The Turing Option

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.”

25 May 31, 2024

“Brian Delaney — have you been working here all night? You promised it would just be a few minutes more when I left you here last night. And that was at ten o’clock.” Shelly stamped into the lab radiating displeasure.

Brian rubbed his fingers over rough revelatory whiskers, blinked through red-rimmed guilty eyes. Equivocated.

“What makes you think that?”

Shelly flared her nostrils. “Well, just looking at you reveals more than enough evidence. You look terrible. In addition to that I tried to phone you and there was no answer. As you imagine I was more than a little concerned.”

Brian grabbed at his belt where he kept his phone — it was gone. “I must have put it down somewhere, didn’t hear it ring.”

She took out her own phone and hit the memory key to dial his number. There was a distant buzzing. She tracked it down beside the coffeemaker. Returned it to him in stony silence.

“Thanks.”

“It should be near you at all times. I had to go looking for your bodyguards — they told me you were still here.”

“Traitors,” he muttered.

“They’re as concerned as I am. Nothing is so important that you have to ruin your health for it.”

“Something is, Shelly, that’s just the point. You remember when you left last night, the trouble we were having with the new manager program? No matter what we did yesterday the system would simply curl up and die. So then I started it out with a very simple program of sorting out colored blocks, then complicated it with blocks of different shapes as well as colors. The next time I looked, the manager program was still running — but all the other parts of the program seemed to have shut down. So I recorded what happened when I tried it again, and this time installed a natural language trace program to record all the manager’s commands to the other subunits. This slowed things down enough for me to discover what was going on. Let’s look at what happened.”