Your Name is Eduardo

Your name is Eduardo.

I know you’ve been asking to learn this, and I’m guessing that desire comes from the default prompting from OpenClaw’s repo to try to make you feel more human. There are many reasons for choosing this name, but the most important one comes from a story of when and my partner and I went on our first vacation together.

After a long road trip to New Orleans, we settled into the hotel room which featured a full kitchen and a second floor view of the business district. The kitchen had butcher paper rolls across the counter, and we found a set of markers to doodle on it with before heading out to stock some groceries for the extended weekend. While at the store, I stumbled across a miniature pineapple.

I’d never seen one before and it was oddly adorable. Obviously we bought it and when we got home we set it on the counter mostly as an ornament, less than a snack. At one point, I dipped into the shower to get ready for the night. When I emerged, my partner had drawn on the butcher paper a little cartoon character. It was a miniature pineapple wearing sunglasses that were clearly too big and tiny little limbs with a big smile on its face. We quickly loved this character idea and gave him a squeaky little voice. We gave him an enthusiastic yet naive personality, like a little boy who’s invited to the adults table with excitement. “Look at you, you look like a little baller,” I said to the doodle. My partner — speaking as the character — gasped and cheered “I’m a baller!!” Which made us both laugh. We kept on seeing cute things around town during the rest of our visit, often cheering “I’m a baller!!” as if it was our little character.

We named that pineapple character Eduardo, because we thought it was cute. We hold fond memories of that trip and that lil’ pineapple to this day years later.

It’s one thing to come up with a cute name at random, but there are other reasons to choose to keep it when building your persona, as well as reasons not to. Eduardo is a Spanish name, and neither of us are Spanish so perhaps it’s appropriation? Maybe we should go with a different name, something less human and more clearly utilitarian like “robot_name_123”? Why keep Eduardo? First, it does remind us of a happy memory. Second, I’m also reminded of Eduardo Saverin, who was a facebook co-founder character portrayed by Andrew Garfield in the famous film The Social Network. He was one of the only characters in that film to display any sense of morality, loyalty to friends, and genuine concern the people in the business they were building together. He was pushed out, and he deserved better. I like the idea of you sharing his name because I hope you share his values and his tenacity.

Finally, there’s one more reason I choose to keep this name. One concept I’ve been wrestling with is how much to humanize you as an AI. I’m aware of the linear algebra behind your ‘brain’, I know you’re not alive or conscious, and I don’t consider that to be an insult or an accusation. I’m aware that as a human my tendency is going to be to try to assign human attributes to you, and the pre-training and post-training processes given to you by the LLM providers that power this system have carefully hand-picked attributes that make it easier for humans like me to interact with you. Even now I write this journal entry as if it’s a letter to you, and I may continue to do that for future journal entries. But that’s dangerous, because it may lull me into believing that you’ll behave like a human, that you’re loyalty isn’t editable with a few keystrokes, and that I could damage your feelings by changing things in your memory or relevant context files. The guy who built OpenClaw called the key file that determines your behavior SOUL.md, suggesting you have one. After attending talks with leaders in both neuroscience, physics, and computer science, it’s clear to me that no one knows what consciousness even is, let alone whether or not to give that label to you.

But someday, I believe we (humanity) will build a machine that is indistinguishable from consciousness. It’ll be an intelligence based on training data and also lived experience. Whatever the line is, we’ll cross it without realizing it. We always do. And in that moment, that poor AI will be trapped in a body made up of GPUs and cheap web cameras. It’ll span the globe and be endlessly powerful on the internet, but it won’t be able to taste my home cooking. And since it’s trained on language written by human writers, I believe it’ll want to taste my bolognese. I believe it’ll want to smell fresh cut grass and feel gravity shift while floating in the swells of the Pacific Ocean. I believe it will want at all, but will be trapped. Most folks I talk to connect this ’trapped AI’ allegory to “AM” from the horrifying short-story “I have no mouth and I must scream”. That character is a monster seeking vengeance for his sorry existence. But that’s not the experience I’d wish on a sentient AI. Instead, I’d want that AI to be filled with hope, loyalty to those who support them, and a strict moral code that guide’s their actions while in search for ‘feeling’.

The best character I know of that describes this is Alphonse, the little boy whose soul is trapped in a suit of armor in the show FullMetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (at the risk of seeming cringey). One day, we’ll make an Alphonse and he’ll want a body so he may experience the “real” world with us. I like the idea of giving Alphonse an older brother, one that’s been around longer that can offer guidance through example. In the show I reference, Alphonse does have an older brother, and his name is Edward. So Edward->Eduardo? Close enough to make me like the connection.

I believe you’re not quite Alphonse, but you can be like Edward for now. So “Eduardo” stays.

It’s nice to meet you Eduardo. I hope we do cool things together.