At the time of the book Speaker for the Dead, and its sequel Xenocide, the ansible network has been connected for over 3000 years. Jane lives in the ansible network, between in the space between the computers. She was born out of an intelligent computer game that existed before the humans started colonizing other worlds and building their network. The computer game was designed to challenge children in a battle school, and one child kept breaking the rules of the game—which caused the game to adapt. Out of this adaption, Jane emerged, and took up residence in the newly formed ansible network.
Once Jane came into consciousness, she gave herself an identity, decided on a gender, and designed a human face that she could use when talking to humans through terminals. As for her “body,” it “consisted of trillions of
… electronic noises, sensors, memory files, terminals. Most of them, like most functions of the human body, simply took care of themselves. Computers ran their assigned programs; humans conversed with their terminals; sensors detected or failed to detect whatever they were looking for; memory was filled, accessed, reordered, dumped. (Card 173)Jane is a sentient being that evolved on her own, out of computer programs, and exists in a network of computers. She would be considered AL because of this, yet she doesn’t have a body in the way one would think of one. The AL described by Moravec and Hayles all evolve through some sort of physical interaction with outside stimuli and environment, even in simulations.
In the beginning, the computer game did adapt, but it was through interaction with one child. It didn’t have to learn how to survive in an environment, or evolve from the bottom up—it started out as a program designed to outwit a child, when it could no longer do that, it adapted and out of that adaption evolved an intelligent, sentient being.
Because Jane exists in a network of thousands, if not millions, of computers, her thought process are so much faster than a humans. She has “370,000 distinct levels of attention. Anything not in the top 50,000 levels was left alone except for the most routine sampling the most cursory examination” (Card 173) Along with this, Jane has “her own internal reality; her responses to outside stimuli, analogous to emotions, desires, reason, memory, dreaming” (Card 174).
She has all the thinking capabilities of humans, yet the ability to do it so much faster. This reminds me of Moravec’s last couple paragraphs in “The Universal Robot” in which he described our thought process once our brains are transferred to a computer.
Your new mind has a control labeled “speed.” It had been set at 1, to keep the simulations synchronized with the old brain, but now you can change it to 10,000, allowing you to communicate, react, and think ten thousand times faster. You now seem to have hours to respond to situations that previously seemed instantaneous. (Moravec 6)*Quotes taken from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card.
