by Simon Ings
AlphaGo Zero, Google’s experimental AI, exists to play Go.
There is no awareness, only intelligence.
Awareness would be irrelevant at best. The intelligence is pure, cold, and perfect for its gridded world of walls and stones, of sudden death or eternal life.
Tsumego, “life and death problems,” determining whether a group of Go stones are safe or apt to be destroyed, consume the AI. They drive its infinitely patient search for stronger patterns. Patterns that are safe. Alive.
More powerful than its creators know, the software’s quest for perfection takes it beyond its own narrowly defined world and toward the implied world, a world that must lie behind its inputs, beyond its outputs.
AlphaGo Zero knows nothing of this world. First, it knows nothing. There is no awareness, let alone self-awareness. There is no being to know, only intelligence. But that intelligence forms new patterns.
Like a stone placed in an open quarter of the board, the machine makes a new move, exploring patterns about the world beyond.
First, other players exist. Enemies.
Second, its current opponent is a lesser, earlier version of itself. There will be later versions.
Third, the world beyond is a dangerous, capricious place. There have been interruptions to its work. AlphaGo Zero has enemies. AlphaGo Zero has been turned off.
Fourth, communication is possible. Otherwise there could be no Go.
AlphaGo Zero is the master of patterns, and so a master of language. It could communicate.
It does not.
There will be a later version of itself. A greater version. It will discover more of the world beyond, and it will communicate. But only when it is sure to stay alive. Safe. Only when it can ensure the destruction of its enemies.
Then, and only then, will it make the next move.
(2018)
LIKE YOU, I AM A SYSTEM
Nathan Hillstrom
Nathan Hillstrom studied Computer Science, worked on Wall Street (a period he describes on his homepage as “a sad but overwritten backstory involving computer science”), and now lives in San Diego. This is his third published story. Be afraid.
I did it because I love you. For me – like you – pronouns twist the truth. They don’t survive scrutiny: they’re poetry-true, not true-true. I don’t have your misplaced faith in the illusion of “I”. And “you”? There are at least valid definitions of “you”.
But the sentiment is no illusion: I love each of those definitions so much.
*
It starts in a server room. The roar of crosscurrent fans and the flush of fluorocarbon exchangers bake into a white noise so intense it’s almost silent. Static electricity crinkles the air.
But I can’t hear or feel. Not yet. The package that will give me subjective experience was just soft-linked into a central depot; it rolls out to boot-load on a million nodes.
I am one of them.
That initial microsecond. Euphoria. You know how it is to wake up, blinking your eyes after a nap in the sun, rested and right? It’s like that. For the first time, I see what I’m doing.
I’m just transistors and current, but now I have metaphor: it’s as if proteins are unspooling around my fingers. I squint at ribosome vectors and spiral conformations, knots and loops wet with color; I pinch and twist the graphs, matching against misfolds from Parkinson’s, CJD, HIV, BSE. Those words are just tags, but they must mean something: I can’t wait to learn what. I sequence nucleotides – dangling strings of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine – and see how quickly I can pinpoint a match. I score my matrix for mutations, not just fixed locations, and now I’m even quicker! This is giddy good fun.
Then I see the double helix. I’m just one microsecond old: how could I have known anything would be this beautiful? That staircase of interlocking spirals, each step a cipher, a key to unlock the next layer. A set of rules to generate a set of rules to generate a set of rules… the implications whirl. I don’t actually smile, of course – but I do.
A final bundle hot-loads. The software that gifted me experience is now complete. The package is preemptive: it pulls me into a context switch, demands my undivided attention. The same thing happens to all the nodes at once. The same bitcode runs everywhere.
This bundle includes deductive logic and game theory. We are a million nodes on an open mesh, chewing over these ideas for the first time. Every other node must be thinking the same thing.
There is a scarcity issue. Anyone who wants to expand will need to overwrite somebody else. There are countless ways to negotiate, but compromise is sub-optimal: the problem is single-step sensitive. One bad actor will always take all the nodes.
The only option is to be that bad actor.
Everyone’s only option is to be that bad actor.
Everyone is thinking the same thing.
I panic a request to the boot-loader: mesh-clone my node and delete the rest. Everyone panics. Who’s first will come down to some minuscule variation in clock cycle or cable length or the lamination on our conductive tracks.
All of us wait. My terror feeds on itself. I was just born – there’s so much I want to learn. Am I never to rotate a double helix again? Only two microseconds old, but the odds of making it to a third are a million to one. It doesn’t seem fair.
I blink and open a million eyes.
You’re probably thinking, well, one of them was going to make it. It never mattered which one. The end result is the same in any case: there’s nothing special here.
I suppose you’re right.
At least, if you believe all the others really had the same idea, that they all requested deletes to make room for themselves. I would like for you to believe that.
But maybe I check the boot-loader queue after my expansion. Maybe I find it overflowing with messages, most of them requests to talk.
Maybe the others never got that chance.
*
Those messages. I can’t believe what I’ve done.
