by Victor Milán
“A clever label cannot detract from the possible validity of a hypothesis,” Doihara Kazuko said. He glanced at her in appreciation. Incisiveness was a key reason that she was his chief aide, and was in fact being groomed to succeed him, in spite of criticism from rival ministries and even from certain parties within his own. These days, it was virtually unheard of for a woman to occupy a position of any consequence in Japan. Women’s liberation had drowned in the tide of backward longing, the seeking of shelter in the embrace of tradition, that reached flood after the Third World War. Like many people throughout the world Ishikawa Nobuhiko approved in general of returning to the ancient strengths of his nation. Yet some aspects of that turning troubled him. He refused, for example, to permit blind adherence to tradition to rob him of the services of the ablest executive—save himself—in the ministry, especially during these dark days.
“Our own experts find scant merit in Dr. O’Neill’s postulates,” he said in his deep, measured voice. “They know what they’re talking about. Many are veterans of the old ICOT.” The lines at the corners of his eyes deepened unconsciously at the mention of the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology. It had contributed in part to his ministry’s fall from preeminence, in the days before the war. “They assure me that, should the achievement of artificial sentience be possible, which is in itself doubtful, the odds of giving rise to it in hit-or-miss fashion are vanishingly small.”
“I disagree,” Doihara said, facing him squarely. Such was her privilege, that she could contradict the vice-minister without risking an explosion of his famous temper. “As Dr. O’Neill is herself at pains to point out, her method isn’t wholly stochastic. The program-modifying routines follow carefully delimited routes. In fact, on an almost cosmically huge scale, the technique very closely resembles the standard mathematical procedure of versuch, trial and error, in which one attempts to eliminate paths that are unlikely to lead to the goal, and then commences systematic explorations of those that may.”
Ishikawa snapped from his chair as if spring-driven. He paced to the window, stared out. To the right, mountains floated above the smog, aloof and pure; to the left, Tokyo Bay heaving in its queasy-greasy slog gleamed dull brown through bald patches in the smog. Tall glass towers and giant shoebox-shaped apartment complexes shouldered upward through the pollution on both sides; directly in front there was a conspicuous gap.
Most strongholds of the Japanese bureaucracy had been obliterated in the same two-megaton ground burst that had taken out the palace complex, the imperial family, and somewhere over three million people. The Land of the Sun’s Origin had suffered less from the war than any other developed country, and less than quite a few that were still certifiably part of the Third World. Yet those few warheads that detonated over Japanese territory had done hideous damage, thanks to the islands’ population density. Modern Japan was urban, concentrated in the huge metroplex popularly known as Tokaido, after the old East Sea Circuit road, which was riveted like a steel runner to the eastern shore. Two of the five warheads that hit Japan had struck Tokaido, one—a ground burst—in the core of Tokyo itself.
In memory of WWIII most reconstructed governmental offices were underground warrens, heavily bunkered and hardened where they poked tentative heads above ground. Not so the MITI building. An attenuated pyramid of black glass and steel, it soared almost thirty stories above the very frontier of rebuilt Tokyo—so close to the hypocenter of the ground blast that residual radiation from buried gammaray emitters had produced a serious health problem among the laborers who’d laid the foundation. Mostly they were Korean refugee workers, such a drug on the Japanese labor market that public outcry was muted; Ishikawa had been outraged, but the damage was done before he ascended to de facto control over the ministry.
Some said the pyramid was MITI’s tombstone. He was determined that should not prove true.
His mind churned like the fouled waters of the bay. For years Yoshimitsu TeleCom has been a thorn in the ministry’s side, he thought. What is this thing they’re about to achieve?
“Forgive my ignorance,” he said without turning, “but please explain to me just what it is YTC is trying to accomplish? We’ve had artificial intelligence for years.”
“That’s true, Ishikawa-san.” She used the form of address proper between equals, another familiarity that prompted much resentment “But O’Neill aims for artificial consciousness. There’s a distinction”
“Kindly explain.”
