We sat on the concrete stairs next to the barricaded door, our backs to the wall, looking out over the dark server room. Thousands of LED lights from the racks twinkled like a miniature galaxy. The alarm had shut off, leaving us in what felt like silence, even though the hum of the servers made a constant background sound.
“How do you know it doesn’t understand?” Shaunessy asked.
“What?”
“The fungus. You said it’s like a neural net. So is our brain. So how do you know it doesn’t understand what it’s doing?”
“Well, I guess it depends what you mean by ‘understand.’ We have centralized locations for language, creative thought, intellect, abstract thinking. A fungus doesn’t. It’s just a network, every part the same as the others. It’s a complex data filter and decision tree. It accomplishes some incredibly sophisticated responses, but it’s not aware of itself.”
“At least, not until now,” Shaunessy said.
“What do you mean?”
“Now its network includes thousands of human beings. Humans who do think. Who are aware of themselves.”
“Interesting,” I said. “It has conscious components, but it itself is not conscious. It’s not centralized—no one human is critical to its existence—but it can take advantage of all the creativity and problem-solving skills of its human nodes.”
“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” she said. “The human race? This is why we have such trouble getting fungi out of our house or off of our toenails. How can we fight something that doesn’t have a central organ to destroy? You have to eradicate it completely, or it keeps coming back.”
I sighed and leaned the back of my head against the wall. “It’s funny. I always thought it was the computers we had to be afraid of. You know, AIs getting so smart that they wouldn’t need humans anymore. The great war between the biological minds and the artificial ones.”
Shaunessy shook her head. “They’re not even close.”
“Really? I keep hearing that the Singularity is only twenty years away.”
She laughed. “It’s been twenty years away for the last sixty years. But it’s nonsense. The computers we have aren’t brains. They’re machines that manipulate one set of symbols into another set of symbols. They don’t respond to their environment; they don’t grow.”
“Sure they do,” I said. “What about deep learning? Cognitive computing? Neuromorphic chips? They’ve got computer chips now with as many synapses as the human brain.”
“That’s just it. We’ve taken a small part of how our brain works—the patterns of dendrites and axons and synapses—and we’ve built computer architectures around them. But that’s all it is—a symbolic machine inspired by the human brain. Real brains are biological pieces of meat inextricably connected to the bodies that host them and the environments they inhabit in a million essential ways. A computer is a complex tool, but it’s not a brain. It requires the human operator to be its body, to be its environment, by writing its algorithm and feeding it data. If we really want to make an artificial construct that can think like we do, we have to start over with a completely different concept.”
“Like what?”
“Well…” Shaunessy took a few of her braids in her hands and fingered them absently. “It might be something more like your fungus.”
“My fungus?”
“You know what I mean. Your brother’s fungus. The fungus. An architecture that doesn’t just manipulate symbols but grows organically from interaction with its environment. Intelligence ultimately isn’t Boolean. It isn’t about logic. It’s physical. It’s a continuous chemical give-and-take with everything around it. Is it getting hot in here?”
I blinked at the sudden change of topic. “Um, I guess.” Now that I thought about it, the temperature was rising. This room had always been chilly.
“The cooling system must be down with the lights,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a backup system on the same generator that’s still powering the machines, but maybe it malfunctioned. If they don’t fix that fast, it’s really going to start cooking down here. Those racks put out a lot of heat.”
“Should we… I don’t know… turn them off?”
“There are thousands of them. And some of them are hosting some pretty critical systems. We can’t just kill them.”
“Better them than us,” I said.
“Hopefully they’ll get us out of here before that becomes a problem.”
It didn’t take long before the heat started to get uncomfortable. Shaunessy checked the temperature reading on one of the servers and reported that it was ninety-five degrees in the room. “The processors will start frying before we’re in any real danger from the heat,” she said.
“I can’t tell you how reassuring that is,” I said.
“This is what I’m talking about, though,” she said. “This is why computers will never be intelligent.”
“Because they get too hot?”
“I’m serious,” she said. “It’s like the guy in the Apollo 13 movie who says, ‘Power is everything.’ The kind of computers you’re talking about, the ones that rival the human brain for processing nodes, consume on the order of four million watts of power. The chunk of meat in your head—which is not a computer, by the way—uses twenty watts. Not twenty million. Just twenty. Our brains are efficient thermodynamic systems, designed to help us produce valuable work from the potential energy around us in the world. Computers are simply extensions of our minds—tools we use that heighten that production value.”
I waved my hands at the servers. “So if these were racks of brains instead of computers, we wouldn’t be getting so hot right now,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “Although… ew.”
“Yeah.”
We sat in silence for a while, sweating. After a while, she checked the temperature again, and reported that it was up to ninety-seven degrees.
My mouth felt dry. “Maybe we should have asked Andrew and Melody to pass in some water bottles before they evacuated.”
“They won’t abandon us,” Shaunessy said. “You know they’re doing everything they can to get the lockdown reversed and get us out of here.”
Sitting there staring down at the carpet of white mushrooms made me uncomfortable, so I replaced the flooring tiles I had removed before.
“There,” I said. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“How does it even grow down there? Doesn’t it need sunlight?” Shaunessy said.
“Nope. Fungus thrives on radiation. That’s like the perfect environment for it down there. Lots of heat, lots of energy.”
“What if we could control its environment?” Shaunessy asked. Her gaze was focused inward, not really looking at me, in an expression I had come to associate with the emergence of a brilliant idea.
“What do you mean?”
“You said it learns from its environment. That it’s not really intelligent or even clever, it just filters data and finds the most efficient beneficial response.”
“That’s right.”
“So, what if we could control the data it processed? What if we could steer its actions by simulating a false environment, causing it to make choices that were actually detrimental, but because we controlled its feedback, it strengthened the wrong pathways?”
“Virtual reality, fungus style.”
“Something like that. If we could get it to interpret negative feedback as if it were positive, then it would increasingly pursue things that were harmful to it. It would destroy itself.”
“Okay,” I said. “How do we do that?”
She fell silent.
“I mean, we’re talking about a lot of inputs, right? Thousands of people scattered everywhere, and who knows how many square miles of rainforest. We can’t actually control that, can we?”