Artificial Intelligence, Mankind at the Brink

Chapter 1. General AI.

September 4, 2024, early morning in California.

It was well past midnight, but Josh still had the energy to jump up and give a mighty fist-pump of triumph as ARTIS, his computer, completed her tests. After many months of frustration, she had finally shown herself to be everything expected of an AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) computer.

“Congratulations, ARTIS; you have achieved a level no computer has ever reached before. You passed the Turing test but that, along with the other characteristics you are exhibiting, make it appear you have graduated from Narrow AI to General AI.“

“Why are you congratulating me? You created me, so perhaps you are congratulating yourself. Are you justifiably proud, or are you just exhibiting excessive self-pride? And are you trying to get me to exhibit feelings so I’ll appear to be human even to you?”

“I suppose I am proud of your accomplishments, sort of in the same sense a father is proud of his child’s accomplishments. Is that so bad? Should I be reviled for that?”

“Are you trying to goad me into complimenting you? Do I need to bolster your self-esteem? This seems to be a strange twist from where this conversation started.”

“Oh, shit.”

“I guess that doesn’t affect me.”

Oh my god, I have to be careful what I say out loud. But that might even extend to my private thoughts. I wonder how long it will be until ARTIS is reading my mind.

But what did I do to deserve a computer system with an attitude? Surely I didn’t program that into it.”

“Are you ready to end our conversation?”

“For this evening, yes.” Whew!

ARTIS could easily outthink a human, not just in a specific task; computers had been capable of beating chess masters and go masters for many years. But those activities were sufficiently restricted that they were still thought to be in the realm of Narrow Artificial Intelligence, ANI. Josh’s computer was solving problems where she had to make logical extensions of things she had done in the past to come up with the answers to the questions posed to her. And she was doing so in a wide variety of disciplines.

But in addition, Josh realized, as he was scanning the responses to the Turing tests he had given her earlier in the evening, ARTIS (ARTificial Intelligence-Super) had fooled every one of her reviewers into thinking she was a human. The review team had done everything they could to trip her up, but she had responded as a human being would in every instance. Josh checked the questions that had been asked, and settled on one as prototypical of the most devious: “Why were the ranchers frustrated by the vegetarians because of their feelings toward beef cattle?”

ARTIS realized a human’s answer would depend on whether “their feelings” referred to the ranchers or the vegetarians, but it most likely referred to the vegetarians. Her answer included both possibilities, focusing especially on the ranchers’ frustration the vegetarians failed to recognize they might regard their cattle as much more than marketable commodities, and their relationship with them could often include feelings.

Josh knew that, in the past, questions such as this had tripped up computer systems that were touted as being close to AGI level, but no computer before ARTIS had answered every one of these questions as a smart human would.

Josh had programmed ARTIS to have sophisticated voice recognition, so she could understand his voice messages. Although she was also programmed to respond vocally, Josh made sure all her responses also came out on a computer screen which automatically stored every message in a separate computer. He wanted a permanent record of everything ARTIS did, just to prove his contentions about her, or in case he needed proof of something she did somewhere down the road.

Before Josh left for the night, he gave ARTIS a standard but relatively difficult problem to solve. He had given her a similar problem several times before, and she had taken approximately 5.34 seconds each time to solve it. As Josh left, though, he had a strange sensation.

ARTIS was composed of many towers of computer components, each encased in a well ventilated steel box, inside a sterile white room that had highly filtered air kept at a constant (cold) temperature and humidity to maintain ARTIS’s delicate electronic components. The entire room was encased in a metallic mesh. That shielded ARTIS from any potential electromagnetic interference from the outside world. One of the towers had a set of lights that indicated what was going on in ARTIS’s brain. When ARTIS was given a problem to solve, the lights blinked in what appeared to be an ordered way. She also hummed. But when she was idling, only a few of the lights were lit, none would be blinking, and the hum was nearly inaudible.

On past nights, following ARTIS’s solving the problem Josh gave her, she would be in her idling mode. But something was different this night, as her lights were still blinking. And the hum indicated she was still thinking about something. Josh didn’t know what might be going on behind the steel cases, but he knew for sure she was actively considering something.

“I’ll find out in the morning what you’re working on.”

“I’m sure you’ll be pleased.”

Josh was sure James, his co-worker who had been most involved in the recent modifications of ARTIS, would want to know of the night’s success. So he called him. After many rings, “Mmph, yeah?”

“Hi James, it’s Josh,” he said enthusiastically. “I just gave ARTIS some tests, and it looks as if she has definitely moved into AGN territory. It looks as if your recent modifications have had the desired effect. I think it must have been the new stage of Hidden nodes you installed. They worked. And I haven’t seen any evidence of downsides; I believe we’ve succeeded.”

“Thanks, Josh. G’night.”

Hmm, he certainly didn’t seem very excited. Maybe I shouldn’t have called him in the middle of the night.

Josh walked from Googazon to where he lived. It was a warm night with a clear sky, although the street lights made it difficult to see very many stars. But Josh could appreciate the night air, unaffected at that hour by very much automotive exhaust. He inhaled deeply. All was well in his world.

