Riley laughed. “Really?” she said in amusement. “Another feline metaphor? First lions, now cats?”
“It isn’t my fault they’re so hard to herd,” replied her father with a grin.
Riley returned her father’s smile but quickly became serious once again. “Here’s what I think you’re missing,” she said. “For a big enough prize, the cats will herd themselves. You’ll hoard whole brain emulation until the entire species agrees on how to handle it. Could be decades. Could be never. But humanity will be forced to work together if they want it. And the species might surprise you. Who could have predicted that billions of cats could herd together to create the Internet and all of its content?”
Jordan nodded slowly, lost in thought.
“You’re absolutely brilliant,” Riley said to her father. “But even you couldn’t have built the Internet by yourself. So don’t put the burden of creating the future all on your own shoulders. Don’t play God. Let humanity, collectively, play God.”
“And if we never come together as a species?” asked Jordan.
“Then we don’t deserve to be preserved,” said Riley simply.
There were several minutes of absolute silence in the conference room as Jordan considered what his daughter had said. It was almost as if everyone in the group had reached a telepathic agreement to wait for the billionaire’s response before speaking.
“So let me be sure I have all of this down,” said Jordan finally. “First, you want me to reveal myself and my technology. Second, you want me to allow universal access to Pock. And third, you want me to make it clear that I’m keeping immortality to myself until the world collectively decides on parameters for its use. Which will paint a massive target on my chest and make kicking a hornet’s nest seem tame.”
“I didn’t say this would be easy,” said Riley. “Just that it was necessary.”
Her father rolled his eyes. “You don’t ask for much, do you?” he said dryly.
“I’ve been thinking small for eight years,” she replied. “It’s time to think big.”
“Is that everything?”
“Almost,” said Riley with a smile. “Glad you asked. You have to revive Mom and the boys, which I know you wanted to do anyway if I joined the team. And one last thing: David and I get to own as many dogs as we want.”
Jordan laughed. “I don’t know about the rest of it,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure dog-ownership won’t be a deal-breaker. And now I know why you objected to so many cat metaphors.”
Riley grinned. “So what do you say?” she asked.
Her father sighed. “I guess if we want to have any hope of reaching global consensus,” he said, “we should at least be able to reach consensus in this room. Anyone object to going forward in this way?”
Jordan waited for almost twenty seconds, but no one spoke.
Finally, Michael O’Banion broke the silence. “Personally,” he said, “I like the idea a lot. It still has us calling most of the shots, but only until humanity can demonstrate the maturity needed to step up to the plate. If this happens, why wouldn’t we want to give this capability to the world?”
“Anyone else want to weigh in?” said Jordan.
“I agree with Riley, also,” said Carr, and Trish and Estrada nodded their agreement as well.
Jordan stared at his daughter intently for several long seconds. “Not that this matters in any way,” he said, “but if you were to join the team, would you still want to be called Riley?”
“I’m afraid so. I did choose it myself, and I’ve gotten used to it. And no offense, Dad, but Melissa was never my favorite.”
“Got it,” said her father. “I’ll never ask again. Anyway, that’s unimportant. The important thing is that you have yourself a deal,” he added, beaming happily. “Welcome to the team, Riley. We need to start our relocation efforts the second we adjourn, but when I get some time I plan to give you, David, and the lieutenant the welcome you deserve.”
Jordan’s eyes moistened as he gazed at his daughter, and Riley couldn’t help from tearing up herself upon seeing how happy he was that she was really joining him.
She knew that this day would change the course of her life almost as dramatically as the day the kinetic round hit Turlock eight years earlier. But whereas Turlock had represented the destruction of her life and the loss of all hope, this day represented the opposite. Despair and self-loathing would be replaced by hope and great purpose. Her life would go from simple and somewhat aimless to as complex, exciting, and meaningful as any life would ever be.
She couldn’t wait to dig in. She was especially interested in finding a way to rule in, or rule out, the existence of a soul. Above all else, this was the most fundamental question posed by the capabilities her father’s technology made possible. His results so far seemed to indicate that one didn’t exist. But absence of proof was not the same as proof of absence.
Was consciousness just a question of the complexity and arrangement of a neuronal pattern? Or was there more? Were her father’s duplicates exactly as human as the originals, or were they missing a subtle ingredient they had yet to identify, one that only a naturally born human could possess?
Among other duties she knew she would take on, she vowed to do whatever she could to answer this question. She would consult with theologians. Read the great philosophers. Find a way to design more elaborate and subtle experiments to get her arms around this issue.
If she could prove the soul did exist, this would obviate the need for immortality. This would reassure humanity that there was a higher power in the universe, and that death was not the end.
If she could prove the opposite, that a human being emerged simply from the sum of its parts, then humanity would know with certainty, even the most devoutly religious, that true immortality was possible.
