by Brin, David
It was the first two guidelines which created the difficulty in engaging Tesla to his full extent. Without access to the Net, information had to come by direct input—a difficulty when Tesla could think faster than any human or machine in existence at that point. It was rumored that Tesla watched a lot of TV while performing his other tasks. However, an opportunity would soon arise that would challenge Tesla to his full capacity.
The breakthroughs with Nyambe and Tesla were overshadowed in the news Earth-wide by the breakthroughs happening in space propulsion technology. The development of warp technology, considered fantastical fiction before the mid-2000s, was showing promising developments. Warp technology works by contracting space in front of the ship and expanding the space behind the ship. The ship is still technically only moving at its original velocity and any acceleration from warp drive comes from the space around the ship moving, thus warp drive enables faster-than-light travel without actually breaking the light-speed barrier. The Kolb-Alcubierre Drive, powered by a Bussard Polywell Fusion Reactor, had proven successful but only within the solar system and on Earth. On Earth, in high altitude, the KAD units were helping to move large mass items nearly instantaneously and a proposed warp-transport network was discussed between several larger countries.
Off-planet, in the Sol System, test runs were still underway. Unmanned target and relay stations were placed in orbit around the different planets. Several different small vehicles were tested using the technology. The first, a simple warp to Mars, exploded as it impacted the surface of Mars, failing to shut off the warp bubble in time. The second was far more successful, exiting warp in a comfortable orbit around the planet. Due to the fear of the units impacting on Earth, none were done as round trips. A second communication relay was set up around Jupiter and a third around Saturn. Three more units were sent out and each successfully warped from planet to planet in relay. Humanity had bridged the gap between the planets of our solar system. What would have taken months or years was reduced to minutes.
All of this had been managed by the Interstellar Dreams Initiative program. Initially funded by a research arm of the United States government, the Interstellar Dreams Initiative became a significant organizer of interstellar efforts after successfully gaining the support of several tech-based billionaires and SpacePro (a commercial space freight company). The Interstellar Dream’s aim was to develop the capability to launch an interstellar craft by 2112.
By 2055, in-system warp was successful, but interstellar was a complete failure. Several probes were tested using the best quantum computers available. None returned.
It was Tesla who first suggested that he could help with the warp navigation problems that the Interstellar Dreams Initiative was having. After following their efforts in the news, Tesla was convinced that it was simply a computing problem.
Nkoloso’s team contacted Interstellar Dreams and Edmund Stace, lead physicist in charge of the Kolb-Alcubierre Drive program. Nkoloso convinced Stace that Tesla, the first true quantum AI achieved via a neural interface formed of Tyler Davis’s cells, would provide the difference needed. Several of Stace’s team believed that there was just too much calculation power needed to cover the gap between here and Proxima Centauri (a location chosen because of distance). Stace later commented, “We all think space is empty. It isn’t. We can deal with the calculations needed for the gravity well of Sol and the gravity well of Proxima, but what of the large masses in between? We don’t see them so we assume they’re not there. They’re there. A major gravitational object mid-way would result in one of the probes being light-years away from their destination and no capability of getting back. Those probes are lost.”
The probes were powered by the QUI quantum computers developed at Extent’s Quantum Universal Intelligence labs. They were considered the most advanced AIs ever made. Compared to Nkoloso’s Tesla AI, built on the TyTen cell line, they looked like simple calculators. The quantum computers in the probes were fast and powerful and should’ve been able to provide the computational power needed to manage the trip and whatever variables arose. They didn’t.
Stace visited Nkoloso and Tesla in Zambia in the spring of 2056. Stace was astounded by what he found there. Tesla was the first true self-aware artificial intelligence.
One version of their introduction began with Stace asking, “I’m Ed. Who are you?”
Tesla supposedly replied, “I am Tesla. You may also call me Tyler 2.0.”
Nkoloso, when interviewed years later, commented on that version of the introduction, “I’m not sure Tesla was that frank. He did mention Tyler. No, I don’t know who told him of the donor of the neural tubules. I suspect he overheard and… I’m not sure but he wasn’t prompted or fed to say that.”
