by Greg Egan
‘Have they arrested him?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Rana said, ‘he’s been shot. They’ve taken him to hospital, but he’s not expected to last the night.’
6
Nasim hunched over her computer screen, gazing intently at a section of code from her neural map integration routines, blocking out thoughts of anything else.
No two zebra finches sang exactly the same song; no two finches had identical brains. So how could you use partial, imperfect images of a thousand different finch brains to build up some kind of meaningful composite?
On a gross level the same structures within the brain appeared in more or less the same anatomical locations, but as you zoomed in towards the level of individual neurons, the cues that counted most were the cells’ biochemistry and their patterns of connections. The problem lay in keeping the notion of a pattern of connections from becoming meaninglessly vague, uselessly rigid, or maddeningly circular. If ten thousand cells of biochemical type A sent axons to ten thousand cells of type B, that certainly didn’t mean that they were all interchangeable. But if you insisted that only neurons that were wired up to identical neighbours in identical ways could be treated as common features, there would be no matches at all. Worse, if you could only characterise every neuron by first characterising the neurons to which it was joined, you ran the risk of pushing everything down a rabbit hole of endless self-reference. The whole endeavour was like trying to reconstruct the human skeleton from a thousand incomplete - and partly inconsistent - translations of ‘Dem Dry Bones’ into unknown foreign languages. ‘The fifflezerm’s connected to the girglesprig . . .’
Over the months she’d spent working on the problem, Nasim had tried all manner of high-powered statistical techniques and classification schemes from abstract network topology, but the approach that was finally showing signs of a payoff involved searching for distinctive sub-networks, not by their pattern of connections per se, but by their function. An engineer staring at a circuit diagram could group the components into various kinds of functional blocks - say, half-a-dozen that formed an oscillator, another half-dozen comprising a filter - without requiring an absolutely rigid, unvarying design for each of these meta-components. An oscillator was anything that oscillated; it didn’t have to be a perfect match for the first one you’d encountered in a textbook. Similarly, if a group of neurons had the same general effect on their inputs as another group, it didn’t really matter if there happened to be thirty-nine neurons in one group and forty-five in the other. ‘The same general effect’ was easier said than defined, but Nasim had been refining the notion for weeks now, and she was convinced that she was finally closing in on a set of meaningful categories.
She tweaked a few definitions in her code and started it running again. It would take a couple of minutes to process the full data set; she looked away from her screen and across the lab. Everyone was unnaturally quiet today; Redland was down in Washington, testifying before a House Select Committee on the mooted Human Connectome Project, and Judith had gone with him. The Committee had been holding hearings for a month, and Redland was just one of dozens of scientists who’d been called to give testimony, but the occasion of his trip had reminded everyone that their funding, and their future, lay in the balance.
The composite map appeared on the screen. Nasim was about to slip on her headphones when a mischievous impulse took hold of her. She pulled the headphone plug out of its jack, rerouting the computer’s audio to its speakers. Then she fired up the software syrinx and ran the latest simulation of the finch brain’s vocalisation pathways.
The infantile babbling of her early trials had slowly been giving way to a more ordered song, but this time hairs rose on the back of her neck. The distinctive rhythms of an adult bird’s call - the whole style, the whole structure - were finally present.
With the song still playing, she checked the simulation’s virtual EEG. The waveforms were not an exact match to any of the biological recordings on file, but the statistics all fell within the population ranges. If she’d handed the traces to a neurobiologist, they would not have been able to pick the artificial one from the real.
Mike stepped away from his bench and looked around, annoyed. ‘Who took the bird out of the animal house?’ he demanded. He was wearing a hairnet and something that resembled a plastic shower cap. ‘If I get droppings in my cell cultures, that’s a month’s work down the tube!’ He finally homed in on the sound and turned to glare angrily at Nasim. ‘Where is it?’
It took her a moment to realise that he wasn’t joking. She said, ‘No droppings, Mike, I promise.’
Mike, Shen and Dinesh gathered around her desk and watched as she ran through a battery of further tests. She kept the syrinx warbling, trying to shake off the eerie feeling that she’d stitched together something gruesome from the corpses of the birds and could now feel the awakened result fluttering its wings in her hand.
Shen said, ‘We should play this to a female bird and see if she’s attracted. A Turing test for zebra finches.’
‘No,’ Mike countered, ‘we should simulate a female’s auditory centres, and see if that simulation is attracted.’
‘One program fools another program? How is that a test?’ Shen demanded.
‘It’s not a test,’ Mike agreed, ‘but it would be much easier for them to consummate the relationship.’
Shen pondered this. ‘I think the Media Lab could put together some avian tele-dildonics faster than we could construct a purely software female capable of mating.’
‘Can we cut the Bride of Frankenfinch crap?’ Nasim pleaded. ‘There’s nothing in there but the vocalisation PDP. If that can feel lust all by itself, then so can a Casio keyboard.’
