Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  Everything about the place was sterile and man-made. There were no plants sprouting furtively from the cracks. The concrete so revered by man in general and Gray in particular reigned supreme.

  Laura crossed the boundary of light into the shadows that lay below. The air grew cooler, and the voices from the hollows ahead resounded sharply against the hard walls and floor and ceiling.

  "Everybody clear!" she heard, followed by a faint buzz and loud clack. "Okay, next section."

  Men worked in the bright artificial light from a small trailer. They rolled a tall, box-shaped machine parallel to the wall.

  Bright tracings of red light the size and shape of a raised hood formed a rectangular box around a long pipe, which was bracketed firmly into place in the concrete.

  "Okay!" shouted a man in blue coveralls. Laura reached the flat floor of the spacious vent and saw an identical ramp leading up into the light of day on the opposite side. "Clear!" someone shouted, and all the workers stepped back from the wheeled machine — all except one man, who wore a heavy, yellow apron. A lead apron, Laura guessed.

  The angry buzz from the device was again followed by a sharp metallic snap.

  "They're x-raying the pipe."

  Laura turned to see Gray, who stepped out of the shadows behind her. He exuded the now-familiar look of contentment. The pattern was clear, she thought. Gray made things, and when he was with them, he was pleased.

  "This is the exhaust vent," he said, looking around. She followed his gaze to the mostly featureless walls. "Seawater comes flooding into here through these pipes," he said, leading her to a round opening in the wall that was at least twice Gray's height. "We can pump about four hundred thousand gallons a second into this vent. That would fill up your average NBA basketball arena in three or four seconds."

  Laura looked around. It was a simple structure. Just a big concrete cavern with two open ends. "Where does all the water go?"

  "Up into the air," Gray said, pointing with arms raised toward the openings. "As steam."

  "Steam?"

  Gray nodded. "It gets vaporized from the heat."

  "Heat from the rockets?"

  Gray nodded again, pointing straight up toward the ceiling. Her eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness overhead. Dimly visible in the black recesses were three giant rings. She looked down at Gray, then back up. "Are those…?"

  "Nozzles," he replied. "The rocket motors."

  Laura slowly lowered her gaze, but she felt the presence of the powerful engines just above. They were aimed right at the thin plastic helmet on her head. She couldn't resist looking up again. "Is that thing, you know, loaded? With fuel, I mean?"

  "Of course. We're trying to pop it off tonight." Gray stared lovingly up at the huge engines, which stood poised and ready to incinerate them. When he looked down, he asked, "What's that?" nodding at the picnic basket Laura carried.

  "Oh, lunch," she replied. Gray arched his eyebrows in surprise.

  "It was Janet's idea. She, I guess, thought you… we might be hungry."

  "Oh, thanks," he said lamely, a trace of puzzlement evident in his voice.

  "You can thank Janet," Laura replied a little too anxiously. "I mean… I'm just delivering it. You know, in case… you're," she shrugged, "hungry… or something." Laura looked down at the basket and she kept her head lowered.

  "Well, would you like to have lunch?" he asked.

  Laura shrugged again, trying to appear indifferent. She'd lugged the basket over a mile to find him, but Gray seemed not to take note of her embarrassment. He was busy looking around for some place to sit.

  Laura eyes rose again to the massive nozzles. "Can we possibly go someplace else to eat?" she asked, then pointed up at the rocket in explanation.

  Gray searched the ceiling for the source of her concern. He had no clue why she would be uncomfortable dining there. He'd made the rocket, after all. "Sure," he replied, clearly without understanding why she'd asked.

  Gray took the basket from her, and they climbed the ramp opposite the road leading out to the pad. When they reached level ground at the top, Laura saw they were all alone. Gray led the short walk toward the beach.

  "People seen surprised that you put the Model Threes back on the roads," Laura said.

  "They'll be safe."

  "You sound pretty sure about that, but those cars go around so fast. What if they're not totally cured?"

  "The Model Threes' trouble with errors is over."

  Laura fell silent after Gray's brusque answer. They stepped down off the last fringe of concrete. The earth all around was scalded from the steam of a launch. From repeated launches, Laura guessed. The undergrowth, such as it was, was young and dead, the brittle sprigs crunching with each step the two of them took. They sat on the trunk of a toppled and charred palm tree. The beautiful white sand and transparent green waters were broken only by the series of massive pipes heading out from the shore. "Water intakes," Gray said simply.

  The pipes lay half buried in the sand at the beach.

  They remained visible as they descended into the water, which was calm inside the island reef. Laura opened the basket. She saw iced strips of salmon and black bread, a delicious-looking pâté already spread across small toasted wafers, a pasta salad mixed with shrimp and bay scallops… and a ham-and-cheese sandwich on white bread.

  "All right!" Joseph exclaimed, snatching the sandwich from the basket. "My favorite!"

  They ate in total silence but for the distant sound of the surf crashing against the barrier reef. The breeze kept the sun from growing too warm. They sat close. She could smell the soap he'd used to bathe.

