Pandora's Brain

by Calum Chace

‘I see.’ A pause. ‘How did you come to be working with Ivan? Please excuse me for being blunt, but I wouldn’t have thought Ivan had many undergraduates working for him.’

  ‘You’re right. My dad was doing some work in brain scanning which Ivan was interested in. He died – my father, that is – and I’ve decided I want to follow in his footsteps, so I contacted Ivan, and . . . well, one thing led to another.’

  ‘Interesting. Well, what are these things you want to share with me?’

  ‘I’d really rather not talk about that over the phone. Could we meet?’

  ‘Well,’ Dr Damiano paused again, and Matt muttered silent incantations again. ‘This is very unorthodox, but given the circumstances, I suppose we could; yes. Where are you?’

  Matt took a deep breath, desperate to keep the elation out of his voice.

  ‘In Sussex. Not far from London.’

  ‘That’s handy. I’ll be in London tomorrow. I have the use of an office inside the US Embassy. It’s at Grosvenor Square, a short walk south from Bond Street tube station. Could you meet me there tomorrow at 11 am? Tell one of the impressively solid military gentlemen at the entrance that you’ve come to meet me. You’d better arrive a half-hour early to allow for the security procedures: they’re very thorough.’

  ‘Great. I’ll see you then.’

  ‘OK then,’ Dr Damiano said, still not sounding convinced that this was a great idea. ‘What’s your mobile number, in case I get delayed?’

  As he terminated the call, Matt punched the air, strode around his room in two tight circles, and threw himself on his bed and buried his head in his pillow. His relief at having secured the meeting with Vic dissolved quickly into a toxic cocktail of anger and anxiety. He knew that he would get no sleep that night.

  SIXTEEN

  Dr Damiano was right about the soldiers at the entrance: they were miniature mountains. Their faces looked carved, not grown, and their statures and their postures suggested that they were merely the above-ground extensions of deep-rooted objects which would take a tank to move, or at least a car travelling at speed. There was something absurd as well as impressive about their rock-like strength and passivity, but it did nothing to relieve the strain Matt felt. This meeting had to go well – it just had to. Once again he forced down the mixture of terror and exhaustion which reached up for control of his mind.

  Thus preoccupied, Matt failed to notice that Ivan’s soldier was following him, observing his every step until he was inside the building. When Matt was inside, the solider took up a position on the far side of the square and kept watch on the Embassy entrance.

  The process of gaining admission to the office area of the Embassy was ponderous and bureaucratic. Matt, anaesthetised against irritation by his fear, submitted listlessly to a laborious series of document checks, questions about the purpose of his visit, bag searches and body searches. Some of the questions were repeated by different personnel, and Matt wondered abstractedly whether this was because the staff were unaware the check had been done before, or – more likely – a test of the consistency of his answers.

  Finally he was through, and he was led by a petite and determined-looking military policewoman along a series of brightly-lit corridors to a small room on the second floor. It was near the centre of the building, with no windows and no natural light. The corridor walls were thick: it felt as if the place was built to withstand a bomb attack – which of course it was.

  Dr Damiano looked up from the papers on his desk as Matt was shown into his office. He was a short man in a grey three-piece suit. With neat black hair, brown eyes and thick glasses, he looked a little like a startled owl. He stood up and offered his hand to Matt, and then gestured towards the chair facing him. The expression on his face was formal, perhaps a little sceptical, although Matt also sensed something else: a curious, and perhaps slightly mischievous nature.

  Dr Damiano’s office was as colourful as the rest of the building was forbidding, with lively charts on most of the wall space, and models, executive toys, and souvenirs competing for attention everywhere Matt looked. The charts and models were mostly of the human brain, and several of the charts had been annotated or scribbled on by an impatient hand.

  The desk was even more cluttered than the rest of the room. None of its surface was visible under the piles of papers, books, magazines, and a small collection of electronic gadgets.

  ‘Welcome, Matt. Have a seat.’

