The Turing Option

24 February 22, 2024

“This is my responsibility now,” General Schorcht said, a glint of grim determination in his eye, a touch of cold anger in his voice. “Toth. Alex Toth. An army pilot!”

“That is a very good idea,” Ben agreed. “This is on your patch and you have the organization to do it. We will of course keep the investigation going at this end. I suggest that Colonel Davis and I liaise at least once a day, oftener if there are any dramatic developments. We must keep each other fully informed about our mutual progress. Is that satisfactory, General?”

“Satisfactory. Company dismissed.”

The two Army officers jumped to their feet, stood at attention, followed the General out.

“And you have a good day too, General,” Brian said to the stiff, vanishing backs. “Were you ever in the Army, Ben?”

“Happily, no.”

“Do you understand the military mind?”

“Unhappily, yes. But I don’t want to be rude in the presence of a serving officer.” Ben saw Shelly’s grim expression and softened his words with a smile. “A joke, Shelly, that’s all. Probably in the worst possible taste — so I apologize.

“No need,” she said, returning a slight smile. “I don’t know why I should be defensive about the military. I joined rotsee to pay for college. Then I enlisted in the Air Force as the only way to get through graduate school. My parents had a vegetable stand in Farmers Market in L.A. Which for anyone else would have been a gold mine. My father is a great Talmudic scholar but a really lousy businessman. The Air Force enabled me to do the only thing I wanted to do.”

“Which leads inexorably to the next generation,” Brian said. “Where does the investigation go from here?”

“I’m going to follow up all the leads that the copter development opened,” Ben said. “As to the Expert Program, our wizard detective Dick Tracy- — that is up to you, Shelly. What’s next?”

She poured herself a glass of water from the carafe on the conference table; gave herself a moment to think.

“I’m still running the Dick Tracy program. But I don’t expect it to find anything new until we get more data for it.”

“Which leaves you with free time — and that means you can work full time on the AI with me,” Brian said. “Because the work we do will eventually be fed into the Dick Tracy program.”

Ben looked puzzled. “Say again.”

“Think about it for a moment. Right now you are approaching the investigation from only the single point of view of the crime that was committed. Well and good — and I hope you succeed before they reach me again. Otherwise I’m for the knackers. But we should also be taking a second approach. Have you thought about just what it was that they stole?”

“Obviously, your AI machine.”

“No — it was more than that. They tried to kill everyone who had any knowledge of the AI, to steal or destroy every existing record. And they are still trying to kill me. That makes one thing very clear.”

“Of course!” Ben said. “I should have realized that. They not only wanted the AI — but they wanted a world monopoly on it. They might possibly be trying to market it now. They will want to use it commercially to turn a profit. But they have committed murder and theft and certainly don’t want to be found out. They have to conceal the fact that they’re using it, so they must exploit it in such a way that the AI cannot be traced back to them.”

“I see what you mean,” Shelly said. “Once they get it working, the stolen AI could be used for almost any purpose. To control mechanical processes, maybe to write software, follow new lines of research, aid product development — it could be used for almost anything.”

Benicoff nodded solemn agreement. “And that makes it rather hard to catch them out. We have to be on the lookout, not for anything very specific, but for virtually any type of program or machine that seems peculiarly advanced.”

“That’s much too general for my program to be able to deal with,” Shelly said. “Dick Tracy can only work with carefully structured data bases. It just doesn’t have enough knowledge or common sense to help with a problem as broad as this.”

“Then we will have to improve it,” Brian said. “This is exactly what I’m driving at. It is now perfectly clear what we have to do. First we have to make Dick Tracy smarter, to equip it with more general knowledge.”

“You mean to make it into a better AI?” Benicoff asked. “And then use it to find the other AIs. Like setting a thief to stop a thief.”

“That’s half of it. The other half is what I’m doing with the robot Robin. Making it more like the AI in the notes. If I can do that, then we’ll know more about what the stolen machine is capable of. And that will help narrow the search.”

“Especially if we can upload those same capabilities into Dick Tracy,” Shelly said. “Then it could really know what to search for!”

