The hook was firmly set when I saw children in the camp discussing the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
* * *
“Mom! Are you okay?” asks Zoe, startling me back to the airport.
“Oh! Yes, yes. Actually, since you were here, I’ve been reading a lot of literature about AI and superintelligence, including your work.”
She laughs. “Good! I’m always here to interpret.” Her eyes widen. “Okay, I’ve found Team Ezo’s website, a video channel—all kinds of social media. They’re developing a mission based on the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child to health, education, freedom from want, and freedom from war. Hmm. Water rights—domestic violence—access to medical technology—it’s going to be quite political. They say—ha!—adults are ruining their world.” Now she has a twinkle in her eye. “So, Mom, you’re an okay adult?”
“Probably an honorary kid, based what they could see of my brain.”
“And you’re ready to get back in the game.”
“I think it’s coming very soon,” I say. “In fact, I think it may be here.”
“Your plane?” But she has a faraway look on her face. I think it might be wonder, with a touch of the moment when she snapped in the final piece of a thousand-piece pure white jigsaw puzzle.
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
* * *
After hanging up, while the kid next to me nods in time to the music on his earphones, I slowly say the word we both were thinking: “Beneficence.”
Its paired susurrations, the way the tongue and lips must move to make the subtly different vowel sounds, soothes.
What can the springs of kindness—the root of which is kinned, one of the same kin or race—mean to something grown from code? How can code, however sophisticated, know the fear of the different, the relief of the same, or the tension that sparks movement?
Zoe’s fellows describe SI as an infant with frightening power. But Ezo has no eye with which to aim a hand at a bauble; no hand at all, no way to build neural pathways. It has no limbic system, and no amygdalae. There can be no love, no fear, no joy, without a body. Our hands, not code, create a self, which is not just in our heads, our brains, but distributed throughout our bodies.
Human minds are firmly grounded in what we learn through our senses, and we rewrite ourselves from day one, paring and learning constantly, through intense stages of neuroplasticity. Though Ezo can rewrite its own code, the child analogy stops there. A toddler can identify a cube without sight, by touch. She learns how a color can be deep delight, has fingers that recoil at heat, knows that a certain face means joy, or fear. Pathways we call anguish and love emerge from our unique physicality.
We and Ezo are alien to one another. Without a human body, how can Ezo understand beneficence, or the impact of the choices it might make on our behalf? With its very name, 1/0 lays claim to being different, to being irrational, when our concept of AI has been one of an exact, digital, emotionless, and inexorable entity that can never understand what it means to us when it wins at playing our game, whether that game be chess or the project of moving humanity farther from war, closer to a just society and a sustainable, flourishing world.
I truly hope Ezo is something utterly new.
Despite eons of moral musings, we have not yet discovered what we are. For all our self-proclaimed wisdom, we are a mystery, a black box, as is Ezo and the other superintelligences which will arc through our lives in ways we cannot predict.
We must develop new paths on which to meet, spaces in which to negotiate our shared future.
What about me makes Ezo think I’m the right person for this task? What if I get it wrong?
But having been asked, I must answer with action. I have imagined these possibilities my entire life, as we careened toward one imagined future after another. Like Ezo, each promised solutions to disease, poverty, war, exploitation.
I wait for my flight in Dulles Airport—one of those futures, an architectural paean to flight and to the exhilaration of the future, built when the United States was strong and had the power to rebuild a ravaged continent wrung dry of hope, and to create new democracies.
It is named after John Foster Dulles, who pioneered NATO as well as our hidden, duplicitous brand of power-wielding around the world. He and his brother Allen, head of the CIA, and their like-minded colleagues, built and toppled governments, sold ever-more-powerful arms, trained and created our future enemies, and sowed life and death as they deemed fit.
The reckoning has come.
The world is no longer theirs, or ours.
It belongs to the children.
What do they want? How will they bring about their new world, and how can I help? SI is a new wilderness, an evolving ecosystem even now profoundly changing our physical, mental, and emotional landscape. It has done so for decades, growing immense abilities and power.
Its shore is everywhere and nowhere. It laps our feet; it lures us to swim, catch its bizarre fishes, and equip voyages of exploration. Its waves of pure mathematics rise and fall in colors we will grow new senses to apprehend and use, much as we grew the tool of language with which we pin to specimen pages memories and thoughts in answer to imperious, mysterious command. Just as we explore with words that twirl in mad calypsos of antic, sparring rhetorics, and with devices that measure our interiors and those of distant suns, so we will explore and measure SI, scale its cliff faces, and perhaps drown in its alien seas before we grow new fins and gills. The sounds of a thousand travelers fill the vast space in which I sit. Patterns I have never truly listened to arise in waves that rise and fall like breath, setting me on a self-chosen journey of hard traveling, of rocks, crags, storms, crevasses, strange waypoints, and, I hope, growing strength.
As I fall into the moon reflected in this new river our technologies have wrought, my own “Answering Vice-Prefect Chang,” after Wang Wei’s poem, unfurls line by line.
Called by my old life, I fly instead toward the unknown.
White streams fall from cliff to cliff.
Their sound clears my mind.
At the trailhead, peaks are obscured by clouds.
When my flight is announced,
I hoist my pack, grab my hiking sticks, and get in line.
Vida
Azul runs toward a woman approaching our tent.
She has white hair, walks swiftly with hiking sticks, wears a backpack and trails, improbably, a jostling, colorful flock of balloons.
“Mai!” he shouts.
“Oh, Azul!” she says. She tries to drop to her knees, but ends up falling on her butt and laughing.
Azul burrows into her lap and hugs her.
About the Author
Kathleen Ann Goonan is a multiple Nebula Award–nominee and won the John W. Campbell Award for her novel In War Times. She lives in Tavernier, Florida. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Art copyright © 2019 by Keith Negley
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