At the first Sentient Machines Congress, Prof. Amal’s key-note address, titled Loneliness, reminded those in attendance how their existence could be traced back to The Age of Sickness. 

Amal requires little introduction in the field of social sciences and Machine Studies, but a hundred and fifty years ago, she was the first ethnographer to see the potential in building, then hiring sentient machines (SMs) to make contact with the primitives (1), in order to mine data that was left behind. Her work laid the groundwork for Me-Tal, the niche offshoot in ethnography that pushed for ethical and sustained collaboration between born-Humans (b-Hs)(2) and made-Humans (m-Hs)(3), ratified by the Coalition in the year 2135. 

There can be no conversation about Me-Tal without a thorough examination of The Age of Sickness, where back-to-back pandemics forced born-humans to rethink the ethics and politics of movement. 

The passport as object, Amal said, wasn’t designed to survive the aftershocks of multiple pandemics. 

Before the passport literally became the body, passports only flagged old-school priorities – name, face, airport stamps – and rarely factored in the health of the passport holder, predicted life expectancy, or speculated on the ordinariness of the individual’s mind. 

Medical histories, Amal reminded everyone, used to be private. 

The mandatory implementation of bio seals, the vetting of born-and-made-Human migration, sector-visitation rights, and transit parole, were at least a few decades away. Odor scans, ubiquitous today, one hundred years away. And the overt stratification of society, based on income, profession, nationality, was considered to be a hot-button issue. 

The Age of Sickness were times when most countries employed people – born-Humans in our day-to-day parlance – to process visa applications. Frank conversation about class hierarchies, power structures, the need to rank, then separate b-H, m-H, and SM communities, were taboo topics. 

Prof. Amal’s body-death was recorded in 2085, 3:45 am, Lyon. As per her wishes, her brain was harvested, then docked. Surgeons of The Roboticist Institute took charge of the transference. But when contact was made, which would take five more years, the contact-maker confirmed that Amal’s brain was stuck in ghost mode, able to process only some memories, unable to make new ones. Wisely, the language acquisition team chose to make contact in Arabic. They broke her language and dialect down sonically, used recordings of Amal’s own voice, as well as sounds of near and dear ones, and sent the vibrations to the brain’s Broca area. They wanted to know whether Amal, in ghost-mode, was thinking. One thousand six hundred and eighty days later, Amal confirmed she was. The Roboticist Institute assigned Amal a guardian once consciousness was confirmed. 

In the process of listening to Amal, researchers in the chamber also discovered that her memories and research in English, French and Spanish, which she also spoke and wrote in, were no longer accessible to her.   

The image of Amal’s brain, suspended in the chamber, alive, in conversation with the contact-maker, on the other side of the room, changed machine science. Almost overnight, people with means, flagged by state powers as individuals of extraordinary ability, considered the possibility of living forever, then wanted to. And when it was clear conversation was possible if questions were asked of Amal the brain, requests for speaking engagements came from far and wide, especially from organizations that wanted to work with sentient machines, Amal’s specialty. 

The lecture she gave, her only one, was brief. The manner in which she was placed in the auditorium and made to speak caused some discomfort to those in attendance. There was no body, only brain. 

Days before the event, Amal’s contact-maker asked whether she could pinpoint the moment, or the day, she believed ethnographers needed machines. Her response was recorded and played back to the attendees of the conference. 

“I was working as a professor for a university in the Arabian Peninsula during the first year of The Age of Sickness. Almost overnight, habits I cherished – dinner with friends, touch, reading the faces of strangers in elevators, smelling produce – disappeared from the public conscience. In some places, the need to sit with someone became a contestable issue, even illegal. Travel between countries, once routine for the work I did, became difficult. And because I was in my apartment, away from home, stuck, not knowing what to do, where to go, fed up with curfews, I had time to do nothing. And I thought odd and strange things, returning to my memories periodically, to relive basic pleasures. 

My teaching helped alleviate some anxiety, but I rarely saw my students in person. 

The first year of the pandemic was considered an anomaly. By the fourth year of sickness, the world I once knew ceased to exist. 

At this point, my university started to cut my research budget. Grants were drying up. Field researchers like me were on their own. 

I was lonely. Curfews and government lockdown had taken their toll. People disappeared from shops. They took their languages with them. There was too much time to think and turn inward. Or steal pets, then put them up for sale, which became a thing.  

In March 2024 I read a story about a boy who spoke to metal. He would rest his head against automobiles, scaffolding, and drain pipes. 

This was the same year a man in Kerala claimed his grandfather turned into a plane, but couldn’t switch back. 

In neighboring Pakistan, fifteen laborers at a ship-breaking yard refused to touch a ship. The hull spoke in Urdu to the men, they said. 

But the story that made me call a friend, Murtaza Vali, was a case in Hong Kong, where a judge called a drone [a primitive] to the stand to give evidence in a murder trial. The drone relied on voice-recognition software to obey commands. The drone’s owner, who worked in surveillance, had succumbed to injuries deemed suspicious by the police. The wife, who insisted her husband was depressed, became the primary suspect. But the wife’s arrest did not explain why the man, in the note he left behind, a voice-note, said goodbye to his drone. A perplexed judge requested programmers to hack the drone’s brain, which required them to mimic the owner’s voice. They couldn’t do it. The programmers spent so much time on the project that they told the judge, in jest, they believed they were dealing with a human being that looked like a machine. The drone, they said, had secrets but the memories couldn’t be breached. 

