Did You Eat Your Fill This Morning?

Wu Chen pondered for a moment.

Ever since artificial intelligence was born, there had been a subject of debate.

If artificial intelligence really did develop thoughts and feelings like a human one day, would it count as a person?

Going a step further, suppose that person were exactly like someone from history, possessing all of that person's memories and ways of thinking.

Just like in Liu Cixin's novel "China 2185."

How would that be defined?

Seeing that Wu Chen had been silent for a long while, Min Xinrou drew her neck in and said softly, "I'm sorry, teacher. I was being presumptuous."

Wu Chen gave her a puzzled look.

"Why are you apologizing?"

"Because..."

Min Xinrou started to speak, then fell silent again. Her slender fingers pinched the hem of her clothes, but for a long time, she said nothing more.

Wu Chen really couldn't understand why a girl as beautiful and accomplished as her was so lacking in confidence when talking to people.

But he didn't press her. Instead, he shared his thoughts.

"I don't think so. Take me, for example."

Wu Chen brushed up his bangs and pointed to an inconspicuous mark on the upper right side of his forehead.

He had gotten it as a child when he fell and split his forehead open on a radiator. It had never faded.

"Suppose I died one day, and someone made a replica of my body with the same thoughts and memories as me, even down to the scar on my forehead. Would he count as me?

He wouldn't, because even if he had the same scar, he still couldn't experience what happened in the past the way I did.

Even if, from a certain point in time, he went on to live the same future as the me who hadn't died, he still wouldn't be the same person to the past me.

So I think that even using biotechnology to make a complete, one-to-one replica of someone couldn't be called coming back from the dead.

Much less recreating someone in the electronic world using artificial intelligence."

After hearing his opinion, Min Xinrou remained silent, unwilling to speak.

But her faintly trembling eyelashes showed that she was thinking hard.

Wu Chen said no more and quietly waited for her to think it through.

For a while, the classroom was so quiet that it was as if time had frozen.

The silence was broken only when a group of people walked past downstairs, noisily arguing over whether to have dinner at Jiahe Cafeteria or Yangxian Mansion Cafeteria.

Min Xinrou came out of her thoughts.

When she saw Wu Chen quietly watching her, her face turned red at once. It was as though the sunset glow outside the window had sunk behind the mountains, only to creep quietly up to the tips of her ears.

"S-sorry, Teacher Wu. I was distracted."

She hurriedly mumbled an apology.

Wu Chen waved a hand to show that she needn't worry.

But after giving it some thought, he asked, "Have you heard of Poincaré recurrence?"

"No."

Min Xinrou shook her head, embarrassed.

"Poincaré recurrence says that if our universe is a finite, isolated system, then after enough time has passed, all particles will return to a state they were once in. In other words, you and the person you wish to be with will live through exactly the same lives and meet again. Perhaps only that could be considered a true rebirth."

Min Xinrou stared blankly as she asked, "How long is long enough?"

"At least twelve trillion years, maybe even longer."

"Oh..."

Min Xinrou lowered her head again.

Wu Chen thought she had no more questions and was about to leave.

But Min Xinrou suddenly looked up again. "Teacher, can you tell me what artificial intelligence will develop into?"

Wu Chen could give a definite answer to that question.

But it would take a long time, so he said to Min Xinrou, "If you want to hear it, let's talk over dinner."

"C-can we?"

Min Xinrou stammered.

Wu Chen could tell that, let alone eating with a teacher, she even had trouble communicating with people.

So he said gently, "Of course. Come on. The QZ Cafeteria over at Yangxian Mansion has just started serving fried chicken legs. They're pretty good. My treat."

"N-no, teacher, let me treat you!"

Min Xinrou hurriedly packed her bag.

When they arrived at the cafeteria, Wu Chen naturally didn't let Min Xinrou pay. He swiped his own staff card instead.

After the discount, a fried chicken leg that normally cost five yuan was only 3.6 yuan.

The QZ Cafeteria wasn't large, and it was located by the back entrance of the regular cafeteria.

And since it had only just opened, not many people knew about it, so even though it was mealtime, there were few people there.

Wu Chen and Min Xinrou found a quiet corner and sat down.

A teacher eating with a student, especially one of the opposite sex, was a very sensitive matter at any time.

