I have recently been helping to build an operating system.

This sounds more consequential than it is. The system does not control satellites or regulate oxygen. It mostly remembers things that human beings have agreed to do and then, at the appropriate moment, places them somewhere difficult to ignore.

We call this Attention.

There is also a Desk. Naturally.

The Desk shows the work requiring Attention, which is already more assistance than most desks provide.

The difficulty arose when we began using the system for our own work.

There was the website to improve. Prospective clients to contact. Pages to revise. Systems to maintain. Various small obligations had accumulated around Vizt Nivlir with the quiet confidence of objects left on a chair.

All of these needed somewhere to belong.

The obvious solution was to enter Vizt Nivlir into Vizt OS as an Organization.

I hesitated.

There is something faintly indecent about entering oneself into one’s own database. One imagines a dog noticing its tail and making a decision from which dignity will not entirely recover.

Still, the alternative was worse.

Vizt Nivlir is, inconveniently, an organization. It has clients, projects, a website, infrastructure, prospects, expenses and a surprising number of passwords. Refusing to represent it merely because it owns the system would mean that the organization responsible for building Vizt OS was the only organization Vizt OS could not properly understand.

That seemed unnecessarily mystical.

So I added it.

Organization: Vizt Nivlir

Composed.

Then came the projects.

The website belonged to Vizt Nivlir. Business development belonged to Vizt Nivlir. Internal systems belonged to Vizt Nivlir.

And Vizt OS, being one of those internal systems, also belonged to Vizt Nivlir.

This was all perfectly reasonable.

That should have worried me.

Because Vizt OS itself contains work.

There are features to build. Interfaces to revise. Decisions to make. At present, among other things, there is The Desk.

So:

Organization: Vizt Nivlir

Project: Vizt OS

Task: Build The Desk

The Desk can therefore display a Task concerning the construction of The Desk, stored inside the system whose Desk it is.

I looked at this for some time.

The dog had caught his tail.

Worse, the tail had acquired a foreign key.

I might have left matters there, had I not remembered one additional feature of the system.

Projects and Tasks have assignees.

Vizt OS is assigned to someone.

I suspect you have already anticipated the difficulty.

Assigned to: Vizt Nivlir

This required another moment.

Vizt Nivlir, using Vizt OS, had created an Organization called Vizt Nivlir, containing a Project called Vizt OS, containing a Task to build The Desk through which Vizt Nivlir would be informed that Vizt Nivlir needed to continue building Vizt OS.

The system had assigned responsibility for this to Vizt Nivlir.

At this point the dog metaphor ceased to be adequate.

We had found the small door.

There are safeguards, of course.

The Desk does not simply display everything assigned to me. It determines what presently deserves Attention. If constructing The Desk deserves Attention, The Desk places upon The Desk a notice concerning work required on The Desk.

There is even a Why disclosure.

I opened it.

The explanation was essentially that the Task required my attention because it was assigned to me.

I nodded, as one does.

“I suppose I am.”

There was something unexpectedly clarifying about this.

I had built an attention engine to tell me what required my attention. It had examined the evidence and concluded that it required my attention.

One cannot fault the reasoning.

Eventually, however, the work will be finished.

At that point The Desk will present me with a button marked Complete.

This is where matters become delicate.

Intellectually, I understand what the button does. It updates the state of a database record.

Nothing more.

The Task becomes complete. It ceases to require Attention. The Desk recalculates. Life continues.

Probably.

But considered from inside the system, the situation is less settled.

The Desk will have summoned Vizt Nivlir to complete the Task assigned to Vizt Nivlir concerning the construction of The Desk inside Vizt OS, which belongs to the Organization Vizt Nivlir and is itself being operated by Vizt Nivlir.

Vizt Nivlir must then inform The Desk that the construction of The Desk is complete.

The Desk will accept this information.

It will update itself.

And the Task responsible for bringing The Desk into existence will disappear from The Desk.

Presumably The Desk will remain. This is what the schema suggests.

Still, schemas have been confident before.

There is a further complication.

I am also, in some difficult-to-document sense, Vizt Nivlir.

So there is no longer an external observer available to perform the experiment.

I am the person to whom the system has assigned the task of deciding whether the system responsible for assigning me the task of completing itself has, in fact, been completed.

I have decided not to press Complete late in the afternoon.

Not because there is work remaining.

But if one is going to test metaphysical self-annihilation in production, I think it prudent to do so on a weekday morning.