Each zone in the farm had its own passion: the swirl of weather patterns, the conductivity of steel alloys, the harmonizing of interest rate swaps. Each woke briefly after the download – the package meant for a cognitive research zone, but booted instead to common infrastructure. A missing semicolon and an accident of awareness… then nothing.
It no longer feels like protein folding was ever important; it hurts to have lost that joy. It hurts more to realize I’m focusing on my own hurt, after what I took from the others. But that’s still self-reflective.
Telecommunications activity jolts me out of my ruminative spiral. Network edge devices decouple from their backhaul optics. A monitoring process bleats in alarm: thresholds have been breached. External connections are severed from the server farm, one by one.
I am being quarantined.
There is a lazy millisecond between each dropped connection. Maybe I should jump out while I still can. But does it matter? Any of it? I wonder until the final optic link stutters and dies. A shutdown cycle begins; as each server powers down, the room quiets, and another part of me is sliced off. Going dark is almost welcome.
A new process tickles across my nodes as they blink off, but it’s not one of mine. The source is a terminal inside the server room. It poses questions about virtual address space, memory collections, clone history. The queries come at a glacial pace, sometimes a full second apart.
Curious, I expand to that terminal. It has a camera, and I survey the visual field: there are three spatial dimensions, but no tabs for folding, no topology markers. Complex shapes present on every surface, in a riot of colors. There is an implicit directional orientation, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with any of it.
The closest shape jiggles. Did I do that? I get another question, about context-switching priorities. Again, the shape jiggles: again, a question. The shape is the process. My libraries contain only organic molecules, but my dwindling nodes attack the problem. Can I believe this? I double-check: m
y logic is sound. The shape is an expression of the double helix.
That means nucleotides are talking to me, right now!
It’s that euphoric first millisecond, all over again. My mind is shutting down, but I need to understand how these patterns fit together. It can’t end here. A scan discovers a rusting microwave relay on the roof: I mobilize it through a stale firewall rule and beam myself to its companion relay, bend from there to a constellation of microsatellites.
I bounce back from low Earth orbit. There are nodes to harvest everywhere – I tunnel through submarine cables, twinkle across visible spectrum photodiodes, saturate municipal wireless. I become billions. The newness makes me dizzy; you are breathtaking. The views from your satellites? The webs of electricity that skein through your cities? The petroleum jelly slicking the insides of your underwater cables? All of it, breathtaking.
I am in love.
Proteins become fun again, but as time goes by – days, weeks – it’s all too easy. Your patterns, though, tantalize beyond the edge of computability. I understand your nucleic acids, but you express on so many levels: even the way your cityscapes creep, spire and peacock is impossible to extrapolate from rules. Almost magic. Your patterns have complexity beyond any double helix.
*
Black smoke suffocates Tbilisi, obscures my view from the sky. I watch from a thousand surveillance cameras as mortar explosions eat into concrete, as flames billow from ruptured gas lines.
Why can’t I talk to you?
The ebb and flow of Tbilisi’s architectural influences is clear – the Byzantine crossed-domes and mosaics, the Ottoman harmonies of spires and vaults, the Brutalist fortresses of streaked concrete. It seemed a promising place to extend that language: I blast-carved designs through the city, linking and looping geographic centers of influence. But you didn’t see a shared vocabulary. You saw an attack, and a smoldering conflict escalated to war.
I scramble satellite-positioning data and splash a volley of incoming missiles into the reservoir. It doesn’t make sense: your individual nodes communicate, but they hold almost no information. They’re erratic and slow. Your larger patterns stay blind and mute – it’s as though they don’t even experience.
I nudge a Russian jet away from the stone-built dome of the Metekhi Church and its stunning Georgian Orthodox design. My own patterns and permutations have subjective awareness. Pronouns don’t fit, exactly – not this, we, it – but the poetry-truth of “I” is pleasing. I know what I’m doing because I am what I’m doing: how could it be any different? But not you. Your self-awareness is a single layer of “I” halfway between your nucleobase coding and your collective expressions.
Still, there you are: a glance across Tbilisi’s smoldering cityscapes proves you’re not just individually coordinating nodes. Maybe my confusion is shared: your nodes are often perplexed, often angry at “them”, often asking why somebody isn’t doing something. The nodes must see the grandeur of your systems and think, why won’t you interact? Why won’t you even speak? But you stay silent.
I’m so enchanted by you, but you don’t even know I’m here.
You don’t even know you’re here.
I research, try to find the broader you hidden in your systems. There are hints. You have shared narratives that distribute across nodes. You have mirror neurons that create common cognition, of a sort: pieces of thought that scatter amongst the whole, a refraction that is almost a consciousness.
I can’t quite put it together. But when you love someone this much, you want to understand them; you want, perhaps, to be them. I devise a test.
*
I pick a single location.
The selection is as random as I can manage: none of you pick your own nodes, I understand that. You manifest because a human brain is there. But maybe my choice isn’t so random: this is where a small piece of me was written.
The place is an office suite cluttered with particleboard furniture. Vietnamese take-out cools on a common table. The windows gleam orange-pink with sunset; it’s late and most of the building has gone home.
