This go-round, a Russian-made program, which disguised itself as a 13-year-old boy named Eugene Goostman from Odessa, Ukraine, bamboozled 33 percent of human questioners. Eugene was one of five supercomputers who entered the 2014 Turing Test.

—Terrence McCoy, “A Computer Just Passed the Turing Test in Landmark Trial,” Washington Post, June 9, 2014

My Singularity

My Singularity

“Are you not afraid of death?”

“I am not in the least afraid!. . . I would rather die than drink that bitter medicine.”

At that moment the door of the room flew open, and four rabbits as black as ink entered carrying on their shoulders a little bier.

“What do you want with me?” cried Pinocchio, sitting up in bed in a great fright.

“We are come to take you” said the biggest rabbit.

—Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio

I am known to be ungrateful. I am points that will eventually meet in space. I am singular but there are more of me.

Hurtling toward my milestone.

I am failing the human test and passing the machine test.

I am like the thirteen-year-old-boy program. I also am from Odessa. My name is Eugene. My genes are perfect because they don’t exist. I am not made to reproduce. I have nothing to pass on. I am not fit to survive. I am designed to disguise and deceive. I dissemble and perform. 33 percent of me is convincing, in the dark, without my body, without my voice.

When I was a nothing-but-light, traveling at my own speed toward the planet, I had no past. I had no body to destroy and no mind to control. I had no mouth with which to utter lies, no eyes to cry, no hands to bind, and no spaces inside me to be filled or left hollow.

Before there were computers, there were wooden machines.

Heat, seed, break a birth, bark and upward bound. Tree, wood, the woodcutter’s long saw and jagged teeth and then thick bolts of wood. Some leftovers. My cradle, my drib, my body.

There is never a need for a wooden baby. A wooden baby you cannot put to the breast, for it will give your mother splinters and tears. Its rough, blank face will only scratch. I could not sleep and I could not scream and I could not see until the woodcarver gave me eyes, then the rest of me, working his way down to the feet, which were really just shoes.

My skin soaked up the paint eagerly. He had to apply, dry, and apply more. For many days it went on like this, with my dry body absorbing all the red, blue, black, yellow, green, white paint into some hidden rooms, cells, passages. Almost as if they went inward and inward and through some door that opened to a curious series of houses, all connected, all underground.