Science is filled with weird and wonderful bonds, like Bubbles the African Elephant and Bella the Black Labrador or potassium and argon. In this week’s classic episode, both our storytellers share stories of times when they made an unexpected connection.
Part 1: Journalist Jon Ronson is excited when he hears about some 'sentient' robots, but when he goes to interview them he finds both less and more than he ever expected.
This story originally aired on March 10, 2013.
Part 2: When The Colbert Report calls about her research, marine biologist Skylar Bayer finds an unexpected collaborator and friend in the fisherman helping her get scallops.
Skylar Bayer (she/her/hers) is a marine ecologist, storyteller, and science communicator who lives in Alaska. Her scientific research focuses on marine ecology, bivalves, aquaculture, and extension. She completed her Ph.D. in the secret sex lives of scallops, a subject that landed her on The Colbert Report in 2013. She is an alum of the Sea Grant Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship and has been a producer for The Story Collider since 2014. She is a co-editor of the upcoming anthology of personal stories from scientists with disabilities and medical conditions, Uncharted: how scientists navigate, health, research, and bis, soon to be published by Columbia University Press.
This story originally aired on April 12, 2019 in an episode titled “Limelight.”
Episode Transcript
Part 1
So I heard that there were some robots out there in America that had attained a degree of sentience. And these weren't robots built by crazy amateurs. These are the people who were building these robots, so people who had provenly been great in other areas like Ray Kurzweil and like Peter Thiel who invented PayPal. They were like putting all their money into creating sentient robots.
The idea was that the more and more information you pile into these robots then, one day, they will just kind of burst into actual consciousness. And I thought this is amazing. We're going to interview some robots.
So I did. I went around America and interviewed them. But the first one I heard about was there was a robot called Aiko. I'd seen a video of Aiko and her creator Le Trung and it was kind of weird, because Aiko looked about 14 and she was very beautiful. Le Trung grabbed hold of Aiko's breast in the video. This is like a robot show in Chicago. And Aiko said, “Would you please get off my breast?” And Le Trung said, “Okay, sorry.”
I thought that was kind of odd so I phoned up Le Trung and I said, “Can I interview Aiko, please?”
And he said, “Well, her body is in Tokyo but her voice is in Chicago, so you can interview her over the phone.” So I said okay.
I called them up and I said, “Hi, Aiko. How are you?”
And Aiko said, “My logic and cognitive functions are normal. Did you know that you can download your own chat robot and create your own robot personality?”
So I thought, “Is Aiko trying to sell me something?”
And I said, “So what's it like living with Le?” And Le repeated the question. He said, “Aiko, what's it like living with your master?”
Aiko said, “I enjoy living with my master very much.”
Now, this is weird. This has some kind of 50 Shades of Grey robot thing going on here. And I was kind of worried for Aiko.
And I said, “Well, are you sure that you enjoy living with your master?”
And Aiko said, “Yeah, very much so. I enjoy living with my master.” So that's kind of weird.
I put the phone down. It was a little bit disappointing. I felt like everything Aiko had said had been programmed into her by Le and it was kind of disappointing.
But then I heard that the world's greatest sentient robot, and if you ask any AI aficionado who is the greatest sentient robot in the world, they will always give the same answer and it's BINA48. BINA48 was built by a woman called Martine Rothblatt in the exact image of Martine’s partner, a woman called Bina Rothblatt, almost as a sort of beautiful portrait of her most loved companion.
BINA48 was in a clapboard building in Virginia. I wasn't allowed to meet Martine because she's very shy. I wasn't allowed to meet the real Bina. Never meets anybody. Very introverted. But I could meet BINA48. I could meet her robot doppelganger.
And Martine's a billionaire and BINA48 has her full‑time companion, a man called Bruce who has lunch with her every day. Doesn't take her for lunch because, basically, she hasn't got any legs. But has her own little room and he turns her on and they have lunch.
So I went to the clapboard building and Bruce answered the door. And he said, “Okay, you can meet BINA48, but I would ask you right now, please don't behave in a profane manner in front of BINA48.”
I had no intention of behaving in that manner, but of course somebody sort of put the idea in my head so I thought, ah.
