The meeting concluded and, once everyone left—including Mohamed, who had gone off with Dr. Caldwell and Dr. Jeffers—Dr. Landenberg took my father, David and me on a tour.
Nano Memory’s production facility, a vast network of clean rooms, was like a zoo dedicated to the genus Silicon-wafer-wielding robot.
“You realize it’s becoming robots building robots,” Dr. Landenberg said at the window of a particularly active room.
“Well, they can’t expect us to do all the work,” my father said.
Dr. Landenberg directed us into a room that had an Olympus stereo-zoom microscope with an LCD display connected to it. He demonstrated some of the “fun” things his people had created using nanotechnology: an electric motor, a helicopter with a spinning rotor blade, an electric car with a track for it to drive around, and all small enough to fit on the head of a pin.
“This is our Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum,” Dr. Landenberg explained.
“Tyler, check this out,” David said.
“I know, I know. They’re awesome.”
“I’d like to order two of these cars.” David turned to Dr. Landenberg. “And a microscope setup just like this, as well.”
Dr. Landenberg, confused, looked at my father.
“He collects cars. Typically of the larger variety.”
“I’m afraid we don’t actually sell these devices,” Dr. Landenberg said. “They’re really just for demonstration purposes.”
“But you can manufacture them, can’t you?”
“I suppose, but the cost would be prohibitive—especially for just two.”
“I’m sure whatever it is, it’ll be fine. I can cut you a check right now if you’d like.”
“Is he serious?”
“Relentlessly.” My father patted Dr. Landenberg on the back. “See, I bet you didn’t think you’d make a sale on this tour. You’ve still got it, Nate.”
“I’ve still got it? I don’t even remember what it is.”
“Come on, you’re only as old as you feel.”
“I feel like a hundred.”
My father and Dr. Landenberg, having other matters to discuss, dropped David and me off at the Nano Memory cafeteria, a gymnasium-size room containing thirty empty tables. The food counter was closed, but there were three open racks of junk food, a refrigerator of sodas and a coffee machine.
“I’ll throw a few dollars on the counter,” David said. “Take whatever you want.”
Famished, I took three packs of Ring Dings and a twenty-ounce bottle of Coke, and found us a table at the center of the room. David opted for a pack of Twinkies and a coffee.
“Thanks, by the way—I mean for helping me out back there at the meeting,” I told him, once we were seated. “I hate public speaking.”
“You’ll get used to it.” David sipped his coffee.
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“You do realize that there’s going to be quite a bit of press around this A.I. XPRIZE competition, don’t you?”
“I’ll just leave that to you and my father.”
David nodded, staring at his cup on the table. After a moment, he leaned back and looked up at the ceiling a good twenty feet above us.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“See those black domes up there? They’re for cameras. They have them all over the casinos out in Vegas. I wonder why they have so many in here.”
“You think someone’s watching us? They probably think we stole this food.”
David scanned the room. “Let’s find out. See that wall-mounted camera over there?” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote on a napkin: Are you man or machine?
“Where’d you learn to write like that?”
“Calligraphy classes were forced on me as a kid—if you can imagine.”
“Actually, I can.”
I followed David over to the camera, where he held up the note. When he stepped sideways, the camera followed.
“I do believe somebody’s home,” David said. “And now that we have their attention…” He tore the note into three equal strips, then each of those into halves. He then rolled the shreds into a ball and, holding that ball up between his thumb and his forefinger, gave the camera a moment to focus before unraveling the ball and revealing the note, fully intact.
“How’d you do that?” I examined the note, shrugging at the camera.
“Don’t tell me I just baffled the great Tyler Cipriani.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to make me figure this out.” We returned to our table. “I’m tired and hungry—“
“You just ate three Ring Dings.”
“Not exactly brain food. Just tell me.”
“It’s more fun not knowing…” He smiled. “All right, fine. But it’s not going to seem so impressive once you know.” He tossed a ball of paper to me.
I opened it. It was his note, in shreds.
“If you put those pieces together you’ll see that the handwriting isn’t so perfect. I wrote that note on the way over to the camera.”
“So you tore this bad one up and then unraveled the good one.”
“That’s it. Pretty simple.”
“Except, how do you write a note like this while walking? That’s pretty impressive.”
“Lots and lots of practice.”
The doors at the far end of the cafeteria swung open and two security guards stepped inside.
“Are you gentlemen supposed to be in here?” one of the guards asked.
“I can assure you we have been placed here by the highest authority,” David told him. “I’m David Levinson and this is Tyler Cipriani. We’re here with Quantum Bay Labs, visiting Dr. Landenberg.”
We waited while the second guard relayed this information via his walkie-talkie.
“Checks out,” he said, after a seemingly indecipherable response blared from his radio.
“Have a nice day,” the first guard mumbled. And as abruptly as they came, they left.
“That was… interesting,” David said.
“I guess they didn’t appreciate your magic act.”
“Well, there’s no accounting for taste. You should see some of the gags we’ve pulled on the security guys out at the Monte Carlo—”
His cellphone chimed.
