Galatea 2.2, page 10
How they arrived at South Station in bleak, freezing drizzle. How they stood soaked in grime-coated twilight, trying to find a bus stop. How she burst into tears: Where have you taken me?
Even hardship felt like a giggle. An adventure. I would have pitched permanent base camp in a war zone with that woman. And I made her feel safe, for a while. As if even this wrong turn were part of an ingenious thread. We were young then, and would live forever. All those disasters, bad judgments, breakages, mistakes: we protected each other, simply by insisting we were still together and happy. That nothing mattered but care.
Now, sometimes, as I trained B or walked back from the Center at nights to my deserted bungalow, panic ambushed me. Some mental picture would trigger it—remembering I’d left the cognitive oven on with something in it. The slightest reminder reached out and laced my ribs. Someone was in trouble, trapped in front of a station in an unidentifiable city without cash, map, or language. And I could not buffer or save them. Someone pitching into free fall. Either me or my old friend.
We settled into B. We found a place. We printed up résumés, complete with convincing Career Goals. Jobs, however anemic, dropped on us like a godsend. I took up work as a technical editor. C. guarded paintings at the Fine Arts.
My images of the two of us, in those early days, needed no gallery guard. C. and I, on our first Thanksgiving, dressing the ruinously expensive Cornish game hens when we didn’t have two dimes to rub together. Listening, setless, to the sounds of the big game next door, holding our breath to hear who was ahead. That Christmas, crayoning a tree onto several sheets of newsprint and taping it to the apartment wall.
That much was almost cheating to remember. All I had to do was turn my eyes to some neutral screen—the wet leaves in the gutters as I walked, the fat gray cumulus—and I could see any scene from that year I could bear to look at. The focal trace that printed those pictures now lent its apparatus to the reverse process. Ouija-like, it retrieved from the file and held my attention on the reduced film of a place now past verifying.
Lentz had speculated about that strange doubling in one of his more controversial articles. Memory was a parasite, he proposed. It opportunistically used perception’s circuitry for its playback theater.
And I have that whole parasite intact. Nothing required to bring it forth but numbness. True, the specifics of that moment have grown stylized. Artist’s conceptions. I can check nothing. C. kept the book, the one where we pasted the paper trail of our shared existence. The documents are all elsewhere, trashed, or transferred to a stranger’s long-term storage.
I CAME TO him depressed.
“It’s mind-fogging,” I told him. “Incomprehensible. I’ve been reading. We don’t have an agnostic’s prayer in hell, do we? One hundred billion neurons. That’s twenty for each person on earth. How many trillion synaptic connections? And all arranged with anatomical precision into who knows how many tangled subsystems …”
“Sixty-three,” Lentz supplied. He was leaning back in his office chair again, reclined, as on the night I first saw him. I couldn’t tell if he was being snide or if he’d finally flipped.
“And even the most trivial of the subsystems solves problems so far past our ability to compute it makes my limbic system spin. We’d need an exponential number of exponents just to number the firings on the way to a self-reflective thought. If we scale our toy up even a little bit bigger than it is now, the thing will grind to a standstill. Responding intelligently to ‘Good afternoon’ would take it a lifetime.”
“Well, we could always tell Plover and Hartrick that Teacher’s Pet needs a slight extension to get its paper in. Say, no later than the next Ice Age.”
Lentz pulled up a subroutine on his terminal and began to massage it. He was a hyperactive child, happiest when several things happened at once.
“Even if we could keep track of the wiring …” my voice cracked.
“Even if we could get all our tin-can telephones spaghettied up to the same switchboard: there still wouldn’t be enough processing power in this part of the galaxy to synchronize their firing.”
Lentz chuckled. “That’s too exaggerate.”
It was eerie. His cruel imitation was tone-perfect. Chen, to the letter. The vicious ear alone would be tough to duplicate on the most advanced of machines.
“Come on, Marcel. Buck up. It’s not so tough. What saves us is that we don’t have to do everything. No motion, no vision, no smell or sensation, no pain, no reflex response, no process control … If you knew what it took to reach out and grasp an object, to pick up a glass, you’d be completely incapable of doing it.”
“If all we had to do was pick things up. We’re trying to get something to understand.”
“Marcel, I’ve never seen you like this. Remarkable. What happened to the cold fish we’ve come to know and love?” He spoke askance now, more intent on the screen than on me. The hypnotic, half-attentive intensity of someone pretending concentration. “Listen. I’ve been trying to explain this to you. In some fundamental way, it’s easier to do high-level stuff than low. It takes fewer neurons to link ‘walk,’ ‘through,’ and ‘doorway’ into some associated cluster than it takes for you to carry out the words.”
“Maybe so. But think how many clusters—”
“You’re overwhelmed because you’re still thinking like Plover. You still think we have to lay out the rules and specify all the computations ourselves. That would be incomprehensibly complex. But we’re not going to write out those calculations. We’re going to feed the already languaged world to Imp B and let it take the bits apart and reassemble them.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’ve done that lecture. But, Engineer. The size! Think of what we’d have to tell it before anything made sense. We’re talking an index magnitudes bigger than the universe it points to.”