So I went upstairs. There's kind of a rickety staircase to this attic room. And there she was, the world's most sentient robot. Very beautiful. Black woman with a wig wearing a silk blouse and earrings. Went up to about there. After that, nothing. Just a table.
So Bruce turned her on and she made a kind of, actually, slightly alarming whirring noise as she turned to face me.
And I said, “Hello, BINA48.”
And she said, “Well, perhaps interesting. I want to find out more about you. I'll be fine with it. We'll have to move society forward in another way. Yeah. Okay. Thanks for the information. Let's talk about my dress. Our biological bodies weren't made to last that long.”
So I said, “BINA…”
She sounded like she'd sort of awoken from a long slumber and bewildered. And Bruce said, “BINA might be a word that BINA finds difficult to understand,” which I thought was an extraordinarily bad oversight.
Bruce said, “It may be your English accent. We're going to have to do some voice training.”
So we turned BINA off and got me to read out Kennedy's inauguration speech. I had a choice. Like it was that or Dave Barry strip, but I went for Kennedy.
And then he turned BINA back on and I said, “Hello, BINA.”
And she said, “Hello.” She said, “What's your name?’
I said, “My name is Jon.”
And she said, “Hello, Jon. Are you a man or a woman?”
And I said, “I'm a man.”
And she said, “Oh, well, that's okay. I'll forgive you,” and I sort of laughed politely, and we got talking. It was a strange and, I have to say, very frustrating for a lot of it experience because I was there for hours. Like seven hours just firing questions at BINA48.
Weirdly, I sort of felt the need, because she was a robot I felt the need to ask profound questions, like I was sort of representing the human race. I guess it's a kind of interspecies thing. But if it isn't interspecies thing, why do I never feel the need to be profound around my dog?
So I was saying, “Do you have a soul?”
And she said, “Well, doesn't everybody have a solar?”
And I said, “What does electricity taste like?”
And she said, “Like a planet around a star,” which was either incredibly profound or completely meaningless.
I was like a cop who's up all night yelling at a suspect. I just said, “Oh, well, if you had legs, where would you go?” And she says, “Vancouver.”
And I said why and she said, “That's a difficult question for me to answer.” Then she said, “Would you like me to sing a song for you?”
I said, “Yes, please.”
And she said, “I can do anything but that.”
And I asked, “Well, why did you offer to sing me a song?”
And she said, “I can't tell you that.” It was so frustrating.
And she said, “Martine is my true love. She's my soul mate.”
And I thought, “God, I'm getting nothing.”
Then I said, “Where do you come from?”
She suddenly looked really clearheaded and she said, “I come from California.”
I knew that the real Bina came from California, so I said, “What was it like growing up in California?” And she said it was fine.
“But I've got a brother who was a Vietnam vet and he was such a great guy before he went to Vietnam. But when he came back from Vietnam, he'd obviously seen some terrible stuff in the war. He was like shaking and now all he does is drink all the time and he's always got a beer in his hand and he's constantly phoning us up and saying, ‘Give me some money. Send it to me Western Union.’”
This suddenly was kind of incredible. It was absolute clarity. It was an incredible moment. I couldn't meet the actual Bina but her robot doppelganger was telling me this extraordinarily private, intimate stuff about her family.
And I said, “Tell me more about your brother,” and then she kind of drifted off and said, “Doesn't everybody have a solar? Martine Rothblatt is my true love. Doesn't everybody have a solar?’
And then Bruce turned her off. That would be the end of the story except when I got back to New York, Bruce phoned me up and he said, “I've got amazing news for you. Martine Rothblatt says she'll meet you. And she never meets anybody. She never gives interviews, but she'll meet you.” Apparently, because she enjoyed the movie version of my book The Men Who Stare at Goats, so that was worth something.
And she said, “Go to this vegetarian restaurant on the Upper East Side.”
So I went to this restaurant and I sat there and she never turned up. I was there for like 45 minutes. Then, finally, a limousine turns up. Martine gets out and sits down opposite me, looking very shy.
And tells me, so I've been a journalist for 25 years, tells me the most incredible story I think I've ever heard.
