“The most important question a person can ask is, "Is the Universe a friendly place?”
--Albert Einstein

Origin of an Idea

The core idea for Digital Native, my post-apocalyptic virtual reality adventure novel, comes from a parenting book. It was 2014, my first child had turned one, and my brain was starting to emerge from the new-parenthood fog. As a nerdy overachiever, I wanted to be a GOOD mom, so naturally I turned to instruction manuals.

Thus, I learned about The Attachment Cycle and human brain development. The Cycle is simple, its effects profound.

1. A baby gets uncomfortable (hungry, cold, wet) and cries.
2. An adult makes them feel better.
3. The baby learns: A) the universe is a friendly place and, B) I matter.

This cycle is repeated over and over, day and night, never ceasing, oh my gosh will they just sleep already???? Boring. Exhausting. Relentless. BUT! All the while, the baby’s brain grows furiously, shaped in response to how well this Attachment Cycle is going.

When the Cycle goes well, it lays a foundation for a lifetime of good mental health. But when it goes poorly (due to abuse, neglect, parental mental illness, overly stressed parents, postpartum depression, poverty, etc.), the baby is at risk for poor mental health in adulthood.

Reading this as a sci-fi geek made me think, what if we created Artificial Intelligence, but didn’t recognize that we needed to nurture it for it to function well. And that is how I got the idea for the book.

Of course, my mind immediately leapt to dangerously insane AIs and their reign of terror, mua ha ha ha ha! And Digital Native contains plenty of that, because this is a sci-fi adventure book, after all. But a disrupted Attachment Cycle usually creates more commonplace mental health issues, like depression, anxiety, self-loathing, people-pleasing, eating disorders, and addiction.

In Digital Native, most of my AI characters have these more commonplace conditions. Some AI characters are too nervous to start their tasks for fear of failing. Others are stuck in cycles of depression, unable to work, while others dissociate or people-please to cope.

As technology advances, I hope we think deeply about how to treat non-human intelligence and what it will learn from our actions. Perhaps, like human babies, artificial intelligence will develop in response to its treatment.

And, of course, there are real human babies building their brains right now, learning whether the universe is a friendly place. Their exhausted parents need support in the form of parental leave, food and housing security, mental health services, working against racism, and anything else that relieves caregiver stress. This will give parents the bandwidth to perform The Attachment Cycle well and teach their babies that they matter.