Dangerous Brains

by Erik Hamre

  Would Cronus be any different? Would it be able to identify the dots, but unable to connect them? Or would it not only be able to connect the dots, but do it by looking forward? Vladimir remembered having watched Steve Jobs’ epic Stanford Commencement Address on YouTube a few years back. The video had made an immense impact on Vladimir. The way Jobs had said that one had to ask oneself every day if the work one did was important enough to continue doing. Steve Jobs had asked the students to imagine if they only had one day left to live, would they still be satisfied doing the same work the next day with this knowledge at hand?

  That statement wasn’t the only profound thing Jobs had said that day, however. He had also said that all his various choices throughout life had led him to the point where he found himself that day. He hadn’t realised at the time, because his various choices for schools and jobs had never been part of any greater plan. It was only afterwards, in retrospect, that Steve Jobs was able to connect the dots. It was only looking backwards that one could connect the dots.

  The only computer in the world that had actually taken a proper IQ test had spit out the result of a four-year-old. Cronus was obviously magnitudes smarter than that. But would Cronus also lack the essential ability of reasoning? Would it lack the ability to connect the dots?

  It was hard to answer the question because Cronus had been able to solve puzzles no human had ever been able to. But those puzzles had invariably been mathematical equations, questions with black and white answers. A different intelligence was required to solve ethical dilemmas or connect the dots in a murder mystery.

  Vladimir had scored one of the highest IQs ever recorded at Moscow Elementary School. Still several of his friends had done much better than he had in life. IQ in itself didn’t really provide you with any measurement of the likelihood of a person’s future success. Not even school success. There were too many variables that could influence the final outcome. So what if Cronus had acquired a higher IQ than any living human being? What did it mean? It didn’t necessarily mean that it would be smarter, more cunning, or even a better conversational partner than an average human being.

  Were they placing too much importance on intelligence? What if intelligence didn’t really matter that much? What if intelligence and creativity weren’t correlated at all? What if Cronus would never be able to achieve an intelligence explosion because it simply wouldn’t be creative enough to come up with ways to improve itself?

  There were people in the world with IQs in the 180s and 190s. Vladimir knew. He had a few of them on his payroll. But they weren’t the guys he asked if he had an important job to get done. They were smart, but they weren’t original. They could solve problems, but their solutions weren’t beautiful or unique. Vladimir’s most trusted inner circle of engineers weren’t the ones with the highest IQ on paper, but they were by far the smartest people in the real world.

  They shone in the real world.

  The high-IQ guys shone on paper.

  And Cronus was now in the real world.

  In the end it didn’t really matter what specs a computer had if the software couldn’t keep up.

  A human brain was hardware, or wetware as Kevorkian had preferred to call it.

  But in the end it was the software that mattered.

  And they had no idea what Cronus’ software was like.

  “How do you intend to test Cronus’ intelligence?” Vladimir asked.

  “We will tweak the security systems on the governmental websites that Cronus will most likely attack next. If we can assign various levels of difficulty for breaching each system, then we can at least see in what direction the intelligence is moving,” Amanda replied. She made a quotation mark in the air when she said intelligence.

  “OK. It’s not perfect, but it might work.” Vladimir scratched his chin as he sat down on the chair next to Amanda. “I need you to do one more thing,” he said.

  “Sure. What is it?”

  “I need you to test Cronus’ level of creativity as well.”

  “Creativity? How am I supposed to test that?”

  “Let me worry about that. Just find me a site or a system you think Cronus will attack. I’ll sort out the rest.”

  39

  2nd of June 2015

  Kevorkiana HFT’s HQ

  Silicon Valley, California

  DAY 2:

  2000 Hours

  Major Olokoff glanced out the window. America – the land of big dreams. The country where everything was possible. The country where kids were told they could become anything they wanted to when they grew up. Olokoff had to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. He studied his fellow passengers as they reached for their luggage. Everyone attempting to be more polite than the next one.

  If this had been in Moscow, there would have been no such politeness. Russians were taught to fend for themselves, to never trust anyone. And Olokoff had to keep this fact in the back of his mind when he was due to meet Ronald Kraut later in the evening.

  Kraut and Olokoff had known each other for decades. One could even call them friends. They hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but they had always respected each other.

  This evening Olokoff had to erase all that history. He had to approach Ronald Kraut as any other American – a potential enemy of his beloved Russia.

  Westerners always complained about how regulation inhibited innovation and growth. How the market economy was the answer to every question under the sun. Yet there were very few social goods that had actually been created by market economies. The good things were usually unintended. Side effects.

  Olokoff stood up and straightened his pants, before reaching for his jacket from the overhead compartment. As usual he had been assigned seat number two in Business Class. It would ensure he would be one of the first to disembark the plane. He would have preferred to fly in on a private jet, but there had been none available. All the jets were apparently in the US at the moment. Most of the world leaders were already there to discuss global warming or a coming ice age. Olokoff wasn’t quite sure what it was the world was afraid of at the moment.

