by David Walton
Naomi stood and stretched. She had skipped lunch, and she was hungry. It was time to find some dinner. The quickest option would be one of the on-campus cafés, which really weren’t too bad. The only problem there was that she might run into someone she knew, but she would just have to risk it. She emerged from her secret lair and went out into the real world.
When Tyler returned to the apartment he shared with Brandon, he found Abby Sumner there, reclining on their sagging, secondhand couch with Brandon, laughing. The apartment was one story of an old Philadelphia townhouse, with tall ceilings, narrow rooms, and warped wooden flooring that threatened splinters to unwary bare feet. Monty Python and the Holy Grail played on the wall, the scene where King Arthur’s company is attacked by the Legendary Black Beast of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh. The two were sitting very close, and Tyler got the idea that the movie wasn’t what they were laughing about. He considered making some excuse and leaving the two of them alone, but it was his apartment, too.
“I thought we were going car shopping,” Tyler said.
“We are,” Brandon said. “I invited Abby to go with us.”
“I invited Naomi, but she turned me down.”
Abby laughed. “Poor Naomi.”
“Poor Naomi?”
“Yeah. She enjoys being with people,” Abby said. “She really does. She just doesn’t admit it to herself.”
“I thought I had said something that offended her,” Tyler said.
“I don’t know if she’s ever been offended in her life. But if she were, she probably wouldn’t tell you. She certainly wouldn’t walk out in a huff.”
“Maybe she was just busy tonight,” Brandon suggested.
“Yeah, busy hiding in the library and working on her software,” Abby said. “Just like every night. I’ll take care of this.” She touched the side of her glasses. “Call Naomi.” They waited while the glasses made the connection. “Hey, girl, it’s Abby. Come on out with us tonight. It’ll be fun.” A pause. “No, you don’t. No, you’re coming out with us. It’s final. Okay, see you soon.” She looked at Tyler. “Problem solved. She’s on her way.”
When Naomi arrived, smiling shyly, the four of them headed to the row of car dealerships on Grays Ferry Avenue. Brandon was the force behind the outing, eyeing cars skeptically under the hood and negotiating hard. The rest of them were just along for the ride, keeping it fun and pushing Brandon to test-drive the most expensive cars in the lot. Eventually, they decided on a pair of electric Honda Alexis. The Alexis weren’t any fancier than the Accords, but as Tyler and Brandon had discussed many times, it only made sense to go electric for a self-driving fleet. An electric car could be designed to return to base and recharge itself a lot easier than a gasoline car could refuel itself. The only problem with electric cars was the infrastructure, and offering cars as a service solved that problem nicely.
After a boring round of paperwork, they signed over Aisha’s money, and the cars were theirs.
“Time to celebrate!” Brandon announced.
“What you need,” Abby said over their first round of drinks, “is a showgirl.”
They sat in a booth, Brandon and Abby on one side and Tyler and Naomi on the other, drinking bottles of Yuengling and munching on a plate of wings.
Brandon coughed. “A what?”
“You’re going to have this big demo for investors, right? You can’t just have it work right. You need to put on a show. Paint your cars all the same, something flashy, with a racing stripe and a company logo.”
“Hondas aren’t very flashy,” Tyler said.
“Hush. You need a flashy paint job, and you need a beautiful showgirl, somebody charismatic, to point at the cars and flash her winning smile and announce each bit as you perform it. You can’t just sit there with your tablet and say, ‘Now we’re going to execute scenario number five.’ You need some sex appeal. You’ve got to sell it.”
“And where would we find such a goddess?” Brandon asked.
Abby threw her arms above her head like a circus performer. “You’re looking at her, baby.”
Brandon frowned. “You want to be a car show bimbo?”
Abby dropped her arms and narrowed her eyes at him. “Be nice. I’m not going to wear a bikini or do a little dance. But if you want investors to rain down millions on you, you can’t just let the technology speak for itself. You’ve got to create a spectacle.”
“She’s right,” Tyler said. “We need a public face. I’m not great in front of an audience, and you’re uglier than an Ood.” He knew Brandon wouldn’t get the Doctor Who reference, but he glanced at Naomi, whose mouth twitched into a shy smile. “For the demo, we need to have a script, perfect timing, show-manship. But even after the demo, we’ll need to be raising public awareness, advertising, and establishing trust that our cars will keep people safe.”
“How many millions do you need?” Abby asked.
“What?” Brandon said.
“Money. What’s your goal? How much do you need to start your company?”
“I . . . uh . . .”
“Whatever we can get,” Tyler said. “We’ll start as small or as big as we have the means for.”
Abby shook her head, her expression scolding. Tyler remembered she was a business major, working on her MBA. “That won’t do at all,” she said. “You need a plan, and you need a make-or-break minimum threshold. More than one threshold, if you like, to designate different levels. But when an investor asks you how much you need to get started, you should have an answer. You can’t just say, ‘Gimme everything you’ve got.’”
“I figured they would have an amount they were willing to give.”