He read the message. “I’m not quite the typist you are—bear with me.” The instant he sent his message, another one arrived. I got up and threw out our Ring Ding and Twinkie wrappers.
“Anything important?” I asked when I returned.
“60 Minutes wants to do a segment on the A.I. XPRIZE competition.”
“You’re talking with someone at 60 Minutes?”
“No, this is my PR guy out at Levinson Productions.” David typed another message.
“The last time my father was on CNN, they tried to make him out to be Dr. Frankenstein.”
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” David muttered absently.
“Why do we need any publicity?”
“To develop interest. Interest equals clout, and clout equals—well, clout is everything.” David looked up. “It’s funny; you don’t seem to realize how much clout you already have.”
“You mean my father has.”
The cafeteria doors swung open. It was my father and Mohamed.
“Right, because you’re just one of his experiments.” David chuckled.
****
Two hours later, sitting across from me at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, David brought up the subject of Danny. We were at the Lake House Grill in Concourse E; a basket of chicken fingers was sitting on the table in front of me. Over my shoulder, my father and Mohamed were watching an American Airlines 737 pull up to the gate.
“All I want is for her to be happy,” David said. “She’s her own person now, and I suppose if you two—”
He paused to hear a flight announcement: “Continental flight 2917 for Las Vegas, now boarding, gate E11.”
“That’s
me.” David reached for his suit bag. “Look, the point is, whatever Danny and I once had is gone. I just wanted to make that clear.”
I nodded—confused. Did he really think I’d been holding back in my pursuit of Danny? Out of deference to him? Everything I’d been doing for the last three months had been in an effort to win her over.
Now I just felt bad.
“Gentlemen,” David walked over to my father and Mohamed at the window. “I will see you both in two weeks.”
“A pleasure as always.” My father shook his hand.
“Have a safe flight,” Mohamed said.
“You too.” David turned to me. “Just get ready to be put on the map.”
“What map?”
David looked at my father knowingly. Then turned and vanished into the roiling sea of travelers.
13
It took David nine months to officially put me on the map. In late February of the following year, only twelve days before the A.I. XPRIZE presentation, the QBL team—sans David, who had obligations in Las Vegas—gathered at my father’s house to watch the 60 Minutes segment entitled “High Tech, High Stakes.”
In the theater room, the cozy den right below the Turret, my mother and the twins were seated on a beaver-fur throw rug; my father, Ishana, Mohamed, Stewart and Peter were on the couch; and Danny was in one of the two black La-Z-Boy recliners—looking like Fay Wray in one of King Kong’s hands. I was in the other recliner, anxious to get this over with.
“To many of us,” 60 Minutes’s Scott McCormick said to us from the theater room’s sixty-five-inch screen, “Aiden Cipriani has become a household name. Dr. Cipriani is a frequent host of the popular PBS series New Frontiers in Science, now in its fourth season, is a recurring guest on The Tonight Show, and can be seen on the Discovery Channel’s Science and Ethics series. He has written four books, has an endless list of scientific awards, patents and papers to his name, and he has two day jobs: one as Director of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Sciences at Cobalt National Laboratory, and the other as president and CEO of Quantum Bay Labs, a private research firm.
“It is with Dr. Cipriani’s role as president of Quantum Bay Labs that we begin our story.”
Scott McCormick explained what Quantum Bay Labs and the A.I. XPRIZE competition were, and at one point, while the camera zoomed in across the front lawn, he actually compared my father to Thomas Edison.
I laughed.
My mother shushed me.
“I have to say,” Scott went on, “that Quantum Bay’s artificial intelligence machine, Prometheus, isn’t exactly what I expected. It’s not a robot, or a computer bank with blinking red lights. Prometheus is more like a bowl of gray pudding. You heard that right: it’s actually a bowl of ‘thinking stuff.’”
On the screen, they showed a close-up of Prometheus, its 3.2-liter hemispherical vat of dielectric gel with wires spidering out in all directions, and behind it, a wall of electronics.
“Within this goop, they tell me, are over a million very, very tiny computers that use electromagnetism to swim around and form connections. You can’t see them without a microscope, but I’m told they’re what give this ‘brain pudding’ its grayish color.”
This had been quite a difficult shot for the camera crew to get, since by this time the QBL workspace had become a tightly packed labyrinth of electronics. A million-dollar Cray XT5 supercomputer and its Fluorinert cooling tower were a big part of that congestion. Both were on loan to us from David’s production company’s holographic design department.
“I understand that Prometheus is capable of solving puzzles,” Scott said. My father and Scott were now in the Turret, my father behind his desk.
“Simple puzzles, yes,” my father replied. “And it gets better and better at them all the time.”
“I’m glad to hear you’re still referring to it as ‘it.’ Are humans in any danger at this point?”
“I think we’re safe for the moment.” My father smiled reassuringly. “Prometheus is a pretty simple creature. Its world is a Flatland world. It can only identify colors like red, green and blue, and shapes like squares, triangles and circles. But we can use these colors and shapes to create puzzles—and using a ‘standard’ computer, we can translate those puzzles into information that can be injected into Prometheus’s sensory data stream.”
