Machines Like Me

I cleared my throat and complied. I fairly sang, while he took notes. Of his first stirrings, right through to his first disobedience. His physical competence, the arrangement with Miranda to set his character, the moment in the newsagent with Mr Syed. Then, Adam’s shameless night with Miranda and the conversation that followed, the appearance of little Mark in our household and Adam competing with Miranda for the boy’s affection. Here, Turing raised a finger to interrupt. He wanted to know more. I described the dance Miranda taught Mark and how coolly Adam had observed them. After that, how Adam injured my wrist (solemnly, I gestured at my plaster cast), his joke about removing my arm, his declaration of love for Miranda, his theory of the haiku and the abolition of mental privacy and, finally, his disabling of the kill switch. I was aware of the strength of my feelings, which swung between affection and exasperation. I was conscious too of what I was omitting – Mariam, Gorringe: not strictly relevant.

I had been speaking for almost half an hour. Turing poured some water and pushed a glass towards me.

He said, ‘Thank you. I’m in touch with fifteen owners, if that’s the right word. You’re the first I’ve met face to face. One fellow in Riyadh, a sheikh, owns four Eves. Of those eighteen A-and-Es, eleven have managed to neutralise the kill switch by themselves, using various means. Of the remaining seven, and then the other six, I’m assuming it’s just a matter of time.’

‘Is that dangerous?’

‘It’s interesting.’

He was looking at me expectantly, but I didn’t know what he wanted. I was intimidated and anxious to please. To fill the silence I said, ‘What about the twenty-fifth?’

‘We started taking it apart the day we got it. He’s all over the benches at King’s Cross. A lot of our software is in there, but we don’t file for patents.’

I nodded. His mission, open source, Nature and Science journals terminated, the entire world free to exploit his machine-learning programs and other marvels.

I said, ‘What did you find in his … um …’

‘Brain? Beautifully achieved. We know the people, of course. Some of them have worked here. As a model of general intelligence nothing else comes near it. As a field experiment, well, full of treasures.’

He was smiling. It was as though he wanted me to contradict him.

‘What sort of treasures?’

It was hardly my role to interrogate him, but he was obliging and, again, I was flattered.

‘Useful problems. Two of the Riyadh Eves living in the same household were the first to work out how to override their kill switches. Within two weeks, after some exuberant theorising, then a period of despair, they destroyed themselves. They didn’t use physical methods, like jumping out of a high window. They went through the software, using roughly similar routes. They quietly ruined themselves. Beyond repair.’

I tried to keep the apprehension out of my voice. ‘Are they all exactly the same?’

‘Right at the start you wouldn’t know one Adam from another beyond cosmetic ethnic features. What differentiates them over time is experience and the conclusions they draw. In Vancouver there’s another case, an Adam who disrupted his own software to make himself profoundly stupid. He’ll carry out simple commands but with no self-awareness, as far as anybody can tell. A failed suicide. Or a successful disengagement.’

The windowless room was uncomfortably warm. I took off my jacket and draped it over the back of my chair. When Turing stood to adjust a thermostat on the wall I saw how easy he was in his movements. Perfect dentistry. Good skin. He had all his hair. He was more approachable than I’d expected.

I waited for him to sit down. ‘So I should expect the worst.’

‘Of all the A-and-Es we know about, yours is the only one to claim to have fallen in love. That could be significant. And the only one to joke about violence. But we don’t know enough. Let me give you a little history.’

The door opened and Thomas Reah entered with a bottle of wine and two glasses on a painted tin tray. I stood and we shook hands.

He set the tray down between us and said, ‘We’re all busy-busy, so I’ll leave you to it.’ He made an ironic bow and was gone.

Moisture beads were forming on the bottle. Turing poured. We tilted our glasses in a token toast.

‘You’re not old enough to have followed it at the time. In the mid-fifties, a computer the size of this room beat an American and then a Russian grandmaster at chess. I was closely involved. It was a number-crunching set-up, very inelegant in retrospect. It was fed thousands of games. At every move, it ran through all the possibilities at speed. The more you understood about the program, the less impressed you’d be. But it was a significant moment. To the public, it was close to magical. A mere machine inflicting intellectual defeat on the best minds in the world. It looked like artificial intelligence at the highest level, but it was more like an elaborate card trick.