A Visitor to the Future - 40 - The Consortium Program
Alexandra pulled up an image of an orange on the surface of her desk. She lightly poked it, the momentum carrying it across to me. "Humour me," she said, addressing me directly, "If you don't know much about the Consortium program, I think you might find this useful. Tell me, what is this?"
"It's an orange," I said, a little confused about where this was going.
"Correct, no prizes for that one. An easy task for a human, or even a CI, generated as the Templates were from human brain scans. Not an easy one for a computer program. For a traditional program to recognise what an orange is, it needs to be given the tools to recognise the orange - most often in the form of visual recognition software. That is ancient history, after all, the Multispheres had been using facial recognition programs to enforce compliance for hundreds of years. But there is an inherent problem with that approach - the program will know what something is, but it won't truly understand it. For all that you teach the program what an orange is, it won't be able to tell you what an orange is for - unless you program in that knowledge too. And so you're stuck in a loop of having to tell the program exactly what everything is, what it is for, and the implications of that, for almost every item it encounters, including every nuance of interactions between different objects. Basically, the program's understanding of the world would be surface level only. The Consortium program was a complete departure from that approach, and an experimental step forward into Property-Based Inference Programs, or PBIPs."
"A curious new blend of ontological categorization and programming," added Tungsten.
Alexandra continued, "The Consortium program was the greatest revolution of the new Consortium, because it truly understood the properties of the world around it. If you present the Consortium with an orange, it does not try in the first instance to name or identify the object - instead, it analyses the properties of the object. An orange is organic, it is round, it has juice and seeds - based on those properties the Consortium can then make a good guess to say that it is a fruit, or, when taking the colour and skin of the object into consideration, that it is an orange. That true understanding is what made the Consortium program such a breakthrough - because when provided with enough data about its surroundings, it can infer more information than its designers provided it with in the first place, and understand the context of that information. Which was incredible for something like analysing potential mining sites, or recognising weather patterns, or even laying foundations on an unstable construction site. It was a program that could solve problems with minimal input from humans or CIs - scalable problem solving! I can't overstate how huge of a breakthrough that was. Of course, people had been talking about PBIPs for hundreds of years, but the Consortium were the first ones to actually get them working at a useful scale."
"In summary," said Tungsten, "The Consortium can look at an orange and not only know what it is, but that it can be made into juice, is slightly corrosive, and is safe for human consumption. All because it both recognises and understands the properties of the orange using all the sensory data available to it - whether that is visual data, the results of scans, or even sound."
"The Consortium can hear an orange?" I said, amazed.
"Is it really so surprising?" said Alexandra, "The Consortium's sensors are magnitudes better than our own senses, though it never relies on one sense alone. But based on what you now know, I can go one step further and tell you that the Consortium even understands why it can't hear things in space. It was never programmed into it directly - it made that inference itself because it understands the properties of a vacuum."
"I think it's important to say," said Tungsten, "That at the beginning the program was not nearly as sophisticated - it was a shadow of what it is today. It was largely for analysis - able to adapt to simple problems and notify personnel where there was a potential issue. Automation came later. However, I personally think that the society built on Mars was a far more critical advancement than the program - it set the groundwork for what we consider to be the Org system today."
"I'll disagree with you there," said Alexandra, "If you'd put that 'shadow' Consortium program in front of me when I was the CEO of Crux, I would have given you the solar system on a platter within a decade." She turned to me once more, "Do you know how many ships the Mars Consortium dispatched to the asteroid belt, the year that they made their move? One. With one ship filled with CIs, state of the art equipment, and the basic Consortium program, in six months they were running the asteroid belt with Ceres as the economic heart of the new Consortium. With a combination of technological and social advances they had made deep space mining not only doable, but scalable, because the barrier to true deep space operations had always been the human element. The fact is humans were ill-adapted to space. Without modern Biodev and poor radiation shielding, if you were living in space for significant periods of your life you were lucky to reach the age of 60. In comparison, at that time the average life expectancy on Earth was about 95, and the record was somewhere around 150. No, living and working in space for humans was extremely bad for your health - and not only that, from a work perspective it was inefficient and time consuming. The only other viable alternative was CIs - which very few Multispheres used because of the constant risk of rebellion. The Consortium had no such issues. Their pioneer CI vessel was filled with CIs that not only would not rebel - they all wanted to be there, signing up for the mining mission determined to build a new, brighter future for everyone in the Consortium."
Tungsten turned to me, "Those CI pioneers were supported by an entire society on Mars - which included both humans and other CIs. I'd hate for you to get the wrong impression that human citizens just sat by and let CIs do the work. CIs were factually the best at working in space at that time - an advantage retained until the Biodev Breakthrough levelled the playing field. But once the groundwork had been done and gravity rings were up and running, humans were flown out to the belt, or recruited from other companies. Though once the Consortium program received further updates, people were hardly needed for mining and production at all."