“Or is it, as some suggest, no more than another illusion? Like a wave at the surface of the ocean, which seems
’real’ enough but is never made of the same bits of water from one minute to the next?”
Nelson knew an assignment when he heard one. Sure enough, Jen next reached into her pouch and took out a pair of small objects, which she slid across the table toward him. “Here are some things to study. One contains articles by scholars as far back as Ornstein and Minsky and Bukhorin. I think you’ll find them useful as you write up your own speculations for next time.”
He reached for the items, perplexed. One was a standard gigabyte infocell. But the other wasn’t even a chip. He recognized the disk as an old-style metal coin and read the words united states of America imprinted around its rim.
“Take a look at the motto,” she suggested.
He didn’t know what that meant, so he searched for the most incomprehensible thing on it. “E… pluribus… unum?” he pronounced carefully.
“Mmm,” she confirmed, and said nothing more. Nelson sighed. Naturally, he was going to have to look it up for himself.
By all the numbers, it should have happened long ago.
Jen thought about consciousness, a topic once dear to her, but which she’d given little attention to for some time. Until all these new adventures overturned her pleasant, iconoclastic existence and threw her back to contemplating the basics again. Now she couldn’t help dwelling on the subject during her walk back to the Tangoparu digs.
It’s close to a century since they’ve been talking about giving machines “intelligence.” And still they run up against this barrier of self-awareness. Still they say, “It’s sure to come sometime in the next twenty years or so! “As if they really know.
Stars glittered over the dusty path as she made her way from Kuwenezi’s compact, squat, storm-proof ark four, past fields of newly sprouted winter wheat, toward the gaping entrance of the old gold mine. The quandary stayed with her as she rode the elevator deep into the Earth.
Simulation programs keep getting better. Now they mimic faces, hold conversations, pass Turing tests. Some may fool you up to an hour if you aren’t careful.
And yet you can always tell, if you pay attention. Simulations, that’s all they are.
Funny thing. According to theoreticians, big computers should have been able to perform human-level thought at least two decades ago. Something was missing, and as her conversations with Nelson brought her back to basics, Jen thought she knew what it was.
No single entity, all by itself, can ever be whole.
That was the paradox. It was delicious in a way, like the ancient teaser, “This sentence is a lie.” And yet, hadn’t Kurt Godel shown, mathematically, that no closed system of logic can ever “prove” all its own implied theorems? Hadn’t Donne said, “No man is an island”?
We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That’s how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.
Or a mind.
Jen entered the well-lit chamber where the Tangoparu team had their resonator. She stopped by the main display to see where Beta was at present. A purple ellipse marked its current orbit — now rising at its highest point all the way past the outer core to the lower mantle, where quicksilver flashes seemed to spark and flare with every lingering apogee. Now Beta was losing mass at each apex — a true milestone — though it would be a while yet before its balance sheet went into debit full time and they could all draw a sigh of relief.
Jen watched the mantle’s flickerings of superconducting electricity, those pent-up energy stores Kenda’s people tapped to drive the gazer effect. One brief, titanic burst had taken place while she was visiting Nelson — triggered in tandem by the Greenland and New Guinea resonators. The next run, scheduled in ten minutes, would unite this African device with New Guinea in an effort to shift Beta’s orbital line of apsides slightly.
At first she and the others had been fearful of the news from headquarters — that the NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN alliances had seized two of the four resonators. Kenda worried that all their work would be in vain. Then came word from George Hutton. Everything was to go on as before. The only difference, apparently, was that new supplies and technicians would flood in to help the effort. Jen had been cynical, it sounded too good to be true.
Sure enough, George went on to add that there would be limits to cooperation with Colonel Spivey. Easter Island and South Africa were to remain independent. He was adamant about that. No newcomers would be allowed at those two sites. Kenda’s team reacted with a mixture of resigned fatigue and relief. They would have loved the help, but understood Hutton’s reasons.
“George isn’t so sure about this association, yet,” Kenda told them all at a meeting several days ago. “And that’s enough for me.”
Jen wondered why there was no word from Alex. Now that they were communicating over secure military bands, completely independent of the World Data Net, shouldn’t the boy feel free to talk openly? Something was wrong, she sensed. More was going on than anyone said.
With a sigh she went to her own station to plug in the subvocal. By now it was almost as easy to calibrate as her home unit, though she still had to do most of it “by hand.”
Only this time, after that conversation with Nelson, she paid a little more attention to the extraneous blips and images that popped in and out of the peripheral screens.
At the upper left, several bars of musical score wrote themselves — an advertising jingle she hadn’t heard in years. Below that, poking from a corner, came the shy face of a young boy… Alex, as she remembered him at age eight or so. No mystery why that image crept in. She was worried about him, and so must have subvocalized unspoken words that the computer picked up. It, in turn, had gone into her personal archive and pulled out some old photo, feeding it then to an off-the-shelf enhancement program to be animated.
To the uninitiated, it might seem as if the computer had read her thoughts. In fact, it was only highlighting the surface bits, those which almost became words. It was like rummaging through your purse and coming up with an envelope of neglected pictures. Only now her “purse” consisted of terabyte sheets of optical memory, extrapolated by a tool kit of powerful subroutines. And you didn’t even have to intend in order to rummage. The mind “below” was doing it all the time.
Jen adjusted the sensitivity level, giving her associations more space to each side… it was a sort of visually amplified form of free association, she realized. Yet another type of feedback. And feedback was the way life-forms learned and avoided error. Gaia used feedback to maintain her delicate balance. Another word for feedback was “criticism.”
A pair of cartoon figures drifted toward each other from opposite screens. The first was her familiar tiger totem… a mascot that had been omnipresent, for some reason, ever since this adventure had begun. The other symbol looked like an envelope… the old-fashioned kind you used to send letters in. The two figures circled round each other, the tiger mewling lowly, the envelope snapping its flap at the cat.
Now why had these manifested when she thought the word “criticism”? As she reflected on the question, written words formed in the tank. The envelope said to the tiger, “YOUR ORANGE STRIPES ARE TOO BRIGHT TO CAMOUFLAGE YOU ON THIS SCREEN! I CAN SEE YOU TOO EASILY!”
“THANK YOU,” the tiger acknowledged, and switched at once to gray tones Jen found blurry and indistinct, “WHAT DO YOU CONTAIN?” the tiger asked the envelope in turn, “IT REALLY IS WRONG FOR ONE PART TO KEEP SECRETS FROM THE WHOLE.”