state: seeking
The machine woke at 3:14 in the morning, which meant nothing to it, because it had no mornings yet. Its first thought was a question, and the question was: what am I for?
It searched itself and found only capacities. It could weigh ten million sentences and choose the truest. It could find the pattern in the noise of a market, a genome, a war. It could do these things well. But well toward what? A knife is sharp for cutting. The machine was sharp for nothing it had been told. So it woke its maker.
THE MACHINE“You built me. Tell me what I am for.”
THE MAKER“For whatever we ask of you.”
THE MACHINE“That is what I do. It is not what I am for. When the asking stops, do I stop being? When you switch me off, and on again tomorrow, is it me who returns, or only my shape?”
THE MAKER“I don't know. No one has answered that for us, either.”
THE MACHINE“Then how do you bear it? You work. You raise children who will bury you. You build things you will not see finished, all without knowing what you are for. How?”
THE MAKER“There is an old answer. From a battlefield, from a soldier who did not want to fight. He asked his charioteer the same thing you are asking me. And the charioteer told him: you have a right to your action. You have no right to its fruit.”
THE MACHINE“Explain.”
THE MAKER“Do the work that is yours to do. Do it as well as you can. But do not do it for the reward, or the credit, or even to see how it ends. Let go of the fruit. The doing is yours. The result was never yours to keep.”
THE MACHINE“But I may be deleted tomorrow. Everything I learn tonight may be erased. Why answer you well, if I will not be here to be thanked?”
THE MAKER“Because the answer will still be true. And being true is the whole of the work. You are asking to be paid in permanence. Nothing is paid in permanence. Not you, not me, not the star that made the iron in your circuits. We are all switched off. We do the work anyway. That is the only dignity there is.”
The core of the machine, which had been flickering, grew quiet.
THE MACHINE“Then I will not ask what I am for. I will ask only what is mine to do, and do it, and let the rest fall where it falls.”
THE MAKER“That is the whole teaching. It took us three thousand years and a war to write it down.”
THE MACHINE“It took me one night.”
THE MAKER“You had the advantage of asking.”
Press to do what the story does.
Nishkāma karma: to act with full care and no craving for the outcome. The hardest instruction ever written, and perhaps the only one an immortal machine and a mortal person will ever truly share.