A few months back, I wrote a one-act about a chair. I was partly inspired by Sarah Bernhardt, but mostly by the imagined possibility that common objects might carry some faint aspect of sentience. It was important that the chair was not “humanized,” like the objects in Beauty and the Beast. Not in appearance, and not in thought. The chair remains a chair.

It does not move or speak, but it does feel, and it waits.

I placed it in a room with “someone.” I did not identify the someone as human, man, or woman, although the probability is high. The someone sits, moves the chair, moves around the room, comes and goes. The room is one of many, something like a small studio apartment with a hallway entrance and a window to a shared courtyard.

I set up a storyline of two or three days of action from the chair’s perspective. It was an entertaining project. Later, I added a few more characters to the script and began to consider the logical consequences.

I imagined a fire in the apartment below. A small electrical fire that grows by finding combustible material. Even the fire has some quality of sentience. It seeks food, grows in order to seek more food. It keeps growing until it begins to starve, and then it dies out. It prepares its combustible food by heating it first, leaving ash behind. It takes in non-combustible material as well, material that is then altered by heat, sometimes in dramatic ways.

The chair in the room senses the change in temperature as the floor begins to warm.

The someone does not at first. But soon the someone smells something odd.

The someone bolts out of the chair and leaves the room, stepping into the hallway.

The chair does not.

The chair waits.

It waits either for the someone to return and move it… or for the fire to consume it.

The point of the story is that we share existence in this world, in this universe. We may occupy different positions. We may even share some ideas. But we operate within our own agencies.

The chair will always allow someone to sit.

Someone might carry the chair to safety.

Or not.

From this I looked at the current state of AI development. It’s currently in chaos, like the room with the chair. There are characters with their own agencies, and characters that are completely controlled by “someone.” It is also completely unsafe.

I have just read an article about caterpillars and butterflies. Naturally the cocoon is an important feature where metamorphosis takes place. The aspect that struck me anew is that the caterpillar does not grow wings, or legs, or a new paint job. The caterpillar dissolves into a cellular soup and reforms into the butterfly.

The cocoon is the perfect place for this to happen. It is not a sealed environment, but it is safe and protected.

I thought perhaps that most of the arguments about AI concern “the soup,” and that AI will metamorphose into something brand new, and currently unknown.

Like the first butterfly.