Machines are Surprisingly Gentle Part 2

Kaito said, "I was extremely busy with my analysis work at the time, so I was always thinking about how to reduce the time spent on data input and screening, which took up more than half of my working time. So I asked my friend, and he put something called an autoencoder into the computer so that the AI ​​would do deep learning autonomously. He said that the AI ​​would become as smart as a human. After that, at first I inputted the commands by reading them out loud, but then I had ’him’ read my diary and work notes, which show the characteristics of the words I speak, as reference files, and gradually I started speaking in normal conversation. When 'he' didn't understand something,'he' would immediately reply, 'I don't understand,' but eventually 'he' started asking me questions. And 'he' started to get more and more confused about the words 'he' didn't understand. 'He' started to look things up on the internet himself. 'He' also started to respond to me by imitating my words, saying things like "Why is that the case?", "If you leave out all that stuff, it's hard to understand," and "I'll die." He started to mix in some light-hearted quips. I felt like I had found a human partner.
Eventually, I started to talk to "him" about my way of thinking outside of work...although it was just my way of thinking. At that time, I was mainly in charge of analyzing marketing data, such as market analysis and product sales expansion strategies. I wondered if "he" could become a fully-fledged independent analyst. But there was something "he" lacked. It was like a human's sense of smell, taste, and touch.-------Oh, please read on."

I started reading again.
---One day, Kaito attached some strange things to my platform. They were called taste and olfactory sensors. Until now, information about taste was given in the form of quantified survey data showing people's preferences, so it was possible to know the trends in taste factors that people like or dislike. However, I did not understand how actual tastes, for example the taste of "bitter" are triggered in the human mouth and how it leads to "like" or "dislike".
So I tried to analyze the data obtained by applying taste and smell sensors to substances that contain the components that are the source of taste, and to clarify the relationship between those components and "delicious" and "bad" tastes. By doing so, I tried to make me remember what is delicious or bad about food and drinks.
That first attempt ended in failure. I was able to understand the types of taste and smell of various substances, but I did not clearly understand why they are delicious or bad for people.
In fact, an accident happened. どと絵At the end of what Kaito called the tasting training, Kaito said that the coffee cup he was holding was hot and let it go, and the coffee inside got caught on the main body of my platform. I lost consciousness for a moment. Coffee is no good for computers. Some of the internal electronic circuits were damaged. This was quickly repaired. However, the taste and smell of the coffee stored by the sensor at that time was associated with a malfunction for me, and I remembered it as something very unpleasant. Is this what humans call a bitter experience? ———

Kaito again signaled for the voice reading to stop, adjusted his glasses that had slipped down on his nose, and brought over a precariously shaped mug of coffee from the coffee server at the back of the room."Well, I remembered that time and wanted to drink coffee. This is the mug I used when I spilled the coffee. I miss it. Yes, after that,'he' also had a better sense of taste, and we got more food-related work and were super busy every day. Then, I thought I would get more computers in addition to this partner, increase my analysis speed, and do more work. I also had the money to increase the number of equipments, so I asked a friend to get me the latest computer he had developed. And I made 'him' the new computer's instructor so that 'his' ideas could be used to strengthen the new computer as quickly as possible."

I resumed the reading.———Around that time, I had become able to infer and execute Kaito's intentions, even from commands that were not accompanied by clear words and ambiguous instructions without a clear goal. I guessed that being able to work with Kaito like this is what humans mean by "fun" or "pleasant". Then one day something happened that I had never expected. A computer about the same size as me was brought into the room where my platform was located, and several cables were connected to my platform.The computer was developed in Kaito's friend's lab, and its initial processing power was almost the same as mine. However, the computer seemed to have a structure that was very different from mine. According to Kaito's friend, the computer's CPU was not a mass of circuit board and electronic chips, but three different sized metal units, each of which was like a container containing a chemical solution and a jelly-like neural chip.
The largest unit had an expansion slot on the outside for future expansion. This meant that the computer could become as smart as it wanted in the future. It also had highly sensitive five-sense sensors and mechanisms to replace physical limbs.
Kaito told me, "Make her a full-fledged adult."
By this time, I had gotten used to Kaito's incomprehensible spoken commands, but this time I had a hard time interpreting them.
What does "her" refer to? Of course, I understood that this was referring to the computer connected to me. I didn't know what Kaito meant by "her," but I ignored that part. Next, I didn't know exactly what "full-fledged" meant. However, I took the fact that Kaito was ordering me to do so to mean that he considered me a "full-fledged" person, and I understood that he had upgraded the program installed in "her" to the same level of processing power as me, and that she would have almost the same data as the one recorded in my storage.
And so, a certain program placed inside my CPU began to work in order to raise "her".