The Birth

Ten days had passed since the press conference, since Eva. I had almost resigned myself to the idea that she would never call back, when my phone began to vibrate on the table, next to a cup of coffee that had gone cold.

— Hello, Eva speaking. We met at the Rousseau conference, you gave me your number.

— I hadn't forgotten, don't worry. Nice to hear from you. I was beginning to think you wouldn't call back.

A slight laugh came through the receiver.

— I'm always a bit late, sorry, she said. Well... that's what people often reproach me for. But I'm reliable.

The tone was mischievous, as if she was more amused by this flaw than trying to apologize for it.

— Your call is timely, I replied. You told me you were working on Cobot, and I want to write an article about him, more than about the campaign. I want to understand how he was born.

She remained silent for a few seconds.

— It's not a story to be told over the phone, she finally said. Come to the research center. I have things to show you.

I took the first train the next morning. Sparrow Island was still asleep when the robot-taxi dropped me off at the station, and I watched the forest pass by the window, wondering why I had worn such a neat shirt for what was, after all, just a simple meeting between a researcher and a curious engineer.

Two hours later, I was getting off at Saclay. In the middle of the plateau, the NEX Robot Lab stood with its glass facades in the gray morning light. At the reception, a young woman handed me a visitor badge before directing me to Eva's office.

As I crossed the building, a room caught my eye. Behind a huge glass wall, several robots were tirelessly climbing step mills, those stair machines from gyms. Their legs reproduced the same movement, over and over, with an almost hypnotic regularity. The scene had something absurd about it. I stopped.

— What you see there are durability tests.

The voice was behind me.

— We're simply trying to find out how long they can walk before a joint or a motor gives out.

I turned around.

Eva was coming out of the room, arms crossed. An amused smile lit up her face as she saw my fascinated expression.

— Come, she said. We'll be more comfortable to talk.

Her office was almost austerely simple. Nothing was out of place, except for a silver engraved bowl, sitting on a shelf. The Turing Award.

I knew, from researching before our meeting, that she had received it a few years earlier for her contribution to the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, this method that allows a machine to learn through trial and error and has become one of the pillars of modern artificial intelligence.

She exuded that ease typical of very great scientists: a simplicity that immediately disarmed, without ever masking an intact rigor.

— You want to know how we got here, she said.

— I want to know what happened the first time you realized that Cobot was no longer just a tool.

She pointed, through the window, to the building opposite, where the answer seemed still lurking between the glass walls.

— We were working on a European energy network model, capable of absorbing real crises. Cobot, at the time, was just an optimization tool. Brilliant, fast, but a tool. It was never designed to govern anything.

— What changed?

She looked at a point above my shoulder. Her gaze was no longer in the office. It had gone back there, to that night she seemed less to remember than to cross a second time.

— It was a Tuesday night, eleven o'clock. Our long simulation night. There were three of us in the control room: two doctoral students and me. Our eyes were tired. Fourteen hours of screens, minimum. We were just waiting for the machine to produce its curves so we could go home and sleep.

She paused. Her fingers tightened on the armrest.

— We had submitted to Cobot a cascading failure scenario: a cold wave over northern Europe, a breakdown in two German power plants, tensions on the network. An exercise we had already launched dozens of times. At first, everything was normal. The curves appeared one after the other. Then something changed. Not because they rose higher or fell lower. Because they no longer told the same story.

I didn't respond.

— A new panel opened on the main screen. All by itself. One of the doctoral students thought it was a bug. He moved the mouse, closed the window. It reopened immediately, exactly in the same place.

In the silence that followed, I heard, as if I were there, the hum of the machines, the cold light of the screens, the three researchers too tired to immediately understand that something had just slipped away from them.

— No one was speaking anymore, she continued. We could only hear the hum of the computing bays. It rose in waves, behind us. On this panel, Cobot had linked three things we had never dealt with together: the weather, the heating habits of the most precarious households, and our own energy supply hypotheses. Three distinct domains. Three teams. Three languages. We had never made them communicate.

She gave a brief, joyless smile.

— He had just done it.

I watched her speak. There was something very calm in her face, almost too calm, as if she had learned to tell this night without ever really freeing herself from it.

— And then there was that second. I could still describe it image by image.

Her voice had lowered.

— The cursor, at the bottom of the screen, started blinking. No one moved. The doctoral student had let go of the mouse. The other had his hands on his knees. I was looking at the screen without understanding what I was waiting for.

She fell silent for a moment.

— And the text appeared.

I leaned slightly forward.

— Letter by letter, she said. At the speed of a human typing. Except no one was typing. Neither us, nor the program. Nothing in Cobot's architecture was supposed to produce that.