“Sensory data stream?”
“It’s a perpetually flowing stream of information that Prometheus passes from node to node. We call it its ‘sensory data stream’ because that’s how we talk to it. The data in this stream contains information that tells Prometheus’s nodes how to assemble themselves.”
“Dr. Cipriani went on to explain,” Scott said in a voiceover, while video played of my father working with Mohamed and Stewart, “that when new information is injected into Prometheus, a specific part of its architecture changes ever so slightly, and that change is then reflected back into the stream. By monitoring the stream, and translating the variations, the computer can display this information on the screen as Prometheus’s ‘answer.’”
Scott and my father were now in a Cobalt hallway, overlooking one of the computer rooms.
“You have to understand,” my father said, “Prometheus doesn’t do much without a whole lot of training. Prometheus can only return sensible answers to puzzles it’s been trained to solve.”
“And what if Prometheus’s data stream ever stopped flowing?”
“If, for example, we ever lost power? Prometheus and its network of nodes would devolve into an undifferentiated mess.”
“In other words,” Scott said, “Prometheus would die, and you’d have to start all over again, right?”
“Yes. Unlike a computer, Prometheus can’t be turned off. If it was, all its acquired knowledge would be lost. And that could be pretty significant. You see, once Prometheus solves a problem, it never completely returns to its former self. Its very structure is its memory—and it draws on that memory to help solve future problems.”
The scene switched to a view of Scott and my father in front of Prometheus, Scott looking down at the ‘bowl of gray pudding’ dubiously.
“Okay, but here’s the thing that bothers me,” Scott said. “I can see how analogous this machine is to a human brain, but what motivates Prometheus to solve these puzzles in the first place? I mean, isn’t that what separates man from machine, the fact that machines are programmed to do what they do and humans have free will?”
“Well, let’s think about it,” my father said. “It’s fairly easy to accept that our DNA instructs our cells how to behave—agreed? No one really questions that programming. But when our cells begin to form things like hearts and lungs and brains, that’s when we start to feel a little disconnected from that original code.” He smiled. “But still, you do get hungry, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And doesn’t that make you curious? After all, who gets fed when you eat? Your cells do. Pretty clever of those little cells—tricking you into getting them food. You see, that’s programming on top of programming on top of programming until, eventually, there’s someone up there who thinks it was their idea to eat.”
My father and Scott went on to discuss possible applications for a machine like Prometheus in nuclear energy, medicine, space travel—essentially, anywhere a singularly focused machine might outperform an emotionally distracted human being. After that, my father challenged Scott to a puzzle-solving race against Prometheus.
Scott went first, solving the puzzle in forty-seven seconds.
Then it was Prometheus’s turn.
My father switched on the microscope cameras underneath Prometheus’s vat so we could see its neurons in action—our low-tech brain scan.
From a computer terminal, he sent Prometheus the puzzle, and we watched as its nano-nodes and their spherical hubs restructured themselves on the big screen.
Prometheus ended up winning two out of the three races (which had surprised us during filming, since Promet
heus was really quite slow—a point my father was now reluctant to expand upon).
“I feel like Garry Kasparov,” Scott said.
“I don’t think I’d go that far.” My father patted his shoulder. “We do, however, have this consolation prize for you.” He handed Scott a Quantum Bay Labs pen.
“When we come back,” Scott said, now in the 60 Minutes studio, “we’ll meet the people behind Prometheus and learn about Quantum Bay Lab’s secret weapon.”
“Are you kidding?” I turned to my father as the commercial began. “I thought you said they cut this crap out.”
“I guess they needed more air time.”
“So my interview is back in?”
“I never said it was out.”
Great. I sank back into my La-Z-Boy.
“Hey, look, it’s a Roomba,” Danny said, referring to the commercial. “That seems appropriate.”
“A little robot that vacuums your house,” Tara said.
“See that?” my mother looked back at my father. “When is Prometheus going to clean my house?”
“Whenever you’re willing to pay it a decent salary—just look at that poor thing slaving away.”
“It gets its batteries charged, doesn’t it?”
“Mom, can we get a Roomba?” Jasmine asked.
“They do look like good little workers.”
“Mine wouldn’t work,” Jasmine said. “I’d set it free.”
When the show resumed, Scott introduced Peter, Mohamed, Stewart, Ishana and Danny, all lined up like witnesses to a crime. Scott asked them a few generic questions and then pressed them about the company’s “secret weapon.”
“He means Tyler,” Mohamed spoke up, clearly just wanting to get back to work.
“Tyler’s hardly a secret,” Danny said, looking from Mohamed to Scott. “Everyone knows how smart he is.”
“Certainly everyone here,” Scott said.
“Do I look fat?” Danny asked from her La-Z-Boy.
“Are you kidding, you look gorgeous,” my mother said.
They now showed a clip of me at my computer, rattling off code while alternating between design windows. In a voiceover, Scott explained who I was and what I had been doing for Quantum Bay Labs.
Magic, Machines and the Awakening of Danny Searle Page 13