Dinesh said, ‘There’s nothing in there that can feel lust, yet. But now that you can integrate maps from different imaging techniques, it would take us, what, eighteen months to do the whole finch brain?’
‘Who’s this “us”?’ Mike replied. ‘You mean the people who are actually sticking around to fight for the HCP?’
Nasim plugged her headphones into their jack, cutting off the speakers. ‘The recital’s over,’ she said. ‘I have work to do.’
At lunchtime, Nasim joined the others gathered around a wide-screen monitor in the conference room, watching Redland give his testimony to the Select Committee. The session had taken place a few hours before, and the video had been posted on the web.
Redland stuck to the usual big targets: schizophrenia, autism, depression and Alzheimer’s. The Human Connectome Project, he declared, would shed light on them all. This was almost certainly true in the long run, and it was a relatively easy goal to sell to the public, but Nasim still had her doubts about the wisdom of the strategy. It didn’t take much reflection for people to start wondering if there weren’t better, cheaper, faster ways to address those conditions. Mapping every corner of the brain would be a triumph of human self-understanding - with payoffs, eventually, that left the genome in the shade - but if you were going to spend billions of dollars and decades of hard work on that goal, selling it as a cure for some Affliction of the Month would only risk making the whole project seem like a bloated white elephant as soon as a drug came along to make that role redundant.
As Shen closed the playback window for the recording, he noticed a small image showing the site’s live feed. ‘Hey, they’re talking to Zachary Churchland!’ He put the feed into full-screen mode.
Churchland was an octogenarian oil billionaire who had raised the possibility of funding his own brain-mapping project, in competition with any government effort. The press had started calling him ‘the Craig Venter of the HCP’, but unlike Venter, he had no biotech skills himself. The neuroscientists advocating the HCP treated him with kid gloves, as they would any potential sugar daddy, but his professed motives could not have been further from their own statements about Alzheimer’s and apple pie.
‘Congressman, the ultimate goal of my project would be universal immortality,�
� Churchland declared. His voice reminded Nasim of William S. Burroughs, a writer whose words had been sampled on one of her favourite dance tracks; she’d never sought out his books, suspecting they’d be rather strait-laced and stuffy, but he had such nice diction that she’d come to think of him as the epitome of twentieth-century gentility. ‘If there are public health benefits along the way, then that’s well and good, but all of public health becomes a minor sub-problem when viewed in the light of the digital migration.’
Congressman Fitzwaller, chairman of the Select Committee, pondered this reply in silence for a moment. He could hardly have been ignorant of Churchland’s views unless he’d had his head in a paper bag for the last six months, but now that the man was there in front of him, in the flesh, giving testimony before this august body, he seemed not quite able to believe what he was hearing.
‘Mr Churchland, the scientists who have come before this committee have all been quite clear: the Human Connectome will not be a personal map of any one human’s brain. It will not describe any individual’s memories, or personality, or goals. Do you dispute that expert testimony, sir?’
Churchland made a sound that could either have been a sigh, or a sign of emphysema. ‘No, Congressman, I do not. I accept that a generic map is a necessary intermediate step on the road towards the mapping of individuals. Having reached that point, a great deal of work will remain to be done in order to achieve personalisation. But to pretend that we will reach that point and then halt is simply absurd. We will continue. That is our nature.’
Fitzwaller said, ‘What timescale do you anticipate for that development? For what you call “personalisation”?’
‘I am not an expert,’ Churchland replied, ‘but the people I have consulted on the matter suggest that it might be possible within twenty or thirty years.’
‘So this is not a development from which you would hope to benefit yourself, sir?’
‘On the contrary, Congressman,’ Churchland replied crisply, ‘I am unlikely to see out the year, but upon my death my body will be frozen. If I do set up a trust to support this research, the deeds of that trust will expressly state that its goals include my own digital resurrection.’
Fitzwaller looked down and shuffled through his papers with something of the air of a doctor reluctant to deliver bad news. Nasim could sympathise with his discomfort. She suspected that uploading would become feasible at some point in the future - perhaps by the end of the century - but to watch a dying man clutching at straws like this was just painful.
Fitzwaller said, ‘Mr Churchland, do you really have that much faith in this technology? We are all grateful for the achievements and ingenuity of the medical profession, but surely there are limits to what mere humans can do.’
Churchland reached off-camera and retrieved an oxygen mask, which he held over his mouth and nose for three deep breaths before replying. ‘Indeed, Congressman. And I would not wish to mislead this committee into thinking that I have definitely resolved to fund a project of the kind we are discussing. In fact, over the last month or so I have received some very persuasive representations from a group who believe that it might be at best inefficient and at worst highly dangerous to proceed in this fashion.’
‘Can you elaborate, sir?’
‘I have been invited to fund an enterprise known as the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project,’ Churchland explained. ‘Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers of self-analysis that it will design and construct its own successor, which will be armed with superior versions of all the skills the original possessed. The successor will then produce a still more proficient third version, and so on, leading to a cascade of exponentially increasing abilities. Once this process is set in motion, within weeks - perhaps within hours - a being of truly God-like powers will emerge.’