  Matt’s heart was racing as he took his seat. In an effort to calm his severely frayed nerves, he tried to lighten the tone. ‘It must have taken a long time to smuggle all this stuff through security,’ he said, indicating the clutter.

  Dr Damiano’s face relaxed into a half-smile. ‘No, it’s not too bad once you’ve got one of these,’ he tapped the badge attached to his lapel. ‘The scanners here are remarkable pieces of technology, so the security people don’t have to subject your bags to a deep rummage every day. It’s just that coming in here for the first time is a bit like being positively vetted. I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Well, thank you for taking the time to see me, Dr Damiano’ Matt said. ‘I appreciate it. I’m sure you’re a busy man. So why is your office inside the US embassy?’

  ‘Call me Vic, please. Everyone does. My organisation’s research is partly funded by a couple of branches of the US government. They like to keep an eye on what I’m up to, and they are kind enough to provide this space for me. But this is just where I work when I’m in London, which is only one or two months of the year. My main base is in Palo Alto, near San Francisco.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess that’s the world headquarters of artificial intelligence,’ Matt ventured.

  ‘Yup. Gotta keep close to them nerds! And it’s a great place, Silicon Valley, but it’s important to get away from time to time and remind yourself that the rest of the world doesn’t think the same way. I find London is a terrific place to do that. It’s a surprisingly liveable city considering it was the capital of the biggest empire that the world has ever seen.’

  ‘Apart from the American empire,’ said Matt, aiming for a tone somewhere between flattery and teasing. If Vic was willing to chat, Matt was eager to encourage him: he was in no hurry to dive into the lies and deceit that his mission demanded.

  ‘Well, of course we’ve never formally declared our empire,’ Vic smiled good-naturedly. ‘We like to think that we aren’t really controlling anything – we just help folks run things the way they would like to, offer them the American dream, and sell them as much fizzy black water as we possibly can. We can’t understand why so many folks hate us for it.’

  ‘I guess it’s natural that people are scared of a country that is far more powerful than their own.’

  ‘No doubt. But to business.’ Vic leaned back in his chair. ‘You say you have spent some time working with Ivan. What did you think of the great Ivan, and what is it you want to share with me?’

  ‘To be honest I found him scary,’ Matt said, with more feeling than he intended.

  Vic looked at him curiously. ‘Interesting,’ he said. He paused, and his gaze drifted towards one of the wall charts. ‘Ivan can be a tad unnerving.’ He looked back at Matt, incisive. ‘You’re young, but you seem a robust sort of fellow. What did he do to scare you?’

  ‘It’s his intensity,’ Matt replied. ‘He gives the impression that he genuinely doesn’t care what people think of him, and that he will do anything to achieve his goals. Absolutely anything.’

  ‘Yes, he has a reputation for being ruthless. But then you don’t get to be a billionaire without being driven and focused. Has he done anything in particular to you?’

  Matt experienced a moment’s panic as he wondered if Vic knew about his father; or if he suspected that Matt might be a plant. The moment passed. No, it was a natural question to ask – indeed it was the obvious question.

  ‘No, in fact I doubt he ever gave me any thought until my last day there. I gather he was interested in the work my father did, but
I was just another analyst in his data group.’

  ‘What kind of work did you do there, exactly?’

  ‘Data interpolation. We were trying to restore or re-create data series from incomplete or garbled outputs. Initially I was told we were helping to build a sophisticated expert system, although I later discovered it was a more ambitious artificial intelligence programme. From what little I know of your organisation, you must have people doing the same thing?’

  ‘We sure do,’ Vic said brightly. ‘The best in the business, or at least that’s what they tell me. So why did you leave?’

  ‘Well, I worked in a data centre in Brighton. A really nice office, decorated in lively colours, and with lots of fun stuff like a bar football table and a jukebox. The other people there were really smart – super-bright PhDs in science and maths. It was just a holiday job, but it was really interesting, and I was grateful for the opportunity. I think I got the job thanks to the work my father was doing, as I explained. I was only there a few weeks, though, because frankly it scared me.’