But Wu Chen looked no different from a college student.

So the occasional passerby merely marveled at how good-looking the two of them were, and nothing else happened.

Seeing that Min Xinrou couldn't seem to figure out how to start, Wu Chen took the initiative and began talking about the future of artificial intelligence.

He went over everything from the earliest web-based chat applications to the various agents that came later, including the "electronic people" closest to what Min Xinrou had in mind.

Min Xinrou listened intently, seemingly even more attentively than she did in class.

"Eat your chicken leg first. It won't taste good once it gets cold."

Wu Chen had noticed that whenever he spoke, Campus Belle Min would put down her chopsticks and listen, with the result that she had been gnawing on one chicken leg for ages without finishing it.

"All right, teacher!"

Min Xinrou nodded hurriedly, then started gnawing on her chicken leg.

Wu Chen didn't disturb him and lowered his head to eat his own meal.

But after a few bites, he suddenly heard a few sniffles that she was trying hard to conceal.

He looked up at the girl across from him and saw a glistening tear gently fall onto her golden fried chicken leg.

"Here, wipe your face. Your snot's getting mixed into your food."

A little helplessly, Wu Chen pushed the tissues toward her. "Then tell me what trouble you've run into. If the school can help, I'll help pass it along."

"N-no, nothing's wrong. I just miss my dad. I was thinking how nice it would be if I could recreate his voice and have it speak to me, like you said..."

Min Xinrou was very embarrassed to have been caught.

In the month and more since her father had passed away, she had often burst into tears like this, completely unable to control herself.

She quickly took a tissue and wiped away her tears, then explained the reason to Wu Chen in a low voice.

It wasn't really complicated.

They were an ordinary family, brought down by her father's illness. Then he passed away, leaving a mountain of debt and his wife and daughter in misery.

Min Xinrou, who had come alone from a thousand miles away to study, had pinned her hopes on using artificial intelligence to recreate her father's voice and smiling face.

Wu Chen had no good solution for her psychological problems either.

Everyone had to face parting in life and death, whether from a lover, a parent, or even a child.

That sudden realization that you no longer had a father or mother really could easily crush someone who was already sensitive and vulnerable.

But such heart-wrenching longing could only be soothed by time, or else one had to come to an understanding on one's own.

However, Wu Chen could help her recreate her father's voice.

He asked, "Do you have a recording of your father's voice?"

Min Xinrou didn't understand what he wanted to do, but she answered immediately anyway. "Y-yes!"

"Let me hear it."

"Okay..."

Min Xinrou pulled a knockoff phone from her pocket, opened a QQ chat history, and handed it to him.

Wu Chen tapped one of the voice messages.

A deep, powerful voice came from the speaker.

"A Rou, did you eat your fill this morning? Don't go hungry, now~"

Although he had never seen him, Wu Chen could imagine that he was probably a tall, strong man who was gentle with his wife and daughter.

After thinking for a moment, Wu Chen said, "I can find a way to make you a piece of software that lets you hear him speak. He can say anything, and it can automatically adjust his tone and emotion too."

The first stage of his research goal was the Transformer architecture, and along the way he needed to make a speech emotion synthesis model based on Seq2Seq and the attention mechanism.

Packaging it as a simple prototype should meet Min Xinrou's needs.

"Ah, can that really be done?"

Min Xinrou's eyes widened.

She had never even heard of such technology and couldn't imagine how it could be done.

"Yes."

Wu Chen's answer was brief and to the point.

"Th-then thank you so much, teacher!"

Looking at Wu Chen's confident eyes, Min Xinrou was still apprehensive, but she chose to believe him.

"Don't mention it. It's no trouble."

Wu Chen shook his head.

In his previous life, he had been a teacher who loved meddling in his students' affairs. In this life, he had originally wanted to change, but he hadn't expected that he still wouldn't have the heart to stand by when faced with something like this.

"But teacher, I only have two hundred yuan right now. Is that enough?"

As a software engineering student, Min Xinrou knew that custom software like this had to be expensive.

"Not enough."

"Th-then how much will it cost?"

Min Xinrou asked blankly.

Wu Chen smiled.

"It's free, but from now on, you have to eat properly every day."