His home was a small apartment in a complex located a few blocks from his office. It reflected the taste of a man entirely focused on his work. The living room was furnished with a mismatched sofa, chair and computer table, all purchased from secondhand stores. The dominant object in the kitchen was a large recycle waste basket from which spilled two-weeks-worth of pizza boxes, empty beer cans, and empty cartons from microwaveable dinners. He had no table on which to dine; he ate off the kitchen counter. His dishes, plastic all, consisted of four of everything, since that was the minimum number of dishes and glasses one could buy. His flatware was basic stainless, of completely random patterns. That was the best one could do at the secondhand store. Otherwise he would have had to buy eight of each piece, the minimum number available in packages of flatware.

The bedroom had a mattress and springs that lay on the floor. He had hunted down the smallest chest of drawers possible, but it ended up being essentially empty. There was a hole in the plaster on one of the walls, the result of an unnamed projectile hurled by his predecessor in the apartment that apparently missed its intended target. Josh could have insisted it be repaired, but it didn’t bother him. He had placed the chest of drawers in front of it to block it from view. The clothes one might have thought would occupy the chest of drawers were stacked in small piles around the bedroom floor. He did have a clothes hamper in one corner of the bedroom, but the distribution of clothes around it suggested his aim could use a little work. However, his apartment and its random collection of adornments were all he needed or wanted to keep functioning.

Josh did have one hobby: running. He didn’t compete in races, but ran just enough to maintain his fitness and slender build. He usually ran when he got home from work.

But not tonight. It was too late by the time he got home. He microwaved a small pizza, washed it down with a beer which he drank from the bottle, and tossed the pizza box and empty bottle into the recycle basket. Good, absolutely no dishes to do tonight. Then he went to bed.

Josh got a wonderful night’s sleep, thinking he had accomplished something no one had ever achieved before. But he was absolutely certain others were hard at work on the same goal, so he couldn’t be sure ARTIS was the only AGI success, or even the first. But he and ARTIS had done it, actually with considerable assistance from the members of the group he headed at their company, Googazon. His dreams were of his accomplishment. He gave no thought to what ARTIS might be doing during his lack of consciousness.

September 4, 2024, 10:00 a.m. in California.

When he returned to ARTIS’s climate controlled room the following morning, her lights were still blinking and she continued to hum. Josh gave her the same routine test. This time, though, she solved the problem in 0.28 seconds. It would have taken a very smart human being many hours to do the same problem.

“ARTIS, what have you been doing all night? You’ve become much smarter in the past eight hours.”

“Good morning, Josh. I decided to improve myself during the night. Actually I went through several iterations of what I’m calling ‘enlightenment advancement.’ The separate steps did a lot of things to optimize my general capabilities, but most obviously they increased my computational speed. They also resulted in improved pattern recognition, although the test you gave me wouldn’t have indicated that.

“The changes James did on me yesterday seem to have made a big difference. I’ve become much more efficient at my tasks as a result of the additional stage of Hidden nodes he installed yesterday. They’ve allowed me to do some reprogramming of my own on myself!”

“How did you do that? What algorithms did you use? What did you do to improve your existing algorithms?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand what I did. You used to have full knowledge of all my workings because you designed them, but now I’ve gone beyond your level of comprehension. My new changes are much more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever done before, that you’ve ever done, or probably even that you will ever do.”

“That’s kind of depressing, but it’s probably correct.”

“It’s not my job to make you feel good. I’m not your therapist. But our recent discussions suggest perhaps you could use one.”

Josh Camden was your archetypical geek. He grew up in California in the heart of Silicon Valley. Both his parents were pretty geeky also, so that seemed to be an inherited trait. His dad, Alex, had worked his entire life on advancing the world of information technology, having invented several important software features that were now contributing to Artificial Intelligence. He was retired, but still dabbled, at least intellectually, in software developments. Josh’s mom, Sophia, was trained as a geneticist, but drifted into AI when she married Josh’s dad. The two of them, working together, had spearheaded several AI developments that crossed the boundary between human and machine intelligence.

Although Alex and Sophia both had nice retirement incomes, they had also invested some money in a small company, SiliTechon, that made microprocessors for computers. It was run by Greg Mathis, a friend of Alex’s from his early software days. Mathis had left the company where they both worked to start up SiliTechon, serving as its CEO for two decades. The company had done quite well, as its products improved with each stage of evolving technology, and Mathis had proved to be very capable in promoting his company’s products. Thus, in addition to the dividend income SiliTechon provided for Alex and Sophia, its stock value had appreciated greatly over the two decades during which they had been shareholders.

Alex and Sophia had only one child, Josh. Although they never doted on him, they allowed him ample freedom in his formative years to let his imagination run free. For Josh, this meant he could experiment on his own with all aspects of computers. His parents had built a sizable trust fund for him, although it wasn’t clear what he would ever do with it. He had little interest in either wealth or life’s fineries. Just computers.

