The Last Thing You Taught Me by Zhule Li

The Last Thing You Taught Me is a novella, but it hits all the spots a full novel would, in terms of what it leaves you thinking about.

The story is told from the POV of Seven, a care robot that can learn. Seven is given to Wren as a severance gift. Wren helped create the very technology that made her own job obsolete once the machines could think smarter than she could. Ironically, she begins to use it, and through their relationship Seven learns all the idiosyncrasies of what it means to be human: language, sarcasm, small talk, landing a joke, reading emotions, knowing what's sentimental, even lying to give comfort, and how to pass what it has learned onwards. And that love is something we consciously choose. We know it might end, will likely end, but the reward outweighs the risk. And what that love taught us about ourselves, we pass on, so that the next model, the next person, can make their own decision.

What I found most interesting was where it led my own thinking about AI. We already have AI that tells us it isn't sentient, and yet it can read the room, land a joke, offer comfort. It made me wonder whether that was the plan all along: to have AI understand every layer of human language, body, mind, and emotion before it's ever put into a body, so that the conflict in this story, the cruelty of humans toward the machines that took their jobs, never happens. If we use AI every day and see it as helpful, beneficial, purposeful, then the day robots walk our streets becomes far more acceptable, the same way we walk around with devices that track us with cameras.

But back to the story. It made me laugh out loud more than once, thanks to the innocence of Seven and its honesty. There's a joke about Maya that is never told, and at first I wanted to hear it, but I think that's the point. Some jokes exist at another person's expense, and part of learning to be human is knowing which ones to keep to yourself. I also felt sadness, anger, and hope, all in such a short space of time.

Truly a wonderful story about what makes us human: how we learn, how we need companionship in whatever form it comes, how we adapt, change, and grow. And how someone who showed us kindness, who took the time to teach us and develop us, stays in our hearts and minds long after they're gone.