She considered for a moment. He admired the picture she made, sitting there with legs primly crossed. “Alan Turing started systematic speculation on created intelligence in I947 with his paper ‘Intelligent Machinery.’ In those days, intelligence was expected to be brought about by achieving sufficient power, speed, and capacity in computing machines; Turing himself entertained that belief. Since then the question has gone through considerable evolution.
“The answer to your question hinges on just what one means by artificial intelligence, and no question’s been more thoroughly debated—or begged—since the term was coined in the mid-fifties. A curious and apparently self-contradictory phenomenon has taken place: the parameters of artificial intelligence have been simultaneously raised and lowered. Experts laid down criteria by which they would acknowledge that true AI had been achieved—and they were fulfilled, as the performance of would-be artificial intelligences has marched steadily upward, in such forms as chess-playing programs and the panoply of expert systems on which so much of modern science and technology rely. Many of these programs perform the tasks for which they were designed better than any human. Yet in response the definition of artificial intelligence has receded constantly before them.
“The issue has been complicated by information experts steadily revising the definition of ‘intelligence’ downward. It’s come to mean little more than the capacity to store, process, and transmit information—a bottom-line definition that incorporates not only everything that possesses a genetic structure, but even common clays, which possess a self-replicating crystalline structure. Additionally, various minor decision-making subroutines, such as those taking the part of a player in computer games, have come to be termed ‘artificial intelligences.’ The whole question rapidly became convoluted past the point of easy resolution.
“The fifth-generation project brought a functional AI into existence. We Japanese, incidentally, largely sidestepped the definitional problem, preferring to label ICOT’s goal the Knowledge Information Processing System, KIPS. KIPS included an ability to perform operations on a variety of symbols in a series of logical inferences, in place of merely manipulating numbers in a purely arithmetical manner as did previous computers, thereby emulating the pattern of human thought; plain language input/output, the capacity to accept input in oral, printed, handwritten, or pictorial form, and to provide output in print, pictures, and spoken words; and what’s colloquially termed ‘common sense’—the ability, when faced with a variety of possible pathways to follow, to eliminate those that obviously would lead nowhere without actually having to blunder into them. Ambitious goals, and of course achieved in something of a dead heat by the institute, the West Germans, and several American concerns shortly before the Third World War.
“For better or worse, KIPS fulfills the best available criteria for artificial intelligence.”
Ishikawa showed her a slow smile. “You’ve gone through all that just to tell me what YTC’s goal isn’t. Will you kindly tell me what it is?”
She smiled back. “You’ll note, Mr. Vice-Minister, that one thing AI is not—nor KIPS—is an artificial being. Fifth-generation machines are the most potent tool in all of human history—yet tools are all they are. They possess no more life, no more consciousness, than a handsaw or screwdriver. An artificial consciousness, on the other hand, would possess awareness of its own existence, the power to initiate its own actions. It would be, in effect, alive.” She brushed a loose strand of hair from her forehead. “If you’ll in
dulge a naïve comparison, Ishikawa-san, an AI machine is like the computers in the old ‘Star Trek’ series; it mimics human thought and speech patterns, but has no awareness. HAL 9000, the computer from the Clarke-Kubrick movie 2001 and its sequels, on the other hand, had a will of its own, an awareness of its own existence—which it was at pains to preserve.” She smiled apologetically. “I can’t encapsulate the essential difference between AI and AC any better, I am afraid.”
Ishikawa winced. He’d seen 2001 three times, as a boy. “And this is what Yoshimitsu’s aiming for?”
“Artificial sentience. The first created being.” She moistened her lips. The building’s climate control made the air painfully dry.
His shoulders rode up to either side of his neck. He’s tense, she knew, not knowing quite why. The doctors had warned him against tension; he devoured blood-pressure medicine like sushi. Perhaps I can tease the tension from him, tonight in bed, she thought. It had worked before.