  Gray finished his sandwich, slipped off the log, and picked up a shell, which he hurled out into the sea. It disappeared into the water with a hollow plunk. "So," he said, "do you have any more observations about the computer?"

  Laura nodded, answering even though she didn't really want to discuss business. "The computer said it hears voices — random, scattered thoughts — and it has to sort them out and make sense of them. It's doing exactly what humans do to create the illusion of a stream of consciousness. It's imposing a serial order — one thought at a time — on a massively parallel process. It seems to have created a self — personality — which it has superimposed on the hardware of the machine. To support that construct, the computer is rationalizing. The computer is telling itself that some thoughts are its thoughts, and others are subconscious, scattered, confused, or random thoughts that are not its."

  The more she spoke, the more excited she had grown about her discovery.

  But Gray simply nodded and said, "These other thoughts — these other voices — what do you make of them?"

  "Well, that's not important. The point is that the computer has created a self. It thinks that 'it' is a thing, and that the computer — the circuit boards and cameras and peripheral devices, et cetera — are some other thing. Don't you see? It's done what all humans do. It's created a dualistic model of itself. There's a brain, which is the computer, and a mind, which is 'it.' Joseph, I think the computer is a conscious being!"

  "Yeah," Gray said, nodding. He was missing the point, she felt sure. "I thought you people didn't believe in dualism."

  "Screw dualism! This is a breakthrough! You've engineered a human brain by non-biological processes! By analyzing what you've done, how you've done it, we can open up some of the mysteries locked inside human brains!"

  "What about these voices? As a psychologist, what do you make of the [missing]?"

  "What do you mean?" Laura asked, irritated that he seemed to be overlooking the significance of her discovery.

  "Are they symptoms of a problem — a psychiatric problem?"

  It finally dawned on Laura that her discovery was old news to Gray. He had known all along what she had just discerned. The realization frustrated and angered her. "If you already knew all this," she asked, "why the hell didn't you just go ahead and clue me in? Why have me waste my time figuring it all out for m
yself?"

  "If I had brought you here and told you that my computer was a conscious, thinking being, and then asked you to find out if it was mentally ill, whose sanity would you have questioned? It's the process of learning, Laura, of putting it together for yourself piece by piece, that's the whole point of the effort."

  Laura wasn't totally convinced by his argument, but she did feel a good bit calmer. "Do you consider the computer to be alive?"

  "By my definition, yes," he replied.

  "'I think, therefore I am'?" He nodded. "And what you want to know is whether this… machine is mentally disturbed?"

  "As one possible explanation for the errors. It could be an interruption or it could be, sabotage. I've got to consider all the possibilities."

  "Including whether the computer suffers from depression."

  "Actually," he said as he turned back to her, "I was thinking more about acute schizophrenia or multiple personally disorder."

  The car sped noisily over the gravel away from the launch pad. Laura kept her eyes on the road ahead, cringing in anticipation of every turn. Gray sat beside her, staring distractedly out the window on his side. He'd gotten a call on his cellular phone that they had freed up enough capacity to load the phase-three. His mood had changed entirely. He seemed deeply saddened now.

  "Do you mind if we talk?" Laura asked cautiously, and Gray shook his head. "Well, it's just that schizophrenia doesn't manifest itself until the subject has reached a pretty advanced level of emotional development — usually in their teens or early twenties. Before I could even begin to form any opinions, I'd have to know a whole lot more about the sophistication of the computer's emotional… database, or whatever. In human therapy, that takes the form of months, sometimes years of analysis."

  "You've got one hour," he said, and Laura stared at him in disbelief. "In one hour, we're loading the phase-three… unless you stop us."

  "Stop you? How could I possibly stop you?"

  He took a deep breath, and he let it out slowly. "Laura, we're going to load the phase-three."

  "Do you have any idea what it'll do if it finds performance-related disabilities on the order of schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder?"

  "Actually, no… I don't." Gray turned to stare again out the window.

  "Joseph," Laura said in a whisper, "how am I supposed to do months' worth of analysis of the computer's emotional maturity in just an hour?"

  "The back prop reports," Gray mumbled, still staring out the window as they sped past the assembly building.

  "The what?"

  His eyes were attracted to something. "Stop the car!" he commanded suddenly, and the deceleration began immediately.

  A small crowd had gathered outside the assembly building. Everyone wore hard hats except the man in the center, who slung his hat across the field and stormed off.

  "What's going on—?" Laura began, but she was cut off by the opening of Gray's door.

  Gray got out, but leaned back inside before departing. "Ask Margaret to pull up the back prop reports." He then took off, running to catch up with the departing worker.

  Laura stuck her head out the car's open door. "Excuse me!" she called out to a worker. When he walked up to the car, she said, "What's going on?"

  "O-o-oh, we just had a man up and quit."

  "Quit? Why?"

  He shrugged. "Said it's getting too dangerous in there. Too many malfunctions."

  "What kind of malfunctions?"

  "Well, it's kinda hard to put your finger on it. It's just a feelin' you get, you know? They're misbehavin'. They're actin' like they got somethin' more important to do than work."