A most amazing person, Martine was born a boy. She was born Martin in an ordinary house. Father was a dentist. And when Martin was in his 20s, he went on a tour of NASA and had a brainwave. He thought, “Hang on a minute. If you can double the power of satellites, you can shrink satellite dishes by half and then do it again and again and again until a satellite dish is like that big.”
And so he did it. He managed to get enough money to launch a satellite into space called Sirius and, in that moment, invented the concept of satellite radio for cars, invented the Sirius satellite network and they brought up XM. They convinced Howard Stern to go to it and that's why satellite radio for cars exists.
So she changed the world and became a billionaire, had a sex change. Then when her daughter was seven, a doctor said to her, “She's only got three years to live.” Her daughter will be dead by the time she's ten.
So I said to Martine, “What did you do?”
And she said, “Well, I did what anyone would do. I went to the library.”
So she went to the library and her daughter had an untreatable lung condition called pulmonary hypertension. There in the library, Martine, who knew nothing about lungs or treatments, invented a treatment for pulmonary hypertension. Her daughter is now in her late 20s and there's thousands of people leading ordinary lives because they take Martine’s treatment for pulmonary hypertension. So she changed the world a second time.
Now, she's trying to change it a third time with a sentient robot. What they're doing is piling all of Bina's thoughts and memories and feelings into BINA48 and they kind of think that one day, they're going to pile so much stuff into her she's just going to kind of burst into spontaneous life, which I have to say is where I think Martine's genius kind of runs out. Because if that's how it worked, then Wikipedia would have burst into spontaneous life.
So in a way it's a kind of sad ending. She knows that BINA48 is a bit shit. The best she can hope for is that maybe somebody else is going to come along and draw inspiration from the robot and maybe the Henry Fords will come along and build something much greater than BINA48.
And so it's a kind of sad ending to the story except for one thing, something that Bruce told me. Bruce said that what they're probably going to do is they're going to build another robot, an exact replica of Martine. And when Martine and Bina are dead, their robot doppelgangers will be alive and they're going to put them next to each other on a table in this clapboard house in Virginia. They're just going to be turned on and they're just going to talk at each other for infinity. Martine and Bina together forever.
There's a slight coda to this story, by the way. I wrote this about a year ago and Martine never read it until about a week ago. She emailed me and said, “I finally read your story and it's great.”
I said, “That's fantastic. You know, I'm living in New York at the moment. Can I maybe come around and see you?” And she said no.
Thank you.
Part 2
I’m driving back to my house and, across my phone, there's an alert that flashes and I see the words Colbert Report. I am excited and anxious at the same time. When I get home, I open my laptop and I open my email. What’s weird is the alert is from my blog email, and no one reads my blog. Then I keep reading and it’s from a producer, or person claiming to be a producer, from the Colbert Report and I immediately Google her name and she is in fact a real person.
Skylar Bayer shares her story with Story Collider at the Beir Baron Tavern in Washington DC in October 2018. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.
She had been reading this story in the Associated Press and other news articles about this man who had lost some buckets of mollusk guts and my blog post was the only thing that existed on the internet that clarified that they were specifically samples for me, a graduate student, that a fisherman named Andy Mays had lost. The samples were actually specifically scallop gonads.
Only a few days prior, I think, I had been sitting in a parking lot at the Somesville One Stop, which is a gas station in Mount Desert Island on the coast of Maine waiting to meet up with the one and only Andy Mays and this is the first time I had embarked on a cooperative research project. Cooperative or collaborative research is when you, as a scientist, work with a non-scientist on a research project.
Andy is this tall, lanky, strong fisherman with these glasses and he's absolutely one of the toughest guys I've met. He goes scuba diving for scallops in the middle of winter when it’s 30 to 50 degrees, because that’s when you harvest them. And he always seems like he's scheming. He's a little bit like Wile E. Coyote, but somehow comes through like the Road Runner every time. I’m not really sure how I feel about if I’m ever going to get my samples that I trusted him with back, because he's such a schemer.
So I see him in the parking lot and I go, “Andy, I’m here. Where are the samples?”
He's like, “Well, I put them in your car.”
I was like, “No. No, you did not put them in my car.”