“The universe will be its own index. The isomorphic contour map, the way the data gets packed together.”
“What does that mean? Okay. Suppose we read it the line ‘He clasps the crag with crooked hands’ …”
“Oh no. Not him. Anybody but him.”
“Then we have to tell it about mountains, silhouettes, eagles, aeries. The difference between clasping and gripping and grasping and gasping. The difference between crags and cliffs and chasms. Wings, flight. The fact that eagles don’t have hands. The fact that the poem is not really about an eagle. We’ll have to teach it isolation, loneliness …”
“It’ll know all about those. It’ll grow into knowledge you won’t even need to spell out. Knowledge will be a by-product of the shape its weight-landscape takes, from bending to the spoken world’s shape.”
“… how a metaphor works. How nineteenth-century England worked. How Romanticism didn’t work. All about imperialism, pathetic projection, trochees …”
Lentz started laughing. At least that meant he heard me. “Yes, there’s a certain density out there it will have to become comfortable with. Give it time. How did you acquire that density? Half a meg, half a meg, half a meg onward.”
“Me? I don’t know what the bloody poem means. I wouldn’t analyze that thing again if my life depended on it.”
“That’s my point. We humans are winging it, improvising. Input pattern x sets off associative matrix y, which bears only the slightest relevance to the stimulus and is often worthless. Conscious intelligence is smoke and mirrors. Almost free-associative. Nobody really responds to anyone else, per se. We all spout our canned and thumbnailed scripts, with the barest minimum of polite segues. Granted, we’re remarkably fast at indexing and retrieval. But comprehension and appropriate response are often more on the order of buckshot.”
“I’m beginning to see. You’re not elevating the machine. You’re debasing us. Took me long enough.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Marcel,” Lentz cooed. “Much of intelligence isn’t really that bright.”
“I can’t believe this. You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Massively parallel pattern matching. We only pretend to be syllogistic creatures. In fact, we identify a few constraints, then spin the block endlessly until it drops in the hole. Have you read an undergraduate paper lately? You should see what I have to deal with in the intro sequences alone. And the stuff I teach requires no real world knowledge at all! You know the old ‘Show your work for partial credit’? It’s when they show their work that I want to give even the ones who solve the problem sets a zero.”
“Are you exempting yourself from this critique of intelligence?”
“Not really. This conclusion stared me in the face for thirty years before I saw it.”
“All right. Let’s say you’re right.”
“Let’s do.”
“It doesn’t change the facts. In order to produce a remotely plausible association matrix for six measly Tennyson lines, our candidate will need a file cabinet two global hemispheres wide.”
My objections were starting to bore Lentz. He stood up. It always frightened me when the man assumed the vertical. He began fiddling with the jumpers on the new neurodal processor board prior to fitting it into the expansion chassis. I thought of those brain surgeons who stimulate conscious patients’ cortexes and what synesthesias the probe elicits.
“That’s a pretty figure of speech, Marcel. And doubtless it’s the sign of some nominal intelligence on your part. But have you read your own school papers lately? Give me Middlemarch, I’ll spin you off a few amorphous generalities, all qualified and deniable.”
“What do you know about that book?” I asked, too quickly. It was Taylor’s book, the one he’d given his scholarly life to. The one I’d written on, analyzed for him. The novel where I’d discovered novels. The mere title in Lentz’s mouth sounded creepy, as if I’d been spied on.
Of course he ignored me. Lentz ignored all direct challenges. Only the shrewdest or most slow-witted of machines could hit upon that conversational tactic.
“Even if you’re right,” I retreated, “it would take us forever to teach it sufficient amorphous generalities.”
Lentz roused himself from distraction. “What do you want? We have ten months. Ten months is several generations these days. Plus, we don’t have to be humanly intelligent. Our brain doesn’t have to correspond to real mentation. We just have to be as good at paraphrase, by any route we care to take. And for that, we can fly, flat out. If you ever stop talking and pitch in.”
I stood and helped him assemble the new card into Imp B’s backplane. Manual labor: the extent of my contribution to date. “It strikes me that the thing we’re trying to get as good as is damn near unparaphrasable.”
“Oh, pish. It’s the easiest thing in the world to take in a human. Remember AI’s early darling, ELIZA, the psychoanalyst? ‘You remind me of my father,’ the human types. ‘Tell me more about your father,’ the machine answers. Remember the student who found the thing up and running on a deserted terminal? Struck up a conversation. Got steadily more frustrated. Ended up shrieking at the sadist on the other end to quit jerking him around.”
Exactly how I ended up every time I talked to Lentz. “So all we’re building is a deception?”
“Consciousness is a deception.” Lentz grimaced. He stared into some middle distance. The pause was long and awful. I didn’t know how to fill it.
At length, I had to say something. “You’re not suggesting that Son of B is going to be conscious, are you?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Marcel. You’re making this argument a duck shoot. No, of course not. Nor do we have to make it conscious. We don’t have to give it sensations either, or even make it think. We just have to make it a reasonable apple-sorter. Get it to interpret utterances, slip them into generic conceptual categories, and then retrieve related ‘theoretical’ commentary from off the prepackaged shelf.”
