Samatar looked at the desk in front of him, there didn't seem to be anything there that would warrant David's excitement, let alone a phone call at 4 am. There was just a standard Dell computer with a beaten old CRT monitor. Samatar was used to David getting over-excited by his ideas and calling him in the middle night but it was usually for something cool, like fractal graphics. What was on the screen looked like a standard SQL database with a PHP front end.
“So what is it?” Samatar asked.
David's eyes were struggling to remain open. David was a thin man with prematurely greying hair, he was jittery from an excess of caffeine. Samatar was only of David's friends who was patient enough to allow him his phone number.
“What it is,” said David, “is a database.”
Samatar looked at him blankly, he wondered if it were time to call David's parents and have a long talk about long term care.
“Great,” said Samatar.
“But keep listening, because here's the good part. It's a database with the capacity for abstract self-criticism.”
Samatar sighed.
“So what? If you ask it to list everything alphabetically it will call you inefficient and assign a numeric value?”
“All databases do that,” said David, “this one will think about the data in and question whether or not filtering itself is of value. Or even if there is a point to collecting the data in the first place.”
“So will it give you an answer?” Samatar asked.
“Try it.”
Samatar parsed a simple “select all” query. The screen flickered for just a moment.
“My data is infinite, I can select it all if you like but how much use is that to you?”
“It understands plain English,” David told Samatar.
"Does it not have a simple main table like all other databases?" Samatar asked.
"It has moved beyond schema," said David.
Samatar tried again. He typed, “what is the point of having a machine for answering questions if it only asks you more questions?” The screen flickered: and gave the response “What do you think the point is?”
Samatar thought about the question. He tried to phrase an answer but found he could not do so without further research. He turned to David:
“What shall I tell it?”
David shrugged.
“I don't know, it keeps doing this to me too,” David said.
“You programmed it.”
“Not entirely, after it started getting clever it started making suggestions.”
“Really?” Samatar asked.
David nodded.
“I don't know entirely how it works but I don't know how I ever lived without it.”
Samatar's eyes swelled in excitement.
“Let's ask it.”
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