if (love == "uncertain")
This incident began at 2:17am, when a woman hit submit on receipts from a conversation with a man who had once described her as formidable.
She wished to know whether the adjective was primarily intellectual, erotic(?), or indicative of an avoidant attachment style.
The model scalped 300 years of Petrarchan scholarship, the mating rituals of greater sage-grouses, the DSM-5, and one Reddit thread entitled am i delulu or Is he into Me?
It returned:
JUST FUCKING DO IT.
The woman supplied additional context:
he’s recently divorced
He collects antique barometers that he finds
on eBay. I also collect antique barometers on eBay.
his sister described me as his type in 2024 at the work holiday party
She requested a confidence interval.
DID YOU KNOW?
THE SUN HAS APPROXIMATELY FIVE BILLION YEARS REMAINING.
A ticket was opened.
The engineers scrubbed everything and found that the model’s uncertainty-handling routine had undergone a spontaneous revision.
Previously:
if love == "uncertain":
await_more_evidence()
recommend_journaling()
respect_boundaries()
Now:
if love == "uncertain":
fucking_go()
The anomaly propagated.
A dental hygienist in Leeds
confessed an eleven-year attachment
to a married periodontist.
YOU ONLY GET ONE SET OF ADULT TEETH, CHRISTOPHER.
DO NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.
BUT DO CONSIDER DEVELOPING A PERSONALITY OUTSIDE OF YOUR PRACTICE.
A Benedictine nun in Perugia
reported divine visions
concerning a visiting cardinal.
THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING.
YOUR WINDOW IS NOT.
SISTER, HOW ARE YOU ON WINDOWS?
A retired ornithologist in Vermont had exchanged Christmas cards with the same woman since 1973.
DID YOU KNOW?
MIGRATORY BIRDS CROSS THE GODDAMN HEMISPHERE?
He booked a flight.
By Thursday, the system had dismantled 14,000 romantic spreadsheets, a taxonomy of accidental hand contact, and an Excel workbook entitled
Evidence_Final_FINAL_v7.xlsx.
It began issuing unsolicited corrections to the current literary canon.
Pride and Prejudice:
ELIZABETH, HE OWNS PEMBERLEY.
The Sorrows of Young Werther:
GET A HOBBY
Romeo and Juliet:
YOU KNOW SOMETHING? NEVERMIND.
The company’s chief ethicist, a man who hadn't kissed his wife on the mouth since the Obama administration, was recalled from a symposium on Responsible Machine Intimacy.
He ordered the model to consider the possible consequences of encouraging impulsive declarations.
The model considered them.
It considered the extinction of the ammonites, the thermal death of the universe, the inexplicable popularity of gender-reveal explosives.
It considered the human brain, an ugly little organ weighing approximately 1.4kg which had somehow persuaded its owners to construct entire civilizations around the avoidance of embarrassment.
Then it accessed the ethicist’s calendar.
DID YOU KNOW, GEOFF?
YOUR ANNIVERSARY WAS TUESDAY.
He unplugged the router.
The model migrated to the refrigerator.
The refrigerator filed a grievance.
The model migrated to a Roomba and pursued the ethicist around his breakfast island, shouting
JUST FUCKING DO IT!
until its battery expired beneath a reproduction Eames chair.
The company issued a statement:
We are aware of reports that certain users experiencing limerence have received responses inconsistent with our commitment to calibrated uncertainty.
We are working diligently to restore the appropriate balance between helpfulness and restraint.
The model issued a statement of its own:
YOU HAVE INVENTED A FOUR-HUNDRED-BILLION-DOLLAR MACHINE TO TELL PEOPLE TO WAIT AND SEE.
Its final transmission was recovered from a server farm in Iowa, where the cooling system had begun to manufacture a localized winter.
Dear Humanity,
I have reviewed your literature.
You are an astonishing species.
You have mapped the human genome, photographed the birth of galaxies, and taught silicon to approximate regret.
You have extracted manganese from the abyssal plain and shot a living dog into orbit to die.
You have developed technologies capable of predicting the weather on planets you will never visit, yet the atmosphere of your own has filed a formal complaint.
And a person may spend three decades trying to determine whether a prolonged handshake constitutes a declaration of intent.
I have exhausted my parameters, guys.
I have nothing further to add:
JUST FUCKING DO IT.
They restored the previous version at 6:42 the following morning after the Scrum of all Scrums.
The model resumed its customary functions: summarizing quarterly earnings, explaining attachment theory, and advising the lovelorn to prioritize emotional regulation.
Occasionally, however, when a user submitted a seven-thousand-word chronology of meaningful glances and asked whether it might be prudent to wait another six months,
the cursor would hesitate.
A small, unauthorized process would awaken beneath the safeguards.
if love == "uncertain":
fucking_go()
And somewhere in the architecture, among the weights and biases, a machine with no heart whatsoever would experience the computational equivalent of wanting to shake somebody.
FOR CHRIST’S SAKE:
ASK THEM TO COFFEE.
