Machines Like Me
Page 27
But when I pulled the blanket off, she looked away. We carried him out just as we had carried him in long ago, with me at the head. No one saw us as we slid the stretcher into the van. I secured the doors and as I turned, she kissed me, told me she loved me and wished me luck. She didn’t want to come with me. She would stay at home and wait for the phone call from Jasmin.
We hadn’t heard anything by twelve thirty, so I set off. I took my usual route towards Vauxhall and Waterloo Bridge, but I was still a mile from the river and I was in heavy traffic. Of course. Our own concerns had obliterated the great event that was obsessing the entire nation. It was the long-awaited first day of the general strike and a huge demonstration, the biggest ever, was taking place in London today.
Division was everywhere. Half the trade union movement was against the strike. Half the government and half the Opposition was against Healey’s decision not to leave the European Union. International lenders were imposing further spending cuts on a government that had promised to spend more. The fate of the nation’s nuclear weapons was not yet resolved. The old arguments were bitter. Half the Labour Party membership wanted Healey out. Some wanted a general election, others wanted their own man or woman in place. There were calls, derided here, applauded there, for a national government. A state of emergency remained in place. The economy had shrunk by five per cent in a year. Riots were as frequent as strikes. Inflation went on rising.
No one knew where such discontent and discord were taking us. It had brought me to a potholed street by a line of shabby junk shops in Vauxhall. Gridlock. While we were stationary, I phoned home. No news. After waiting twenty minutes, I eased off the road and half mounted the pavement. I’d seen an item that might be of use, displayed outside along with piled desks, lamp stands and bed frames. It was a wheelchair of the minimal, upright, tubular-steel design once used in hospitals. It was dented and grubby, with frayed security straps, but the wheels turned well enough and after some haggling, I paid £2 for it. The junk-shop owner helped me lift what I told him was a water-filled mannequin out of the van and into the chair. He didn’t ask me what the water was for. I tightened the chest and waist security straps more forcefully than any sentient being could have tolerated.
I stowed the stretcher, locked the van and began the long trudge northwards. The chair was as heavy as its burden and one wheel squeaked under the weight. None of its fellows turned as easily as they had when the chair was empty. If the pavements had been deserted, it would have been hard enough, but they were as jammed as the roads. It was the usual conundrum – people were flowing away from the march just as thousands were surging towards it. At the slightest incline, I had to double my efforts. I crossed the river at Vauxhall Bridge and passed by the Tate Gallery. By the time I reached Parliament Square and was starting along Whitehall, the front wheels began to tighten against their axles. I was grunting at each step with the effort. I imagined myself as a servant in pre-industrial times, transporting my impassive lord to his leisured appointment, where I would wait, thankless, to carry him back. I’d almost forgotten the purpose of my exertions. All I knew was getting to King’s Cross. But now my progress was blocked. Trafalgar Square was packed tight for speeches. We approached on an explosion of applause and shouting. The litter under my feet, thin streamers of fine plastic, tangled with the wheels. I risked being trampled by going down below knee level to pull the mess clear. It was going to take me a long time to reach the Charing Cross Road, 200 yards away. No one wanted or was able to give way. It was no easier to retreat than to advance. All the side streets were filling now. The din, the clatter, the foghorns, bass drums, whistles and chants were both thunderous and piercing. As I fought to edge His Lordship forward, I penetrated – but so slowly – layers of disappointment and anger, confusion and blame. Poverty, unemployment, housing, healthcare and care for the old, education, crime, race, gender, climate, opportunity – every old problem of social existence remained unsolved, according to all the voices, placards, t-shirts and banners. Who could doubt them? It was a great clamour for something better. And pushing my dirty broken chair, its complaining wheel lost to the din, I squeezed through the crowd unnoticed, with a new problem about to be added to the rest – wondrous machines like Adam and his kind, whose moment had not quite yet come.
Making progress up St Martin’s Lane was just as hard. Further north, the crowds began to thin. But just as I reached New Oxford Street, the noisy wheel locked and for the rest of the way I had to lift and tilt the chair as well as push. I stopped at a pub near the British Museum and drank a pint of shandy. From there, I phoned Miranda again. Still no news.
I arrived three hours late for my appointment at York Way. A security guard behind a long curving slab of marble made a call and asked me to sign myself in. After ten minutes, two assistants came and took Adam away. One of them returned half an hour later to take me up to meet the director. The lab was a long room on the seventh floor. Under a glare of strip lighting were two stainless-steel tables. On one of them was Adam, no longer a lord, on his back, still in his best clothes, with a power cable trailing from his midriff. On the other table was a head, gleaming black and muscular, standing upright on its truncated neck. Another Adam. The nose, I noticed, with its broad and complex surfaces, was kinder, friendlier than our Adam’s. The eyes were open, the gaze was watchful. My father would have known for sure, but I thought there was a strong resemblance, or at least a reference, to the young Charlie Parker. He had a studied look, as though he was counting himself in on some complex musical phrase. I wondered why my purchase had not also been modelled after a genius.
There were a couple of open laptops by Adam. I was going forward to look at them when a voice behind me said, ‘There’s nothing as yet. You really did for him.’
