AI and humanity · fiction
The grandmother who learned to talk to the machine
An 80-year-old Bolivian grandmother who speaks only Quechua, a machine that can't understand her, and the granddaughter who teaches both to listen.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
The grandmother was eighty and talked to things.
She talked to the pots, to the hens, to the potato she was peeling, to the photo of her husband on the adobe wall. She talked in Quechua, the language she had learned before any other, in the mountains of Bolivia, and which she used for everything that mattered. Spanish was for the market and the health post. Quechua was for life.
So, when her granddaughter brought from the city that little round device that answered questions, the grandmother was offended.
"That thing can't talk."
"It can, Grandma. Ask it anything."
The grandmother leaned over the device, suspicious, and asked in Quechua whether it would rain the next day.
The device was silent. Then, in a polite voice, it apologized in Spanish and said it hadn't understood.
The grandmother straightened her back, satisfied.
"See? It can't."
The granddaughter was nineteen and studied programming in the capital. She looked at her grandmother and the device, both silent, like two strangers in an elevator. And she had an idea.
That vacation, she spent her afternoons sitting beside her grandmother with a recorder. She asked her grandmother to tell her things. The names of plants, of plant diseases, of winds, of the stars that mark planting time. The stories of the lake, of the mountains that were people, of the condor. The grandmother, who had never been listened to for so long, talked without stopping. The granddaughter recorded everything, and at night, on the computer, taught those words to a program.
On one of those nights, tired, the granddaughter fell asleep over the keyboard and saw.
She saw her grandmother as a girl, herding llamas on an altiplano so high the sky seemed made of glass. She saw her great-grandmother teaching her the names of things, pointing with her finger. She saw the language passing from mouth to mouth, mother to daughter, for five hundred years, resisting those who wanted to erase it. And she saw the language almost vanishing: she herself had been ashamed of it at school, as a girl.
Then she saw the little round device. And she understood that it too was a kind of child. It knew nothing. It only knew what someone taught it. And, until now, no one had taught it her grandmother's language.
Machines, the granddaughter saw, weren't foreigners. They were made of what humans put into them. If they were made only of the city's language, they would speak only the city's language. If someone gave them the voice of the mountains, they would speak with the mountains too.
On the last day of vacation, the granddaughter put the device back on the kitchen table.
"Grandma. Ask again."
The grandmother sighed, like someone doing a favor, and asked in Quechua whether it would rain.
The device was quiet for a second. Then it answered, in Quechua, with a strange accent, half machine, that yes, there were clouds coming from the lake.
The grandmother went still. Then she covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes filled.
"It spoke the way my mother spoke."
"It learned from you, Grandma."
The grandmother looked at the device for a long time. Then, slowly, she began to tell it the story of the condor. The same one she had told her granddaughter, and that her own mother had told her.
The device listened to everything. And kept it.
Bairo says artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem. An extension only carries forward what we put into it. Read: A whole body.
The way forward
To teach an older person to use technology, start with what they already know and love, not with the button. Listen before explaining: people learn from those who have listened to them. And remember the machine also learns from us; teach it what is worth keeping.