The Emotional Ear

She had replied that very evening. Just a few words: with pleasure. I know the place. Then she sent me an address, that of a brasserie located between the Luxembourg Gardens and the Odéon Theatre, in the 6th arrondissement.

I had arrived early, as always when something matters a bit too much to risk being late.

Eva had arranged to meet at seven o'clock.

It was seven twenty.

I looked at the time and smiled despite myself. It had taken her ten days to decide to call me back the first time, I could well wait twenty minutes.

The room was full, without being noisy. Conversations slid from one table to another, glasses caught the light, and behind the bay window, the trees of Luxembourg formed a dark, almost motionless mass. I had settled facing the entrance. Out of caution, perhaps. Or impatience.

She finally arrived.

She crossed the room with a quick step, beige trench coat, sharp cut, almost no jewelry. Nothing about her sought to attract attention. Perhaps that was what made her impossible not to look at.

— Sorry, she said, sitting down. A meeting that wouldn't end.

She was short of breath. A lock of hair had slipped against her temple.

— A meeting that wouldn't end, of course. Let me guess: next time, it will be the transport. Do you have an integrated excuse generator?

She laughed. Not a polite laugh. A real laugh, brief, surprised, which immediately relaxed her shoulders.

— You're resentful.

— Punctual, above all.

A waiter approached. She ordered a glass of white wine. I took one too.

For a few seconds, we watched the night fall over the garden. Passersby slid behind the glass like soundless silhouettes.

— This area is quieter than anything you find in Saclay, she said.

— At my place, on Moineau Island, tranquility never takes a break.

She gave me a sideways glance, then her eyes slid for a second to the table, to the train ticket sticking out of my notebook.

— Moineau Island, she repeated, as if to verify the name aloud. It sounds like a place with only trees and a steeple.

— You're not far off. A cabin, rather than a steeple.

— I always forget I'm dining with a hermit.

— A hermit who responds to Parisian invitations.

— A hermit who, just a few years ago, spent his nights in newsrooms. You can't erase a Parisian past so easily.

— You're researching me now? I asked.

— Let's say I observe, she replied with a smile, and I listen when I'm told interesting things.

She smiled.

I then felt an unusual ease settle between us, almost too quickly. The kind of familiarity that usually doesn't come in the second real exchange. As if part of the conversation had already taken place elsewhere, without me.

I decided to get to the heart of the matter.

— You told me about that night. Cobot's question. The curves that changed nature. But there's one thing you didn't say.

She looked up.

— Which one?

— How did you know you had a major innovation, and not just a particularly strange bug?

Eva didn't answer right away.

The question seemed to have touched her in an unexpected place. Not on the facts. On her. On what she had perceived even before she could demonstrate it.

She twirled her glass between her fingers.

— It was in the tone, she finally said.

— The tone?

— Not in the facts themselves. The question was logical. Perfectly constructed. Anyone could have seen it as an elegant bug, or a well-disguised statistical anomaly. But me, even before deciding if it was valid, I heard something else.

She paused.

— An assurance.

The word hung between us.

— Not curiosity, she continued. Not really. Rather a suspense deliberately created.

She lowered her eyes slightly, as if searching for the exact wording.

— It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't have...

She hesitated.

— That ear.

— That ear? I repeated.

— It's my specialty. Even before reinforcement learning models, I was trained in human-machine interactions: the way we perceive a machine, how we grant it, or not, our trust. But to understand that, you first have to understand how humans read each other. A hesitation. A silence that lasts a second too long. A sentence that says the opposite of what it should say.

She paused, as if replaying the scene.

— That night, in Cobot, I heard something I had already heard in humans: the voice of someone who has decided to go further than what they let on.

— It's that same intuition that gave you the idea for Cobot's colors, I suppose, I said. Rousseau mentioned it at the conference: Cobot expressed its "emotions" by projecting colors.

She looked up, surprised that I had remembered that detail.

— Exactly. A color for each state, with all the necessary quotation marks, of course, because we still don't know what it really covers in him. I was inspired by a cartoon I watched with my nephew. Each emotion has a hue, readable at a glance. It's very simple. Almost childlike. That's precisely what interests me.

She brushed the edge of her glass with her fingertips.

— LEDs diffuse the colors. In one of its humanoid vehicles, it even has a ventral screen that displays these colors, because emotions often happen there. Cobot can also project images, graphs, texts, on any surface. But the idea wasn't technical, at first. It was an idea of trust. If an intelligence becomes complex enough that we no longer know what it thinks, we need to find a means of expression to communicate its feelings, that's what we do among humans.

— You designed expressions for a machine that had worried you, I remarked.

She remained thoughtful for a moment. Her gaze was fixed somewhere behind me, without really seeing the room. There was a discreet, restrained energy in her face, as if she took great care never to let on the full extent of what she understood.

— It must be exhausting, I said.

She returned to me.

— What is?

— Seeing all that all the time. In a machine. And in the people around you.

She didn't answer right away. The laughter had disappeared.