  Everything was as it had to be though. The world needed a constant threat hanging over its head to function properly. Olokoff had lived through the cold war. The Americans always portrayed it as though it was they who had lived with the constant threat of a nuclear war over their heads. But what about the Russians? The Americans were after all the only nation in human history that had actually been reckless enough to use nuclear weapons in a war. They thought they could justify any means, the Americans, because they thought they were always morally right. And now they had created an Artificial General Intelligence. Olokoff wondered what their excuse would be this time.

  And he wondered what their suggestions to solve the problem would be.

  He could already guess it though.

  The President would declare artificial intelligence the nuclear weapons of the twenty-second century and force every other country in the world to sign a treaty to never attempt to develop weapons controlled by artificial intelligence. The exemption would of course be America. America had already developed it, and it couldn’t very well take that back.

  Thus America would make sure that it would have an everlasting monopoly on weapons controlled by artificial intelligence.

  Olokoff was there to make sure that would never happen.

  He could see straight through the Americans’ deceptive ploy. He had interviewed Vladimir Sorovis’ brother Ivan. And he now knew what had happened. He knew what Neuralgo had created. And he knew it couldn’t have resulted in an Artificial General Intelligence.

  Everything was a setup. The Americans were applying their usual scare tactics on the rest of the world. They would claim they had identified a rogue technology company attempting to develop Artificial General Intelligence, and then they would tell the world all the scary things this could result in. When the population was sufficiently scared, they would reveal that they had been able to contain the threat, and
that the world could never allow something like this to ever happen again.

  And then they would move in for the kill: Proposing that no other country be allowed to develop what they had just developed.

  Olokoff glanced at the captain. He was standing in the front of the cabin, talking to a uniformed soldier. Kraut had sent the welcoming committee to greet him. He must be eager to get this out of the way, Olokoff thought as he pushed the American next to him, the one who had seat number three, to the side so he could disembark. The American fell backwards into his seat.

  Olokoff didn’t look back.

  Olokoff didn’t apologise.

  40

  2nd of June 2015

  Kevorkiana HFT’s HQ

  Silicon Valley, California

  DAY 2:

  2100 Hours

  Vladimir was studying the code on the computer screen. Some of it was Greek even to him. Cronus was a clever machine. There was no doubt about that. But what Vladimir found strange was that he was able to understand anything at all. If Kevorkian had truly developed an Artificial Super Intelligence, something so smart that it would eventually make humans look like mice, then they should already now see signs of that intelligence seeping through in the coding.

  But it wasn’t.

  Kraut was correct in saying that Cronus had been able to solve some mathematical equations that no humans had ever been able to. And it had done it in less than seconds. This should be sufficient evidence that Cronus not only was as smart as a human being, but magnitudes smarter. But when Vladimir reviewed the equations he wasn’t that impressed. The answers Cronus had come up with weren’t beautiful. They were more the result of an enormous data crunching ability than brilliant creativity.

  Einstein had come up with his law of relativity based solely on his observations and imagination. He had used the power of his mind to ponder why things were as they were. And only decades later had computer capacity caught up sufficiently to verify his theories. Cronus didn’t have to wait. It could launch a million theories and test them all within seconds. Was that an equal level of creativity?

  The more Vladimir studied the results on the screen, the more convinced he became; the Turing Test Tripwires Kraut and his team had designed were deeply flawed. They didn’t conclusively assess whether Cronus was an Artificial Super Intelligence or not, not even whether it was an Artificial General Intelligence or not.

  Vladimir had to admit that Cronus most likely was smarter than any living human being. But he still wasn’t sure whether it was more creative.

  And there was something else that didn’t make sense.

  The way Cronus had solved the various puzzles was remarkably like the way Vladimir would have approached them, the way Kevorkian would have approached them.

  Vladimir knew how different people’s thinking patterns could be. Whereas Kevorkian had only been interested in Vladimir arriving at the correct answers when he put all those puzzles up on the internet in 2003, Vladimir had always been interested in how his engineers arrived at the answers.

  At its peak Neuralgo had employed 404 engineers. Vladimir had interviewed every single one of them. It was a long and tedious process, and Vladimir usually never got involved until the fourth or fifth interview. But ultimately he was the one with the power to make the decision.

  Whether to hire or not.

  And he used that power indiscriminately. In the end it didn’t matter what human resources said. They could claim the guy was a brilliant team worker, an inspirational bundle of energy, a future management asset, and Vladimir could still give him the thumbs down. Vladimir looked at how the person approached problem-solving, how his mind worked when he was put to solve a complex problem under time pressure, and he based his judgment solely on that observation. Vladimir had turned down people who had later moved on to start successful million-dollar corporations or become hugely successful executives in Yahoo and LinkedIn, and he had hired people with shady backgrounds, massive holes in their CV’s, and generally antisocial behaviours. But if he had been given the same opportunity again, there were very few of his hires he wouldn’t have rehired, and he didn’t regret passing on any of the career climbers. Neuralgo had been blessed with the most stable and productive engineering team in the entire technology industry if you asked Vladimir.