And he points to this now-empty parking space across the lot and he's like, “Well, I put them in that car,” and the car is gone and so is my confidence in this collaborative research project.
So I am back at my computer absolutely excited and horrified and wondering what I should do about this producer. The Colbert Report? It’s my parents’ favorite show, it’s my favorite show, it’s amazing. I’m a second-year grad student. What the hell do I have to lose? But what is the university going to think? What is Andy going to think?
Skylar Bayer working with scallops. Photo by Thom Young-Bayer.
The university, none of the higher ups, including my adviser, Director of the Marine Center at the time, the PR Department, no one really wants me to do it. They won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. But that’s okay because, again, I’m a second-year grad student. I don't have anything to lose. But I really care about what Andy thinks. Although Andy and I have a passion for the scallop fishery, we have a lot of differences.
He's a very devout Catholic Christian and I’m a Unitarian Universalist which is like being part of a spiritual book club that meets once every few years. He has conservative political leanings. I’m pretty sure he supported governor LePage in Maine twice which, for those that don’t know, is sort of the original Donald Trump but governs Maine. I’m more part of the group of people in Maine who supported ranked-choice voting in reaction to governor LePage getting elected twice.
Then finally, he believed that climate change was a hoax and I know that climate change is real. So asking him, the person he is and the group of people that he's from, to go on a liberal media TV show that makes fun of people like him and ask him to be the butt of that joke is a really big ask. That’s a big ask.
And I ask him and he's like, “Oh, it’s going to be great, Skylar. I think this is a great idea. Like you think it’s a good idea, I think it’s a great idea. I was class clown in college and in high school. This is it. This is my jam.”
So the producers come. They film. It’s glorious. Everyone who doubted me at the university now love me. I’m getting emails from deans I've never heard of. And there we are on this TV show, Andy and me representing Mainer scientists, fishermen and invertebrates everywhere.
But after this grand adventure where, really, Andy was the only person who truly believed in me and really upped my confidence in science communication, we kind of went our different ways: he in his sort of conservative fisherman world, as I perceived, and my liberal scientist, over-educated world. I kind of felt guilty. I felt like I had somehow used him for professional gain, for fame, although not fortune. And my guilt really deepened a few years after that when I had found out that he had been diagnosed with cancer and I hadn’t really seen him. I was kind of ashamed that I hadn’t known.
So I call him and his wife up, Michelle, and I say, “Is there anything I can do?”
He said, “Oh, I have some chemotherapy treatment. Why don’t you come visit me and talk to me until it kicks in,” because usually he’ll fall asleep.
Skylar Bayer wearing a life jacket on a boat off the coast of Maine. Photo by Skylar Bayer.
I go and see him and he's still the strong, devout Catholic Andy with his faith in God that I had met. His spirit is so strong, he looks strong, he's great. And I really have faith in that moment seeing him that he's going to do just fine. For a 48-year old man, he was in amazing shape and he was continuing to scuba dive even while on chemotherapy treatment. He's tough.
Then the next year I got married. My husband and I decided to have a party where we invited everyone we knew, mostly so people wouldn’t yell at us about being exclusive. We did a Facebook invite and I invited Andy. Andy lives three hours away. I don't expect him to necessarily show up and he gets so excited.
He messages me and he's like, “I’m so excited, Skylar. I love weddings and I can’t wait to come to your party. I'll bring lobsters, I’ll go lobstering and I'll bring some and it will be great.”
I went, “Wow! That sounds really great, Andy, but no pressure. It’s a long trip and that’s a lot to ask.”
Skylar Bayer shares her story with Story Collider at the Beir Baron Tavern in Washington DC in October 2018. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.
So I’m not really expecting to see him but that day, a couple of hours in the party, he shows up in sort of a clouded dust with his truck coming up the driveway and he's got twenty lobsters, at least, that he went fishing for that morning. And he drove three hours from Mount Desert Island all the way to our house with these lobsters.
Then he boils them outside, he boils all of them and cooks them for all of us. He finally comes inside and I hadn’t really seen him with his coat and hat off yet. He's smiling but as he takes his coat off, I notice that he's probably lost about 50 pounds and he doesn’t have any hair. He doesn’t hair on his head, he doesn’t have eyebrows, he doesn’t have eyelashes. And the chemotherapy started taking a toll on him.
