A Visitor to the Future - 7 - Handshakes and Ethics
I woke up in the dark room, panicked and confused at first, before things settled down and I remembered where I was. It was a familiar feeling, as I had spent the last few months in and out of hospitals - where I was never truly comfortable. The main difference was that this time, I was healthy and full of energy - and I had to stop myself from falling out of my bed.
I sat on the stool which was still there from yesterday. Usually my mornings would be full of worries about upcoming appointments, treatments, or bills. I supposed these worries were now outdated.
I enjoyed the peace and quiet for a while, cleaned myself up, and then said Sarkona's name into the empty air. It can't have been more than five minutes before their friendly face arrived at my door.
"Welcome back!" they said, gesturing toward the canteen. "Food?"
Breakfast was delicious - at some point someone had invented a roll filled with some sort of yoghurt and soft bread, and had the brilliant idea to serve it with a scoop of ice cream. I had seconds. And thirds.
"That's a super appetite you've got there!" said Sarkona, "Good - I've got plans for as much as you're willing to do today. I figured we'd go talk to Tungsten first if that's good with you."
We made our way around the ring and to a door we'd walked past the previous day. It looked just like any other cabin, except with a different label, which I assumed said something in Human.
Sarkona was about to knock, when they stopped suddenly, mid-knock, and pivoted to face me, their balled fist twisting into an upward-pointing finger.
"I almost made a big mistake there. I keep forgetting that things that are normal to me might be a big surprise to you. Tungsten isn't human - he's an AI. Did I not make that clear yesterday?"
I shook my head. They grimaced. "I'll have to remember to be better about that. Are you still good to meet him?"
"If anything, I want to meet him more now," I said, my eyebrows raising in surprise.
"Phew, okay. Sorry about that - I can forget things like that sometimes, feel free to speak up if I do. Tungsten will be happy to answer any questions you have about AIs, I'm sure."
They turned back to the door and continued their knocking. The door opened almost immediately.
Behind the door was a humanoid robot, who appeared to be wearing a grey waistcoat and deep green long-sleeved shirt - the sleeves were rolled up, revealing a forearm which widened significantly at the ends into large hands with four fingers and two thumbs - one on each side of the palm. A pair of neat, slim-fitting trousers completed a very smart look - but there were no shoes to speak of. His feet had six long toes that extended from the ball of the foot - giving an impression of bird-like talons.
His head was a matte - not shiny - grey, rounded and sleek - generally spherical but effectively molded back to where it met the nape of the neck. Two pale green lenses served as eyes, each pivoting to observe me, and there was a diamond-shaped speaker grill in the place of a mouth. The lines of seams ran diagonally across the entire head, giving the impression that the whole head had been assembled in stages - for all I knew, it had.
"Hello!" he said jovially, "Come in, come in! Look at you - up and about - wonderful to see." His voice was fairly deep, with a slight metallic hint to it which was most noticeable at the end of his sentences.
The room was very nicely decorated in a style which reminded me of a comfortable cottage - there was even what appeared to be a small wood-burning stove in one corner, though the fire looked artificial. Tungsten led us into the room, before extending a hand in my direction. I took it and shook it - his hand was spindly and large, closing entirely around mine, but not cold.
"How was it?" he said, cocking his head slightly.
"How was what?" I said, flustered.
"The handshake, of course! I so rarely get to practice such things! I'm told it was a lot more common prior to the 2600s." He took both his arms and gave himself a handshake in front of me - his joints seemed to easily accommodate the motion.
"Oh, it was fine! You say they're not common any more?"
"Yes," he nodded. "Waving, nods, and bows are the way it's done these days! A shame! There's something so personal about a handshake. Anyway, please have a seat!"
He indicated toward a comfortable sofa, on which both I and Sarkona sat. He settled himself into a smart armchair opposite us, crossing his legs, and leaning back.
"It really is so good to see you up and about, Nat - may I call you Nat?" he said as I smiled, "First of all, how are you feeling? Any difficulties over the past day or so?"
"No," I said, fixing my gaze on Tungsten's lenses - this was going to take some getting used to. "Well, maybe. I had some nausea at one point but Sarkona knows about that. Weirdly, I'm having difficulties adjusting to how well I am. I'm not used to having this much energy. I nearly fell out of bed earlier."
"That sounds like a good problem to have at the least," acknowledged Tungsten, "But if you do feel like you want alternative sleeping arrangements, please let us know."
I nodded, thinking of what to say next. Curiosity got the better of me. "Sarkona told me you might be willing to answer some questions I had - about AIs."
"AI!" boomed Tungsten, "That's not been a used term in English for almost an eternity! I didn't know you were that old!"
"The date of freezing was 2021," volunteered Sarkona, "November, I think."
"What? I thought it was a few hundred years later than that! Why didn't I know this?"
"You did know this," said Sarkona, "It was literally the first thing we covered in the project outline workshop. This is why I'm handling the adjustment period! You were too busy working on your restoration scripts for the right index fingernail."
"The right index nail is very important!"
"But we already had great scripts!"
"Yes," said Tungsten, crossing his arms with a smug tone, "But mine were better, weren't they?"
Sarkona rolled their eyes but reluctantly nodded, smiling slightly.
"Anyway, the modern - and more accurate term in English is CI - Constructed Intelligence - though the Human term is much more accurate in general. Sarkona, you still have work to do on your English if you haven't corrected that already! Too many old projections, perhaps?"
The two clearly had a friendly rapport - the last comment was made with a subtle nod toward me. I got the feeling Tungsten would have winked, if he could.
"Hey," replied Sarkona, "The late 2300s Asimov trilogy is a classic projection series! You know how many awards it got!"
