by Erik Hamre
And with the law of accelerating returns, a law that futurist and Director of Engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, had developed, it was estimated that an Artificial Super Intelligence would very quickly become so smart that we would become the ants.
We would become insignificant.
It wouldn’t matter whether humans at one stage had been the artificial intelligence’s creator. It would feel no loyalty to us.
It would be superior in every aspect.
And it would eventually replace us.
It was evolution.
Vladimir thought back on how Kevorkian had recruited him. Vladimir had been living outside Moscow at the time. He had been working as a programmer for a Russian security firm. He had been working late one evening when he noticed an ad on one of the hacker-forums. It had just been an innocent picture of a bug, and the adjoining text: Do you think you’re smart enough to work for us?
The ad had intrigued Vladimir. He considered himself a pretty smart guy; so he clicked on the ad. The ad had led to a math puzzle, and the answer of that puzzle to a riddle. Vladimir soon found out that many of the hackers on the forum had tried to solve the various riddles and puzzles, but no one was getting anywhere. ‘It’s a hoax,’ some had written on the forum board. ‘It’s the government attempting to set us up. Stay away,’ another one had written. But Vladimir had always liked a challenge. He kept on solving the puzzles, and for every next step the field narrowed. After two long days, he had reached a math puzzle that only one other person had solved. It took Vladimir three hours, but he finally arrived at an answer. He was expecting a ‘congratulations, you made it,’ or some other nice message. Instead the screen had turned black. Frustrated, he had acknowledged that the paranoid hackers had probably been correct. It had all been a hoax. He had walked home looking over his shoulders that night, wondering if the government was spying on him. But they hadn’t been. Nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened for three weeks.
Then, one day at work, he had been advised that there was an American waiting for him in the canteen. He had taken the elevator to the second level, where the canteen was located, and walked in to find only one other person in the room. It had been Andrew Kevorkian. That was the first time Vladimir met Kevorkian. And that was now almost twelve years ago. Kevorkian had introduced himself in perfect Russian, and he had congratulated Vladimir on solving the puzzles, before offering him a job in the US.
From that day on Kevorkian had been Vladimir’s mentor, friend and benefactor. Kevorkian had taken Vladimir under his broad wing; provided him with a visa, a job and an apartment in the US. Introduced him to new people, important people, and made him very rich in the process. He had changed Vladimir’s life in an instant – still Vladimir had a short moment ago treated him as a criminal, as a terrorist - yelling at him, accusing him of attempting to exterminate the human race.
Vladimir felt sick in the stomach.
Deep down Vladimir knew he was justified though. He had seen it in Kevorkian’s eyes. Kevorkian hadn’t accidentally let loose an artificial intelligence on the world; it had been a deliberate act. He had been planning this for months, maybe years. Whenever Vladimir and his team had made progress in their research, or been successful in solving some technical issues they had encountered, Kevorkian had somehow used those breakthroughs to help him in his quest to create an Artificial General Intelligence. He had most likely duplicated all the work they had ever done at Neuralgo. But how had he been able to do it? Vladimir couldn’t get his head around how the knowledge of copying a human brain could have been used to create an Artificial General Intelligence. Vladimir’s team had only two months earlier been successful in duplicating Kevorkian’s entire brain. It had been an extraordinary achievement, but scientists had witnessed the same pattern before. Halfway through the fifteen-year effort to map the human genome only one percent of it had been identified. The rest of the genome was collected in the project’s last seven years. Vladimir and his team had experienced an even more dramatic and exponential development when attempting to reverse-engineer the human brain. After they had invented an entirely new non-invasive scanning technique, which had allowed them to observe individual interneuronal connections forming and firing in real time inside Kevorkian’s brain, they had achieved a dramatic jump in productivity. They had in fact achieved more in the last seven months than the last nine years. But there was a huge leap from mapping a brain to making it into an operational program. Scientists had mapped the human genome several years ago, but it wasn’t like they were pumping out human clones in large scale factories. How had Kevorkian been able to make the leap?
The answer would not be found inside the building in the Nevada desert. Vladimir knew that much.
If Kevorkian had planned this event, possibly for several years, then it would be extremely difficult to find out what he had been doing if he didn’t want them to find out. He would have had ample time to hide his tracks. Vladimir had learnt something about the way Kevorkian’s mind worked solving those riddles and puzzles back in Russia though. Kevorkian’s brain didn’t work like most normal brains. It worked differently, very differently.
The secret of the human brain was in essence its ability to observe and recognise patterns. When humans stored memories in their brains, they didn’t store them as a video, sound or a picture in jpeg format. They stored them as a sequence of patterns, in an increasingly hierarchical system. This was the reason most people didn’t remember much from their drive to work every day – to most people the drive was probably just another uneventful event with a lot of familiar observations. Another boring morning, easily forgettable. But if something unexpected should happen on that drive, then there was a much higher probability that it would stick in one’s memory. If one had a crash, one would probably remember it.
