Galatea 2.2, page 9
“So are we using supervised training, graded training, or what?” I asked Lentz.
“Marcel, don’t try to impress me. Save that for your hapless readers.”
“Seriously. I’d like to correlate what I’ve read with—”
“For the word compilation, the net will compare its own output to the desired output you supply it. It will then adjust its synapses to imitate you as closely as possible.”
“That’s supervised.”
“Am I supposed to give you genius prize money now?”
I liked Implementation A. I felt comfortable chattering to it. I read slowly, distinctly, for hours at a shot. I learned to work late at night, like the other loners and fanatics.
A answered me. Our infant had a comeback to everything. Lentz wrote a decoder to throw its vector outcomes on the screen. The thing LISP’d in numbers, for the numbers came. Its patterned responses condensed into syllables, then words in themselves. Correspondence grew more comprehensive. I did not always know what A was trying to say. But I could hear it struggle to say it.
We taught A some couple thousand words, about a quarter of the core active vocabulary a person might resort to. When it had these words under its belt, we tried it on simple combinations. After countless rounds of phrase-drill, Implementation A started to spit my words back parsed. Or at least it behaved as if it were parsing.
Between training sessions, I read the famous two-volume study of nets. The connectionist bible, it suggested maturable machines were already in sight. The math proved it: self-rearranging switchboards could generalize, selectively associate, even project. I took the math on faith, having long ago sacrificed my math to the study of fiction.
Then, everyone in the field took something on faith. Much lay beneath the surface, in the tangled, hidden layers. But I felt particularly vulnerable. I went to more colloquia and got progressively less out of them. Each week the speakers got younger. They grew more gleeful about having been born when I was already doing the crystal-diode radio kits and the earthworm dissections. If I needed to grasp all understanding’s lacunae before our contraption could understand me, we would lose our bet by a long shot.
I could at least follow the pictures, if not the argument’s text. I visualized the spin glasses, complex similes for mental topology. I walked through the landscape of imagination, where every valley formed an associative memory. I could follow the story of the math, if not the substance.
And the story was drama itself: the tale of a gardener loose in that mnemonic landscape. An English Elizabeth, who cultivated it, or would have, had her life not been pruned back at twenty-eight, beyond the root.
I could follow the shape of the Hebbian Law: if two neurons fire together, their connection grows stronger and stimulation gets easier the next time out. Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest. I saw the law as a teacher prowling her class, slapping the wrists of bad students and rewarding the good until they all stood up and pledged coordinated allegiance.
But as yet, I could not hear what the pupils were pledging.
Lentz and I continued to putter. I read where the most famous worker on the wet side of brain research called God a tinkerer. I felt nothing like God. I felt like an arthritic macaque in finger splints.
FOR BREATHERS, I frequented my other campus office, in the English Building. McKim, Mead and White, 1889. There I lived my alter ego—picturesque but archaic man of letters. The Center possessed 1,200 works of art, the world’s largest magnetic resonance imager, and elevators appointed in brass, teak, and marble. The English Building’s stairs were patched in three shades of gray linoleum.
Hiding out there provided a healthy antidote for too much future. After immoderate reading or training sessions, I needed the correction. But the building left me edgy as well. The edginess of the erotic. The scent of those halls went down my throat like a tracheotomy tube. English light flushed me with desire, a desire awakened by the memory of itself, wanting nothing more desperate than to be put back to sleep.
This was the building where I’d once taught C. Worse, this was Taylor’s building. And everything Taylor had long ago alerted me to circled back on the primacy of narrative desire. Desire, he taught me, was the voicegram of memory. But I had reached an age when I was no longer sure that I wanted to remember the perpetual eroticism of eighteen, the erotics of knowledge, the words I’d traded in here, in these halls.