They all looked at one another, but there seemed to be little more to say. It was clear what each of them had to do.

Ben stopped them as they rose to leave. “One last and important matter to discuss. Shelly’s living quarters.”

“I’m sorry you mentioned that,” she said. “I thought I was getting a lovely little apartment. But at the very last moment the whole deal fell through.”

Ben looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry but, well, that was my doing. I have been thinking about the attacks on Brian’s life and I realized that you must also be a target now. Once you start developing AI, the murderous power out there will… it’s not easy to say, will want to kill you as well as Brian. Do you agree?”

Shelly nodded a reluctant yes.

“Which means you will have to live with the same degree of security as Brian. Here in Megalobe.”

“I’ll get suicidal if I have to live in the businessmen’s flophouse where I am staying now.”

“No question of that! I speak with feeling because I have spent many a miserable night there myself. Now can I make a suggestion? There are WAC quarters in the barracks here with provision for female Army personnel. If we knocked a couple of rooms together and fitted them up as a small apartment — would you mind staying there?”

“I’ll want a say in the decorating.”

“You pick it out — we’ll pick up the tab. Electronic kitchen, Jacuzzi bath — anything you want. The army engineers will install it.”

“Offer accepted. When do I get the catalogs?”

“I have them in my office right now.”

“Ben — you’re terrible. How did you know I would go along with this plan?”

“I didn’t know — just hoped. And when you look at it from all sides it really turns out to be the only safe thing to do.”

“Can I see the catalogs now?”

“Of course. In this building, room 412. I’ll call my assistant and have her dig them out.”

Shelly started for the door — then spun about. “I’m sorry, Brian. I should have asked you first if you need me.”

“I think it’s a great idea. In any case I have some other things to do today away from the lab. What do we say we meet there at nine a.m. tomorrow?”

“Right”

Brian waited until the door had closed before he turned to Ben, chewed his lip in silence before he managed to speak. “I still haven’t told her about the CPU implant in my brain. And she hasn’t asked me about that session where it produced the clue about the theft. Has she mentioned it to you?”

“No — and I don’t think she will. Shelly is a very private person and I think she extends the same privacy to others. Is it important?”

“Only to me. What I told you before about feeling like a freak—”

“You’re not, and you know it. I doubt if the topic will come up again.”

“I’ll tell her about it, someday. Just not now. Particularly since I have arranged some lengthy sessions with Dr. Snaresbrook.” He glanced at his watch. “The first one will be starting soon. The main reason I am doing this is that I am determined to speed up the AI work.”

“How?”

“I want to improve my approach to the research. Right now all that I am doing is going through the material from the backup data bank we brought back from Mexico. But these are mostly notes and questions about work in progress. What I need to do is locate the real memories and the results of the research based upon them. At the present time it has been slow and infuriating work.”

“In what way?”

“I was, am, are…” Brian smiled wryly. “I guess there is no correct syntax to express it. What I mean is the me that made those notes was a sloppy note maker. You know how, when you write a note to yourself, you mostly scribble a couple of words that will remind you of the whole idea. But that particular me no longer exists, so my old notes don’t remind me of anything. So I’ve started working with Dr. Snaresbrook to see if we can use the CPU implant to link the notes to additional disconnected memories that are still in my brain. It took me ten years to develop AI the first time — and I’m afraid it will take that long again if I don’t have some help. I must get those lost memories back.”

“Are there any results of your accessing these memories?”

“Early days yet. We are still trying to find a way to make connections that I can reliably activate at will. The CPU is a machine — and I’m not — and we interface badly at the best of times. It is like a bad phone connection at other times. You know, both people talking at once and nothing coming across. Or I just simply cannot make sense of what is getting through. Have to stop all input and go back to square A. Frustrating, I can tell you. But I’m going to lick it. It can only improve. I hope.”

Ben walked Brian over to the Megalobe clinic and left him outside Dr. Snaresbrook’s office. He watched him enter, stood there for some time, deep in thought. There was plenty to think about.