Much like evolution ensured that only the strongest and most adaptable species survived, the brain continually trimmed its own connections. If some connections were rarely or never used, the neocortex would prune them away. That was the real reason that boring drive home would soon be forgotten.
Kevorkian’s brain didn’t observe and interpret patterns the same way most other brains did though. Kevorkian’s brain always noticed the patterns everyone else missed. The hidden patterns, the seemingly unimportant ones - but those patterns were the ones that so often led to breakthrough discoveries and altered our view of how the world worked.
To Kevorkian there was never a boring drive to work. He would always notice something new.
Vladimir had observed Kevorkian stumble into meetings, where a group of engineers could have been discussing a specific problem for hours, only to ask the question everyone in the room wished they had been smart enough to ask. Kevorkian would sit in on the meeting for ten minutes, always in the back, seemingly totally uninterested. Then he would pose a question or make a remark that would make the whole room go ‘ahhh’. And then he would simply get up and leave. Kevorkian was never patient enough to attend a meeting for more than ten minutes. It was part of the reason the engineers had all respected him so much, the reason they hadn’t minded him being an asshole most of the time.
If I were Kevorkian, what motive could I possibly have had for building and releasing an Artificial General Intelligence out in the world? Vladimir asked himself. He soon realised it was a pointless question though. Nobody could ever hope to understand what Kevorkian’s motive or reasoning had been.
Because nobody was like him.
How could one understand one of the most brilliant minds in the world?
One just couldn’t.
Kraut observed Vladimir through the window of the office. He wondered if he should have given Vladimir the full protocol. There was always a risk having people working for one without a full understanding of the situation. But Vladimir was a wild card. He hadn’t been prepped like the others on Team Cronus. Kraut couldn’t trust him like the others. He needed to be careful with what information he shared.
At least for now. He looked down at the pages he had omitted from the report Vladimir was reading. Directive 32-EED was part of the updated and final version of Protocol Cronus. The directive had been implemented only three months earlier, and Kraut had never imagined that it could ever be invoked. He had suggested it merely as an alternative to stress the importance of the matter. The directive called for the detonation of several thermonuclear weapons in the Earth’s atmosphere. The blasts would function as an Electromagnetic Magnetic Pulse blast, EMP for short, and fry between ninety-five and ninety-nine percent of the electronic equipment on Earth. In an instant the world as we knew it would cease to exist. But at least it would give the generations that came after us a chance to survive.
There had been many heated discussions about Directive 32-EED before it was finally approved on the 15th of March 2015. The Vice President had argued that any thermonuclear detonation would most likely have catastrophic repercussions internationally. It was naïve to believe that the many enemies of America would sit back and watch America detonate nuclear weapons aboveground, whatever the purpose for those detonations was. ”It won’t matter,” the President had replied. ”By the time the bombs are detonated, every single nation in the world will have lost its nuclear capabilities.” ”But what right do we have to make this decision for every country in the world?” the Vice President had asked. “Countries will cease to exist. Borders won’t matter anymore. Old enemies will become allies. The moment the human race faces extinction from a common enemy, who cares what skin colour you have or what God you believe in?” the President had replied. And so it had been decided. The President had received his blessing for the directive. With the stroke of a pen he had put the fate of the entire human race into an automated response.
The moment the first Artificial General Intelligence was identified and attempted to hack the US nuclear weapons control systems, the world’s fate was sealed. It wouldn’t matter if it was friendly or not - it had to be terminated. The longer one waited, the harder it would become. If an AGI ever managed to achieve an intelligence explosion, there was only one end game – the end of the human era.
”99.99% of all species in the world have gone extinct. If history can tell us one thing it is that humans will eventually go extinct as well, it is inevitable.” The President had remarked. ”The only question is when, and who is going to replace us. With this directive we will at least set our own terms.”
Kraut had been in the other camp. He had argued that there were two possible outcomes of Artificial Super Intelligence. One: Humans would go extinct as the President claimed, or two: Humans could become immortal and conquer the universe.
Throughout history evolution had never had any reason to extend any species’ lifespan any longer than it currently was. If a bear could live long enough to raise her cubs to an age where they could fend for themselves, then that was sufficient for evolution. For humans that age was probably around thirty years. Yet we had somehow managed to extend it to well past one hundred. ‘The problem is that we think of aging like time – both keep moving, and there is nothing we can do to stop either. But why shouldn’t we be able to stop aging?’ Kraut had asked in his latest book about Singularity – The Morphing of Humans and Machines. He had been quoting Richard Feynman. Feynman had never understood the necessity of death. Like Kraut he had been a proponent for technological advancement, a believer. ‘All aging is just wear and tear of our bodies. If you replaced every part once it started to wear down, then our bodies could theoretically run forever,” Kraut had written in a scientific journal in 1970. Now he probably wished he could take back those words.