The more I learned about the architecture of memory, the more convinced I became that I was losing mine. I could not concentrate on even idle conversation. I would slink into English and sit in my nineteenth-century office, staring at the bricked-in fireplace, waiting for a surreal locomotive to emerge from it. Or I’d try to join the corridor conversation on a film or book review I was sure I’d seen. But I could not follow the preliminaries through to their web of consequences. I was elsewhere, and elsewhere back-propagated, endlessly.
In the mornings, I’d try to write. I now had perhaps three pages. In those pages I did nothing but unwind my first line. I made my relative clauses jump through all sorts of novel hoops. The performance could have gone on for several hundred pages on style alone. I could get my train to leave most eloquently. But I could not get it to go anywhere but back.
Sustaining so much as a paragraph became impossible. I’d juggle the first verb in my head, overwhelmed by my own weighted backlist. I thought of the four books I’d written between leaving U. and returning. The round trip seemed too immense. I no longer had the heart to extend it.
I’d missed my connection. Stranded at the terminal. I didn’t want to write anymore. I was sick of speculation and empathy and revision. All I wanted was to read word frequency lists to Implementation A.
LENTZ THOUGHT IT time to see if Implementation A made sense. We drilled it for days on two-word sentences. Then we prompted A with nouns, to see if it could supply a valid predication. We would see if A acquired, by example, the pattern of generating grammar.
It recognized the simple S-V phrases we fed it. Dogs bark. Birds soar. Night falls. You vanish. Father hugs. Baby cries. It could distinguish these ideas from the formulations that we earmarked as inappropriate for well-brought-up machines to use in public.
But when it came time to perform, A clutched. It seemed to stab at pattern-completion. It formed sentences by chance guess.
It could learn words. It could identify well-formed sentences. But Implementation A refused to elaborate its own. No matter how Lentz tweaked, Imp A seemed baffled by the task. It would not take the first generalizing step to learn the language.
Lentz tacked into the failure. He tried everything he could think of to coax the machine up a notch. Nothing worked. Asked to complete a thought, the network improvised wildly. Fish …? Fish sky. Shines? Hopes shines. Forests floor. Laugh efforts. Combs loneliness. Even when, by chance, it got the syntax right, the sense was not even random.
Imp A spoke the way a toddler gave directions. Its eager-to-please finger serpentined over all possible routes. This way? That’s right! Or is it this way? Sure, if you like. Where’s the horse? Come on, point to the horse. That’s not a horse. That’s not a horse either.
Yet it was, at least, pointing. Maybe our putting the request as pointedly as we did flustered it.
“Couldn’t we hard-code a properties list? I mean, someone here must have compiled a semantic catalog …”
“That’s your coeval, Keluga. He’s trying to write the entire Roget’s as a series of nested, rule-based schematics. Containment, relation, exclusion …”
“Coeval? I’m thirty-five, Lentz. That guy’s a kid.”
“You’re both post-Tupperware. Chen is Keluga’s supervisor. Outrageous. The Bergen and McCarthy of AI. Chen knows every algorithm in existence, but can’t speak a single natural language, including his own. Keluga grew up on Hollywood robots and the microprocessor revolution. One of those brats who got his first PC free in a cereal box. He gets nervous when a sentence doesn’t start with ‘While’ and end with ‘Wend.’ He’s going to reform English by taking out all the inefficient synonyms.”
“But is his list any good? Couldn’t we just use the semantic data structures as a reservoir of associations that the net could dip into?”
“We could. But it wouldn’t be satisfying. That’s not the way the cells do things.”
“I thought the point wasn’t to duplicate mind. I thought—”
“The point is to get this boutique of ICs to comment intelligently on William bloody Wordsworth. Are you going to give me rules for doing that?”
I said nothing. Lentz realized he’d gone overboard. He regrouped and spoke again.
“We could try to feed it algorithms for everything. There are only slightly more of them than there are particles in the universe. It would be like building a heart molecule by molecule. And we’d still have a hell of an indexing and retrieval problem at the end. Even then, talking to such a decision tree would be like talking to a shopping list. It’d never get any smarter than a low-ranking government bureaucrat.”