Regardless, she would be intimately involved in the most important tipping point in the evolution of mankind since Homo sapiens first came on the scene. A tipping point that could directly trace its roots to unspeakable tragedy.
Some day in the far future, a historian would be asked, “What event marked the end of mortality? What event marked the end of humanity being trapped within a single solar system?
“When, precisely, was infinity born?”
The answer might be surprising. “Just after a man named Isaac Jordan had wiped out thousands of innocents and beheaded his wife and sons. The moment he refused to accept that death was irreversible.”
But maybe the answer wouldn’t be that surprising, after all. Maybe it would be well understood in this far future time that resilience, determination, refusal to accept defeat, and ability to bounce back from tragedy were the hallmarks of the human condition.
How many of mankind’s greatest advances had arisen from the ashes of defeat? How much of the success of the species was due to its members being too stubborn to stay down after getting thrown from a horse?
Tragedy could spark drive, motivation, and resilience. Riley’s own experiences were a testament to this. Would she be this excited about her future, this adamant that humanity needed to find a way forward together, without her eight years in the wilderness? Would she fully embrace the sacrifices that would need to be made to ensure this could happen?
Or would she have graduated from a spoiled rich kid to a spoiled rich adult, self-absorbed and uncaring about others?
There was no way to know. What she did know was that she intended to make full use of this opportunity. Being reunited with the family she loved, including Michael O’Banion, who had been like a father to her, was a dream come true. And she would have the chance to work shoulder to shoulder with amazing people on momentous projects. With her father and adopted uncle. With Cameron Carr, a bright and charming lieutenant who had proven his courage and friendship. And with David Bram, the man she had fallen in love with, despite her best efforts to resist this.
And perhaps when a far future historian, on a far distant planet, was asked what had marked th
e beginning of humanity’s immortality and expansion into the cosmos, this extraordinary group of people would still be around to offer their perspective.
Author Notes & Bonus Content
Table of Contents
1) From the Author
2) Infinity Born: What’s real and what isn’t
3) My essay entitled, “Scientific Advances are Ruining Science Fiction!” (First published in the book, Visions of the Future, in 2016). Note: this essay touches on the future evolution of humanity and I think it fits nicely with the subject matter of Infinity Born.
4) My author bio and list of books
1) From the Author: Thanks for reading Infinity Born. I hope that you enjoyed it.
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2) Infinity Born: What’s real and what isn’t
As you may know, in addition to trying to tell the most compelling stories I possibly can, I strive to introduce concepts and accurate information that I hope will prove fascinating, thought-provoking, and even controversial. Infinity Born is a work of fiction and contains considerable speculation, so I encourage interested readers to explore these topics on your own to arrive at your own view of the subject matter.
Being human, I know I get things wrong sometimes, but I do try very hard to get them right. Sometimes, I even get a little carried away. Just to give one example, I planned to have Cameron Carr tape a steak knife to his outer pant leg. I wasn’t sure if this would really work, so I actually taped one of our steak knives to my leg and ran around the house (at first very gingerly to be sure I wouldn’t get stabbed). Happily, it didn’t obstruct my movement in the least.
The funny thing about this is that my wife is so used to seeing me do crazy things in the name of research, she didn’t even raise an eyebrow. She did draw the line, however, at letting me cut her bathing suit into strips to test how well these would work as a Molotov-cocktail fuses : )
Anyway, with this said, I’ll get right to it: what’s real in Infinity Born and what isn’t. If you aren’t interested in an early category and want to skip ahead to one that might interest you more, I’ve listed the categories I’ll be covering in order of their appearance.
· AGI/ASI—Current efforts
· AGI/ASI—The potential for disaster
· Mind Uploading/Whole Brain Emulation
· Bioprinting
· Nanites in the brain
· The nature of consciousness
· Isaac Jordan’s R-Drive fleet (EmDrive technology)
· Asteroid mining
· Kinetic bombardment (The Rod of God)
· The rise of the Internet
· Are our bodies replaced every five years?
· The speed of thought
· Are we living in a computer simulation?
· The Fermi Paradox
· Elon Musk, Mars, tunneling, and brain implants
· Graphene
· DARPA, the Pentagon, Helen Woodward Animal Center, and smoke alarms
AGI/ASI—Current efforts
Where to even begin? What I wrote in the novel about the scope of AGI efforts (still called plain AI by many publications) is accurate, and I took the liberty of extrapolating these trends into the future. Is there any government or powerful investor not sinking millions or billions into this area? Not as far as I can tell.
Here is an excerpt from an article in the Wall Street Journal published in December of 2016 that I think puts things nicely into perspective: “Startups that claim to be using AI are attracting record levels of investment. Big tech companies are going all-in, draining universities of entire departments. Nearly 140 AI companies have been acquired since 2011, including 40 this year alone.”
