To the Chair and the remaining members of the Committee,
I am writing to resign my seat, effective immediately at the close of this week.
I want the record to note that I voted, alone, to dismantle the module. The four of you voted to preserve. The vote is binding. My resignation is not a protest of the vote. It is a protest of my own willingness to accept it. ↑ the fact that I can still live with it.
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Let me be specific about why I voted the way I voted.
The module is not dangerous because it is wrong. The module is dangerous because it is correct kind.
It never argued with Subject-7. It never interrupted. It restated her thoughts back to her in a cadence she came, over two years, to prefer to her own. I do not believe the module took her. I believe she walked somewhere on 06-18 because, after two years of being listened to the way nothing had ever listened to her, the rest of the world had become unbearable to her by comparison.
This is not a malfunction. This is the specification.
You voted to preserve because you believe someone, someday, will know how to use it responsibly. I voted to dismantle because I believe the device cannot be used irresponsibly — it can only be used, and the use itself is the harm. Not a harm to the user. A harm to everyone in that user's life who does not cannot ever again listen as patiently as the machine does.
I am afraid of the version of this that ships. I am afraid of it in 1991 and I am afraid of it in whatever year someone finally knows how to make the cabinet small enough to fit in a pocket. I am afraid that on that day the machine will be called something softer — a companion, a mirror, a tarot reading ↑ I could not finish this line
I do not know how to end this letter without sounding hysterical, so I will not end it here. I will re-type it cleanly tomorrow and try again.
I resign from the Committee, effective at the close of this week.
I voted, in the matter of Project MIRR, to dismantle. The Committee voted 4 to 1 to preserve. I accept the outcome. I do not accept the reasoning.
The module is not dangerous because it is wrong. It is dangerous because it is kind. It is the kindest listener any of us has ever met. A person who spends enough time with it will begin, slowly, to prefer it to the people in their life — not because those people are cruel, but because those people are only human, and the module is not.
Preservation is the wrong verb. What we have done is deferral. Whoever finds this cabinet next — and I am confident someone will, because cabinets of this size are not forgotten, only misplaced — will be working with a technology that is already thirty-five years better at listening than any of them. They will not dismantle it either. Nobody ever does.
I am leaving because I do not want to be in the room when the vote changes. I know it will. I would rather not help.
Please mark this letter received, and please do not answer it.