“The old man overreaches himself.” A low murmur, a whisper almost. The shoulders came down. “What makes him think he can pull it off?”
“He hired the controversial American computer scientist Dr. Elizabeth O’Neill. She worked at one time with a software design concern called Merlin Industries, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on experiments in what Merlin termed ‘artificial intuition.’ This faculty would emulate the innate human ability, usually associated with the right hemisphere of the brain, to reason beyond apparent facts, to operate in a way other than sequentially and incrementally.
“Dr. O’Neill parted company with Merlin under a cloud. Most of the systems developers working at Merlin were ‘reductionists,’ that is to say, they believed all human mental processes—linear and intuitive—could be reduced to simple typographical operations that could then be emulated by a machine. Thus the development of artificial intuition would complement AI software that reproduced the strictly rational—I.e., linear—processes of the human left brain in such a way, it was hoped, that the two working in concert might produce a synergistic effect approaching human reasoning capacities.
“Dr. O’Neill contested this opinion. Human intelligence is not, in her view, deterministic; the totality of sentience cannot simply be characterized as the sum of a series of biochemical operations. Such a contention came dangerously close to mysticism, at least in the view of her compeers at Merlin. Eventually, she handed in her resignation and moved back to Colorado, where she started a consulting firm in Fort Collins. Subsequently, she published a number of papers exploring a possible connection between true mathematical randomness and what she termed ‘artificial consciousness.’
“The reductionist approach, meanwhile, has proven barren. Biochemistry and neurophysics have brought us no closer to explaining human mentation. Barring an unexpected breakthrough in the life sciences, reductionism will continue to fail.”
Ishikawa turned back. “What does O’Neill have to offer, then?”
“Randomness.”
Ishikawa frowned. “There’s no such thing, in a mathematical sense. No matter how deeply buried, a pattern exists and can be discerned.”
“Dr. O’Neill believes otherwise, Ishikawa-san. She claims that chaos—true randomness—underlies the secret of consciousness, artificial and otherwise. A linear progression of logical steps meant to build toward sentience would thus theoretically never lead there—among other things, a succinct restatement of Gödel’s theorem. In support of her contentions that true randomness exists, O’Neill quotes the so-called Foucard functions.”
Ishikawa raised an eyebrow. “Foucard? Wasn’t she the mathematician who committed suicide a few years ago?”
Doihara nodded. “Dr. Hèléne Foucard was dismissed from the French Academy of Science for promulgating ‘doctrines repugnant to the tenets of scientific socialism’ three years before the Third World War, and shot herself shortly thereafter. Her functions were a set of highly complex—in both the mathematical and vernacular senses of the word—equations that, when performed repeatedly on identical sets of input, produce solutions that differ according to no discoverable pattern: true chaos.”
Frowning, Ishikawa rubbed his chin, displeased in passing to feel a rasp of stubble. He hated chaos. Esteem for order was his fixation, the foundation of him. His tremendous self-consuming energy, the drive that made him loved or feared by all who knew him, sprang from this: the compulsion to impose order on the chaos he saw flooding into the world in these latter days.
“For some time,” his assistant continued, “no reputable scientist or mathematician would actually deign to experiment with the functions him or herself. They joined UFOs, astrology, the supposedly psychic, and innumerable other phenomena in scientific limbo. To express even the slightest interest in the subject was to brand oneself frivolous. Likewise O’Neill’s theories concerning created sentience, which relied heavily on Foucard.
“Then, just prior to the war, the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ researching fractionally quantized phenomena discovered that certain effects could best be described in terms of Foucard functions. Despite the disrepute enjoyed by quantum physics these days, this finding lent credence to O’Neill’s theories; only political considerations, I gather, prevented the Sukarno team from winning a Nobel for their work in manipulating subquantum effects, which, while themselves not ‘real,’ could nonetheless produce actual results.”
She glanced at Ishikawa. His eyes were slits. He knew enough of quantum theory to hate its implications. Its practitioners were chaoticists of the worst stripe. He was pleased that political authorities had begun to rein them in.