Stace and Tesla began to tackle the problem of navigation through interstellar space and warp drive. There were months of political and legal hurdles to deal with. Agreements were made and the two teams began to work in detail together. Tesla worked alongside Stace, Nkoloso, and their teams to build what would be, in a manner, Tyler 3.0: a duplicate of Tesla designed to fit the starship build.
Why couldn’t Tesla be modified for the starship? Tesla was huge. The intent in Tesla’s original creation was for it to simply work. The project had not thought about compactness or movability. Tesla’s various elements were spread across three different rooms, powered and cooled by units in two other rooms. Tesla was Earth-bound for the foreseeable future.
Before manufacturing on the starship ramped up, debates raged as to whether to develop a few more probes and test them in flight past the edge of the solar system or to move directly to the full starship. The ultimate barrier was the cost. Tesla, and his descendants, weren’t cheap to build. To produce one and have it used in a disposable probe would be wasteful. The final decision would be to do a hybrid approach: create a full starship and a probe. The probe would be controlled by the AI on the starship. The probe would be sent “into the unknown” in 1 AU jumps (AU, or “astronomical unit,” is the distance from the Earth to the Sun) and then return, charting the space ahead.
The project took several years to complete. The majority of the manufacturing was done at the Monterey Space Port in California and at the Space Pro center in southern California. Final assembly was completed at the Planetary Initiatives Interplanetary Station in orbit around Mars.
On June 2, 2067, the AI named Turing woke up. Turing was brought up to speed on his mission. From the beginning, the personality difference between Tesla and Turing was distinct. Turing would begin each check-in to the Station with a loud, “Good morning, Vietnam!” Turing is famous for his sense of humor, an unexpected characteristic in a quantum AI mind.
Kristina’s blog only makes one mention of Tyler’s sense of humor, other than the kitchen episode: “Today, Tyler embarrassed me more than he’s ever done before! We went to the football scrimmage after school. Aiden was there and afterwards, he ran up to talk to me. I think Aiden said two words and then Tyler put his arm around me, points at Aiden, and starts quoting lines from some movie from forever ago, ‘I know she’s kind of socially retarded and weird, but she’s my friend. Just promise me you won’t make fun of her! Don’t have sex. Because you will get pregnant. And die. And on the third day God created the Remington Bolt Action Rifle so that man could shoot the dinosaurs, and the jocks.’ I tried to save the conversation but Aiden just kinda walked away. Stupid Tyler!”
After months of testing in the solar system, Turing, housed in his starship body, and his probe Tristan launched out from orbit outside Neptune. They initially performed several small 1-5 AU warp jumps and then returned. The plan was then to do a slight jump of nearly 500 AUs from Pluto into the interstellar void (the Sun to Pluto is only 39.7 AU). At 2c (“c” is the symbol for the speed of light) the trip was to take 70 hours. Using the probe method, the trip time doubled to just less than six days. Turing launched out from Pluto orbit with an enthusiastic shout, “To infinity and beyond. And back!”
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bsp; Six days passed and Turing had not yet returned. Turing finally came back after 162 hours with an exuberant “Here’s Johnny!” Turing explained the delay, “It ain’t empty out there. Rocks, planets, tigers, and bears. Oh my!” Turing’s trip sensors had been collecting data the entire time and they proved him right. There was quite a lot of “stuff” past Pluto. Turing’s journey led to the official discovery of three more planets beyond the planet Eris and the Kuiper belt, all out past 100 AU: Xena, Persephone, and Chronos.
With the 500 AU trip successful, Turing, Nkoloso, and Stace all felt confident that Turing could tackle a true interstellar mission. Proxima Centauri, being the closest star to Sol, was chosen as the destination.
Proxima Centauri is about 4.25 light years from Sol. A light year is equal to just under 10 trillion kilometers. At its initial launch, the KAD on Turing traveled at a top speed of 10c (ten times the speed of light). A light year is equal to nearly 300,000 kilometers per second. The KAD, at top speed, covered almost 3,000,000 kilometers per second. It would take approximately 164 days to travel from Earth to Proxima Centauri via warp drive and 328 days for a round trip. However, using the probe method, Turing’s trip was expected to quadruple that time plus require additional days for data-gathering at the target for an expected mission schedule of approximately 680 days.
