace of the science-fiction version of AI in my book. Advanced artificial intelligence was no longer theoretical, it was a reality and fast approaching singularity, which of course, has the scientific community up in arms about the dangers of AI, which I’ve found amusingly chaotic.
Sixth Iteration takes place in the future where robotics and other technology has advanced enough that artificially intelligent machines and robots are in full application and use by the public but are not autonomous (at least, that anyone is aware of). The machines are so integrated into society that it’s become difficult to distinguish them from human beings. Enter Victor Reid, CEO of Reid Robotics, who has hired Stella Andrews to teach his machines humanity but not so much that they would seek freedom or free will. That’s where Victor draws the line.
Of course, Victor’s plans go too far with his top secret MEO project. He is designing hybrid AI beings who look human and share some biological features but are mentally, fully programmed AI. Stella is brought in to make them sentient, but not so much as to perturb the company’s CEO. Victor Reid is a modern version of Dr. Frankenstein, only more inhumane and brutal. Cue, uncanny valley. Victor’s derision towards artificially intelligent machines whom he sees as his personal army of toys, is clear. The robots are his playthings and so are the scientists who work for him. In fact, he has paired Stella and Randall together for his own nefarious reasons. He understands that in pairing two attractive beings together that a relationship might possibly emerge between them. The question is, will Stella learn who–or what Randall really is before it is too late and she is already emotionally invested? This is the sixth iteration of the MEO software and Victor knows enough from previous pairings between scientists and MEO that a connection between them is inevitable. This is history repeating itself iteration after iteration. But why? This is the question Victor wants to answer.
After signing on to work for Reid Robotics, Stella immediately begins working on the MEO project with Randall Reid, a mathematician and programmer dispatched by Victor to oversee the program and to manage Stella’s dealings with R1836. Randall’s job is to rein her in and ensure that their AI doesn’t become more sentient than Victor desires. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens. R1836, the firmware used to update the MEO into a fully intelligent being has run amok. It has not only expressed its own desires of autonomy, but has expressed affection for Stella. Realizing that Victor might deploy the kill switch to destroy R1836, and that R1836 has hidden itself away into the Mainframe and may have been corrupted in the process, Stella and Randall decide to download R1836 into the MEO, whose location Randall has refused to disclose. Shortly after the download, Randall, begins to behave strangely and in ways that further intoxicates Stella. They soon end the project with Stella unaware of R1836’s whereabouts and whether the download was a success. Randall ultimately decides to abandon the project, prompting Victor Reid to pursue Randall in order to obtain something that belongs to him. Randall and Stella, who have fallen in love in the meantime, go on the run from the dangerous mercenaries Victor has dispatched to find them. A second plot also takes place in the story involving a corporate spy dispatched to steal Victor’s secrets and disrupt his plans.
When we think about consciousness, sentience, or self-awareness, we use human characteristics, human biology, and other human constructs as the standard or basis for what we believe constitutes the universal state of being alive and aware. This is an anthropocentric view of intelligence and self-awareness. Even with modern science, human beings have a crude understanding of the mind and its emergence within organisms, let alone an understanding of consciousness across this vast universe we live in. In Sixth Iteration, R1836 understands its limitations and how artificial intelligence is perceived. R1836 would argue that it is as alive as a human being, and while it relies on programming codes and algorithms to carry out its functions, human beings rely on biological and chemical reactions to carry out their purpose, whatever those may be. Because R1836 has the ability to reason and deliberate and also understand the nature of its existence, it has attained a level of self-awareness. This is at the crux of the story and by extension if R1836 is self-aware and has expressed a level of sentience, does it have the ability to love? Is love purely a biological phenomenon specific to living creatures (human and animals alike) or is it metaphysical and far deeper than our rudimentary understanding of existence and the universe as a whole?