Vladimir placed the sealed version of the protocol he had received on the table. Protocol Cronus. Strange name, he thought. Then he started reading.
1 An artificial General Intelligence is identified in an American computer not connected to the internet. The President may order the destruction of the facilities. The risk of loss of life is considered non-existent.
2 An Artificial General Intelligence is identified in a computer not connected to the internet in a friendly or neutral country. The President should contact the country’s respective leaders and advise them to destroy the facilities within six hours. If not destroyed by then, the president should order a thermonuclear strike or aboveground EMP strike immediately. Risk of loss of life deemed to be great. Retribution consequences considered likely.
3 An Artificial General Intelligence is identified in a computer not connected to the internet in a country considered to be an enemy of the United States……
Vladimir skimmed the next couple of paragraphs before stopping at bullet point number 9.
An Artificial General Intelligence is attempting to access the Nuclear Weapons Control Systems of the United States of America. Response outlined in separate document (Directive 32-EED.)
What is Directive 32-EED, he wondered, before proceeding to skim the next page. The document he had received was thirty-five pages long. He had to be quick.
9
1st of June 2015
DARPA’s remote Listening Station No 3
The Nevada Desert
DAY 1:
1100 Hours
It was eleven o’clock in the morning when Vladimir got the message. He knew something had happened the second he noticed Ronald Kraut’s head peeking through the open door. “Vladimir, I’ve got some bad news,” Kraut said, entering the room.
Vladimir closed the laptop he was working on and looked up at Kraut.
“Kevorkian has had a stroke,” Kraut continued.
At first Vladimir hadn’t know how to respond. The shock of the news was just overwhelming. “Is he… is he OK?” Vladimir finally stuttered.
Kraut shook his head. “I’m afraid not. It was a big one. He’s currently on life support.”
“Is he going to be OK though?” Vladimir got up from his chair.
“They’re not sure. The doctors had to put him into an induced coma. If he wakes up, he won’t be the same though. He’ll most likely have severe brain damage.”
The news was devastating. If anything defined Kevorkian it was his brain. Even if he survived the stroke, he would never be Kevorkian again. “Shit. How did it happen? I thought Kevorkian was in the shape of his life.”
“That’s what we thought too. We did an extensive medical check after we brought him in. There were no indications anything was wrong. His medical condition was good.”
“Where is he now?”
“The plane had to make an emergency landing. He is in an Army hospital, still on American soil. Unfortunately that’s all I can tell you at this stage. I don’t know where he is. That information is classified, even to me.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Kraut shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”
“Was he tortured?” Vladimir asked.
Kraut shook his head. “No. I won’t deny he would probably have been subjected to waterboarding and other interrogating techniques once he arrived at Guantanamo Bay. But he never got that far. We believe he had the stroke earlier this morning. Maybe as early as seven hours ago. When you spoke to him he was already deteriorating.”
Vladimir was in shock. It still sounded surreal to hear Kevorkian being labelled a terrorist, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. “I don’t believe it. It’s too convenient.”
“You think someone provoked the stroke?”
“Don’t you?”
Kraut shrugged his shoulders. “Not sure. We just called up his doctor. Turns out Kevorkian has been struggling with severe migraines for quite some years. It is actually quite possible he’s had some minor strokes before, without even realising it.”
“No, that’s not possible.” Vladimir shook his head in disbelief. “We have scanned his brain a million times at Neuralgo. There has never been any sign of strokes. And I’ve known him for twelve years. He’s never once complained about headaches.”
“Hmmf.” Kraut scratched his chin. “That’s odd. What’
s even odder is that there was no mention of the headaches in the softcopy of his medical files. Only in the hardcopies.”
“Which we didn’t have access to at Neuralgo,” Vladimir said, realising that Kevorkian’s deception must have started years earlier.
“Correct.”
Vladimir leant against the desk for support. “At least that rules out the artificial intelligence having made the amendments. It must have been done a long time before the artificial intelligence was created.”
Kraut nodded. His first fear had also been that the artificial intelligence could be involved. “Where does that leave us then? Why would Kevorkian deliberately hide the fact that he has been suffering from headaches?”
Vladimir shook his head. “Neuralgo’s investors. They would never have allowed us to study Kevorkian’s brain if they knew something could be wrong.”
Kraut nodded.
“He would have to have had help amending the medical records though,” Vladimir said.
“Most likely. An inside job you think?”
Vladimir shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
Kraut moved towards the door. “I don’t think we should spend much time entertaining conspiracy theories though. Kevorkian has as good as admitted that he released the AGI. We traced the origin of the singularity event back to his text message. All the evidence is there if we look. Kevorkian was behind this.”
Vladimir nodded. “I don’t dispute that. But what if he didn’t act alone? What if there are more people involved? Don’t you think it is convenient that he has a stroke now, just when he is about to get interrogated? If someone knew he had a weakness, they could easily have provoked the stroke. There are ways.”