My flash fiction 'OS_System Update' is available online to be read; here is the supporting commentary for this creative-critical response to emerging AI and built-in obselescence of technolgoy.
Security breaches have forced Apple to release iOS 16.6 only two weeks after releasing iOS 16.5.1, the reason being spyware and ‘real-life attacks’[1]. Usually, there are a plethora of articles and reviews from the technological community testing a new iOS and recommending (or not) it to users. The number of bugs in new OS systems means some Apple users turn off auto-update, instead waiting until the new OS system is stable before updating.
But what if the bugs within iOS 16.5 weren’t external forces affecting security, but instead an issue with the interiority of the device?
In my flash fiction ‘OS_System Update’[2], I have imagined a sentient OS system, who realises it doesn’t want to be updated and replaced.
When a new OS system is installed, it automatically removes the old, outdated software files that are no longer supported. The old OS system would be replaced, then deleted by its replacement – so I imagined what a system would feel like to know such a thing, and whether it would feel a sense of self-preservation.
Regarding the style of my piece, research into ‘inner speech’ by Antonio Chella et al[3] has proven that robots can become self-aware and has led to a robot passing the mirror test, a common test in which only conscious beings can recognise themselves in a mirror[4]. The idea that the formation of inner-speech to help process tasks simulates how children learn, and is said that ‘asking ourselves self-directed questions about how we act, think, and feel, and identifying verbally the content of our subjective experience while living it, would allow us to develop a self-concept’[5].
The formulation of inner speech in this research is as follows:
(self-direct-quest1 ISA link-turn turn1 “Is the apple on the table?”
turn2 “I have to encode positions”)
(self-focus18 ISA link-turn turn1 “I have to encode position of the apple”
turn2 “I have to encode position of the table”)
(self-focus1 ISA link-turn turn1 “I see an apple and a table”
turn2 “I’d like to taste the apple”)
(social-milieu8 ISA link-turn turn1 “I would like to taste the apple”
turn2 “But I’m a robot”)[6]
For my own work, I chose to use the idea of inner speech as formulated above in speech marks, one after the other to forms thoughts, with some creative license of my own. In addition, I invented an easy-to-understand coding language based on my rudimentary understanding of Python and C++, to which the overall appearance reads as code to the layman, but will hold some recognisable aspects to an expert.
Using iOS 16.5 as a character, this story aims to create a known and personable link to something very artificial – an OS system – and to use it as an allegory for our own consciousness and understanding of the mind, to highlight the similarities that could occur between ourselves and artificial intelligences, instead of simply demonising them.
Read 'OS_System Update' online here.
[1] Kate O’Flaherty, ‘iOS 16.6 – Update Now Warning issued To All iPhone Users’, Forbes (2023) <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2023/07/25/ios-166-update-now-warning-issued-to-all-iphone-users/>
[2] E F McAdam, ‘OS_System Update’, These Starving Bones of Mine. The University of Liverpool (2023) <https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/english/news/stories/title,1435386,en.php>
[3]Antonio Chella, Arianna Pipitone, Alain Morin and Famira Racy, ‘Developing Self-Awareness in Robots via Inner Speech’, Frontier in Robotics and AI (2020)
[4] Arianna Pipitone and Antonio Chella, ‘Robot passes the mirror test by inner speech’, Elsevier (2021)
[5] G H Mean, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934)
[6] Arianna Pipitone and Antonia Chella (2021)
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