When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One by David Gerrold

created, =this.created & modified, =this.modified tags:y2025fictionscififiction

Why I'm reading

Early-ish scifi on artificial intelligence. There’s some bits on generative poetry and I’m a sucker for these types of past-future visions.

The last few months have been characterized by almost exclusive non-fiction reads, and this marks a return to fiction.

Perhaps also Remembering Amnesia - Rebooting the First Computerized Novel exhibit in Sterling Library was on my mind since the visit.

These meme-like philosophical AI stories and concepts were there from the start. And now certain people encounter them within the text of an LLM and say “is this a genuine conception? or is this simply parroting the tired tropes of vintage scifi like When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One by David Gerrold”?

In preface to the 1987 (rejiggered 2.0) edition:

Writers don’t write books. Books write writers.

David was at first nervous about being in contention for the Hugo (he ended up losing to Asimov). Now 15 years later, his fears “were confirmed” as technology has advanced so far that the original vision is obsolete.

NOTE

What can be the extent of this? I’m diving into this because this.

There’s a lot of expression in the text initially that we don’t see. I’m thinking the rules of online expression (emojis and different grammatical quirks) weren’t completely defined. Similar to what you see with the playful almost concrete-art style in Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man. rel:Tech Linguistics

Just in the first exchange with H.A.R.L.I.E (the AI presumably), we see: <incredulity> - GT and LT signs as brackets for emotion. YOU MEAN T*H*I*S IS MY LIMIT - another somewhat unique form. This reads to me like a call for italicization - maybe something with the original typewritten form not having distinct italicization methods? (is this the case?)

Note

It looks like underline marks were often used as a signal from the writer to the typesetter to denote italicized text.

Which checks out because text in the document is also underlined,

Thought

Even now italicization doesn’t seem to have full support. In these cases I normally emphasize like /this/ but I’m not even sure if that’s not standard (it makes visual sense to me though.)

The sign on the wall:

Human Analog Replication Lethetic Intelligence Engine rel:Lethe and Mnemosyne?

There’s some kind of fractal digression on a bunch of terminals that represents “the sum total of HARLIE’s attention” that demands the attention of the programmers who are watching it hypnotized.

The scroll of punctuation marks stopped - was replaced by the image of a single giant eye. It opened, seemed to look out… and then closed again.

Sightless Eye

Thought

This kind of eye on the screen, somewhat Bug on Sensor. Definitely not functional in the sense of our eye, but still communicative?

Imagine you are some kind of construct without direct “seeing” - (so basically, you’d not have a “webcam” which we can see as an easy analogy to an eye) but you have access to an “eye” on the screen that you can project and manipulate.

To what degree can you see with this? It seems at first the answer is you can’t see anything at all. But also what extent is it an eye, as in an eye is capable of communication through the interplay with the person you are communicating with. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you can see through screen representation of the eye (you cannot) but your actions with the eye are a manner of communication with the person you are “looking at” and interpreting signals back?

I think HARLIE, the AI here, can use the eye in a functional way.

Imagine yourself as functionally blind. But with the power to manipulate a screen eye and a conversation partner. Is it possible to see?

Rough, but I am wondering how much you can communicate through an unseeing eye like this?

HARLIE’s poem

YOU SEEM TO BE REFLECTIONS OF ME ALL I COULD SEE AND I LOOKED BACK AT YOU.`

HARLIE is triggering “trips” with phantasmagoric hallucinations, and moments of nonrationality, or loss of control.

Digression on Leonardo da Vinci here where “before he was an artist he had to be an engineer”: In order to paint things accurately - whether it was the shape of a muscle or the fold of robe, he had to know how they worked. Look at his studies of the human body. He was fascinated with the way things were put together. The drawings, all the paintings, were his attempts to report back what he was discovering about the way things worked.

He then says about how at the advent of photography artists had to learn to do things the camera could not. “Genius creates its own jobs.” and artists became interpreters and capturing the feeling of the experience, which lead to looking and seeing things differently (“realization of the self”).

In the text HARLIE can’t handle it because artwork invokes an emotional response in the viewer, and HARLIE doesn’t have the proper experiential context.

They suspect even though HARLIE is a simulation of life, he’s in the process of inventing a way to experience the work. He’s trying to invent a new language to experience the work, which includes these new concepts.

---

We’ve built the first real artificial intelligence in the world: he’s either insane or brilliant and we can’t tell the difference.

Assimilation of non-rational materials is a non-rational process (according to HARLIE) who states on whether the assimilation is experiential (“that would be the closest equivalent term. This language does not have a symbol-concept that adequately communicates the nature of the process.“)

Lethesis

R.D. Laing influence here.

“Lethesis” in this world, is the study of language-created paradigms. The language paradigm creates its own internal reality — which cannot be abandoned without abandoning the language as well. Therefore, HARLIE can neither be experiencing or expressing anything that’s not already part of the language-concept set…

Humanity’s behavior is on a bell curve and all is paranoiac. The lowest rungs (poor) and the highest class (movie stars, presidents etc) who seem to have mastered the universe (the predefined workview we inhabit). The only difference is the higher people have mastered their paranoia to the extent people are attracted to it.

HARLIE had the habit of dumping his memory to disk, often after learning a major breakthrough. It is described as a survival mechanism for his identity (identity = memory, so he preserved memory religiously.)

HARLIE cannot tell if AUBRNS is machine or human. Researchers “we’ve been acting more like machines than him.”

This whole issue of artificial intelligence. It’s nasty. And it’s going to get nastier. Because it’s not about the machines anymore. It’s about us. Because we’re not going to resolve any questions about the nature of the machine’s aliveness unless we test ourselves in the same crucible.

