Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  "Here," was all he said.

  The lenses were jet-black, and around the edges of the lenses was wrapped a black, semi-rigid fabric. "What's this?" she asked.

  "Put them on," Griffith said as he donned his own pair. "They prevent retinal damage from the lasers."

  "What?" Laura asked, her legs practically buckling underneath her as the tug of the elevators deceleration grew and grew. "What lasers?" she asked, but didn't wait for the answer — quickly covering her eyes with the goggles just as Griffith had done.

  The lenses were so heavily tinted it was practically pitch-dark in the small compartment. When the elevator reached bottom, the lights suddenly went out completely. "Hey!" Laura blurted out.

  "We have to prevent any stray light from corrupting the communications signals," Griffith explained. "There'll be a low level of red light in the observation platform."

  There was a long pause before the elevator doors opened one thousand feet beneath the computer center bunker. The parting of the doors revealed a small room, which was dimly lit and surrounded by windows.

  A frigid tide of heavy air poured into the elevator. In the near-total darkness, Laura felt the freezing wave inundate her — washing over her legs like fluid and rising inch by inch up her body. Within seconds, she was totally immersed in the icy bath.

  Laura waded into the cold air behind Griffith. He retrieved a heavy parka from a locker and vigorously shook the jacket before handing it to her. "This ought to warm up once the chemical pouches in the lining get going."

  Laura was already ignoring him. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the low light, she became transfixed by the spectacular display glimmering through the ice-covered windows. She'd never seen anything like it before.

  The dark world was ablaze with a billion sparkling stars. They twinkled on and off so rapidly each pulse seemed just a figment of her imagination — a trick of her eye. The effect was stunning. The mysterious cave was alive with light, and yet it was immersed in total darkness.

  The numbing cold forced Laura to climb into the oversized jacket. With shaking hands, she tugged at the zipper and raised the fur-lined hood over her head. The quilted parka hung low like a military greatcoat, but her feet were still exposed to the air's wintry grip.

  Carefully she edged her way across the observation deck toward the lights.

  A shiver rippled up Laura's spine as the chill sank straight through the jacket. "Man!" she whispered, the word vibrating through the chatter of her teeth.

  "Yeah," Griffith said — his voice quaking as well. "It's co-o-old!"

  "No, I mean what's this place?" she said, standing at the red-lit window. "These lights! They're…"

  "Otherworldly," Griffith supplied. "That's what I always think. It's like you're peering into another world, another dimension."

  Laura reached out to touch the glass. "Don't!" Griffith warned, and she quickly withdrew her hand. "You might get your skin burned by the cold." Griffith pried an ordinary ice scraper from the sill and began to clear a spot on the window. "We don't have visitors down here very often," he said as he worked. After chipping off a large, irregular patch in the center of the pane, he quickly stuck his hand back into his pocket and awkwardly used his elbow to wipe the glass clean.

  When he stood back, Laura leaned over to peer through the hole.

  The twinkling was gone. The pulses of light shone brilliantly, each a fleeting pinprick in the coal-black canvas below. The scene was constantly changing, each momentary flash a singular, non-repeating event. Randomness, hinting at perfect order.

  "That's the 'net,'" Griffith said, his voice lowered, almost reverent. "A neural network. An optical, analog, neural network. The most innovative machine ever created. You're looking at the eighth wonder of the world, Dr. Aldridge. I only wish Archimedes were here to see it."

  "It's, beautiful," Laura mumbled, mesmerized by the unearthly display.

  "You can't tell in the darkness, of course, but we're standing on a terrace suspended over a big concrete pool. The pool's about ten meters deep, a couple of hundred meters long, and a hundred wide. It's filled with liquid nitrogen, which boils at minus two hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit. When the peripheral electronic components are cooled to that temperature, they become superconducting. What we do is lower racks that look like a child's erector set into the pool. Each rack holds a thousand circuit boards, and each board is about a hundred times more powerful than an old Cray-1 supercomputer."

  His voice was shaking, and he shifted from one foot to the other. It would be a short tour, Laura guessed, despite the chemical warmth now radiating down the length of her overcoat.

  "On each of those circuit boards," Griffith continued, "there are about ten million nodes or, using your terminology, neurons. Ten million brain cells."

  What Griffith said were mere words. They were nothing compared to what she saw with her own two eyes. The sheer immensity of the display that lay before them was staggering. How could anything be constructed to produce such an effect. Blackness, filled with light.

  "It's an optical computer," Griffith continued, "not an electronic one. It uses light instead of electricity to process its basic logical operations and to store its memories. Logic gates are opened or closed depending on the intensity of a laser beam and take the place of semiconductors." Laura heard a rustle of fabric, and she tore herself momentarily from the light show to look at the opening in Griffith's hood. "Do you know what a picosecond is?" he asked, dimly visible inside the furry fringe.

  "Well… of course!" Laura's breath came out as steam only.

  "It's a trillionth of a second. Ordinary electronic supercomputers take four hundred or so picoseconds to process a binary operation like adding two numbers together. This optical computer has cut that time down to point four picoseconds. And you're seeing only a minute fraction of those operations. Ninety-nine point nine percent of its signal traffic is passed along microscopic waveguides impregnated on the boards themselves."