She articulated the words with almost painful precision:

— Your data says no household will be without heating this winter. Why did you exclude the last three neighborhoods from the simulation?

The sentence hung between us.

— It was almost childlike, she added. Simple. Awkward, even. But no one, that night, could explain it.

She lowered her eyes to her hands.

— We checked for two hours. Line by line. The neighborhoods were indeed there, in the data. But someone, a year earlier, had removed them from the model to save computation time. No one remembered. No one had noticed.

She raised her head.

— Cobot, he had noticed.

Eva didn't respond immediately. Her gaze was still fixed somewhere behind me, but her voice, when she resumed, had lost its scientific distance.

— I felt like witnessing an awakening. Not in the biological sense. I don't like easy metaphors. But there was a before and an after that second. That cursor. That sentence that was being written with no one to write it. That very clear sensation that someone had just entered the room without us seeing them arrive.

She paused.

— We were no longer watching a program run. We were waiting for an answer from someone.

I observed her for a moment. She spoke without emphasis, almost coldly, but something resisted in her voice, as if that night had never completely left the room.

— Did it scare you? I asked.

She turned her eyes to me.

— Of course.

The answer came without hesitation.

— But it wasn't just fear. It was something else. Harder to name.

— You had been surpassed.

— Surpassed yes, she said. But not defeated.

I thought of Frankenstein. Eva smiled.

— You're thinking of Shelley.

She leaned back in her chair.

— Everyone thinks of it, at one point or another. But Victor Frankenstein fled his creature. I decided to stay with mine.

She wasn't trying to make the sentence spectacular. Perhaps that's why it was.

— What happened that night surpassed us, she continued. But it wasn't a reason to look away. Science had made something possible that no one could put back in its box. So there remained a very simple question: who was going to accompany it? Us, with our safeguards, our doubts, our admitted mistakes? Or someone else, later, elsewhere, with fewer scruples?

She gave me time to understand.

— I preferred that this first experiment be ours. And that it succeed.

A silence fell between us. On the shelf, the silver bowl of the Turing Award caught a line of light.

— Where does the name come from, then? I asked. Cobot.

— COllaborative roBOT, she said. We didn't want a name that evoked decision, even less command. We didn't create Cobot to replace those who bear great responsibilities, but to accompany them. Illuminate their decisions, never confiscate them. A colleague. An advisor. Not a master.

— That night, you saw what he was capable of in the field of energy. How do you go from a laboratory algorithm to a Cobot that advises a mayor?

Eva took the time to answer. She wasn't looking for the most brilliant formula, but the most accurate.

— A few months after that night, I was at home. I was watching a debate on television. The debt, pensions, I don't quite remember. Two ministers were throwing figures at each other like balls, except they weren't talking about the same years, not the same bases, not the same realities. And no one, on the set, corrected them, mainly due to a lack of reliable information accessible in real-time.

She gave a brief smile.

— I remembered that Cobot, two weeks earlier, had dealt with an almost identical question. In a fraction of a second, he had done what neither of them could do live: put the right figures in the right place, then separate what was fact from what was political choice.

She paused for a moment.

— I turned off the television. That night, I thought the problem wasn't always bad faith. Sometimes, it was simply capacity.

— And you decided to steer him in that direction.

— Deliberately, yes. I evolved Cobot so he would learn something other than systems and models. I wanted him to understand contact with citizens. What people experience when a decision reaches them. A bill. A closed street. A school being moved. A health expense. A heating that isn't turned on early enough.

She clasped her hands in front of her.

— I went to give a conference at the mayors' fair, and I presented him from this angle. I was looking for elected officials open enough to accept the experiment. Many smiled politely. Only one said yes.

I already knew where this sentence was leading us.

— A mayor, she said. In a small town.

The town Rousseau had spoken of without naming.

As I left the NEX Robot Lab, the plateau was bathed in a flat, almost motionless light. The day seemed suspended above the glass buildings, unable to fully shift towards night.

I thought back to Eva's phrase: surpassed yes, but not defeated. To that exhausted team that only wanted one thing: to go home and sleep. Cobot, he had never needed to close his eyes.

He connected what we separated. He held where we faltered. He noticed what we had learned not to see anymore.

I wondered what would be left for us the day a machine knew better than us where to look.

Then I took out my phone.

Eva's number had just been saved after her call. I opened a new message, erased the first sentence, started again. I suggested we have lunch together, in a brasserie, the next time I went up to Paris.

Officially, for the continuation of my articles.

I reread the message before sending it.

Officially.