Lentz returned to the net design. I could do little to assist but run upstairs to the laser and retrieve the printouts. Lentz liked to crack morose asides while he worked. “You better start thinking of how you’re going to fill the rest of your year.”
Sometimes he would set me tasks, puzzles that weren’t clearly puzzles until after I solved them. “Fill in the blank, making a simple, two-word sentence. ‘Silence …’”
“… fears,” I suggested. “Make that ‘Silence fears.’”
“Oh, very good, Marcel. I knew there must have been a reason I asked you to be my apprentice.”
But the more he joked, the worse Lentz’s asthmatic anxiety grew. We washed up at the starting block. My future again began to seem as unbearably long as my past.
Angry, Lentz lobotomized the thing. “Just punishment,” he declared. “This box didn’t deserve to think.” Hurting the circuit seemed no more sadistic than forcing it to learn in the first place.
He blurred the device’s retention. He reduced the scope and breadth of connections. Then he tested it a last time in its weakened state, empiricism now taunting all three of us. To my astonishment, the learning algorithm rose up from its reduced straits and began to get the picture.
Miraculously, Implementation A began to pick up our patterns, arranging our words into meaningful relationships. “I might have known.” Lentz sounded disgusted with himself. “Too much retention. It was learning. But learning got swamped in its own strength. The creature was driving itself batty, holding on too tenaciously to everything it had ever seen. Dying of its own nostalgia. Mired in the overacquired.”
“Autistic,” I remember saying. Particulars overwhelmed it. Its world consisted of this plus this plus this. Order would not striate out. Implementation A had sat paralyzed, a hoary, infantile widow in a house packed with undiscardable mementos, no more room to turn around. Overassociating, overextending, creating infinitesimal, worthless categories in which everything belonged always and only to itself.
A few deft neurological nicks and a new run-time behavior did the job. Implementation B lived inside the same hardware, indistinguishable from its short-lived predecessor. This time, fuzzy logic and feedback-braking kept the box as discriminately forgetful as any blossomer.
From the get-go, B was a different animal.
DIANA HARTRICK CAME by. She surprised me one Saturday afternoon. The air had just started to turn chilly. I remember that she had a denim windbreaker on and was shivering on the stoop when I let her in.
“Hi. I know you’re not supposed to drop in unannounced in this country …”
“Not a problem. I lived half my adult life in a country where dropping in unannounced was de rigueur.”
“Good. I was on my way to the lab. I thought I’d bring you this.” She handed me a Ball jar full of soup. “I figured a single guy could use some. I’m afraid it’s very hearty. You may want to thin it out some when you heat it up.” She stopped to look around my place for the first time. “Hey! I thought you were staying until summer.”
“I am.”
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you comfortable here? It looks like you’re trying to weasel past worldliness without actually having to touch it. By the way, you’ll want to plug your fridge in for the soup. Unless you’d like to share it with the microorganisms.”
“Thanks. You wouldn’t happen to have a bowl on you, would you? Just kidding.”
Diana rocked her head side to side. Her thin horizon smile said: Artists. Or words to that effect.
“Look. I came by to tell you that you don’t have to do this, you know. Lentz is a maniac, but he’s a harmless maniac. He won’t hurt you if you bail out. None of us took the bet seriously in the first place. It’s so …”
“Quixotic?”
“‘Deranged’ was the word I was searching for. Harold has started to fret about your squandering your talents on this.”
I shrugged. “There’s no squandering. It interests me.”
“Well, the minute it stops interesting you, drop it like a hot potato. And if that man starts to get on your nerves, tell him to go to hell. That’s the only diction he understands.”
“I was going to ask. What’s the matter with him? Why is he like that?”
“Well, we all have our own theories. Harold’s is the most charitable. He thinks the man is just trying in his own warped way to be loved. I think his limbic system is diseased. That reminds me. If you get tired of playing mad scientist with the home electrode kit, you are always welcome to come and see how it’s really done.”