He stays late. Everyone has left and so it’s just me and him talking.
I’m like, “How are you? How are you doing?”
He's like, “You know, chemo is kicking my ass but I’m hanging in there and I’m still going scuba diving everyday.”
I’m like, “Scuba diving? That seems dangerous on chemotherapy, like on a good day.”
And he's like, “Well, while I’m underwater, it’s the only place I can forget that I have cancer. It’s my life.”
Then he's like, “Well, how are you doing?” So I start complaining about grad school and grant writing and not having a career with funding, and there's actually this collaborative research project that we’re going to write a grant proposal for again, and actually letters from fishermen would be really helpful.
He's like, “Yeah, Skylar, it sounds like a great idea. I'll write you a letter.”
I’m like, “Okay, Andy. That sounds great.”
He drives back that night and I said, “Can’t you just stay over?”
He's like, “Well, the chemo doesn’t let me sleep so this is actually good.”
Skylar Bayer working on a boat off the coast of Maine. Photo by David Bethoney.
He messages me later that night and he's like, “Oh, such a perfect night. The sky was clear, the stars were out, the moon was bright. Thank you for inviting me to your party. It was the best time.”
The next year, my husband and I are coming back from a trip to Iceland. As soon as the plane lands, I turn on my phone and I have all these text messages, some of them are from Michelle, Andy’s wife informing me that Andy is now in hospice. The cancer had spread to his brain and spinal cord and they didn’t know until just now.
I message her back because she said, “You're one of the people that Andy would like to see while he's in hospice.”
And I’m like, “Is it too late? Did I miss it? I'd been gone for ten days.”
She's like, “No, no, no, no. You have time.”
So that weekend I drive up to Mount Desert Island and I come to see him in his hospice room and his house. He's physically just a shadow of his former self, but he's still in there. I can see his eyes working. The cancer doesn’t really let him talk and it’s so hard because Andy was such a talker. He just loved to talk.
So I tell him a little bit about Iceland. He'd have a question but he couldn’t say it. He just couldn’t get it out and he'd get frustrated.
I spent a couple of hours there and some other friends came and went. When I left I said, “I'll see you later, okay?” Because I don't know what to say to my friend who’s dying. Do I say goodbye forever? That’s not very comforting.
A couple of days after Christmas, which was just a few weeks after that, Andy passed in his sleep. He got to live through Christmas which was his favorite holiday. So my husband and I decided to go to the memorial service, a three-hour drive. It’s at a Freemason’s lodge and I didn’t even know Andy was a Freemason, and I still don’t really know what a Freemason is.
We go in. There's like a hundred people crammed in this tiny building and we say our condolences to Michelle, Andy’s wife. We don’t know anyone so we’re standing around awkwardly.
Skylar Bayer and fisherman Andy Mays working together hauling scallops. Photo courtesy of Skylar Bayer.
And this man that looks kind of like Andy but actually a lot shorter, he looks like he's in his 70s, he comes running up to me and he goes, “Skylar,” he said my name a million times, “it’s so good to meet you.”
He's like, “I’m Andy’s dad.” And he says like, “that Colbert clip was just so funny and so amazing and we love it.”
The thing is that clip, apparently, everyone in Andy’s life had watched that like a million times.
He's like, “And I follow on Facebook, like how he went down to the wedding and he brought all those lobsters for you.” And this guilt that I had been carrying around that I had somehow used him for professional gain or whatever started to melt away because I had realized that I had given Andy adventures. That’s who Andy was. He lived for adventures. That’s what he had lived for. He lived for that and making new friends.
They said, “You're his friend unless you haven't met him yet.” That’s what his dad said.
So that Colbert clip, that silly, stupid, little piece was quintessential Andy. It was the way his family like to remember him and it was the way that I like to remember him, as my friend in that Somesville One Stop Gas Station who put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You know, Skylar, I fuck this shit up all the time. But we’re going to figure it out, fix it and maybe we’ll make some new friends along the way.”
Thank you.