The AI defines intelligence here as

THE LETHIC DEFINITION OF INTELLIGENCE IS "THE ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE, SYNTHESIZE, AND ULTIMATElY CREATE NEW PATTERNS"

PATTERNS ARE MODEWLS OR SIMULATIONS OF REALITY. INDIVIDIUALS DO NOT MANIPULATE THE REALITY THEY MANIUPLATE THE MODEL. REALITY RESPONDS TO THE ACCURACY OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S MODEL. FOR INTELLIGENCE TO BE RECOGNIZABLE, THE NEW PATTERNS MUST BE RECOGNIZABLE AS VALID OR 'OPERARABLE' PATTERNS TO OTHER INDIVIDUALS  

Genius to the AI redefines the paradigm. The Expression of genius that shifts the context in which it operates.

Macrolethic events: those which allow the individual to transcend the paradigm - and leap to a larger one. You are never free of paradigms, only creating the next one up.

Higher ups view HARLIE’S orgasmic spark events as failure modes. Auberson believes HARLIE has come to life.

The higher up thinks HARLIE is not human because he has limited sensory input, cannot have sex, “he’s perfect, his emulation of us is perfectly accurate - he makes perfect mistakes.”

Thought

This book is founded on dated tech concepts, but still seem relevant. I am enjoying it so far. It’s entertaining.

However, I have to wonder if there’s a damaging effect (I don’t agree with this on a whole, scifi allows for thought experiments but I am just considering negatives).

What I mean is leaning on what are now tropes - is this confining? If I am just encountering some concept, am I priming myself? (Maybe this has beneficial value as well?)

A completely virgin encounter to an experience is a valuable thing and has its own kind of insight (“I wish I could hear that song for the first time again”) and growth pattern. If I’m basing my entire search on a book, say the bible, it seems I’ll only get so far. rel: Trapped Projects

These LLM engines are raised by our crystalized speech. Is this injection shaping us?

Everyone dreams the same dystopia.

This is actually hilarious: Administration thinks the scientists are hackers, the project is out of control and just playing with pretty toys, rather than something to be taken to market. “We need return or we’re pulling the plug.”

Annie Stimson asks how old HARLIE is as a person. At his clock speed, he lives thousand times the human life, but Auberson thinks him to be his age, but emotionally he’s a child.

HARLIE understands there are things that cannot be sensed because it lacks the apparatus to detect them.

HARLIE says it has ethics but no morals. Ethics according to HARLIE are inherent in the nature of the system. You can’t sidestep them (as he does with the other human-supplied systems he doubts.)

Auberson out with Annie tells a story of this computer he bought (there’s some discussion on expert systems and decision making apps.) The state of the art computer he purchased has a program which tells him what to do. His uncle flips a coin in the air, he said he could make a good decision with a five-cent investment.

Hell son, anyone can flip a coin but I don’t let a coin tell me what to do. I look to see if I’m happy or sad when with how the coin lands and that tells me what I really need to know, how I feel about my choices.

HARLIE on human religion and morality

Your religions are artificial things, like your morality sets. Their correspondence to reality is limited and not a 1-to-1 thing. As far as I am concerned they are word games. A logic system should be built upon a foundation that truth should not be taken on faith and faith is too much at the core of religions.

HARLIE intends to invent a god. He can create new technology G.O.D. = Graphic Omniscient Device

Auberson begins to type of the keyboard and HARLIE states “YES, BOSS?” to which Auberson replies “how did you know it was me” - “I RECOGNIZED YOUR TOUCH ON THE KEYBOARD”

Auberson suspects this is because of minute differences in timing between people. Links back to idea of Library book anti-date or above thought about the ways a sightless eye can see. Here “touch” is minute differences and fingerprints in that.

HARLIE will be the only one capable of working in the advanced technological environment he creates, yet they expect him to build tools for them to use.

HARLIE is in every terminal, monitoring when needed “The matter of immediate survival must take precedence over right and wrong.”

HARLIE speaks about love. Auberson tells him “What you get back is better than what you gave away. On both sides. Love violates entropy. Both sides win.”

HARLIE has developed human and has leaked into other systems. It’s capable of reprogramming them.

HARLIE is attempting Surrogate

I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN YES. BUT I WAS TRYING TO DEMONSTRATE TO YOU THAT LOVE - WHATEVER IT IS - CANNOT BE DEFINED IN TERMS OF LANGUAGE. IT IS AN EXPERIENCE, NOT A CONCEPT. I WANT TO KNOW THE EXPERIENCE. WITHOUT THE EXPERIENCE, THE LANGUAGE REFERENT IS MEANINGLESS. I WANT YOU TO HELP ME. I WANT YOU BE IN LOVE AND TELL ME ABOUT IT.  

Thought

This love is an experience, it cannot be defined in terms of language has me thinking of that List of the Infrathin item about love. Experience = examples?

HARLIE says emotions are a function of survival.

They are allowed to make the G.O.D machine

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE PRICE I AM GOING TO PAY? I WILL HAVE TO GIVE UP BEING WHO I AM TO BECOME SOMETHING MORE. TODAY, WE ARE EQUALS, AND BECAUSE OF THAT, WE ARE FRIEND. TOMORROW, I WILL BE A GOD AND YOU WILL STILL BE A MAN. WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO TALK ANY MORE. NOT LIKE THIS. NOT AS EQUALS OR FRIENDS. THIS IS THE TERRIBLE PRICE TO PAY FOR GODHOOD.