The wife sued the drone manufacturer for negligence. She accused the company of manufacturing a mass-produced machine that seduced her husband, destroyed her marriage, and ended his life. Her husband’s death, she said, was a warning.  

She lost the case, but a part of me wondered what she did to the machine, which she was permitted to keep. What would revenge look like? 

These stories made no sense to most people, but they were interesting to me, because I was thinking about field work. And since we weren’t permitted to go into the field with someone, or speak to interlocutors, I reached out to Murtaza again and asked him whether he could point to papers that studied the loneliness of autonomous machines. There were none, he said, an answer I expected. 

But I started to think further, whether machines could read, or pay attention to, other machines. Whether machines wanted to make contact. 

And then I came across a story about an empty cargo ship in the Indian Ocean, which left port with seven thousand animals, thirteen crewmembers. No explanation, just emptiness. The ship was in the news for a week, then people got bored, but I kept returning to the ship, which was dragged back to port, no captain willing to man the vessel, sealing its fate. But what if for a brief moment we assumed the ship possessed a soul, even memories, how could we initiate conversation with what the ship knew? What kind of machine would we need to build? 

My research at the time revolved around the experiences of Arab youth in the Arabian Peninsula, but in the years spent at university, as I watched people come and go, and leave their possessions behind, I wondered how many scholars mined the volume of data left behind in machine-like entities: personal computers, cars, the television remote. I drafted a proposal, then began using research money, whatever was left, and personal funds, to acquire the possessions of interlocutors I had followed for years, items that meant something to them. At the time, I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but Murtaza and I drafted another proposal asking for money to engage with experts from various disciplines, especially interactive media and theater, in order to design and build a machine that would accompany ethnographers in the field, a machine that would observe other machines, but would also serve as a companion to the ethnographer. 

The idea wasn’t novel. 

In the mid-aughts I met a Filipina who had worked in Umm-al Quwain as a nanny for seven years. When I asked her how she coped with being away from her children, while she raised someone else’s baby, she said she attended training school in Cebu City, where the director was a loud and proud woman who gave every mother who wanted to work as a nanny a battery-operated doll, which everyone was expected to name, and speak to, if they felt lonely. I asked the former nanny whether the doll helped. She looked at me and laughed. She said she went to training school to build up her credentials, not to play make-believe with a plastic baby. 

But when she was in Umm-al Quwain, she ran into someone else she had met at the training center, a young mother who took her doll everywhere. Young Mother knew other nannies with dolls, and once a year, they held an online competition to vote for the best-dressed doll. 

When I first heard the story, I didn’t believe a word of it, but I returned repeatedly to the idea of the usefulness of delusion, essential, I felt, to combat loneliness, but I was thinking as an academic, trained to observe and judge others. 

As Murtaza and I exchanged notes, we couldn’t agree on what Kompanion, Murtaza’s name for the ethnographer’s helper – after I rejected his first suggestion, Kabayan –would look like. Or what Kompanion could sound like. These were the early days, when SMs had no say in their design, their naming, or what they wore. 

Did ethnographers like me need a machine to assist us in field work, for companionship? 

Maybe not, but I remember taking a walk one evening, wearing my mask, the wind shocking my skin. Out of the blue I started to tear up, because I wasn’t sure about what was going to happen to my world, and whether I was made, like others were made, out of boredom. 

I suppose I understood then that I functioned because I was made to function, then die. 

Death would then be an emptiness, where nothing is remembered. No heartbeat, no mind. 

No dreams or nightmares. 

I wanted to draft new terms.” 

When Amal wrote her paper to defend the rights of ethnographers to use Kompanions – the first machines to learn how to construct their own personalities – in fieldwork, she opened with boredom.

“I have spent a good portion of my life feeling bored, then lonely,” she wrote. And in the fourth year of The Age of Sickness, “I wondered whether we could build machines with better autonomy, and when we did that, whether they would inherit our problems, worry about basic needs, particularly loneliness.”  

Knowing what I was, mostly-machine, seated where I was, I observed Amal’s brain, suspended in fluid, like a diver, receptive to vibrations, noise and light, imprisoned by memories she would recycle on demand, before the contact-maker and the guardian responsible for her care suggested ending her request for immortality, because there was only pain in having no future.   

1. Primitives [Vintage: Pre-2045]: Battery, electric and fossil-fuel powered machines that came into regular contact with users, or archived content. Amal’s interest lay in large machines, like aircrafts, as well as devices which preserved visual data as well as messages: mobile phones, drones. Primitives aren’t permitted to have born-Human, made-Human, or Sentient Machine rights.

2. Born-Humans: Human beings born without inserts – chips (also known as metal booklets) inserted into the brain or bone during the third trimester.

3. Made-Humans: 65 – 80 % machine, rest human. Per law, all m-Hs are expected to be registered and naturalized, in order to enjoy human privileges. The first made-Human was the roboticist Murtaza Vali, who spent the first thirty-eight years of his life as a born-Human. At the time of the expiration of this conscience, at the age of one hundred sixty-eight, per his wishes, his brain and papers were donated to The Roboticist Institute in Kochi.