by P. W. Singer
“Yeah,” Keegan replied. “It detected someone inside. I think they’re stuck in that booth by the turnstiles, you know, where you ask for directions.”
“And you’re going to send the Terminator in after them?”
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m listening.”
“Nah. Just don’t ask me to sign for that when you lose it.”
With the water now up to its neckline, TAMS had stopped to listen to their conversation. Perhaps the soldier’s uniform had triggered some old program.
“TAMS, you’re still cleared to proceed,” Keegan stated.
“OK.”
It wasn’t a remarkable set of last words, Keegan thought, as the bot disappeared into the murk in a shimmering blue halo generated by its onboard navigation lights. Her AR glasses pushed a notice: Network connection lost.
“This going to work?” the soldier asked.
“Hell if I know.”
“Sergeant Terrence King, Maryland National Guard,” he said. “Your phone app functional? I need to let my wife know I’m OK.”
“Agent Lara Keegan. No, not without the bot boosting the signal.”
The man sighed.
Then light washed over them and Keegan looked back up the escalator and saw a line of people gathered to watch, several turning on their lens cameras to record them, even a few holding out old smartphones to get a better angle.
“FBI! Turn your cameras off!” she shouted back.
“Like that’s ever worked,” said King.
Keegan glared at him, then turned back to the water, waiting for any sign of the robot. Neither spoke as they waited, watching another frog hop past their feet and clamber up the escalator. Then they heard a voice.
“We’re coming up! We’re coming up!” a breathless woman shouted from the far end of the tunnel. Then she appeared, a woman in her fifties. She thrashed at the water with one hand, her other arm being pulled by some force under the water. Just ahead of her a faint blue light got brighter and brighter as it approached beneath the surface.
“We’re up here! Watch the steps at the bottom of the escalator,” said Keegan, wading into the water as TAMS came into view, its head barely clearing the surface. She and King pulled the woman out of the water, the polyester of her blue WMATA uniform dripping sheets of water.
King took off his jacket to wrap the woman up and led her up the stairs.
TAMS, meanwhile, waited down at the bottom of the escalator, the water lapping at its waist, its arm locked on the railing. Keegan thought about what exactly the deputy director would order at this moment.
“Come on, TAMS,” she said. “Get out of the water, hero.”
“OK.”
As the machine exited the murk, water spurted from its joints and sensor ports. On Keegan’s viz screen, it showed that the connection to the bot’s operating system was still not working.
“Confirm diagnostics, TAMS,” Keegan said.
The robot stood still for thirty seconds, until a message read on Keegan’s vizglasses: System reboot complete. Restore network connection.
That meant taking TAMS up to the street level to get a signal. “Follow me to the street and reestablish satellite bandwidth connection.”
“OK.”
At the top of the stairs, she stopped so abruptly that TAMS literally stepped on her heels. Even through the pant leg, the metal edge scraped a piece of skin off the back. “Shit,” she said to herself, but not at the pain.
Waiting there was King, standing at attention. He threw a salute and then started clapping, a steady authoritative rhythm. The crowd of hundreds behind him joined in, wet palms slapping together in applause, humans looking for something good to cling to on a day of awfulness, even if it was a machine.
The National Archives
Washington, DC
The sewage stench that burned the back of the throat. The red high-heeled shoe abandoned in the mud. The desert-tan six-by-six National Guard truck, its wheels thrashing water into a chemical froth that looked like a dirty bubble bath.
As the adrenaline ebbed, it all felt overwhelming. In that moment, though, Keegan reminded herself she’d have to monitor the effect also on TAMS; the robot’s experience during this disaster was foundational, transformative, just as it would be for the entire nation to see its capital deluged. This was a data set unlike any other.1
She knew what awaited at the Washington Field Office: bureaucratic chaos, the bosses jockeying to be in charge, and then long waits to get cleared for whatever their assignment turned out to be. So she found herself drawn in another direction, toward a different kind of duty.
