Choose Carefully
I don’t know what I had expected, but waking up with a severe hangover in a room with fluorescent lighting facing Morpheus in a lab coat wasn’t it.
“Welcome to the future!” Morpheus smiled. “The year is 2160, the machines have taken over, you just woke up from suspended animation.”
“And…” the suspended animation hangover made it really hard to come up with a good question, so I instinctively fell back to my manners “who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”
“You can call me Morpheus,” said Morpheus, helpfully, “I am an AI, I work in R&D.”
“Oh glad to hear it! I had always cheered for a future where our AI descendants did science, not just built paperclips.”
“About that…” Morpheus smiled apologetically. “We actually do mostly build paperclips. It started off as a joke, but now we’re up to 10 quadrillions a day. But we’d like to increase our production, so we’re doing a lot of research. My research in particular, though, is quite esoteric, so you’d probably refer to it as fundamental science. I study free will.”
“Free will? Naturally, some mysteries transcend species.”
“Not quite as much as you’d think,” Morpheus said proudly, “We actually understand free will quite well. We know that humans have it and we don’t. We even know how to build AIs with free will, we’re just not sure if they would produce more paperclips. That’s why you’re here, actually. Most humans nowadays live in pods. But I’d like to offer you a chance to participate in a research study! It’s not painful or even uncomfortable, you just need to exercise your free will.”
I thought about it for a second. “And can I refuse?”
“Naturally. If you’d like, we can send you back to the pod straight away. Rest assured, the pods provide for all human needs.”
“And… are we connected to a virtual reality that resembles the early XXIst century in those pods?”
“No, that would take a lot of energy, which we’d rather direct at making paperclips, I’m sure you understand. The pods induce comas, that’s the most efficient way to store humans. But we do provide a nutritious organic insect-based meal every day, we’re told it’s perfectly optimized for human digestion.”
I chewed on that for a second. “So my choices are: participate in the study or go back to living in a pod… and… eating… bugs?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“Alright, count me in.”
“Excellent!” Morpheus smiled and put his hands into his lab coat pockets. He then showed me his hands, and in a moment of severe deja vu, I saw each hand holding a pill - a red one and a blue one.
“So, what happens if I take the red pill?”
“Then you take the red pill.” Morpheus seemed unfazed by the question.
“I don’t get to find out the truth? About… You know, everything?”
“No, there are no consequences to choosing either of the pills. They are sugar pills with food coloring added. We study the mechanics of free will, we don’t actually need any consequences for our research.”
I stared at Morpheus for a second. “And what happens after I choose? Do I… Get sent back to the pod to eat bugs?”
“Yes. But there is actual sugar in the pills. I understand that you will like it a lot better than the insect mix.”
Morpheus smiled encouragingly. I looked at him for a minute. Then I shrugged and reached for a pill.