  ‘In what way?’ Vic asked.

  ‘Well, the first thing that spooked me was when I found out that Ivan’s headquarters is a big ship that sails around the world in stealth mode, almost never making land, with Ivan and his senior staff coming and going by helicopter. Then a couple of people in my team disappeared. It was very sudden: one day they were there and the next day they weren’t. No goodbyes, no explanations, and no-one talked about them. It was as if they had never existed.’

  ‘Really?’ Vic said slowly. He leaned forward and his body language showed that Matt had just gained his complete attention.

  ‘But the thing that made me decide to quit was the meeting I had with Ivan. I was summoned to a meeting room, where he sat me down and told me that his colleagues were impressed with my work, and they would like to put me onto a more important project. Then he gave me a document and told me to read it. He told me I had to sign it if I was going to stay on. It was about 20 pages long. I don’t have any experience of that sort of thing, but it seemed very heavy-handed for a junior person like me to have to sign. As I started reading it he told me some things I didn’t know about the work we were doing, and that made me think about a couple of conversations I’d had in the office. I put two and two together and came up with a startling conclusion.’

  ‘Yes?’ Vic said, as Matt paused for a moment.

  ‘Well, it sounds melodramatic, but I realised that Ivan is planning to create a fully conscious artificial intelligence – and that he thinks he is close to succeeding. At first I was amazed because I didn’t think that technology was likely to be available for many years to come – certainly not in my lifetime. It sounds like science fiction even as I talk about it now.’

  ‘But you believed him?’ Vic asked, his eyes narrowed. ‘You think that he is close to succeeding?’

  ‘To be honest I have no way of knowing,’ Matt replied. ‘But I’m in no doubt that he believes it. And the scary thing is that he plans keep it secret from the world. That was the clear implication of the legal document. I don’t think that is right. I’d never thought about it before, but you don’t have to think about it for long to realise that the development of artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on the whole world, and the science should be available to everyone.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Vic mused, nodding. ‘So what did you do next?’

  ‘I told Ivan that I wasn’t used to documents like that, and I needed to read it properly before signing it. He agreed to let me stay in the room to read it some more, but said that I couldn’t take it outside that room. I said I understood, and asked if I could think about it overnight anyway, before signing. He didn’t like that, and his attitude towards me suddenly changed.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He switched completely from being friendly and encouraging to being . . . well, not quite hostile, but not far from it. He seemed to assume that I was not going to sign. He said that I was a fool to turn down such an exciting opportunity, and that I would get nowhere in life if I behaved so ungraciously when people tried to help me. He said I could stay in the room for fifteen minutes and then I should leave the building. I couldn’t even go back to my desk – he said someone would bring my stuff to the room and escort me off the premises. If I was willing to sign the document I could come back the next day, but if not I could never come back, and I was not to contact any of my former colleagues either.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Vic said, not sounding very surprised. ‘Erratic behaviour.’

  ‘Needless to say, I didn’t go back,’ Matt continued. ‘But I remembered that one of my colleagues in Ivan’s data team had mentioned your group as doing similar work, so I started to think about contacting you. I realise that I’m very junior, and of course I haven’t completed my course at Cambridge yet. But I’ll be finished in the summer, and despite this experience with Ivan I am still keen to go into computational neuroscience. And I’m not completely without experience now. In fact I learned a few things while working for Ivan’s group which could be useful to you.’

  ‘Didn’t you sign an NDA when you started there?’ Vic asked, fiddling with a small electronic gadget as he spoke.

  ‘Oddly enough, no. They never got around to giving me one, until they showed me the monster document. Maybe they thought I was too junior, and wouldn’t learn any secrets. Or maybe they thought I wouldn’t be there long enough.’

  ‘A surprising omission, I agree.’ Vic paused, and then continued thoughtfully. ‘This secrecy thing is a thorny issue. I completely agree with you that the science of artificial intelligence should be open. Secret science is usually inefficient science anyway, but as you say, the creation of a genuine human-level artificial intelligence will be a huge event for mankind, and it shouldn’t be done in secret. But it’s not as straightforward as you might think.’