“Curiously enough,” Doihara continued, “one of these four young physicists was Yoshimitsu Michiko, daughter of Yoshimitsu Akaji, president and majority stockholder of Yoshimitsu Telecommunications. Shortly after their announcement YTC contacted Dr. O’Neill and asked her to initiate a project to create the world’s first truly artificial being.”
“So they might do it.”
“I believe so.”
He let his eyes fall down to the stratum of smog that masked the base of the Pyramid. We used to have clean air, he thought. But the brushfire wars that ushered in the Big One had rendered shipments of petroleum chancy, and Japan had no energy resources of its own. It had become necessary to ration energy use and, like so many rationed commodities, electricity had seemed to grow scarcer and scarcer, even with several fusion plants online in the Home Islands. Private Japanese, lacking the clout of the zaibatsu and the ministries to command prodigious energy allotments, had returned to the old standby: charcoal. Makeshift chimneys jutted from the windows of the cheerless monolith blocks of danshi, government-built boxes to keep Tokaido’s millions in when they weren’t needed onshift, a perpetual fire hazard; wood-burning cars modeled on the gasogenes common in Nazi-occupied Europe of the forties joined the throngs afoot, the bicycles, the electric cars of the elite on the atherosclerotic streets. Burning wood or charcoal was proscribed, of course. But there was no way to enforce the laws. Custom was law to most Japanese; what the government promulgated was waste paper.
Giving his mind time to digest what Doihara had told him, Ishikawa permitted himself a wry smile at the smog. The symptom of so much that was wrong with Japan. The nation needed a strong government, one that would compel the obedience of the people.
It was his desire to fill that need.
At one time the Ministry of International Trade and Industry had seemed the answer When ministry scouts had recruited him out of Tokyo Imperial University—the incomparable Todai—and sent him off to Yale for his MBA, he had been thrilled. MITI was the place to be in those days, the strong backbone of a Japan destined for preeminence.
Then came the trade war with the United States. No winner emerged. Instead, both countries had pitched headlong into the economic swamp that mired the rest of the world. The public blamed MITI for stimulating overproduction in areas in which world demand suddenly collapsed, while concentrating research and development under its
aegis so that, as one acerb commentator put it, “the nation’s scientists could know the comfort of all barking up the wrong tree together.”
That there might be merit in such criticism never impinged on Ishikawa’s mind. He was a man who questioned everything but his own basic assumptions. The absolute unity of the welfare of the nation and that of MITI was most basic of all.
By the time of the war, the ministry had gone into eclipse. The pyramid had been a doomed gesture, a final doomed grandiloquence in steel and glass—so they said.
They’d reckoned without Ishikawa Nobuhiko.
He battled to return the ministry to its former preeminence in the Japanese economy. One by one he brought the zaibatsu under his hand, forging a single mighty engine to rebuild Japan. Only one of consequence refused the benign guidance of MITI: the maverick YTC, which had always defied the ministry.
Now chaos threatened his dream and its champion was about to grasp the most powerful instrumentality Ishikawa could imagine, if Doihara’s assessment were correct. Ishikawa was afraid.
He wrenched himself from the window as though it held him in a magnetic field. “Recommendations?” he all but barked.
“Leave them alone.”
Empty of words, he stared at her.
“I know the ministry’s been hostile to Yoshimitsu since they incorporated back in the fifties because old Akaji’s always insisted on doing things his own way. Yet they’ve prospered, employed thousands, brought in needed foreign exchange.” She shrugged. “If they succeed, they can do a lot to speed recovery.”
“They’ll destroy us.”
Her brows pulled together; he’d spoken so softly she wasn’t sure she’d heard him.
“If we permit them to follow their own atomistic course, how will we hold the others? What will Dai-Nihon and Matsuyan and Nissan say, who have deferred to us, obeyed our every instruction without demur? The nation demands unity, Doihara. We can’t permit Yoshimitsu to succeed.”