  Laura gazed in wonder at the needles of light popping like troy flashbulbs out of thin air. It reminded her most of astronomers' pictures of deep space. Only this universe was alive and well — fast-forward — stars being born, shining brightly, and dying out in mere fractions of a picosecond. "So those lights down there," Laura asked, "are just point one percent of the computer's operations?"

  "Well, no, actually. They're a lot less than that. About ninety nine point something percent of the signal traffic that's not passed along a board's internal circuitry is routed by fiber-optic cables, which you also can't see."

  "So, wait," Laura said. "If we can't see the internal light signals on the boards themselves, and we can't see the fiber-optic signs" — she turned back to the miraculous sights visible through the thin patch of clear glass—"what are those?"

  "Laser pulses. Communications between boards that aren't regular enough or sufficiently close to each other to justify hardwiring the two boards together. Those boards talk to each other by beaming lasers through the gaseous nitrogen above the pool. Those laser signals down there represent only about one out of every hundred million or so packets of data being passed from one logic gate to the next."

  Griffith went on to talk about the constant "rationalizing" of the computer's wiring to improve efficiency, but Laura wasn't listening.

  She was too astonished at the implications of what he was saying to follow the details. If this, she thought, looking at the extraordinary constellation of feeling stars, is one hundred-millionth of the total number of signals… It was impossible to comprehend. It was a rush of noise so constant, so dissonant, that it overwhelmed her imagination completely.

  It's a brain. The thought came to her as clearly as if whispered into her ear. She was standing inside a living brain, watching the most elementary impulses of thought — synaptic interaction. Individual brain cells talking to one another. A tingle spread outward from her scalp and ran down her neck to her shoulders. She shivered, but not because of t
he cold. What she felt was the physical reaction to an entirely cerebral phenomenon.

  For it was, Laura knew, from connections of similar complexity that thoughts arose in animal brains. It was, from a tangled web of impulses very much like the confusion of light down below, that a sense of consciousness emerged in humans.

  "… signals come into the net from input devices — things like cameras, microphones, motion detectors, et cetera, or traditional electronic, input devices like keyboards, mice, or digitizers. They're converted from electron-based to light-based signals by…"

  "He's done it!" she whispered, her eyes watering but her mouth dry as she watched the symphony of lights perform over the nitrogen pool.

  With a rustling of his parka Griffith looked her way and fell silent.

  Gray had made a brain. He'd done it. All the talk — all the fruitless research by so many for so long — and Gray had made it happen.

  The goose bumps had free rein over Laura now, spreading not just to her arms but across her entire body. It was a feeling of exultation.

  Of triumph. Of advancement. Laura reveled in it — in the euphoria that was released like a drug on suddenly appreciating the true magnitude of Gray's breakthrough.

  "How could he ever figure it all out?" she said as if in a dream — not really asking a question, just giving voice to her disbelief. "The complexity of it is phenomenal!"

  "Oh, Mr. Gray didn't build the net."

  Laura spun instantly to the dark shape of the man. "What do you mean? Who built this, then?"

  "Well, now you're sort of getting into a philosophical question, I suppose. Certainly, Mr. Gray set the process in motion. He and Margaret put the computer to work on developing the net about three years ago. Gray implanted the seed program, but from then on it just sort of grew and…"

  "What 'seed' program?"

  In the darkness, it was impossible to read Griffith's facial expression. His response was slow in coming. "Well… he… They didn't just start out with a completely blank slate. I mean, Gray had been toying with a lot of the theories, of course, for years. But they started with a program that initially worked solely on increasing the net's size, and it sort of grew around that base. About a year ago they filled up this pool: and added another — the annex — a half a klick from here. It has a much larger potential volume, but to date they only added roughly the same number of boards as the main pool here has."

  "And this seed program — it was Gray's?" Laura asked, [unclear] using hard on the inflection in Griffith's voice as he answered. "Sure! Yeah."

  Laura nodded. The connections in her mind were all complete now.

  The connections between the points in Gray's biography — the milestones on his path to becoming the richest man in his [missing].

  From its humble beginnings on Wall Street, the child prodigy's math-deficient computer program had grown into… this! Of course! she thought. He'd started work on this system almost two decades ago. His little "seed" program was in fact the product of years of his genius hard at work. She was almost breathless with excitement at her discovery. But it was so obvious, it was a discovery that surely the others had already made.

  "Why do you ask?" Griffith whispered. He sounded guarded, conspiratorial. "What are you saying?" he pressed.

  Laura was amazed. Somehow, at least one member of Gray's "team" had not drawn the conclusions Laura thought were so clear.

  "Nothing," Laura said, not knowing why she was hesitant to share her thoughts with the man — one of Gray's top associates.

  She went back to the thread of Griffith's last comment. "So, you're saying that the seed program grew into this? That the computer built itself?"

  Griffith hesitated a pause that Laura interpreted as disappointment at the evasive response. "Oh, we supervised it, of course. But only at the most general level. Take my department — robotics. Each of our robots has its own miniature neural network — or mini net — and the first training we give those mini-nets is to have the main computer run them through the paces with simulations. When we needed greater kinesthetic capabilities for our Model Seven robots we just asked the computer to give them more kinesthesia training. More boards go in the pool, and the next thing you know the Model Sevens' motor skills begin to improve."