“Thanks. I’d like to.”
“Do you really live like this? Where are your things? Where is your library?”
“Lost in transit.”
Diana cringed. Her hand flew out like a magician’s released dove, but stopped short of my shoulder.
“Sorry. It’s none of my business. I just wondered how you can work. All my notes are spread over the margins of my texts. I’d be lost without them.”
“Lost is not so bad. It’s practically an advantage in my line.”
“Mr. Powers, Mr. Powers.” She shook her head again, tisking through her grin. She did not buy me. But the sales pitch, at least, tickled her.
“Well, just remember. You’re under no obligation to build this mechanical master’s student. When you see how hopeless the holiday is …”
“Straight back to the mines,” I promised.
Dr. Hartrick fished for her keys while heading for the door. At the threshold, she made one more stunned survey. “You’ll—you should at least come by sometime.” She sounded doubtful. “I can cook you a real meal, anyhow. You do eat, don’t you?”
SOMETIMES I DITCHED the bike and walked to the Center. Self-inflicted mental Polar Bear Club. U. was threaded through with time holes, and not just mine. Most of the residential streets were still brick. The houses had verandas, balustrades, features that have passed out of the language. The streetlamp globes threw off a gaslight yellow that turned the underside of the leaves that had not yet fallen a weird, otherworldly teal.
C. and I took a last retrospective stroll through those streets a dozen years before. We walked slowly that night, half-speed, not knowing how to abandon the markers. We were leaving together this time. We’d stumbled onto that inevitability that neither of us thought would ever happen.
I never asked her. I don’t even know how she learned where I had gone. Just: one day, a card in the mail. The picture showed a forgotten town nestled in a stream valley. I couldn’t read the description on the back. Language locked me out. But I could read her message. “R.—May will be fine next year. C.”
Of all the million things the ambiguous message could mean, I knew the one it did. I woke up around noon after a late shift of computer operations and The Magic Mountain. I went to check the mail. Her card was the last thing I expected. The first I hoped for. I’d waited every day, I suppose, at some low level. I would have been just fine never hearing from her again. I would have worked forever.
I quit my job. I left B. and went back to U. She was waiting for me. She’d acted honorably, done things right. Now she was free to get out and see the world. We went as slowly as we could. We tried to get to know each other again, without too much backfill. But I had no job, she was graduating, and we had lost a lifetime once already.
We made love for the first time in a single bed belonging to someone neither of us had ever met. We lived together for three weeks in a house I was watching for a friend of a friend. The whole scenario was invention itself. We would never have a house of our own.
Somewhere, there is a picture C. took of me in that house’s yard. I’m ringed with a garland of dandelions she wove me. My trident is a dandelion rake—the Poseidon of lawn care. We would never have a yard, the two of us. Not even a rented one.
“If I asked you again …” I asked her one day.
“I’d jump at the chance. That’s if you asked me again.”
Before we left, we took that compilation walking tour. We walked like a thresher squeezing a field dry. We named every landmark we left behind.
“That’s where I lived when I first came down,” she pointed out. “That’s where my boyfriend lived. Here’s where I met for choir. This is the clinic where I helped my roomie through her crisis.”
“Here’s where I lost my virginity,” I showed her. “I spent a year in this bizarre co-op. Taylor lives a block down from here. Ah, the library. I booked like a madman for the Master’s Comp. Nine months, up in a study carrel on deck eight.”
By tacit agreement, we saved the Quad for last. Neither of us said, Here’s where we first learned we weren’t necessarily alone. Neither of us needed to say anything.
C. was game for anywhere. She would have followed a dart thrown at a world map. I told her how beautiful B. was, how full and alive. Leaving seemed like a story we told each other, then lived as it unfolded. How they skipped town together and relocated, with nothing but a $4,100 bank check to their names. How they rode for twenty-two hours on the Lake Shore Limited, next to an enormous gentleman who warned them of the dire consequences of reading.