Nasim resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. However surreal the spectacle unfolding on the screen, there was, in retrospect, something inevitable about it. The uploading advocates who’d sold Churchland on an imminent digital resurrection hadn’t lost their critical faculties entirely, but their penchant for finessing away any ‘mere technical problems’ that might stretch out the timetable was, nonetheless, intellectually corrosive, to the point where the next step probably didn’t seem like such a great leap any more: hand-waving all practicalities out of existence, transforming the cyber-eschatologists’ rickety scaffolding of untested assumptions into a cast-iron stairway to heaven.
Fitzwaller cleared his throat. ‘Mr Churchland, it’s not entirely clear to me how that matter is pertinent to the business of this committee.’
Churchland said, ‘Rather than trust humans to perfect the brain-mapping technology that we’ve been discussing, I am leaning towards putting my fate in the hands of an artificial God, for whom such problems will be trivial. The Benign Superintelligence will rule the planet with wisdom and compassion, eliminating war, disease, unhappiness, and of course, death. I am told that it will probably disassemble most of the material in our solar system in order to construct a vast computer that will exploit all the energy of the sun. Perhaps it will spare the Earth, or perhaps the Earth will be reconstructed, more perfectly, within that computerised domain.’
The camera caught Fitzwaller in the transition from bewilderment to revulsion. ‘ “Rule the planet”? Am I to understand that you’re contemplating funding a body that advocates overthrowing the lawful government of the United States?’
Churchland required more oxygen before replying, ‘Keep your shirt on, Congressman. There’s no point fighting it, and the alternative would be far worse. Imagine if one of our country’s enemies did this first. Imagine the kind of despotic superintelligence that Al Qaeda would create.’
‘Mr Churchland,’ Fitzwaller said evenly, ‘does it not occur to you that most people on the planet would prefer not to have their affairs dictated by an artificial intelligence of any kind?’
‘That’s too bad, Congressman,’ Churchland retorted, ‘because I am coming to the view that we probably have no choice.’
Judith stormed into the conference room and slammed her briefcase down on the table. For a moment Nasim assumed that she’d been watching the same feed, but then it became clear from her body language that she was oblivious to the sight of half the HCP’s potential funding sprouting wings and flying away. She was livid, but it had nothing to do with Churchland’s deathbed embrace of Bullshit Squared.
‘Whoever’s idea it was,’ she fumed, ‘it really wasn’t funny.’
Nasim said, ‘Whoever’s idea was what?’
‘Can you think of a reason why five sleaze-bags would have hit on me this morning in Reagan Airport alone?’
‘New perfume?’ Mike suggested. Judith picked up the whiteboard eraser and hurled it at him; he squirmed sideways but it clipped his shoulder.
Dinesh spread his hands innocently. ‘How could that possibly be our doing? You think we’re paying men to harass you, as some kind of prank?’
Judith took her phone from her pocket. ‘Someone, somehow, has signed me on to . . . PowerFlirt, or HookMeUp, or whatever the fuck it’s called when total strangers get a message on their phone the moment I walk into sight—’ She must have noticed the growing expression of discomfort on Nasim’s face, because she loomed towards her and demanded, ‘What do you know about this?’
Nasim cringed. She’d thought Christopher in IT would have fixed everything by now, but she’d never got around to switching AcTrack back on and checking if her own problem had gone away - let alone following up the whole question of whether Murmur had made its system less prone to bizarre cross-infections. ‘I should have told everyone sooner,’ she confessed, flustered, ‘but I put the rabbit in the park and I just forgot about it.’
Judith stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.
Shen said, ‘Phwoar. Isn’t it called Phwoar? That’s what I heard.’ He was sitting next to Nasim, and through the floor she could feel his
chair resonating with a dull mechanical vibration.
7
Crouched in the dark recess behind the freezer-truck’s compressor, Martin was wishing that he’d brought some music for the trip. He was wearing earplugs, but the relentless thumping of the compressor still seeped into his skull, and he was beginning to hallucinate snatches of songs emerging from the noise. In principle that might have been entertaining, but the songs were all terrible: soppy Bollywood love duets with doleful heroes and squeaky-voiced heroines; monotonous aerobics-class remixes of undeserved hits of the eighties; vapid punk-metal droning by airheads sporting novelty contact lenses. If he’d known before he’d left Tehran that there was so much bad music buried in his skull, he would have shoved a screwdriver up one nostril and done his best to scrape it all out.
Behrouz was wedged behind the other side of the compressor, and though it probably would have been safe for them to yell at each other while the truck was moving, Martin suspected that bellowing pleasantries and idle observations wouldn’t have done much to help them pass the time. And being caught at a checkpoint playing ‘Twenty Questions’ would just have been embarrassing.