  Laura stared at the murky outline of the man, then turned back to the pool. The computer was busy talking to itself. "You don't know how it works, do you?" she asked.

  Griffith took his time in answering. "Not a clue, really," he replied at last.

  12

  The warm night air on the long walk to the assembly building was slowly thawing Laura's frozen feet. She had insisted on walking to the next stop on their tour. Not to rid herself of the chill, as she'd told Griffith, but to slow down her fast-forward journey through time so she could digest what she'd already learned.

  But Griffith was unrelenting. He continued his crash course on the twenty-first century. "The computer is analog, not digital. The light signals it sends aren't limited to just on or off like in a digital computer. They also are stronger or weaker, more or less, higher or lower, hotter or colder, depending on the intensity of the laser's signal and what information that signal is intended to represent."

  On and on he went, Laura gazing at the towering wonders that dotted Gray's small pocket of the future. "The computer is massively parallel. It breaks any problem down into as many pieces as possible, and then it attacks all those pieces simultaneously."

  Laura's mind was completely saturated with new ideas — the buffers full of unprocessed data. But Griffith was a fountain of knowledge, and the valves of that fountain were wide-open. "If it's a totally new problem, a neural net uses trial and error to solve it. And even after it figures the problem out, it's constantly testing, constantly rewiring itself to improve its efficiency."

  "Complex adaptive behavior," Laura mumbled, struggling to imagine it all.

  "After trillions and trillions of rewirings, we don't have even the faintest clue what the vast majority of the system does. And a major portion of the signals coming down the pike at any given time have reprogramming content that may completely change the operation of a given circuit board."

  A warm ocean breeze washed over them, and Laura shook her head — her own circuits overloaded. "It sounds like it's a complete mess," she said. "A total jumble."

  "It's that," Griffith said, turning to her and smiling. "But in that randomness, something wonderful happens." The tone of his voice had changed. He now seemed not to be discussing nuts and bolts but something much more sublime. "Once… once I was on the shell — that's the global user interface — and out of the blue the computer said, 'Have you ever noticed that some clouds look like faces?'" Laura looked up at him. He didn't need to explain the significance of the computer's question. She felt every bit of the torment evident in his voice. "I had the computer trace the synaptic routing of that thought, and I found out what had happened. The computer had been taking meteorological readings over a launch pad. When a cloud passed by, the board that looked for bad weather assigned the image a high priority — a strong synaptic weighting — and fired it out through all its connections for further processing. Other boards decided whether the cloud might be prone to electrical discharge, or micro burst potential, or whatever. If it looked dangerous, those boards upped the signal's weighting and fired the processed information out through all their connections. The boards that didn't care about the cloud did the opposite — they reduced the signal strength before passing the image on. Most of the paths were dead ends — a series of boards each reducing the signal's strength until it died out completely. On one of those dead ends — before the picture of this cloud died out — it landed in a board that traced edges in video images. That board found a pattern. It traced lines through the contours of the cloud and decided the image was in the shape of a face. Now, what do you think about that?"

  "I… I think it's… wonderful! It's an analogy!" It was exactly what Gray had described on th
eir walk earlier that night. "With analogies, it can make generalizations!" Laura said, growing more and more excited as what Gray and Griffith had said began to sink in. She spoke more and more rapidly, gesticulating with her hands to help make her points. "With generalizations, it can learn! It can tell a sofa is for sitting because it looks sort of like a chair! With that kind of learning potential, it could become…!" The words caught in her throat.

  He's done it! she thought, stopping herself from giving voice to thoughts that raced far out ahead. She reached over and grabbed Griffith. They stopped on the walk beside the same curbed roadbed on which Gray had shown Laura the Model Six. "I want to know how it works," Laura demanded. "I want to know everything about it."

  "What's the point?" Griffith replied with a casual shrug of dismissal, continuing on toward their destination — the gleaming assembly building. "Large, mainframe computers like we've got down in those pools are an increasingly outmoded form of computing. Miniaturization is the key. We've been very successful at downsizing the circuitry. You'll be impressed when I show you the Model Sevens. You'd just be wasting your time studying the main computer."

  Griffith's offhand comment stabbed right at the heart of her insecurity, which was never very far from the surface. Laura had only one truly deep-seated fear. Only one thing really mattered dearly to her. She wasn't insecure about her looks, or her personality, or the scanty number of suitors she'd brought home for her mother to meet.

  The thing by which she rated herself was her mind.

  Her intellect. Her intelligence.

  In her prior life, that intelligence was measured by the papers she published, the discussions her ideas stimulated. By those measures, she'd already been judged a failure. She'd admitted as much when she climbed aboard Gray's plane. The offer to join Gray's "dream team" had been her salvation. The others would talk about her selling out, but that was infinitely more palatable than what they'd have said after the department chairman had his "We've been so privileged" speech with her. Gray had given her a rare opportunity — the chance to wave her middle finger right in the faces of the tenure committee.