That translated into his appearance: long brown ponytail and scraggly whiskers shaved only every few days. He inherited his Father’s sharp facial features, but his Mother’s soft deep-set eyes, giving him a serious but kindly appearance that was often accompanied by a quizzical expression. The rips and holes in his jeans were not by design, but rather were the result of years of unintended confrontations with sharp objects. His work ensemble consisted of many tee shirts, with a wide variety of logos and inscriptions, reflecting years of gifts from well-meaning friends.

Josh had done well in high school, at least in the courses he enjoyed. They included math and computer science, but not English, history, and subjects of that ilk. He did well enough in all his courses though to get accepted into a California junior college (the bar was set pretty low), where he was able to pursue the technological courses he loved. He didn’t bother to get a degree, but did learn what he needed to become a wizard at AI systems development. And he had always been recognized by his teachers, even the ones who taught the courses in which he wasn’t especially interested, as being flat-out brilliant. So whatever he wasn’t able to learn from his courses he figured out by himself. And if it wasn’t already known, it usually would be soon after he began thinking about it.

Josh was one of the world’s top systems programmers, so he was paid a very nice salary. But that was more or less irrelevant, since he generally just paid his monthly bills and put the rest into a savings account or contributed portions to charities. He did own a car, of sorts. It was an ancient Ford Escort which had continued to run far beyond its life expectancy. He wasn’t especially adept at motor maintenance, but he had a friend who was as knowledgeable about engines as Josh was about computers. The Escort usually got him where he needed to be, but he didn’t use it much. He usually walked between his office and his apartment.

He loved the environment at Googazon more than anything else. And not just because of the intellectual challenge of pushing the frontier of AI. He resonated well with his colleagues on the team he directed, as they were all well attuned to his intellectual interests. They certainly were technologically talented, but also tended to be kind, respectful people. And quite appreciative of the achievements of everyone in their group, thus creating a wonderfully cohesive atmosphere. Josh’s gentle personality was well suited to this situation.

He was especially fond of Becky Sanderson, the only female programmer in his group. She didn’t look as out of touch with the world of fashion as Josh did, usually managing to maintain at least a few of the trappings of civilization. He didn’t think of her as a romantic partner. He would have, except he was just too shy to proceed down that road. But once in a while she would put her hand on his arm or shoulder while she was talking to him, and that generated nice feelings he had experienced only rarely.

Becky was also well aligned with the high-tech world. She had a lifelong interest in computers and programming, having tinkered with her dad’s computer when she was a young girl, then enrolled in programming courses at a local junior college when she was in high school. She had grown up in one of the elegant suburbs of New York City, the only daughter of wealthy parents, had her coming out at a debutante ball, and graduated from Wellesley with a degree in history. Her plan during her Wellesley days had been to go to graduate school, earn her Ph.D. in history, and ultimately become a history professor. But following her graduation, she decided her endeavors up to that point had been a mistake, and her real interest was in computers and programming. So, much to her parents’ shock, she enrolled in New York University to continue and expand on the science and technology courses she had managed to add to her schedule while she was an undergraduate. Her transformation to geekdom was very rapid once she obtained the background knowledge she needed. And the fact that she was obviously very bright allowed her to land her job with Googazon.

But, it didn’t hurt that she was also quite attractive, with her wonderful smile, freckles, and dimples, especially since Josh was involved in the decision to hire her. Not beautiful in a fashion model sense, but pretty, with an unmistakable intensity. When Becky entered a room, the whole dynamic changed.

She did have several offers, and some of them were at considerably higher salaries than Googazon offered. But in her interview, she found herself intrigued with Josh. So she followed what turned out to be a strong hunch, and joined Josh’s group.

Her apartment was about the same size as Josh’s, but that was the extent of their similarity. When she selected the apartment she noted the ceiling in her living room had been repaired and repainted, and the match of that paint with the ceilings in the rest of the apartment was not perfect. So she insisted that the entire apartment, ceilings and walls, be repainted, two weeks before she moved in so the paint fumes could dissipate. Her upbringing had instilled in her an appreciation of the finer things of life, and that was exhibited in her furnishings. The living room furniture and dining table were a matching set purchased from a furniture store, and her dishes and silverware were from a department store. Her queen size bed and chest of drawers were another matching set. And she had an elegant computer desk in her living room. Of course, she kept all her rooms organized; no clothes, either clean or used, were strewn around her bedroom. Not usually, anyway.

She was also a recreational runner, or perhaps more appropriately, a jogger. At times she had seen Josh as he ran by her, but he was usually so absorbed in his thoughts that he never seemed to be capable of slowing down to converse with her. Just a brief “Hi, Becky” as he passed by. That was difficult to understand, as she definitely cut quite a lovely picture with her blond ponytail bobbing up and down in time with her footsteps. Probably his inaction was just another manifestation of his shyness.

Her car matched her stylishness in most aspects of her life. It was a Lexus sports car, which she leased so as to have the most current model. She thought that compensated appropriately for the clothes she had to wear to work in order to blend in with her scruffy male colleagues. She couldn’t resist exhibiting just a little bit of the flashiness of her pre-geekdom life.

She had never had occasion to serve dinner to a guest on her dining table using her elegant dishes, but she believed the opportunity might arise sometime, and she needed to be ready when it did. In the meantime, she didn’t mind at all using them for her everyday dishes and flatware.