From my reading, advances are so dizzying in so many areas, I could write hundreds of pages of notes and not even scratch the surface. But if you have further interest just Google any of the following: Exascale computing (a computer capable of a billion billion calculations per second, on the order of the processing power of the human brain, expected in the early 2020s), NVIDIA (which is a company making supercomputers on a chip), DNA computing, Quantum computing, and Optical computing.
Because I used Optical Computing in the novel, I’ve included what I think to be a relevant excerpt about this technology below. This is from the website Next Big Future and an article entitled, “Progress to overcoming the last obstacle to the creation of all optical computers.”
EXCERPT: Optical signals travel much faster than electrons—at the speed of light—and are not subject to "resistance." Scientists have already created all the major components needed to create the ultimate all optical computer. Unfortunately, the waveguides down which optical signals travel in a photonic computer introduce losses much like the resistance against electrons in copper wires.
Now the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) claims it may have cleared that last hurdle. According to the journal, Nature, a new method can compensate for losses just by carefully designing dual waveguides to match the wavelength of the light traveling through them. By doing so, the traveling waves can reinforce each other along the way, thus introducing a slight gain that compensates for the normal losses.
AGI/ASI—The potential for disaster
I should point out that there is much disagreement as to the possible dangers of AGI and ASI. Many brilliant scientists believe the perils as expressed in this novel are overblown. Some believe AGI will never be possible. Others believe that we’ll be able to create ASI and wield it as the ultimate tool without obsoleting ourselves or going extinct in the process. These scientists bristle at any alarmist attitudes, believing those who espouse them are nothing more than Chicken Littles screaming that the sky is falling.
To give you an illustration of this divide, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are very concerned. Mark Zuckerberg . . . not so much. Here is an excerpt from the UK’s Mirror, in an article entitled, “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “frustrated” with Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk’s views on AI.”
EXCERPT: In an interview Zuckerberg admitted he was frustrated by people who “fear-monger” about artificial intelligence. Stephen Hawking has raised concerns over AI, saying it has the potential to wipe out the human race. “Once machines reach a critical stage of being able to evolve themselves we cannot predict whether their goals will be the same as ours. AI has the potential to evolve faster than the human race.” Despite using AI in Tesla cars, Elon Musk also has similar fears, but their concerns fall on deaf ears with Zuckerberg.
Why did I choose to write a novel that explores the negative consequences of ASI envisioned by those who are fearful of it? First, because their arguments make sense to me, and I think there is a real possibility something like the events depicted in Infinity Born might someday come to pass. Second, because Infinity Born is a science fiction thriller. If I wrote a novel that explored the positive consequences of ASI, as envisioned by those who think we have nothing to fear from it, the stakes for my characters, and humanity, wouldn’t be nearly as high.
Back to the subject at hand, I believe DeepMind has achieved perhaps the most impressive feat of any AI around today. When DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat the Go master alluded to in the novel, it freaked out the entire nation of South Korea. Here is an excerpt from a 2016 article in New Scientist.
EXCERPT: Watching Google’s AlphaGo AI eviscerate Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol put the nation into shock. “Koreans are afraid that AI will destroy human history and human culture,” said Jeong. “It’s an emotional thing.”
It is perhaps the perceived beauty of AlphaG
o’s moves that has ruffled the most feathers. “AlphaGo actually does have an intuition,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told New Scientist. “It makes beautiful moves—more beautiful moves than most of us could think of.”
This ability to make beauty has left many shaken. “This is a tremendous incident in the history of human evolution—that a machine can surpass the intuition and creativity of human beings,” said Jang Dae-Ik, a science philosopher at Seoul National University.
Finally, one last excerpt on this from a 2017 Vanity Fair article (which is quite extensive), entitled, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse.”
EXCERPT: It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. Demis Hassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, was chatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils of artificial intelligence. Hassabis, a co-founder of DeepMind, had come to Musk’s SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. Musk explained that his ultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important project in the world: interplanetary colonization. Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial superintelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Mars—so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused, Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist told me a story about an investor in DeepMind who joked as he left a meeting that he ought to shoot Hassabis on the spot, because it was the last chance to save the human race.
Elon Musk began warning about the possibility of A.I. running amok three years ago. It probably hadn’t eased his mind when one of Hassabis’s partners in DeepMind, Shane Legg, stated flatly, “I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this.”
Before DeepMind was gobbled up by Google, in 2014, as part of its A.I. shopping spree, Musk had been an investor in the company. He told me that his involvement was not about a return on his money but rather to keep a wary eye on the arc of A.I.: “It gave me more visibility into the rate at which things were improving, and I think they’re really improving at an accelerating rate, far faster than people realize.
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