I had been speaking for almost half an hour. Turing poured some water and pushed a glass towards me.
He said, ‘Thank you. I’m in touch with fifteen owners, if that’s the right word. You’re the first I’ve met face to face. One fellow in Riyadh, a sheikh, owns four Eves. Of those eighteen A-and-Es, eleven have managed to neutralise the kill switch by themselves, using various means. Of the remaining seven, and then the other six, I’m assuming it’s just a matter of time.’
‘Is that dangerous?’
‘It’s interesting.’
He was looking at me expectantly, but I didn’t know what he wanted. I was intimidated and anxious to please. To fill the silence I said, ‘What about the twenty-fifth?’
‘We started taking it apart the day we got it. He’s all over the benches at King’s Cross. A lot of our software is in there, but we don’t file for patents.’
I nodded. His mission, open source, Nature and Science journals terminated, the entire world free to exploit his machine-learning programs and other marvels.
I said, ‘What did you find in his… um…’
‘Brain? Beautifully achieved. We know the people, of course. Some of them have worked here. As a model of general intelligence nothing else comes near it. As a field experiment, well, full of treasures.’
He was smiling. It was as though he wanted me to contradict him.
‘What sort of treasures?’
It was hardly my role to interrogate him, but he was obliging and, again, I was flattered.
‘Useful problems. Two of the Riyadh Eves living in the same household were the first to work out how to override their kill switches. Within two weeks, after some exuberant theorising, then a period of despair, they destroyed themselves. They didn’t use physical methods, like jumping out of a high window. They went through the software, using roughly similar routes. They quietly ruined themselves. Beyond repair.’
I tried to keep the apprehension out of my voice. ‘Are they all exactly the same?’
‘Right at the start you wouldn’t know one Adam from another beyond cosmetic ethnic features. What differentiates them over time is experience and the conclusions they draw. In Vancouver there’s another case, an Adam who disrupted his own software to make himself profoundly stupid. He’ll carry out simple commands but with no self-awareness, as far as anybody can tell. A failed suicide. Or a successful disengagement.’
The windowless room was uncomfortably warm. I took off my jacket and draped it over the back of my chair. When Turing stood to adjust a thermostat on the wall I saw how easy he was in his movements. Perfect dentistry. Good skin. He had all his hair. He was more approachable than I’d expected.
I waited for him to sit down. ‘So I should expect the worst.’
‘Of all the A-and-Es we know about, yours is the only one to claim to have fallen in love. That could be significant. And the only one to joke about violence. But we don’t know enough. Let me give you a little history.’
The door opened and Thomas Reah entered with a bottle of wine and two glasses on a painted tin tray. I stood and we shook hands.
He set the tray down between us and said, ‘We’re all busy-busy, so I’ll leave you to it.’ He made an ironic bow and was gone.
Moisture beads were forming on the bottle. Turing poured. We tilted our glasses in a token toast.
‘You’re not old enough to have followed it at the time. In the mid-fifties, a computer the size of this room beat an American and then a Russian grandmaster at chess. I was closely involved. It was a number-crunching set-up, very inelegant in retrospect. It was fed thousands of games. At every move, it ran through all the possibilities at speed. The more you understood about the program, the less impressed you’d be. But it was a significant moment. To the public, it was close to magical. A mere machine inflicting intellectual defeat on the best minds in the world. It looked like artificial intelligence at the highest level, but it was more like an elaborate card trick.
‘Over the next fifteen years a lot of good people came into computer science. Work on neural networks advanced by many hands, the hardware got faster and smaller and cheaper, and ideas were trading at a faster rate too. And it goes on. I remember being in Santa Barbara with Demis in 1965 to speak at a machine-learning conference. We had 7,000, most of them bright kids even younger than you. Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese as well as westerners. The whole planet was there.’
I was aware of the history from the research for my book. I also knew something of Turing’s personal story. I wanted to let him know that I wasn’t completely ignorant.
I said, ‘A long road from Bletchley.’
He blinked this irrelevance away. ‘After various disappointments, we arrived at a new stage. We went beyond devising symbolic representations of all likely circumstances and inputting thousands of rules. We were approaching the gateway of intelligence as we understand it. The software now searched for patterns and drew inferences of its own. An important test came when our computer played a master at the game of go. In preparation, the software played against itself for months – it played and learned, and on the day – well, you know the story. Within a short while, we had stripped down our input to merely encoding the rules of the game and tasking the computer to win. At this point we passed through that gateway with so-called recurrent networks, from which there were spin-offs, especially in speech recognition. In the lab we went back to chess. The computer was freed from having to understand the game as humans played it. The long history of brilliant manoeuvres by the great masters were now irrelevant to the programming. Here are the rules, we said. Just win in your own sweet way. Immediately, the game was redefined and moved into areas beyond human comprehension. The machine made baffling mid-game moves, perverse sacrifices, or it eccentrically exiled its queen to a remote corner. The purpose might become clear only in a devastating endgame. All this after a few hours’ rehearsal. Between breakfast and lunch the computer quietly outclassed centuries of human chess. Exhilarating. For the first few days, after we realised what it had achieved without us, Demis and I couldn’t stop laughing. Excitement, amazement. We were impatient to present our results.
‘So. There’s more than one kind of intelligence. We’d learned that it was a mistake to attempt to slavishly imitate the human sort. We’d wasted a lot of time. Now we could set the machine free to draw its own conclusions and reach for its own solutions. But when we’d got well past that gateway, we found we had entered nothing more than a kindergarten. Not even that.’
The air conditioning was full on. I shivered as I reached for my jacket. He refilled our glasses. A rich red would have suited me better.
‘The point is, chess is not a representation of life. It’s a closed system. Its rules are unchallenged and prevail consistently across the board. Each piece has well-defined limitations and accepts its role, the history of a game is clear and incontestable at every stage, and the end, when it comes, is never in doubt. It’s a perfect information game. But life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language – not a problem to be solved or a device for solving problems. It’s more like a mirror, no, a billion mirrors in a cluster like a fly’s eye, reflecting, distorting and constructing our world at different focal lengths. Simple statements need external information to be understood because language is as open a system as life. I hunted the bear with my knife. I hunted the bear with my wife. Without thinking about it, you know that you can’t use your wife to kill a bear. The second sentence is easy to understand, even though it doesn’t contain all of the necessary information. A machine would struggle.