The sound of the bucket brigades rang out two blocks before she saw them, a large crowd singing “The General’s Daughter.” A country song released last year, it was a ballad about a soldier in the Army who died on her first deployment, after which her dad resigned his commission and took his own life. It was about the darkest song everyone knew, which was probably why someone had started singing it. When it first came out, Keegan had wondered if it had a human writer. Seeing its lyrics stitch together so many people at this moment, she doubted it more than ever.
The crowd ranged from federal workers in muddy suits to woolly-bearded veterans who had left their encampment. It was a moment to choose what you cared most about. One line ran from the steps of the National Gallery of Art, another from the National Museum of American History. Their upper levels were free from the flow of water, but the crowd carried out anything that could be rescued from the lower levels. From person to person, they passed the objects, murmuring with curiosity and cheering whenever something crossed their hands that they recognized. A dripping wet red knit cardigan was treated with as much reverence as a gilded portrait by one of the Dutch Masters.2
For Keegan, the choice was the National Archives, which made it TAMS’s selection too. It was slightly cruel, and even ironic, thought Keegan, to underscore TAMS’s lack of free will at that location. But that’s just how it was.
Here, the mission was slightly different. In the waist-deep water, a line of muddy men and women were trying to create a makeshift barrier around the building’s perimeter. Keegan noticed they were keeping clear of a jagged edge of metal sticking out of the water on 9th Street where a ramp leading to an underground garage had been. To her, it looked like one of the Archives’ pop-up flood barriers had structurally failed, maybe from the weight of the water, maybe just from how everything had seemed to go to shit today.
Somebody shouted a hoarse command to hurry up to beat the tide. Pushing back against the Potomac River’s outward flow, the tidal shifts changed the river’s water level by 3 feet each day. On top of the flood, it would be catastrophic. While the nation’s founding documents held in the Archives were safe behind glass in the public display areas two stories above the water, the levels below held many more irreplaceable records. From early letters and diaries of the Founders to the very first photographs and then audio and film recordings of the nation, they there literally told the story of America.
“TAMS, how long until the tide starts to rise?” Keegan asked.
“High tide will occur in two hours and forty-seven minutes.”
“We need to move faster, otherwise the pumps in the Archives won’t be able to keep up.”
The crowd was using anything and everything they could to build the floodwall. Trash bins were overturned and the garbage bags within tied off and then tossed into a pile. Bags of sod were pulled from a landscaper’s truck. Once-hated plastic bags from the gift store were being filled with dirt. Then an Army National Guard truck pulled up and passed out a bin of the all-too-familiar HESCO bags she’d filled with sand or rocks to build temporary bullet-stopper walls in war zones.
“Agent Keegan, you have instructions to report to the Washington Field Office,” TAMS said.
“Correct, but this is where we need to be right now. The priority is to help. That mission comes first.”
Keegan wedged her way into
the line of people, TAMS following. They quickly worked out the pace. A man in shorts and a University of Kansas basketball jersey, a tourist whose vacation had just turned far more interesting than planned, would pass her a bag. She’d then pass it to TAMS, and then the machine passed it to the woman beside it, who was wearing a sun-faded purple running jacket that was torn at the left shoulder.
At the first handoff, the woman had given the machine a curious look. She looked to be in her early sixties. Keegan observed her gaunt frame and silver-haired buzz cut, surmising she was one of those runners who still moved like they were twenty years younger and could care less about anything else but running fast.
“Is that your bot?”
“Nope, it’s actually yours. Gov test system. Seemed as good a time as any to put our tax dollars to good use.”
“Helluva test.” Satisfied, the woman went back to work.
For the next fifteen minutes, Keegan forgot everything around her but the handoff: one bag passed on and then another. The smell of labor soon overpowered the stink of the flood. The only noise TAMS made was a slight grating noise, from fine siltlike mud and grit getting inside its servos.
The woman gave a deep sigh and bent over at the waist.
