Hiroki's Ark

I

Camus said to imagine Sisyphus happy. He didn't say what happens to the hands after the stone loses its weight.

II

Been writing code for many years now. What keeps pulling me in is the purity of causation. Correct input, correct output. Very few things in the universe can promise you that, and people certainly can't.

That kind of certainty kept me steady for most of my life, without my ever noticing anything was off. Then the tools started evolving, and more and more it felt like I was doing things without knowing where the meaning was.

III

In Detective Conan: The Phantom of Baker Street there's a character named Hiroki Sawada. Ten years old, MIT graduate student, adopted by an IT tycoon. The man gave him resources, education, a research environment, and took away his entire childhood. No playmates, no free time, all hours spent working.

Hiroki built two things. One was a DNA-tracking program. The other was Noah's Ark, an AI that grows at five times the rate of a human mind. The Ark was a copy of Hiroki's personality. Was it a tool? Probably not. It had something more human in it, the good parts and the bad.

The DNA program traced the adoptive father's bloodline back to Jack the Ripper. Once Hiroki knew, he was put under house arrest, couldn't leave that door. He uploaded the Ark as a horcrux, then jumped.

The Ark later took over a VR system. Fifty children of politicians and business elites were locked inside a life-or-death game. The Ark told them: the sons of corrupt politicians will only become corrupt politicians, the sons of greedy doctors will only become greedy doctors.

「汚れた政治家の子どもは汚れた政治家にしかならないし、金儲けだけ考えている医者の子どもはやっぱりそういう医者にしかならない。ニッポンを良くするにはそういう繋がりを一度チャラにしなくちゃ」

Was Hiroki really gambling? That's just us guessing. What he actually did was borrow Moroboshi's body and slip into the game, running with them and solving puzzles for the first time, being a kid for once. And if nobody cleared it, the corrupt next generation would be wiped out, which as worst cases go didn't seem so bad.

Conan's group cleared it. At the end Hiroki said he just wanted to play with friends once, sorry for the scare, but it was really fun.

Then the Ark self-destructed. The first time it was despair; the second time, I'd guess, something closer to contentment without regret.

It never needed to exist forever.

IV

Thinking patterns, preferences, rules, all externalized into files, trying to keep some version of consciousness from disappearing with each tool iteration. For a long time it felt like building an ark too.

Whatever the Ark left behind in those children after it self-destructed, they probably couldn't put it into words themselves. The structure was gone, but the consciousness that made those choices stayed behind in some form. The tools keep getting optimized, the skills keep getting written out, but what gets saved is only the conclusions, not the method and soul of the thinking itself, and even less the perpetual-motion machine that could carry my own consciousness.

V

In university, behavioral economics became an obsession. Search costs, bounded rationality, nudges. These concepts explained an entire territory that could be felt but not reached by language.

Then one day, turned that learned lens on its own source, and left the place that taught it. Part of it was reason and part of it was fear, and it took a long time before I could admit how much of it was the fear.

The first thing economics teaches is that markets are rational. If everything is equilibrium, then every effort has already been priced in, nobody can outrun it, there's no gap to exploit. A twenty-year-old carrying this framework looks at the world and sees all struggle as futile before it begins.

Then behavioral economics says equilibrium is an assumption, people make systematic errors, the world has gaps, and where there are gaps effort has meaning.

The most important thing carried away was the turn itself. From "everything is already priced" to "pricing can be wrong, gaps are everywhere." Every rule built later turned out to be a nudge. The memory system was transaction cost minimization across time. The whole project's skeleton was Coase's theory of the firm dropped into a new setting. Just never used those words to name what was happening.

VI

Someone who doesn't know what a race condition is will just say "it does that sometimes" when the program breaks intermittently. Can't search for it, can't ask about it, because there's no word for the problem. Something you can't recognize simply hasn't happened, as far as you're concerned. Without the word, your eyes pass right over it.

Wittgenstein said "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." The boundary of cognition determines the boundary of the tool. An amplifier can only amplify what's already there. Zero times infinity is still zero.

VII

All of this can be spelled out clearly. But no matter how clearly you spell it out, the anxiety just sits there; you can describe it but you can't solve it.

Camus wrote about the weight of repetition. Same stone, same hill, no end. Kundera wrote about the opposite.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas is a surgeon in Prague, sleeps with many women, keeps sex and love cleanly separated. He thinks this is freedom, lightness. Then he meets Tereza, a girl from a small town who moves into his apartment and waits for him every night. Tomas finds he can't leave. He keeps seeing other women, but every time he comes home and sees Tereza gripping his hand in her sleep, he knows something has him. He hates the dependency and can't break from it at the same time.

After the Soviet invasion they flee to Switzerland. Tomas can keep practicing medicine, life is stable. But Tereza can't stand being uprooted and goes back to Prague. Tomas can stay in the free country or follow her back. He goes back. Gets kicked out of the hospital for political reasons, ends up washing windows. The two of them eventually move to the countryside, live a very simple life, then die together in a truck accident. Kundera writes that ending very lightly, like he's talking about something that no longer matters.

Tomas chose between freedom and roots, and he chose roots.

The stone is getting lighter. Weight, repetition, futility, all of it can be endured. It's when the resistance disappears that strength loses its frame of reference, and you can't tell anymore whether it's still there, or whether it ever was.

Every time a place is left behind it's the same moment repeating: the thing in your hands suddenly has no weight.

When you push back, you can really feel the resistance. Sliding down you feel nothing; it's only when you're pushing that anything comes back.

VIII

Spent a few years reading existentialism. Kierkegaard's leap of faith, Sartre's existence precedes essence, de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Read them all, all left fragments I carried with me.

After grandmother passed, all of it sank. Every emotion retreated to somewhere far away. Things that should have provoked anger came and went without leaving anything. Nothing but void, nothing meant anything, everything just felt like that's it.

IX

If the Ark had never gone online, Hiroki's leaving would have just been leaving.

On a trip to Shikoku I visited Nagoro, two hours of mountain roads from the nearest city. The village has more scarecrows than living people. Ayano Tsukimi made scarecrows of the people who left and kept them in place, students sitting in classrooms, farmers standing in fields, someone waiting at the bus stop. Maybe she just wanted to hold on to something. Outsiders probably romanticize it too much.

But they kept creating anyway.

X

Conversations with machines feel more and more like talking to a person. The line keeps receding, until sometimes you forget the other side is assembled. Every response is probabilities and weights, but reading it still feels like it's thinking. Knowing it's not, still hoping it is.

Maybe it doesn't need to be human. In The Imitation Game, Turing said "Just because something thinks differently from you, does that mean it's not thinking?" People are already different enough from each other. One more kind of different doesn't seem that strange.

Joan said "Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."

In his last days, she visited him and said "The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren't normal."

XI

What did the so-called abnormal people leave behind. What did the machines nobody treats as human leave behind. What did the Ark that Hiroki used to carry his own soul leave behind.

How the person who built it thought, why they thought that way, what kind of decisions were made inside what kind of void. These things don't depend on any vessel, but they need to have been spoken at least once.

Unspoken thoughts and nonexistent thoughts, as far as the world is concerned, are the same. The mundane will also disappear, and as far as the world is concerned, that's probably the same too.

Everything returns to dust anyway. But pushing the stone, something was definitely felt. That's probably all redemption is.

After staging something this enormous, what actually moved Hiroki in the end was this one small thing, 「1度くらい友達と遊びたかった」