— You know what's strangest, Franck? she finally said. I understand people. Really. I see what happens behind their silences, behind their little phrases too well formulated to be honest. At the center, it's almost a reflex. I know which doctoral student doubts himself without ever saying it. I recognize the moment when someone closes up for fear of being wrong. Sometimes, I would prefer not to see these weak signals. Not to hear them. Not to receive them.

She brought her glass to her lips, but barely drank.

— It would be simpler to ignore them.

She set her glass down carefully.

— And it's the same with my friends. They sit across from me and lay down what they don't dare tell anyone else. I find the words. The right ones, generally. And it works. Almost always.

She had a small laugh, but it was no longer light.

— Afterward, they go home lighter. And I stay with their fears, their doubts, their anger. Their shame, sometimes. I carry that. And I never say anything about my emotions or feelings.

She stopped abruptly.

Something had just slipped out. I saw it immediately in the way her face closed, almost imperceptibly. She looked like someone who realizes too late that they have just spoken a sentence they had kept for years.

— Sorry, she said.

— Why?

She shook her head slightly.

— I don't know. Because I hadn't planned to say that.

Her voice dropped a tone.

— There's something quite paradoxical, on top of that. Everyone sees me as someone who has succeeded. The Turing Award, the research center, the recognition. And it's precisely that which forbids me from complaining. When you get all that, you no longer have the right to say it's heavy to bear. So I keep quiet. I carry. Again and again. Because unloading my own weight on someone else seems almost indecent to me.

She turned her eyes to the street.

— I feel like I've exhausted my right to complain by succeeding.

Her voice had trembled on the last words. Her eyes shone. Immediately, she straightened up, as if her body had decided before her to regain control.

I looked at her for a long moment before responding.

It was necessary to find words that do not console too quickly. Words that do not reduce what she had just said to a passing fragility.

— It's an immense quality, Eva. Perhaps even THE quality, today.

She had a troubled smile.

— You're saying that to please me.

— No.

I searched for my words.

— Look at what you're building, at the research center. Machines that calculate, that optimize, that learn. Machines that may eventually replace part of what we still call work or politics. But sensing a hesitation in a voice, guessing what a person can't formulate, understanding the exact moment when to speak and when to remain silent... no artificial intelligence really knows how to do that.

She didn't move.

— The more the world fills with machines capable of automating what humans repeat in finance, in law, in human resources, the rarer what you do becomes. It may even be the last thing that will really matter when everything else is done by machines.

She didn't answer right away.

— I wish I could believe you completely, she finally said.

— What prevents you? I asked.

She had a thoughtful sigh. The door she had just slightly opened closed gently. She returned to the official reason for our dinner.

— You know, the commune that Rousseau didn't name at the conference? It's Fontenys.

She let a second pass, as if the name had to take its place between us.

— The mayor is a former engineer. He became a local elected official after the factory that supported the commune closed. He had been using Cobot for months, without communication, without a plan, even before Rousseau heard about it.

— And Rousseau picked up the story, I said.

— Not exactly. Or rather, without even understanding that he was really picking it up. You heard him at the conference: he ended up admitting that it wasn't his idea. That's Rousseau. An outsider. Not a strategist. Even less someone who thinks two moves ahead.

She had a slight smile, but it was not admiring.

— An instinct, almost animal. He senses what can serve him, even when he hasn't sought it. He discovered Fontenys by chance and thought there was something there to carry higher. He didn't launch anything. Didn't build anything. He saw a story that was already working on its own, and he clung to it.

— And the experimentation continues?

— For six months now. Without an official protocol.

She lowered her eyes to her glass, then raised them to me. We were no longer in confidence. She had just decided something.

— I'm going there tomorrow morning to understand what the inhabitants really feel. Not what is said about them since Rousseau brought the story to light.

She paused.

— You should come.

I accepted without hesitation. She had a mischievous smile.

It was only afterward that this lack of hesitation seemed strange to me. At the time, it had seemed obvious. Almost natural.

We arranged to meet at Montparnasse station, at seven o'clock.

Leaving the brasserie, night had already fallen over the garden. The air had cooled. The Luxembourg gates lined the sidewalk like a black border, and the streetlights cut the trees into deep masses.

I walked alone for a few minutes.

I thought back to what I had just told her with such assurance. This almost reassuring idea that her social intelligence would be what machines could never steal from her.

Then another question settled.

Colder. More precise.

And if that same intelligence had just been exercised on me?

I thought back to the questions she had asked. To the silences she had let slip with a precision that was no accident. To her way of observing each of my gestures without ever seeming to do so. To the train ticket she had noticed before I even realized I had left it in plain sight. To Moineau Island, guessed in a second. To this ease between us, perhaps too quick to be innocent.

She had even chosen the place for this dinner I thought I had initiated.

And I had just accepted, without a second's hesitation, to drop everything to follow her at dawn, to a place I would never have gone of my own accord.

She had only to ask.

Worse: I had the impression that the decision came from me.