  "I'm sorry, but I don't understand. Who's misbehaving?"

  "You know… the robots."

  24

  "What do you want with old back prop reports?" Margaret asked in a harried and barely civil tone. Scraps of hand-scrawled notes littered her semicircular desk between half a dozen monitors.

  "Gray wants me to look at them," Laura replied. "I don't even know what the hell they are."

  Margaret sighed impatiently. Her eyes were hidden behind eyeglasses bathed in the colorful glare from her computer screens.

  "They're old reports we used in the early days to keep track of the net's progress. Every night, after the staff went home, we'd turn the net loose and let it pose its own questions and come up with its own answers. The next day we'd strengthen or weaken the connections depending on whether its conclusions were right or wrong."

  Laura shrugged — at a loss to see how that might help her research. "What do the reports look like?"

  "They're organized into conclusions and analyses. It's all real easy to read. Gray wanted to use grad students from non-technical disciplines to check them. They'd pour over the reports and enter a strength weighting from one to ten, one being the least accurate conclusion and ten the most accurate." Margaret laughed, which in her seemed to come off as derision. "Every day some English lit student would come tearing into my office shouting, 'It's alive! It's conscious!' I'd take a look, and the computer would've made some bullshit conclusion like 'Men aren't attracted to hairy women.' It would support the conclusion with analysis like 'Hair is a sign of older age and consequently shorter reproductive life.' Mr. Gray and I used to have a good laugh at closing time going over those monumental discoveries."

  "So you and Mr. Gray went over those students' findings even though they were no big deal?"

  Margaret had returned to her work. She reluctantly looked up at Laura. "Mr. Gray, as you might've heard, doesn't need much sleep. He'd spend most evenings at the lab doing minor housekeeping. Going back over low-priority things like aberrations."

  "What aberrations?"

  "Abnormal conditioning. There's an intrinsic risk in allowing the net to draw its own conclusions. It goes down rabbit trails into unproductive knowledge domains. Things like…" She thought for a minute. "I remember one. 'People lacking an ability to empathize are capable of horrific crimes. Analysis: They can't appreciate that their acts of convenience are the tragedies of their victims.'" She laughed.

  "That one sent some doctoral candidate from the sociology department right through the roof."

  "But that's… that's brilliant!" Laura said.

  Margaret looked at Laura with a smirk.

  Laura ignored the intended slight. "So you'd go home and Mr. Gray would stick around at night to review these 'aberrations' you found?"

  "Yes," Margaret replied curtly.

  "And he would do what with them?"

  "He would decondition the connection, of course," Margaret shot back with unexpected vehemence.

  Laura remembered something Gray had said about Margaret. She went home to her family every night like clockwork. That would have left Gray alone in the lab with the computer.

  "I'd like to see the back prop reports," Laura said.

  "All thirty billion of them?" Margaret replied, then laughed.

  She shot her thumb toward the door. "Just ask one of the techs."

  "Thirty billon? How could you possibly check all those reports for errors?"

  "We couldn't. We just sampled a small fraction of them."

  It took what seemed like forever, but a technician finally loaded a program called a "browser" on the computer in Laura's office. He pulled up a hundred back prop reports as a test. When assured all was in order, he left Laura alone at her desk. She read the first report and found it interesting — a budding mind at work organizing itself.

  The next few reports were more of the same, as were the next, and the next, and the next. Tons of minutiae, all parsed into tidy logical arguments.

  Most revealed the computer's difficulty interacting with the physical world.

 


  Laura yawned and read on.

  Out of the mass of mundane conclusions, a few stood out from the rest.

 

 

  While the report conclusion was correct, its analysis contained an obvious error. The computer connected "Time is money" with what it knew about financial calculations instead of appreciating the saying's subtler meaning. What interested Laura more, however, was that the question was asked at all. The computer was clearly struggling to assimilate to adopt the "knowledge domain" of human culture.

  And what's the difference between that and actually becoming a human? she wondered.

  Laura glanced nervously at her watch. She had only twenty minutes to advise Mr. Gray whether to load the phase-three. If the computer's problem was a virus, the phase-three might be the only thing that could save it. But if the computer was emotionally disturbed, the vicious antiviral program might destroy the dense maze of conclusions and analyses that was the machine's brilliance.

  A red bar along the top of the screen set out a menu of the program functions. One was entitled Search. She'd told Gray she needed to know more about the computer's "emotional database," and he had directed her to the back prop reports. Laura clicked on the Search command. In the query box she typed "love, hate, fear" — she looked up at the ceiling in search of more words—"parent, child, lover." Laura clicked on the button labeled Go.

  The cursor flashed and flashed and flashed. "Come on," she urged.

  <927,964 entries contain words "LOVE, HATE, FEAR, PARENT, CHILD, or LOVER.">

  "Oh, ma-a-an," Laura mumbled. She was certain she'd made some mistake in phrasing her search request. Once, back at Harvard, she had accidentally searched the Web for any articles with the word "disassociation" or a comma in them. She'd had to unplug her computer to make the machine stop searching.