The Turing Option

“Hell, no!” He opened the refrigerator and took out a can of soda, popped the seal, drank half of it in one long chugalug. Much calmer and more rational now. He knew what was happening, one part of his brain had taken over and was calling all the shots and suppressing everything else. There was no such thing as a central me, though it was easy to believe that there was. The more he had studied the operation of intelligence, the more he had come to believe that each person was sort of a committee. The brain was made up of a lot of little subanimals — protospecialists, that’s what they were called.

The hunger-animal took over when looking for food. Or the fear-animal when there was trouble looming. And every night the sleep-animal took its place. It was King Solomon’s ring. All the machinery that Lorenz and Tinbergen had discovered. Those intricate networks of brain centers for hunger, sex, defense that had taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Not only in reptiles, birds and fish — but in parts of his own brain.

And now his own internal sex-animal was chomping and salivating and taking over. A primitive agency way down in the brain stem — and he had to fight it!

“That’s not me!” he shouted out loud, slamming his fist onto the table so hard it hurt. “Not the whole me. Just a singularly stupid but powerful part. Balls galore!”

He was more than a rutting animal. He had intelligence — so why couldn’t he use it? How could he let a stupid subunit take control? Where was the mental manager that should have evaluated it and put it into proper perspective and place?

He took the can of soda with him, sipping at it slowly. Sat in front of his computer and opened a new file labeled SELF CONTROL, then leaned back and thought about what came next.

Most mental processes work unconsciously, because most subunits of his mind had to become autonomous — as separate as his hands and feet — in order to work efficiently.

When he had learned to walk as a baby he must have done it badly at first, stumbling and falling, then gradually improving by learning from mistakes. The old subunits for not-good walking must slowly have been replaced or suppressed by new agents for good-walking agents that worked more automatically, with less need for reflective thinking. So many agents, he thought, to be controlled by what? Right now, they seemed to be quite out of control. It was time for him to take them in charge; he must exercise more self-control. It was time that he, himself, must decide which of those subunits should be engaged. That mysterious, separate He, must be the manager, the central control that would correspond to the essence of Brian’s own consciousness.

“Those stupid AI programs could sure use a managing machine like that,” he said, then choked on the soda.

Was it that simple? Was this the missing element that would pull together all the separate pieces? The AI research labs were filling up with so many interesting systems these days at universities like Amherst, Northwestern, and Kyushu Institute of Technology. Rule-based logic systems, story-based language understanders, neural-network learning systems, each solving its own kind of problem in its own way. Some could play chess, some could control mechanical arms and fingers, some could plan financial investments. All separate, all working by themselves — but none of them seemed to really think. Because nobody knew how to get all those useful parts to work together. What artificial intelligence needed was something like that internal he. Some sort of central Managing Machine to tie all the subunits into a single working unit.

It couldn’t be that simple. There can’t be any such he in charge — because the mind doesn’t contain any real people, only a lot of subunits. Therefore, that he could not be any single thing — because no single thing could be smart enough. So that he must itself be some sort of illusion created by the activity of yet another society composed of subunits. Otherwise there would still be something missing, something to manage that Manager.

“Not good enough. I haven’t got it quite right yet. It will need a lot more working out.”

He saved the file with his thoughts — then noticed that there was one KIM file left on disk. The term paper for Betser. She had a copy of it — but she would never understand it, much less explain it when she was queried. Maybe he should save this one as well, after all she had been responsible for his idea about a managing program. No way! He hit delete and it vanished with all the rest.

The very last thing he did was put a lock on the computer so it would not accept calls from her phone. But this wasn’t good enough — she could still call from a public phone. He added a program that would turn away all incoming calls, no calls now or forever from anyone.

In the end he sat there tired and dry-eyed. Betrayed in every way.