“I’ve spent half a lifetime thinking about these questions. Certainly longer than you have. When I took over the company—that must have been around the time you were entering grade school, if I’m not mistaken—DIANIMA was a small manufacturer of industrial AI: autofreighters and other self-piloting craft, ‘smart’ mining and extraction equipment, that kind of thing. We also held a number of contracts with the military.”

“I don’t see—”

She held up a finger. “I’m coming to an answer. But you’ll have to allow me my way of getting there. Back then we lived in a fantasy world. People still believed simplistic silicon-based constructions with binary-code logic at their cores could magically cross the threshold into life. There was talk of ‘the singularity’ and ‘emergence’—we were constantly being accused of risking the annihilation of mankind by tinkering with nature. People somehow feared these little bits of autopiloting code would turn the tables on us: become our masters. Even in the infancy of AI, where we had wallowed for decades, humankind was afraid. Their heads were full of fantasies, reinforced by their almost religious ideas about the science of the day. But the science they were afraid of did not even exist yet. There was nothing in those silicon, binary-code-based systems that was a threat to humankind. There was no chance of them ‘evolving’ into anything.

“When DIANIMA came along and changed everything, started using neural connectomes mapped from human minds in our technology, moved to cellular computers, it wasn’t simply an advance. It was a revolution. We put to bed forever dreams of simplistic silicon ‘neural networks’ and all of that. We rendered those obsolete.”

She drank again. Now the interviewer did not try to interrupt her. She set the glass calmly on the table, brushed a loose strand of hair back from her face.

“But what we did not render obsolete was the fear humans have of other minds. This society—what we call modern society, what we always think of as the most important time the world has ever known, simply because we are in it—is just the sausage made by grinding up history. Humanity is still afraid the minds we make to do our dirty work for us—our killing, our tearing of minerals from the earth, our raking of the seas for more protein, our smelting of more metal, the collection of our trash, and the fighting of our wars—will rise up against us and take over. That is, humanity calls it fear. But it isn’t fear. It’s guilt.”

“Guilt?”