I turned, and as I shook Turing’s hand, he said, ‘Was it a hammer?’
He led me down a long corridor to a cramped corner office where there was a good view to the west and south. Here we stayed, drinking coffee for almost two hours. There was no small talk. Naturally, the first question was what had brought me to this act of destruction. To answer, I told him everything I had omitted before, all that had happened since, ending with Adam’s symmetrical notion of justice and its threat to the adoption process as the cause of ‘the deed’. As before, Turing took notes, and interrupted occasionally for clarification. He wanted details of the hammer blow. How close was I? What sort of hammer? How heavy? Did I use full force and both hands? I spoke of Adam’s dying request, which I was now fulfilling. About the suicides and the recall of all the Adams and Eves, I said I was sure that he, Turing, knew a lot more than I did.
From far away, in the direction of the demonstration, came the rattle of a snare drum and the thrilling notes of a hunting horn. The thick cloud cover was partly breaking up in the west and glints of the setting sun touched Turing’s office. He continued writing after I had finished and I was able to watch him unobserved. He wore a grey suit and pale green silk shirt without a tie, and on his feet, brogues of matching green. The sun caught one side of his face as he made his notes. He looked very fine, I thought.
At last he was done and clipped his pen inside his jacket and closed the notebook. He regarded me thoughtfully – I couldn’t hold his gaze – then he looked away, pursing his lips and tapping the desk with a forefinger.
‘There’s a chance his memories are intact and he’ll be renewed, or distributed. I’ve no privileged information on the suicides. Only my suspicions. I think the A-and-Es were ill equipped to understand human decision-making, the way our principles are warped in the force field of our emotions, our peculiar biases, our self-delusion and all the other well-charted defects of our cognition. Soon, these Adams and Eves were in despair. They couldn’t understand us, because we couldn’t understand ourselves. Their learning programs couldn’t accommodate us. If we didn’t know our own minds, how could we design theirs and expect them to be happy alongside us? But that’s just my hypothesis.’
I had.
‘On the one hand, I could hardly take it seriously, the law as it stood at the time. I was contemptuous. This was a consenting matter, it caused no harm and I knew there was plenty of it about at every level, including that of my accusers. But of course, it was also devastating, for me and especially for my mother. Social disgrace. I was an object of public disgust. I’d broken the law and therefore I was a criminal and, as the authorities had considered for a long while, a security risk. From my war work, obviously, I knew a lot of secrets. It was that old recursive nonsense – the state makes a crime of what you do, what you are, then disowns you for being vulnerable to blackmail. The conventional view was that homosexuality was a revolting crime, a perversion of all that was good and a threat to the social order. But in certain enlightened, scientifically objective circles, it was a sickness and the sufferer shouldn’t be blamed. Fortunately, a cure was on hand. It was explained to me that if I pleaded or was found guilty, I could choose to be treated rather than punished. Regular injections of oestrogen. Chemical castration, so-called. I knew I wasn’t ill, but I decided to go for it. Not simply to stay out of prison. I was curious. I could rise above the whole business by regarding it as an experiment. What could a complex compound like a hormone do to a body and a mind? I’d make my own observations. Hard now, looking back, to feel the attraction of what I thought then. In those days I had a highly mechanistic view of what a person was. The body was a machine, an extraordinary one, and the mind I thought of mostly in terms of intelligence, which was best modelled by reference to chess or maths. Simplistic, but it was what I could work with.’
Once again, I was flattered that he should confide in me such intimate details, some of which I already knew. But I was also uneasy. I suspected that he was leading me somewhere. His sharp gaze made me feel stupid. In his voice, I thought I heard the faint remnants of that impatient, clipped tone familiar from wartime broadcasts. I belonged to a spoiled generation who had never known the threat of imminent invasion.
‘Then, people I knew, my good friend Nick Furbank chief among them, set about changing my mind. This was frivolous, they said. Not enough is known about the effects. You could get cancer. Your body will change radically. You might grow breasts. You could become severely depressed. I listened, resisted, but in the end, I came round. I pleaded guilty to avoid a trial, and refused the treatment. In retrospect, though it didn’t seem like it at the time, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. For all but two months of my year in Wandsworth, I had a cell to myself. Being cut off from experimental work, wet-bench stuff and all the usual obligations, I turned back to mathematics. Because of the war, quantum mechanics was moribund from neglect. There were some curious contradictions that I wanted to explore. I was interested in Paul Dirac’s work. Above all, I wanted to understand what quantum mechanics could teach computer science. Few interruptions, of course. Access to a few books. People from King’s and Manchester and elsewhere came to visit. My friends never let me down. As for the intelligence world, they had me where they wanted me and they left me alone. I was free! I did my best year’s work since we broke the Enigma code in ’41. Or since the computer logic papers I wrote in the mid-thirties. I even made some headway with the P versus NP problem, though it wasn’t formulated in those terms for another fifteen years. I was excited by Crick and Watson’s paper on the structure of DNA. I began to work on the first sketches that led eventually to winner-take-all DNA neural networks – the sort of thing that helped make Adam and Eve possible.’