“It’s an investment with considerable risk,” Abby said. “Sorry, but it is. They want to give the right amount—not so little that it doesn’t help, but not so much that they’re throwing money away. You need to be ready with an answer, and know why it’s the right one. Also, are they going to want convertible debt or ownership equity in return for their investment? And are you willing to offer either? They’re going to expect a very large return on investment, if the company is profitable—have you thought about how high you’re willing to go?”
Brandon and Tyler looked at each other. “I think we might need a business major on the team,” Brandon said.
Abby smirked. “You think? Do you know what kind of insurance you’ll need? What taxes you expect to pay? Are you starting a ‘C’ corporation or an LLC?”
“Okay, you’re hired,” Brandon said. “Your salary starts at zero, but with great potential for advancement. Unless . . . how much do we have to pay to get the bikini and the dance?”
She punched him hard in the thigh, and he yelped. “You do it first, and I’ll think about it,” she said.
Later, the evening finally over, Naomi stretched out on her bed with her glasses on and checked the progress of her latest Real-planet world. She was pleased to discover that, despite the harsher environment, as many as seventy of her Mikes were surviving in each iteration. Not only that, but they were communicating through a rudimentary kind of language, mostly to warn each other about the locations of the traps she’d set for them. They didn’t speak by moving vocal chords to create sound waves; the simulation wasn’t sophisticated enough for that. Instead, they used the game’s “action” command in sequences, like a kind of Morse code.
To call it a language, however, was generous. The “action” command provided three different behaviors and their opposites: pick up/put down, build/break, and activate/deactivate. That meant it was a three-bit system, with a total of eight possible meanings. There was no way for them to increase the number of “words” without finding some different mechanism for communication.
She watched them for hours, deciphering the meanings of the signals from how the Mikes reacted. The eight words seemed to be the equivalent of: yes, no, straight, right, left, danger, food, and grass. They never had conversations, per se—they just passed information. For instance, “straight straight ri
ght straight right right danger” indicated the presence of a trap in a certain place. Since the world was broken into square tiles, the directions served as a sufficient indicator of location. Or, they might say “straight right food, straight straight grass” to indicate that one square should be used for planting food and another for grazing their sheep herds. It was no more sophisticated than a bee wiggling its backside to communicate the location of discovered nectar to the rest of the hive.
As Naomi studied the data from these new worlds, however, she started to notice patterns that made a chill creep up her spine. In previous worlds, there had been no leaders, just independent Mikes stumbling upon effective ways to survive. They didn’t collaborate as much as discover the same things at the same times. Each Mike worked for his own survival. Arguably, they didn’t even differentiate between fellow Mikes and other features of the world around them.
Now, however, things were different. Hierarchies had developed, with some Mikes at the bottom, doing most of the work and taking most of the risks. At the top, a single Mike ruled as a kind of king, doing no work, but taking a larger portion of the better food. The kings in each world had some of the best survival rates, however, since they had devised ways to manipulate and control the others, keeping most at subsistence levels while they themselves had plenty. They weren’t just kings. They were tyrants.
Studying the early logs from each world, she could see how it was happening. Mikes lucky enough to find a trap without it killing them learned to exploit that advantage—they would tell others where to find it or how to avoid it, for a price. The most successful of them leveraged that price into more knowledge and more control, until the whole survival pattern of their world revolved around them.
It was the beginning of a society. Not a good one, perhaps, but it felt very human. Just about all human groups had self- organized in similar ways from the very beginning. Many mammals and birds did the same, developing hierarchies, pecking orders, rituals of subservience or challenge. So far, she had seen no evidence that the tyrant Mikes were ever challenged, but perhaps that was due to the basic simplicity of the world. Her Mikes never grew old, never had a bad winter, never had children who grew up and became strong enough to test their elders. Once king, they could stay king forever, or so it seemed.
Not that any of this disproved Searle. Just because they behaved in roughly human ways didn’t make the Mikes intelligent in their own right. She could have written software to do this directly. In fact, she could have written software to imitate humans better than this. But that would have been straightforward if-then-else logic, and thus obviously a simulation, however realistic. What made this seem different was that it was emergent behavior. The deep learning algorithms were trained, not directly written, which made them more mysterious. She didn’t know why they made one choice over another, and so they felt more human to her.
But was it really different? Did her ignorance of their decision-making really mean the Mikes had human-level, self-aware intelligence? Or had she just moved to the outside of the Chinese room, assuming intelligence simply because she couldn’t see what was really happening inside? Humans were very good at anthropomorphizing things they didn’t understand. Or could it be that all intelligence worked this way—even human intelligence—and it was only our inability to follow the complexity of the firings of neurons and synapses in our brains that made it seem like something magical?
Regardless, she knew she couldn’t stop. She no longer worried about publishing; she had more than enough to do that. In fact, even now, if she revealed what she had to the larger world, she would attract a lot of attention. This wasn’t just a senior project; this was a whole field of study. She could see dozens of researchers in various vocations wanting to study her Mikes in different settings and make conclusions about the nature of humanity and intelligence. She had no doubt the media would run with the idea as well. She could be famous.