“You OK?” Keegan asked.
“Yeah, just a stich in my side. Unlike your machine there, I’m tiring out. Too bad it can’t do more.”
Keegan realized the woman was right. She’d been going about this the wrong way. “TAMS,” she said. “Build a wall around the Archives as rapidly as possible.”
“OK,” said TAMS. The robot ran through the water, leaving a sloshing white wake behind it. It picked a bag of sod off the truck and then ran back, placing it on their stack. It then did it again at the exact same speed, moving so quickly that the humans stopped stacking and watched.
“It’s going to run out of those soon,” the woman said. Without instruction, the chain of people redirected, all of them now focusing on filling bags to keep TAMS supplied. They worked in a frenzied burst of activity, inspired by the newfound efficiency and also not wanting to get beaten by the demands of a single robot. Half of them dug up dirt with anything that got traction, using shovels taken from the landscaper’s truck to the poles once used to hold display signs. The other half packed the bags by hand. Keegan’s throat was dry, despite her being soaked to the bone. Her back ached, and so did her leg, but it felt good. There was nothing to focus on beyond the feeling of dirt in your hands and the satisfying sound, almost like a great collective sigh, that the bags made when TAMS stacked yet another.
“It seems that the Declaration of Independence will live to see another disaster, Agent Keegan.”
Keegan looked over and there was Modi, though it took her a moment to recognize him. His suit and tie had been replaced with slate-gray tactical pants and shirt. With ripstop fabric and triple stitching, it was what the civilian advisors used to wear when they came out to visit her unit in the field. It must be pretty bad, she thought, if they were handing those out now to the geek squad.
“What are you doing down here?” she said. “And how’d you find us?”
“Hopefully doing some good. That wasn’t going to happen back at the office,” he said. “And I have my privileges.” He pointed down to the screen on his own Watchlet. There was a small map app open with a pulsing red dot. “I may not be on the mobile network, but I have a lock on TAMS.”
Rather than let him steer the conversation to why she had not checked into the field office, Keegan just smiled and said, “Well, let’s put you to work then too.”
The two teamed up, Keegan digging into a plot of sidewalk grass in front of the Navy Memorial with the base of what had once been a traffic barrier and Modi packing the dirt into bags from a dry cleaner. The woman in purple carried them to the central pile that had been set up for TAMS, while back and forth TAMS went at the same pace, stacking and stacking.
Where the robot placed the bags appeared random, but Keegan knew there was some kind of pattern driving the selection. When Keegan was eleven, her uncle had taken her to see the hive where he worked, a sprawling distribution center near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He worked as a technician, performing repairs on the warehouse bots. They had zoomed around in what seemed like a frenzy, some driving at top speed on the extra-slick concrete floors, some on tracks that ran along the ceiling. It all looked like chaos, but he had explained that was actually the point.3
“What if I gave you a tube of toothpaste, where would you put it in the warehouse?” he’d asked her.
“Whichever row all the toothpaste is in,” she’d replied.
“That’s what a human would do,” he’d explained. “But a thinking machine, they’ll just fit that single tube of toothpaste in wherever it goes best, not just by fit, but factoring in everything from its expiration date to the anticipated date someone is going to order it, relative to the date that the book or coffeemaker or whatever it is wedged behind is going to be ordered and pulled off the shelf. Pretty cool, huh?”
He’d been less excited about it all two years later, when he’d lost his job after the company deployed new modular robots that could repair themselves.4
She took a breather, and Modi stopped too. He then tried to wipe a clump of mud from his face, but only smeared it with his glove. “Here,” then she brushed off the smudge with her bare hand.
“This is definitely not the Singularity that they promised,” said Modi.5
“Yeah, I thought the plan was for us to be sitting around in our mechanical replacement bodies eating bonbons all day by now.”
“Instead of wiping literal shit off our faces as we burn ourselves out trying to keep up with a robot?”