The session went well. Brian could, access the CPU at will now, use it to extract specific memories. The system was functioning better — although sometimes he would retrieve fragments of knowledge that were hard to comprehend. It was as though they came as suggestions from someone else rather than from his own memories. Occasionally, when he accessed a memory of his earlier, adult self, he would find himself losing track of his own thoughts. When he regained control he found it hard to recall how it had felt. How strange, he thought to himself. Am I maintaining two personalities? Can a single mind have room for two personalities at once — one old, the other new?

The probing certainly was saving a great deal of time in his research and, as the novelty began to wear off, Brian’s thoughts returned to the most serious problems that still beset him on the AI. All the different bugs that led to failures — to breakdowns in which the machine would end up at one extreme of behavior or another.

“Brian — are you there?”

“What — ?”

“Welcome back. I asked you the same question three times. You were wandering, weren’t you?”

“Sorry. It just seems so intractable and there is nothing in the notes to help me out. What I need is to have a part of my mind that is watching itself without the rest of the mind knowing what is happening. Something that would help keep the system’s control circuitry in balance. That’s not particularly hard when the system itself is stable, not changing or learning very much — but nothing seems to work when the system learns new ways to learn. What I need is some system, some sort of separate submind that can maintain a measure of control.”

“Sounds very Freudian.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Like the theories of Sigmund Freud.”

“I don’t recall anyone with that name in any AI research.”

“Easy enough to see why. He was a psychiatrist working in the 1890s, before there were any computers. When he first proposed his theories — about how the mind is made of a number of different agencies — he gave them names like id, ego, superego, censor and so on. It is understood that every normal person is constantly dealing, unconsciously, with all sorts of conflicts, contradictions, and incompatible goals. That’s why I thought you might get some feedback if you were to study Freud’s theories of mind.”

“Sounds fine to me. Let’s do it now, download all the Freudian theories into my memory banks.”

Snaresbrook was concerned. As a scientist, she still regarded the use of the implant computer as an experimental study — but Brian had already absorbed it as a natural part of his lifestyle. No more poring over printed texts for him. Get it all into memory in an instant, then deal with it later.

He did not go back to his room, but paced the floor, while in his mind he dipped first into one part of the text, then another, making links and changing them — then gasped out loud.

“This has to be it — really it! A theory that fits my problem perfectly. The superego appears to be a sort of goal-learning mechanism that probably evolved on top of the imprinting mechanisms that evolved earlier. You know, the systems discovered by Konrad Lorenz, that are used to hold many infant animals within a safe sphere of nurture and protection. These produce a relatively permanent, stable goal system in the child. Once a child introjects a mother or father image, that structure can remain there for the rest of that child’s life. But how can we provide my AI with a superego? Consider this — we should be able to download a functioning superego for my AI if we can find some way of downloading enough of the details of my own unconscious value structure. And why not? Activate each of my K-lines and nemes, sense and record the emotional values associated with them. Use that data to first build a representation of my conscious self-image. Then add my self-ideal — what the superego says I ought to be. If we can download that, we might be much further on the way toward being able to stabilize and regulate our machine intelligence.”

“Let’s do it,” Snaresbrook said. “Even if no one has proven yet that the thing exists. We’ll simply assume that you do indeed have a perfectly fine one inside your head. And we are perhaps the first people ever to be in a position to find it. Look at what we have been doing for months now, searching out and downloading your matrix of memories and thought processes. Now we may as well push a little further — only backward instead of forward in time. We can try to do more backtracking toward your infancy, and see if we can find some nenies and attached memories that might correspond to your earliest value systems.”

“And you think that you can do this?”

“I don’t see any reason why not — unless what we’re seeking just doesn’t exist. In any case the search will probably involve locating another few hundred thousand old K-lines and nemes. But cautiously. There might be some serious dangers here, in giving you access to such deeply buried activities. I’ll first want to work up a way to do this by using an external computer, while disabling your own internal connection machine for a while. That way, we’ll have a record of the structures we discover in external form, which might be used in improving Robin. This will prevent the experiments from affecting you until we’re more sure of ourselves.”

“Well, then — let’s give it a try.”