"Classic, yes. Outdated English terminology, also yes. Anyway!" Tungsten turned back to me. "To answer your question, yes, I can tell you quite a lot about CIs like myself. What do you want to know?"
"Well, when was the first AI - sorry, CI, made?" I asked.
Tungsten nodded at my self-correction. "That's a more difficult question to answer than you might think. The fact is that CIs predate the Consortium. There isn't really even a 'first'", he raised his hands and did air quotes to emphasise, "Or if there was, they've been lost to time. There are what we call the five Templates - every CI is created from a blank copy of one of these Templates. That's not to say we're all variations of the same five people - no, individual differences quickly emerge."
He seemed to pause for a beat to collect himself, then continued.
"To step back in time for a moment, the foremost CI researchers of the 2300s were based around Deimos - that's a moon of Mars, if you didn't know. It was what might have been considered a good environment for research at the time, for it had none of the oversight or laws on research associated with Mars or Earth. It attracted dedicated scientists - all of them determined to make the breakthrough they'd been dreaming of, and usher in a new age of thinking robots."
He paused and adjusted his pose slightly.
"The problem was they weren't getting anywhere. No matter what combination of code they used, no matter how much processing power was at their disposal, they couldn't code a thinking CI from scratch. Indeed, it is still a problem today -sentience is not something we as researchers completely understand. So they had to try something new - and they clearly succeeded, otherwise, how could you be sitting here talking to me right now?"
He leaned forward and slowly reached out an outstretched finger, lightly giving the centre of my forehead a very gentle tap.
"The answer is that they cheated. They copied someone else's work - that of nature. Well, to an extent."
"They copied people?" I said, shocked.
"That is a tough question to answer - after all, what is a person? As a biological human, are you your brain or your body and brain in combination? Which parts of your brain make you, you? Are there any that you don't need? That's a mystery that scientists like me and Sarkona are constantly trying to unravel."
Sarkona nodded and responded, "A very complex problem it is."
"No," continued Tungsten, "They did something far worse. They didn't just copy - it didn't work. They iterated." The note of disgust was obvious in Tungsten's voice. "My apologies for my emotion on this - it is a topic that is very important to us CIs."
"If I can step in," said Sarkona, "Even if you were to scan a human brain perfectly, upload it to a computer and try and run it, it wouldn't work. You might get some odd bits working - but the substrate - the actual physical brain - is different. There are no neurons, no neurotransmitters, nothing like that. It would be like taking an engine from an automobile and trying to put it into... I don't know, a duck, and expecting it to go. There's no process we know of for direct transfer. You can't virtualize a biological brain."
"Exactly right," said Tungsten, "The reality of it is you can't virtualize a whole brain. But as Sarkona says, occasionally little bits of functionality line up and seem to spark across the mind. Which is what the researchers realized. So they took a lot of brain scans - numbering in the thousands, and hooked them up to an algorithm."
There was a dire look on Sarkona's face - it almost didn't seem compatible with the happy, friendly person I had met so far.
Tungsten continued, in a quiet voice. "And so the algorithm combined the different scans until it found a pattern that did work."
There was a sinking feeling in my stomach. From both of their responses, that didn't seem good. "So what happened to the ones that didn't work?"
Tungsten crossed his arms, and shook his head slightly. "They were discarded. Whatever didn't meet the research team's definition of working was just deleted. We don't have the exact numbers - but the lower estimate is the thousands. The upper estimate is the millions. Millions of partial consciousnesses. It's unthinkable. And yes, many of them were probably not alive - but some of they may have been. What a terrifying existence for a living individual to have, poked and prodded and then discarded."
"Why did no-one object to this?" I asked.
"You have to remember," said Sarkona, "This was prior to the Consortium - the entity doing the research was private, had no accountability, nothing. And definitely no sense of appreciation for ethics."
"The truth did eventually come out," added Tungsten, "Hundreds of years later, when the Consortium was founded and free movement of information became common, it was determined that the proprietary techniques the group claimed they had used to create their templates were falsehoods, fabrications. It took ten years to find out the full truth by reassembling information. An impressive feat of data archeology."
"That must have been very difficult." I said.
"I'm told it was," said Tungsten. "And even today we struggle with it. But I suppose we have that in common with organics - after all, there are many ethical dilemmas in the past of humans which are difficult to reconcile. How many humans died to get you where you are today? Ah, but let's not go too deep into such ethical questions. To answer your original question fully - all CIs are derived from those five blank Templates, created in the 2300s. For obvious reasons, attempting to make other Templates in the same way as the original five is one of the most illegal things in Consortium society."
Sarkona spoke up. "It's also why progress - and I must say this properly - has been slow on understanding human and constructed consciousnesses - but if the price to pay for quicker understanding is having to carry out such atrocities, then I think we'd all rather not know at all."
Tungsten nodded at that.
"Can I ask - what about the Consortium itself - isn't that a CI too?"
"Oh, no!" said Tungsten, "But it is an easy mistake to make for one so new to the concepts. The Consortium is smart but it does not think. We can build such programs in the traditional way without issue - it is the thinking part that is difficult. There's a team of dedicated Auditors who constantly check it to make sure it is not alive or heading in that direction - and checking for spontaneous intelligences is a key part of all automation maintenance protocols. There are even a number of procedures in place just in case the Consortium does somehow become alive - we wouldn't simply stop it, that would be unethical. But given how robustly the program is designed, the Auditors don't think that would ever happen - it is mathematically impossible. The Consortium is nothing more than a sophisticated computer program."
Tungsten stood up and smoothed his waistcoat. "I wager that was a bit more detailed than you were perhaps looking for. Now, let's move onto more pleasant topics - can I interest you in some tea?"