“And what are we doing next week?”
“Touché, Marcel. You’re right, for once. Let’s just take the baby steps first.”
“As they say to skydivers: that first step is a killer.”
“Nah. The first step’s a cakewalk. We can beat the hell out of a developing infant, in any case. First off, our baby never needs a nap. Never. We can feed it around the clock, once things start to take off. Second, a kid’s neurons aren’t even fully myelinated until age twelve or so. They’re erratic. Trying to get them to potentiate is like writing in Jell-O.”
Not long after that conversation, I learned that the only child Lentz ever raised had disowned him.
I STILL THOUGHT of B as a composite of makeshift components. Silk-screened cards populated with ICs on the one side and word frequency lists by parts of speech on the other. Each of its distributed, loosely linked subsystem nets was a community of neurodes, and each neurode a community of shifting allegiances.
Day after day, I trained these micro–circus animals to respond to my voice. Pattern generalization became simple sentence parsers, the way push-ups become pectorals. The stacked layers began to recognize—and even make—rudimentary distinctions. I told it: John is taller than Jim. By copying the repeated ur-models, it then reassured me that, yes, Jim is shorter than John.
But even such simple manipulations of properties could throw it for an infinite loop. The kettle has more coffee than the cup, but the cup is fuller. That conclusion needed to wash recursively through the mesh several times before B got comfortable with it.
As with many younger sibs, B turned A’s personality inside out. While it handled the two-word sentence drill with curt aplomb, it turned garrulous at anything longer. This second set of arrays found more patterns in our sentence prompts than either of us intended.
“B is sick,” Lentz greeted me one day on my arrival at the lab.
“Oh no. Don’t tell me.”
“By ‘Don’t tell me,’ I assume you mean ‘Tell me.’”
“What’s it doing now?”
“Watch.”
Though the machine would respond to no voice but mine, it answered to anyone’s typing. It couldn’t tell who was at the keys. It answered all comers, cheerfully presuming the typist had nothing but its best interests at heart.
Lentz typed B a little story: “Friends are in a room. A chair is in the room. Richard talks to Diana. Diana sits in the chair.” Each word converted to a token, a matrix of strengths. These tokens laced together into sentence vectors. The vectors rolled around through the net landscape, marbles seeking the most available basin. The place they landed, the way they fell, was what they meant. The sieve sorted every configuration that entered it. And each sort changed forever the net configuration.
“You ready?” Lentz asked me. Then he typed, “Who is in the chair?”
B flipped out. “Friends is in the chair. The chair is in the chair. Richard talks to in the chair …”
It wouldn’t stop prattling. “It’s got St. Vitus’ dance,” I said.
“It’s got St. Vincent’s malaise,” Lentz countered.
He was right. Figuration was driving B as batty as a poet. It framed meaning too meagerly, extending semblance too far. It pushed the classic toddler’s tendency to overgroup. Had its digits been skeletal, it would have pointed at anything sitting on a bookshelf and called it a book.
“We’ll need to cut the graded feedback and go to more rigorous supervision,” Lentz said. “This beast is going to have to learn that not everything will fly.”
It made sense. I’d read some developmental neurology. A newborn’s synapses far outnumbered those of an adult. Perhaps building effective pathways required that many useless ones had to die. Short of slitting B’s metaphoric throat with Occam’s razor, we were going to have to rein it in.
For the time being, we decided to pare back B’s associations with definitive answers. Repeated treading across the desired path would force Imp B to hack a right route through its lush profusion.
Now, when B started to do its permutational thing, I learned to say no. I would tell it the proper answer, however problematic. However much it hurt, I made it play straight. B took this right answer, matched it to the verbal diarrhea it had produced, and step by painful step went back over its connections to see where it had gotten carried away.
Only this reduction of limitless possibility made learning possible again. And only real learning—nothing mechanical or predictable—would satisfy me.
It pained me, one false spring dusk late in the season, as I walked home along the soon-to-be-crusted-over streets, to hear myself thinking in terms of satisfaction. I thought I’d left the word behind, in the reweighted and long-since-extinguished past.
IMP B ALWAYS did rub me the wrong way. Nothing violent. I just never cared for it, although I tried not to let that impede our work. I guess the way its linked nets responded to input reminded me too much of all my own little rickies, drowned in fecundity, unable to damp generalization down or clamp it into the manageable.
But as B grew less poetic and more docile, I began to miss the willful driveler. I’d taken perverse delight in watching it conclude, from “If you want me, I’ll be in the office,” that until you want me, I’ll be at home.
Lentz seemed unhumbled by this second lesson in unbounded verbal space. “What do the literary theorists say about reading books these days?” As if I could paraphrase for him, in an afternoon. As if, armed with my paraphrase, he might tack on a couple of preprocessing, feed-forward subsystem nets that would address any conceivable problem.
“First off, they’re not books anymore.”
“Texts,” Lentz corrected himself. “Excuse me.” As always, he knew more than he let on.
“Well, let’s see. The sign is public property, the signifier is in small-claims court, and the signification is a total land grab. Meaning doesn’t circulate. Nobody’s going to jailbreak the prison house of language.”