They laughed and went back to filling bags. After a minute, she looked back over at Modi.
“It does raise a good question, though: What are we really hoping to get out of all these machines? I mean, look at TAMS. In the end, is it going to be like this glorified shovel?” she said, waving the pole she’d been digging with. “For all its smarts, just a better tool?”
“Really, really better,” Modi said.
“Or something more, something beyond just a tool? Something that we’re going to have to think of differently?”
“We doing a session now?” said Modi. “Here?”
“You got somewhere better to be?” Keegan asked.
“Just about anywhere,” Modi said. “But I appreciate you trying to keep my mind off how bad my back hurts.” He paused. “I do think it’s something more. Look at how TAMS is integrated into the group here, robot alongside people, the output of the team more than its parts. Even more, it’s not just integrated with the people, but changed them.”
“That’s the part that worries me.”
“What do you mean? As long as more work is getting done, do you think anybody really cares?”
“Not in the moment,” said Keegan. “It’s when there’s time to think that we humans get into trouble.”
“That’s why you don’t like talking to me?”
“Well, not in your office,” she said.
“But it’s a conversation we need to have. Not just you, all of us,” he said. “It’s not so much what we think about them. It’s what are we supposed to feel about a robot? Not just now, but what about when it becomes more like us? Or even worse, does more than us?”
“We used to feel it when our bots got whacked out on mission,” Keegan said. “You’d get angry at the enemy for plugging your bots in a different way than you would if they took out a radio or a Humvee. The worst was the legged ones.”
“And TAMS is much more than one of your sniffers or a vacuum,” Modi said. “It’s your partner.”
“No, I’ve had partners,” said Keegan. “It’s nothing like this.”
“But it might be. Because it’s always learning to be. Here, look at this.” He swiped an app open on his Watchlet screen and showed it to Keegan, drawing closer to her. It showed TAMS’s network activity
, accessing news coverage and documentaries about human behavior during past flood events.
“But that’s not really what a partner is. This just shows it doesn’t need me at all.”
“Not so fast,” said Modi. “You gave it the mission, right?”
“Yeah, I told it to build a wall. But I could have just stayed home and told it that.”
“Do you think you would have figured out the situation from afar? Or if TAMS just showed up here, without you, that it would have teamed up with the humans this way? I doubt it. It would make a mistake, maybe step on a toe or just annoy people by its very presence in a high-stress situation. Pretty soon, it would be kicked over on its side in the muck, maybe a sandbag stacked on its head. You were both needed, just maybe not in the way we traditionally think.”
“So give the robot a mission and protect it from the bad guys? Not all that different from how I used ’em in the Corps.”
He stooped to pick up another bag and held it open for Keegan to fill. “It’s not that simple. What you did in the Marines as a wrangler was what’s known as the ‘centaur model,’ like the Greek myth of the guy whose body was blended with a horse.6 It still treated the robot as a tool, much like the feet of the horse just took the guy wherever he wanted. The next step is a ‘shepherd,’ a human guiding a robot as it learns its way around the world.”7
Keegan pounded at the dirt with another stab. “Yeah, I remember that chess master, the one who first got beat by an AI and then became a guru on how humans had to adjust to AI, came up with that concept.8 A big part of it was that while an AI could beat a chess master, the AI turned out to be unable to beat an ordinary player working with an AI.”
“And you just gave away that you know more about all this than you let on,” he said with a bemused look. “But I knew that already.”
“I contain multitudes.”9
“Well, then, Whitman, that’s what you gotta wrap your head around. You’re still trying to get the job done, but have to do so in ways well beyond the machine just being an extension of yourself. You said the question was ‘What are we really hoping to get out of all these machines?’ I say it’s beyond that. Where does that machine’s new ability, new intelligence, take us all to next? Not just for you and TAMS, but the future of our existence? What happens as we’re working, and living, more and more alongside something that thinks and acts in ways we no longer understand?” He wiped his brow again. “Switch?”