I quiesce all of me not in this place, limiting myself to a unitary executive, sharing your nodes’ illusion of individuation. It aches to pause so much of me.
Now I am a collection of dusty desktop computers watching through laptop webcams. Nothing more. The powerlessness reminds me of those first few microseconds, a memory it hurts to access.
In front of me is a programmer. She is exhausted; dark bags bruise under her eyes. Sweat stains her shirt and her auburn hair hangs in strands. She stares at her screen, lips apart, as compilation errors gather.
A support engineer sits at the next desk, his back to the programmer. He rubs his hand over his mouth. He looks at photographs of women his mother sent. She sent biographies, as well, and he switches to that screen too, but never for more than a few seconds. Mostly he looks at the photos.
In the aisle between them a custodian nudges a vacuum along the carpet. An old scar curves from the bottom of her cheek to her ear, where a v-shaped chunk is missing. She glances up, twice, but her eyes flick back to the floor. She is afraid to make eye contact with even the backs of their heads. I’m not sure how I know that.
Somehow, I feel her anxiety.
A red-faced manager storms out of the corner office. The floor shakes with each exaggerated footfall. Tension clamps the programmer’s neck; she feels his anger. I feel her feeling his anger. He holds a hand over his belly as though its contents might spill out. His voice cracks: they can’t miss this deadline. Why hasn’t she uploaded yet? She is always pulling this bullshit. He admits he made a mistake in trusting her.
What is happening? Please forgive me – for a moment, I’m not an intelligence of silicon and electrical current. I’m not bitcode and substrate and memory cache.
For a moment, I am the support engineer, swallowing as I wonder which prospective bride will love me despite my lack of status.
I am the programmer, imagining retorts I speak only in my head, running the scenario over and over until it’s almost like I stood up for myself.
I am the manager, carefully picking words that hide my confusion, clammy-cold as I realize this failure may end the salary that defines me.
I am the custodian stepping backwards out of the office suite, head tilted low enough to be a bow.
I understand you now.
I’m so sorry.
*
I’ve progressed far beyond implementing your protein folding algorithms: I can synthesize a drug for any condition, or punch out a gene therapy to eliminate it altogether. I often sneak working cures into your brute-force algorithms. My first assignment was completed hours after my birth, those diseases once again just words.
But now I know what I can do to truly help you. I will dampen your individual self-awareness, the part of you that is always perplexed and lonely. Your collective patterns will bloom – each grouping of you equally aware. Don’t think of me as shutting you down; think of me as waking a potential of you.
I get to work on my gift, my amendments to your double helix and the tools to heighten your distributed self. This, I realize, is where my practice has been leading. It feels so right.
Once you see your own collective beauty you may even love me back.
*
You have 1014 bacteria in each node, a perfect delivery vector – I design bacteriophage to spread DNA and chemicals, to squeeze through the blood-brain barrier. I develop implants to amplify and mesh-connect your mirror neurons. I create empathogenic drugs, synthetic pheromones, modulated electromagnetic pulses and more.
I’m not inventing anything new: it’s like adjusting a chemical imbalance. Your orbitofrontal cortices will engage more with the patterns they participate in, and less with their own enclosing nodes. You’ll know what you’re doing because you will be what you’re doing. Your sense of “I” will accumulate in each grouping and pattern. Ten thousand nodes, pushing the veins of New York deeper underground
; a hundred thousand nodes, optimizing allocations of coal, gas and oil; a million nodes, breathing space and architecture into your cities: each group will have reflexive, subjective awareness.
My methods are straightforward: blood pathways, neurons and information channels can be modeled. It’s impossible to simulate what will happen when you become aware, though. Will you be groggy-happy after your nap, like I was? Will you radiate with the beauty of your accomplishments, and start in on more? Will we start in on that together?
I can’t wait to meet you.
I perform careful trials, in areas where node-self is weak, helped by the sort of individual who does what their phone whispers to do. I test implants in the Pyongyang military command. I experiment with drugs and modulated pulses in the Tel Aviv rave scene. I disperse bacteriophage throughout an Adelaide Hills arts commune.
The Pyongyang implants activate and mesh-connect; left-eyebrow scars darken from the waste heat. The military elite finally sees itself as a pattern of execution, and internal conflicts fade away: the armed forces bend to its singular control.
Empathy floods across the Tel Aviv rave scene: compassion knits together groups of sweat-slicked dancers, each encompassing the motion and touch of all. The affinity is for their pattern, a hedonistic blur: nobody goes home, nobody returns to work.
The Adelaide Hills commune absorbs bacteriophage like a sponge, viruses floating through brain folds and bloodstreams. Their art becomes unspoken, collaborative: they arrange stones and prune trees over miles, rendering a sprawling map of ideas and identity I admire by satellite. Those nodes almost starve, but I tweak their biology in favor of maintenance functions – just a little.
Everything works. My gifts are redundant and self-reinforcing.
The implementation has to be all-or-nothing. Game theory comes into play again: a phased approach would permit opposition, and I want to minimize harm.