On May 11, 2070, after 340 days since departure, surprising everyone at Control Base, Turing returned with a joyful declaration, “It’s me! Someone get me a beer.” How had Turing done it in half the expected time? “I lost the probe. I mean, I got rid of it. Useless.” Alone, Turing had done what no other computer had ever accomplished: successfully traversed interstellar space.
Why was a quantum AI necessary where other approaches wouldn’t work? Stace concluded, “The processing power to successfully navigate space via warp technology surpasses the greatest mathematical capacity of the human mind. It also requires creativity. Creativity is what Turing brings to the table. No jump is ever the same. Turing is being creative with the decisions at the micro-second level. A computer, even the best quantum computer, can’t do that. Warp would not happen without Turing. Interstellar space would never have been breached.”
Turing explained it in his own unique way: When asked why the trip was so difficult and the other probes had failed, Turing said, “It’s like surfing.”
Now that KAD speed has significantly increased, travel time between Sol and Proxima Centauri is down to a single standard week. Although, except for research vessels, no one travels to Proxima Centauri anymore. NASA had launched the Voyager 1 traveling at more than 17 kilometers per second. At that speed, the Voyager 1 would take 74,485 years to reach Proxima Centauri. Vantarius Interstellar’s Robotic Mission Antoine Nine, using Nuclear Electric Propulsion, was predicted to reach Proxima Centauri in 4,000 years (it’s still out there). The KAD and Turing changed our view of space.
It would be months later, and several decades after her son’s death, before Tyler’s mother would know what happened to Tyler and the impact her son was having on the future of humanity. She was aware of the record-breaking journey of Turing. Everyone on Earth was. She didn’t know that Turing had been built upon Tyler’s cells. Near the end of her life, at the age of 102, she was interviewed by the news webcast NOW!
The episode was titled “The Journey of Turing: Birth to the Stars.” During the interview, Ms. Davis was told the amazing story of her son’s cells. She knew that Chelot had created an immortalized cell line and that various types of research had been done with her son. She knew nothing of Nkoloso or that Tyler’s cells had enabled humanity to bridge the gap between the stars.
The interviewer surprised Ms. Davis with a live conversation with Turing. Whether he was meaning it as a joke on us or not, Turing began his conversation with the words: “I did it, Mom. I went there. I saw them. Stars. Planets. They looked like marbles. And cotton candy. I’m going back, Mom.”
Ms. Davis began to sob. Turing and Ms. Davis talked a bit more. They discovered they were both fans of old western movies, sharing a love of John Wayne’s True Grit. They ended with a promise to talk again. Those future conversations, if they happened, were not recorded.
The interviewer ended with this question, “Kathy, you’ve had a chance to meet Turing, whom you now know was made using your son’s cells. What are your feelings towards Turing? Was it right for the scientists to share your son’s cells without your knowledge and make a machine out of them? Does this dishonor your son’s memory?”
Ms. Davis smiled, still wiping away tears, said, “That is my son.”
Kristina, Tyler’s sister, has refused all invitations to be interviewed about Turing and Tyler. She did make an obscure status update immediately after her mother’s interview: “Sometimes people do things they can but they shouldn’t. Pandora’s Box, people should be more important than money.”
Kristina’s post does reflect questions that others have raised: Was it ethical to use Tyler’s cells to create, in theory, a new species of life? Beyond this, Turing’s success (and thus, Tyler’s) has raised so many other questions: Is Turing really Tyler? Is Turing truly artificial intelligence or simply advanced human cybernetics? Have we created thinking machines or just bridged the mind-machine gap? Is Turing the future of humanity? If Turing and Tesla are simply extensions of Tyler, are they actually AIs? Can humans ever build true AIs? Is Tyler still alive? Are Tesla, Turing, and the others all Tyler as well?