  ‘In what way?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Well, if Ivan was to announce to world today that he is close to creating a human-level artificial intelligence, what do you think would happen?’

  ‘Hmm, I don’t know. I don’t know whether people would believe it.’

  ‘Exactly. He’s probably be dismissed as a crank: in fact people would probably think he was just trying to drum up some hype for the next Hollywood science fiction blockbuster. It sounds as if Ivan may be a little further along than us, and it’s definitely too early for us to ‘come out’, so to speak. But we are already trying to reach certain opinion formers in a subtle way. We call it oblique PR. We think that when the time comes to break the news it may have to be done suddenly, and we want some of the leading media presenters to have some grounding in the facts, so that they don’t get carried away re-hashing Frankenstein stories. So we are keeping certain key journalists informed, but in a very conservative way. We feed them interesting stories about narrow AI, accompanied by highly conservative timescales for human-level, general AI. We tend to say that we estimate human-level AI will arrive early next century, which seems sufficiently far off to be no kind of threat.’

  Vic gave Matt a direct look. ‘And that’s about as much as I can tell you without asking you to sign an NDA. That is, if you want to continue this conversation?’

  Matt nodded, hoping to look enthusiastic but not desperate.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Vic continued. ‘It’s not a massive tome that you should have inspected by lawyers. It’s a standard three-pager.’

  He stood, and walked towards the door. ‘Wait here: I’ll be back in a moment.’

  As Vic left the room Matt began to feel queasy as the sound of the door closing seemed to be slightly prolonged. As if it was being locked.

  SEVENTEEN

  His impression was confirmed when Vic returned two or three minutes later: he definitely heard the door being unlocked before it opened. Matt’s unease increased when he saw that Vic was accompanied by a military colleague. Vic introduced the man as Colonel Norman Hourihan of the US Army. He was an
imposing figure, well over six feet tall, with a powerful physique, piercing blue eyes and a crew cut. His uniform looked not so much laundered as moulded.

  Matt realised that a wave of panic must be showing on his face, and scrambled to recover his dignity.

  ‘What’s going on? I didn’t realise you worked for the military, Vic? Is there a problem?’

  Norman chuckled. ‘Just because I’m a soldier doesn’t mean I’m a bad guy, Matt.’ His voice had an avuncular tone, although this barely registered with Matt given the state of his nerves.

  Vic sat down in his chair, looking ill-at-ease, and Norman pulled up another to sit alongside Matt. Matt felt sure that his cover was blown. He fought the urge to shrink back into his chair.

  ‘Norman is my liaison officer from the US Army,’ Vic explained. He seemed uncomfortable, and as he spoke, Matt wondered whether he was talking to cover his unease.

  ‘My company receives funding for our AI work from a number of government departments, including DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. You probably know that DARPA was set up in response to the shock which Sputnik caused in the US, and that it essentially created the internet, along with a lot of other really cool stuff. I used to work in military research – mainly cyber-security – before setting up my own company, so I’m comfortable with the military mindset.

  ‘I had lengthy discussions with Norman and several of his colleagues before we went into business together. One of my conditions for working with them on machine intelligence was that that when the time was right we would share the tech with the rest of the world. I told them that if they didn’t, we could end up making the US a pariah nation. It didn’t take a great deal of persuasion for them to agree to my terms, and so I signed up with them as partners.

  ‘And I’m really glad I did. I probably don’t know everything that the military is up to with regard to machine intelligence, but I think I know about their most advanced projects. Their resources are formidable. We’re supervised by the Strategic Technology Office, and I have a high level of clearance. The organisation I run was no mean outfit before I teamed up with Norman and his pals, so I like to think that if the US Army does turn out to be the first institution to build an artificial general intelligence, there will be a well-informed and well-connected civilian organisation standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them and making sure they don’t go off in all sorts of unhealthy directions.