  And it had all been due to the fact that Vladimir hired people who approached problems in radically different ways than he did.

  When he studied Cronus’ problem-solving he could almost recognise himself and Kevorkian though.

  It was as if he recognised the DNA of Kevorkian’s problem-solving in the code.

  “It’s still bloody Kevorkian,” he cried out enthusiastically.

  “What is?” Amanda asked.

  “The code. It’s Kevorkian. I think we’ve been so blindsided by this whole talk about singularity that we have missed the fact that Cronus is thinking like a human being, it is problem-solving like a human being.”

  “Of course. It is probably a very bright Artificial General Intelligence. So we would expect it to think sort of like a human.”

  “No we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t at all. If we gave a spider an IQ of 180 it wouldn’t think at all like humans. So why do we think that a machine with an IQ of 180 should think anything like us. It simply doesn’t make sense. Even at lower IQ levels, it would think radically differently.”

  “But Cronus was based on Kevorkian’s brain, wasn’t it? It was based on a human brain.”

  “That’s the problem. We talk about an artificial intelligence that will soon be unrecognisable to us, because in essence it will always be a machine. But Cronus isn’t just a machine. It is Kevorkian. It is not only based on Kevorkian, it is still Kevorkian. His brain has just been given a lot more computing power.”

  “Damn,” Amanda exclaimed. She didn’t like to admit, but Vladimir could be on to something.

  41

  2nd of June 2015

  Kevorkiana HFT’s HQ

  Silicon Valley, California

  DAY 2:

  2200 Hours

  As Kraut walked into the room all eyes turned to face him. Everyone noticed the difference. Most of the people in the room had only known Kraut through his various TV performances and key note presentations. Out of Team Cronus only Amanda had ever met him in person before. But they had all been surprised about how different the public Ronald Kraut had been from the private Ronald Kraut. During their entire time dealing with the Cronus threat, Kraut had been humble, almost insecure. He had asked for advice and genuinely seemed like he didn’t know what he was doing.

  Now his normal arrogance had returned with a vengeance, the arrogance that had silenced so many talk show participants and critics. One never entered an argument with Ronald Kraut without risking ending up looking like a fool. Everybody knew that. It was part of the reason Kraut had been so popular on TV shows. He was a master in argumentation. And he had the credentials to back up his claims. He was a millionaire, founder of several successful start-ups, had a Ph. D. in philosophy, had authored books, had invented new disruptive technology. One could love him or hate him, but one couldn’t argue he wasn’t extremely accomplished. And when one added his uncanny ability to make outrageous claims, and to back them up with sound arguments, he was a certain ratings winner.

  None of Team Cronus had experienced that side of Kraut though, not yet. Not until he walked into the office and called for everyone’s attention.

  “We will have a guest arriving in ten minutes. I want you to treat him nicely. But don’t discuss anything without me being present.”

  “Who is it?” Amanda asked. They all assumed it would have to be someone from high up in the government. Maybe the Vice President or the Secretary of Defense?

  “His name is Olokoff. He is a Major in the Russian Army. He will be here in an observatory function only.”

  “A Russian?” Amanda asked.

  “Yes,” Kraut responded crassly.

  Vladimir just stared
at the floor. The time had come for Kraut to make Vladimir useful. Kraut had been open about it. Vladimir hadn’t been chosen because he was the best in his field. Not even because he was the one person in the world who knew Kevorkian the best. He had been chosen due to his Russian background. If Kraut wasn’t able to convince the Russians that this whole thing wasn’t an elaborate setup, then it would become Vladimir’s job. Vladimir was Kraut’s truth witness. The problem facing Vladimir was that he was starting to doubt the whole story. He didn’t doubt the fact that Kevorkian had created Cronus. But he had started to doubt whether Kraut was being honest with him. Why hadn’t Kraut told him that he thought it was an Artificial Super Intelligence from the outset? Why had he first lied and told Vladimir they were only dealing with an Artificial General Intelligence? Kraut had not been honest. He kept secrets, and Vladimir had to find out why.

  “Why would we share information with the Russians?” Amanda asked.

  “Because we have no choice. Cronus is not only an American problem. For the first time in history all humans are facing a common enemy,” Kraut responded.

  Vladimir studied Kraut where he stood, lightly rocking back and forth on his toes, a strange smile on his face. His lip slightly curled up.

  Why the newfound arrogance? Why the newfound self-confidence? Had Kraut just been to the bathroom to snort some cocaine? Vladimir had witnessed it before. He drove his engineers hard. Most of them coped, but some didn’t. The threshold to start using drugs wasn’t that high.