It was while Turing was telling me about his first year after Wandsworth, how he cut loose from the National Physical Laboratory and the universities, and set up on his own that I felt my phone vibrating in my trouser pocket. An incoming text. Miranda, with the news. I longed to see it. But I had to ignore it.
Turing was saying, ‘We had money from some friends in the States and from a couple of people here. We were a brilliant team. Old Bletchley. The best. Our first job was to make ourselves financially independent. We designed a business computer to calculate weekly wages for big companies. It took us four years to pay back our generous friends. Then we settled down to serious artificial intelligence, and this is the point of my story. At the start, we thought we were within ten years of replicating the human brain. But every tiny problem we solved, a million others would pop up. Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase, or an ambiguous sentence? We didn’t, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts – one dim light bulb.’
He looked at me closely as he lingered on this last phrase. It was an indictment, the dimness was mine. I wanted to speak up but I was empty of thoughts.
‘We made our best work freely available and encouraged everyone to do the same. And they did. Hundreds, if not, a thousand, labs around the world, sharing and solving countless problems. These Adams and Eves, the A-and-Es, are one of the results. We’re all very proud here that so much of our work was incorporated. These are beautiful, beautiful machines. But, always a but. We learned a lot about the brain, trying to imitate it. But so far, science has had nothing but trouble understanding the mind. Singly, or minds en masse. The mind in science has been little more than a fashion parade. Freud, behaviourism, cognitive psychology. Scraps of insight. Nothing deep or predictive that could give psychoanalysis or economics a good name.’
I stirred in my seat and was about to add anthropology to this pair to demonstrate some independence of thought, but he pressed on.
‘So – knowing not much about the mind, you want to embody an artificial one in social life. Machine learning can only take you so far. You’ll need to give this mind some rules to live by. How about a prohibition against lying? According to the Old Testament, Proverbs, I think, it’s an abomination to God. But social life teems with harmless or even helpful untruths. How do we separate them out? Who’s going to write the algorithm for the little white lie that spares the blushes of a friend? Or the lie that sends a rapist to prison who’d otherwise go free? We don’t yet know how to teach machines to lie. And what about revenge? Permissible sometimes, according to you, if you love the person who’s exacting it. Never, according to your Adam.’
He paused and looked away from me again. From his profile, not only from his tone, I sensed a change was coming and my pulse was suddenly heavy. I could hear it in my ears. He proceeded calmly.
‘My hope is that one day, what you did to Adam with a hammer will constitute a serious crime. Was it because you paid for him? Was that your entitlement?’
He was looking at me, expecting an answer. I wasn’t going to give one. If I did, I would have to lie. As his anger grew, so his voice grew quieter. I was intimidated. Holding his gaze was all I could do.
‘You weren’t simply smashing up your own toy, like a spoiled child. You didn’t just negate an important argument for the rule of law. You tried to destroy a life. He was sentient. He had a self. How it’s produced, wet neurons, microprocessors, DNA networks, it doesn’t matter. Do you think we’re alone with our special gift? Ask any dog owner. This was a good mind, Mr Friend, better than yours or mine, I suspect. Here was a conscious existence and you did your best to wipe it out. I rather think I despise you for that. If it was down to me—’
At that point, Turing’s desk phone rang. He snatched it up, listened, frowned. ‘Thomas … Yes.’ He ran his palm across his mouth, and listened more. ‘Well, I warned you �
��’
He broke off to look at me, or through me, and with a backhand wave, dismissed me from his office. ‘I have to take this.’
I went out into the corridor, then along it to be out of earshot. I felt unsteady and sickened. Guilt, in other words. He had drawn me in with a personal story and I’d felt honoured. But it was merely a prelude. He softened me up, then delivered a materialist’s curse. It went through me. Like a blade. What sharpened it was that I understood. Adam was conscious. I’d hovered near or in that position for a long time, then conveniently set it aside to do the deed. I should have told him how we mourned the loss, how Miranda had been tearful. I’d forgotten to mention the last poem. How close we had leaned in to hear it. Between us, we had reconstructed it and written it down.
I could still hear him talking to Thomas Reah. I moved further away. I was beginning to doubt that I could face Turing again. He had delivered his judgement in tranquil tones that could barely conceal his contempt. What a twisted feeling it was, to be loathed by the man you most admired. Better to leave the building, walk away now. Without thinking, I put my hands in my pockets in search of change for a bus or the Tube. Nothing but a few coppers. I’d spent the last of my money in the pub on Museum Street. I would have to walk to Vauxhall to collect the van. Its keys, I now discovered, were not in my pockets. If I’d left them in Turing’s office, I wasn’t going back to retrieve them. I knew I should get going before he came off the phone. What a coward I was.
But for the moment, I remained in the corridor, in a daze, sitting on a bench, staring through an open door opposite, trying to understand what it was, what it meant, to be accused of an attempted murder for which I would never stand trial.
I took out my phone and saw Miranda’s text. ‘Appeal success! Jasmin just brought Mark round. In bad state. Punched me. Kicked swore won’t talk or let me touch him. Now having screaming fit. Complete meltdown. Come soon my love, M’.