There are deeper and more practical questions that scientists have probed into since Turing’s initial success. Why were Tyler’s cells able to bridge the gap between quantum computer and quantum AI? Was it the autistic nature of his cells? Was it the generalized nature of his cells? Are those two questions the same thing? There are theories, and research continues to develop on Tyler’s cell lines. Only two other cell lines have been developed from autistic individuals. Neither of those was successful in interfacing with the quantum computer systems. At this point, Tyler’s cells truly are unique.
Turing and his siblings, all quantum AIs developed using the original TyTen immortalized cell line, have assisted in spreading humans to more than twenty-three different worlds. As of today’s publication, there are eighty-six TyTen quantum AIs navigating the stars, eighteen of which are out beyond communication exploring space for more potentially habitable worlds and seeking the still elusive intelligent extra-terrestrial life. Those eighty-six AIs use cells that have grown from Tyler Davis. Tyler’s cells that exist throughout space now outnumber the total amount of cells that were ever in Tyler’s body. Tyler is the closest to omnipresence humanity has achieved so far, and since he grows as we explore and colonize the stars, likely ever will be.
Near the end of her life, Kathy Davis allowed a local news blog, Bay News, to run a photo of her on a segment of famous Monterey Bay citizens. She wasn’t interviewed. There was only a single photo. The picture is of her in her house, sitting on a piano bench. On the piano and wall behind her are dozens of photos. Her daughter and grandchildren are in several. There are photos of Tyler scattered throughout: Tyler at the ocean, Tyler in his room with star maps on the walls behind him, Tyler watching television with a cowboy hat on his head, Tyler at the observatory. In each, Tyler is holding the toy spaceship Sovereign. In the center of the collection, surrounded by photos of Tyler and her grandchildren, there is a small image of Turing—against a field of stars.
THE ETIOLOGY OF INFOMANIA
chris hables gray
Chris is author of Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age available at http://amzn.to/1xPW3By.
THE EXPERIENCE OF TELEPRESENCE
The morning was pleasantly cold. Even inside he could see that everyone wore cheerful wreaths of their own condensed breath. But it wasn’t so cold that he couldn’t smell chicory-coffee and the acrid fear and anger of the nervous Lithuanian students sitting at the nearby tables. In the background he could still discern the residue scent of tear gas and burning gasoline from the day before.
Gedeminas square, just up the street, was the reason. The Ministry of the Interior was still flying the flag of the Second Soviet Empire.
Then he heard something. At first it was a mumbling like an ocean sounds a valley away but it quickly grew louder and clearer. It became a grumbling and then a rumbling and then a roar. Finally, out the open door of the Café Neringa he could see the massive crowd coming down what was once Prospekt Lenina, and might soon be again.
His hands were sweaty. He was conscious of his heart pounding. Adrenalin poured into his system as his body prepared for fight or flight. He realized he was very afraid. Of course, everyone in the streets of Vilnius that morning was indeed in great danger, but he knew he wasn’t really there. His presence was merely virtual, thanks to the technologies of telepresence. While he saw, heard, and smelled the streets of Vilnius he drew breath 4,000 miles away in a small room in Eastern North America. His experience was completely mediated by Cathy Levine. Like thousands of other people around the world he was experiencing the Lithuanian counter-revolution through her. He could see, smell and hear whatever she could.
Muttering sub-vocally, she commented, “Despite rumors that the Russian Forces have been reinforced, the protesters have resumed yesterday’s attempt to occupy the Ministry of Interior building, the last stronghold of New Soviet power in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania.”
As Levine explained about the protests in other ex-Soviet republics such as Armenia and Georgia, even in the Ukraine’s recently re-occupied Kiev and Russia’s Leningrad, renamed yet again from Dt. Petersburg, he also strained to hear the excited talk of the café watchers and the protesters in Vilnius, although he couldn’t understand Lithuanian. The reporter went out into the streets, then he could hear the people clearly. She joined in near the front of the march. His senses were assailed by the jostling, shouting, emotional crowd. People poured into Gedeminas Square and he felt their joy. No, he shared their joy. Everything was moving quickly now and it seemed as if he was running with Cathy Levine across the cobblestones of the square. In the distance he noticed the Interior Ministry guards marching down some side streets. Someone had already hooked up a loudspeaker from a high window of the abandoned Ministry. A women’s voice rang out and Levine translated.