The thought terrified her. She didn’t like people noticing her across the room, never mind the kind of attention even a modest amount of fame would bring. People would look at her. Eventually, she would have to let the secret out, at least enough to get a passing grade and publish a paper. But not yet. She wasn’t ready for that. Besides, the Mikes were hers. And she had a feeling she had only begun to see what they could do.
She decided to make one more change. Instead of selecting the longest-living Mikes after a simulation had ended to populate the next iteration, she baked the iterations into the world itself. Whenever a Mike survived for twenty years of game time, it would spawn a copy of itself. Not an exact copy—although ninety-eight percent of the weights and biases that made up the layers of its neural net remained the same, the remaining two percent were randomly generated. If it survived another twenty years, it would spawn another copy. This more directly mirrored the natural process of evolution, where the most successful variants produced the most offspring, and those in command ultimately had to make way for the younger.
More importantly, however, it meant a single game world could continue indefinitely. As new Mikes were spawned, they would compete against older versions for available resources. Children would inhabit the same world as their parents, making it possible for improved variants of the genome to overthrow entrenched tyrants. Perhaps later generations would learn to work together to achieve such a coup.
Physically, all Mikes were identical. None could evolve to be stronger or faster than the others, or able to survive with less food, or to eat something new. The only thing that changed was their behavior. A Mike could theoretically live forever in such a world, but the genome randomization should inevitably yield children that were smarter than their parents. And grandchildren that were smarter still. Eventually, the older generations, unable to compete, would be left behind to die.
CHAPTER 6
Tyler, Brandon, Abby, and Naomi spent almost every waking hour in each other’s company. They ate meals together, watched movies together, and most of all, worked on their upcoming demo together. Naomi and Tyler concentrated on the software; Brandon dealt with outfitting the new cars with the needed solenoids, microcontrollers, and sensors; and Abby wrote the script for herself as showgirl.
Abby spent so much time at their apartment that Tyler felt like he’d added a new roommate. She and Brandon were disgustingly in love, barely able to take a breath without kissing, and sitting close enough to each other that they took up only one spot on the furniture. Abby complained that her MBA work increasingly pulled her away from Brandon and the autocar project, but as far as Tyler could tell, she was always around.
Tyler hadn’t gotten that far with Naomi, but he knew he was falling for her, and he thought the feeling was mutual, though it was sometimes hard to tell. They spent a tremendous amount of time together, virtually if not in person, reworking the code for their cars. Her brilliant insights had prompted a significant rewrite of most of what he had written, but once it was done, it would be capable of so much more. He admired her, was impressed by her, loved to be with her.
He couldn’t rush her, though. She was skittish enough about relationships that he was afraid to make a misstep. He feared that if he came on too strong, she’d pull back into her shell and never speak to him again.
He had initially thought she must have been hurt in the past, some kind of trauma perpetrated by someone close to her, but she said that wasn’t it. People just made her nervous, and always had. She couldn’t tell what people were thinking and always imagined they were judging her. The prospect of having a conversation when people could be thinking just anything about her paralyzed her. If she said something out loud, how would she know if it was wrong? They could be laughing at her inside. Better not to say anything at all.
Tyler had felt enough like that at times in his life that he understood, at least somewhat. It wasn’t as intense for him, but he, too, felt a sense of relief and comfort when he was alone, or at least with people he knew well enough not to be afraid of what th
ey thought. Still, he wished he knew how to make her feel safe with him. For the moment, she seemed willing to talk, even share her feelings and fears, but it felt like trying to coax a wild animal to take a piece of food from his hand. If he made any sudden moves, she might bolt, and he would lose her forever.
He had taken to playing a question game with her, so he could get her talking and find out the things about her she didn’t volunteer.
“I’ll start with an easy one this time,” he said. “What’s your favorite color?”
“I’m not six,” she said. “I don’t have a favorite color.”
“You stole that line from Ex Machina,” Tyler said. “That’s cheating.” The science fiction references had become a game, too. They rarely managed to stump each other. “What’s your real answer?”
“It is my real answer,” she said. “I couldn’t pick a favorite color. The others might feel bad.”
This was a very Naomi response, and it made him smile. “Okay, fair enough. Your turn.”
She twisted her mouth to one side, thinking. When she finally spoke, he could barely hear her. “Why do you hang out with me?”
He hesitated, surprised by her sudden directness. He sensed the vulnerability behind the question, too, and answered carefully. “We love what we love. Reason doesn’t enter into it.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, suspicious. “That’s got to be a quote.”
“Yup. Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear. But it’s my real answer, too. I could say I like your knowledge of books, or your mad programming skillz, or your quirky sense of humor, but it’s really none of that, or maybe all of it together. I enjoy being with you. That’s all. I don’t need a reason beyond that.”
She hitched up her shoulders bit by bit as he spoke, doing her turtle-hiding-in-its-shell thing. She didn’t say anything more, so he pressed on. “My turn,” he said. He rubbed his chin and then gave her a devious look. “What’s your most awkward or embarrassing memory?”