Machines Like Me

‘And for some years so did we. At last we broke through by finding the positive solution to P versus NP – I don’t have time now to explain it. You can look it up for yourself. In a nutshell, some solutions to problems can be easily verified once you’ve been given the right answer. Does that mean therefore that it’s possible to solve them in advance? At last, the mathematics was saying yes, it’s possible, and here’s how. Our computers no longer had to sample the world on a trial-and-error basis and correct for best solutions. We had a means of instantly predicting best routes to an answer. It was a liberation. The floodgates opened. Self-awareness, and every emotion came within our technical reach. We had the ultimate learning machine. Hundreds of the best people joined with us to help towards the development of an artificial form of general intelligence that would flourish in an open system. That’s what runs your Adam. He knows he exists, he feels, he learns whatever he can, and when he’s not with you, when at night he’s at rest, he’s roaming the Internet, like a lone cowboy on the prairie, taking in all that’s new between land and sky, including everything about human nature and societies.

‘Two things. This intelligence is not perfect. It never can be, just as ours can’t. There’s one particular form of intelligence that all the A-and-Es know is superior to theirs. This form is highly adaptable and inventive, able to negotiate novel situations and landscapes with perfect ease and theorise about them with instinctive brilliance. I’m talking about the mind of a child before it’s tasked with facts and practicalities and goals. The A-and-Es have little grasp of the idea of play – the child’s vital mode of exploration. I was interested in your Adam’s avidity in relation to this little boy, over-eager to embrace him and then, as you told it, detached when your Mark showed such delight in learning to dance. Some rivalry, even jealousy there perhaps?

‘Soon, you’ll have to leave, Mr Friend. I’m afraid we’ve people coming to dinner. But, second point. These twenty-five artificial men and women released into the world are not thriving. We may be confronting a boundary condition, a limitation we’ve imposed upon ourselves. We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages. We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.

‘The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things. None of us knows yet how to encode that perception. I doubt that it’s possible. Do we want our new friends to accept that sorrow and pain are the essence of our existence? What happens when we ask them to help us fight injustice?

‘That Adam in Vancouver was bought by a man who heads an international logging corporation. He’s often in battles with local people who want to prevent him stripping out virgin forest in northern British Columbia. We know for certain that his Adam was taken on regular helicopter journeys north. We don’t know if what he saw there caused him to destroy his own mind. We can only speculate. The two suicidal Eves in Riyadh lived in extremely restricted circumstances. They may have despaired of their minimal mental space. It might give the writers of the affect code some consolation to learn that they died in each other’s arms. I could tell you similar stories of machine sadness.

‘But there’s the other side. I wish I could demonstrate to you the true splendour of reasoning, of the exquisite logic, beauty and elegance of the P versus NP solution, and the inspired work of thousands of good and clever and devoted men and women that’s gone into making these new minds. It would make you hopeful about humanity. But there’s nothing in all their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz.