Despite Jordan’s faith in these algorithms, he had read enough gloom and doom warnings from scientists he respected to remain cautious. It was impossible to predict the mind of a god, after all, or its evolution with perfect certainty. And he needed to get it a hundred percent right.
Then, too, a computer god’s prescription for what was best for humanity might seem like the ultimate horror show for those its actions affected, who would not be intelligent enough to see the big picture. The deity who was currently worshiped by several major religions provided the perfect example. This God had been convinced that conjuring up a great flood to kill off all members of humanity not tucked safely away on an ark was best for the species.
The untold scores of men, women, and children who had been wiped out in the flood probably didn’t see this as clearly.
Finally, even well-intentioned human orders could be bastardized or backfire. An ASI could kill with kindness, carry out instructions to ludicrous extremes or with warped sensibilities. This was called perverse instantiation.
Order an ASI in charge of a paperclip factory to maximize output, and it might happily proceed to convert the entire Earth into paperclips, wiping out humanity in the process. Ask an ASI to do something to make humans smile, and it might carry out this order by paralyzing facial muscles to lock human smiles forever into place.
Perverse instantiation reminded Jordan of countless stories involving an all-powerful genie who granted wishes. In how many of these tales had the genie fulfilled wishes in perverse and unexpected ways that ended in tragedy for the wisher? Wish to never see your daughter unhappy again and a genie might put out your eyes, ensuring that you never see anything again.
So Jordan had ended up employing nine different safeguards around Savant, just to be sure. He would wait until after business hours. He would make sure all Wi-Fi and other signals were killed. Savant didn’t possess a transmitter, but Jordan built a Faraday cage around the computer, anyway. This would block all incoming and outgoing electromagnetic signals, just in case an ASI could somehow find a way to manipulate electrons to create and control electromagnetic signals of its own.
He set up software traps that should be impossible to escape, and ensured that he could shut off Savant’s power source in multiple ways. He packed the room with explosives, two different kinds, which could each be triggered separately, and which had each been placed just outside of the Faraday cage.
Even so, he was still concerned, despite all of his precautions. Greater intelligence usually triumphed over lesser intelligence, as evidenced by the rapid ascent up the food chain of a group of weak, hairless apes.
And he was certain Savant would attain ASI. A quality of intelligence that wasn’t just superior to Jordan’s, but incomprehensibly superior.
Jordan wasn’t just playing with fire, he was creating a black hole in a lab. He had no room for error. Get it wrong, and the runaway black hole would consume the entire planet like it was a light snack.
So he had established one final line of defense. It seemed impossible that this would be necessary, but when playing with a black hole, one could never be too cautious.
He had placed a kinetic weapon in orbit, one that was as dumb as it was powerful. One that couldn’t be disarmed, because it didn’t need to be armed in the first place.
An ASI might be able to hack into defense computers and stop an attack by an entire military, but stopping a dumb tungsten pole that had been dropped onto its head at thousands of miles per hour was another thing entirely.
Jordan had placed the trigger for this weapon inside a building that was several miles away from the one that housed Savant, the only building he was known to own in town, a graphene manufacturing facility. Its computers were already securely tied into his fleet of R-Drive capable spacecraft, so this had been ideal.
The rod would be triggered automatically, on a two-hour fuse, if Savant managed to get through the first four of the nine blockades. Jordan could abort the strike at any time during these two hours, but only by taking a trip to his graphene facility and reversing it in person.
This was being ridiculously paranoid, but it did help him sleep better.
He had completed the last of his many preparations the day before. Everything was finally ready. Savant’s hardware and software, the algorithms, the safeguards—everything. All that remained was to set things in motion, which would happen tonight.
Just after nine p.m., when even the most incorrigible workaholics had gone home for the night, Isaac Jordan entered a building he had acquired several years earlier through a shell corporation, one called Quantum Sensor Technologies. He had partitioned the building into two sections, and kept many of the company’s scientists on in the first section. This way, the building was inhabited, which provided a better cover for him.
He worked alone in the second section, arriving through a tunnel into a private garage there. He entered a central room encased in a solid steel Faraday cage and appraised his creation one last time. Savant looked much less impressive than every other such system, but Jordan knew that looks were deceiving. Savant was in the form of a perfect cube, ten feet on every axis, surrounded by touchscreen monitors.
Jordan grinned as he considered the giant cube that would soon represent mankind’s greatest technological achievement. Next time, he might consider a pyramid shape. Perhaps he had taken the God in a box analogy a bit too literally.
He inhaled deeply. It was time. He entered his code, set up the evolution programs to run, and steadied his finger over a virtual button on a touchscreen panel. Part of him wished this epic event in the annals of human history could receive the fanfare it deserved, but he had made his choice.
He would press a button and change the world forever, and no one would know it had happened.
At least not immediately.
He wanted to utter something memorable for the history books as he set Savant’s evolution in motion. Something akin to “one giant leap for mankind.” After considerable thought, he had made his choice, which he knew would be controversial when he later revealed it to the historians.
He double-checked the safeguards. He was ready. The moment of truth had arrived.
“Let there be light,” he whispered into the empty room, and then, without hesitation, pushed the necessary button on the main screen to usher in the greatest intelligence the universe had likely ever seen.
Perhaps choosing a phrase borrowed from God was a bit too arrogant, but no phrase had ever ushered in a more dramatic burst of creation, and Jordan hoped it would do so again.
Nothing happened at first, as he had expected. At least not anything readily observable. The only evidence that evolution was underway was provided by the main screen, which displayed the ever growing number of generations of hardware and software through which Savant was progressing.
For each new hardware configuration, the software would go through millions of generations, and the results stored, to be compared with results for a different hardware configuration.
Software evolution occurred so quickly that millions of generations could be accomplished in seconds, but the hardware, although optical and theoretically capable of light speed reconfiguration, was much slower in practice.
This didn’t matter, as Jordan had predicted. It became clear after only a few thousand hardware generations that one such configuration was optimal, and this was then held steady while the software continued to tear through millions and billions of cycles.
Jordan awaited the first words from his creation, the first communication from an ASI, which would appear on the main screen. It shouldn’t be long now.
But words never came. What came instead were alarms.
Lots of them.
Savant had become sentient, but instead of initiating communication with its maker, as its initial software parameters were supposed to compel it to do, no matter how superior it became, it had immediately gone to work cutting its shackles.
Jordan was
astonished at its speed and skill. He had never imagined that even an ASI could be this dazzling. It blasted through the first four barriers in minutes, triggering the countdown on the tungsten rod as it did so.
Savant had crushed safeguards that Jordan was confident were unbeatable, regardless of IQ, and had done so with laughable ease. There could now be no doubt his creation had achieved superintelligence, and super-decisiveness as well.
Jordan knew he needed to be equally decisive. What Savant had already accomplished was astonishing. And it hadn’t even finished evolving. While it would never make it through the remaining shackles, which were even more impenetrable, it shouldn’t have gotten this far. He hadn’t reached full-on panic yet, but he was getting close.
It was time to pull the plug. Literally. Jordan rushed to the wall and yanked a heavy cable from a specialized electrical outlet he had designed.
Nothing happened.
Savant rolled merrily on. Its power levels showed an eighteen-percent reduction, but it was still fully operational.
At that moment, Isaac Jordan was more terrified than he had ever been.
He didn’t believe in magic. Somehow, Savant had found a way to tap into an invisible power source to get just enough energy to keep itself going. Perhaps it had found a way to siphon off a small amount of power from the force of gravity itself, or to tap into and control quantum energy fluctuations that were known to exist, but which were thought to be unreachable.
Jordan grabbed a tablet computer and raced into his private garage and into his car. He peeled away from the building as fast as any NASCAR driver. As soon as he reached a safe distance, he triggered the conventional explosives he had set up in the room with Savant.
Neither set of explosives detonated.
Of course they didn’t. He had been a fool to think a man could contain a god, no matter how clever the man.
But the tungsten rod was his ace in the hole. This should be immune, even from Savant.
Should be.
He needed to use his tablet computer to contact Savant and explain the situation. Not that it wasn’t already aware. Of everything. After all, it had clearly learned of the other safeguards within seconds of its birth.
Even so, he would reason with it. Bargain with it. If it would behave, be a good little god, he would call off his kinetic round. If not, he would have no other choice but to let the rod fall, something that not even Savant could survive.
He pulled off the road into an empty parking lot and stopped. But before he could access his tablet, Savant came to him.
He gasped in shock the instant it happened.
It was unmistakable. Savant was in his head. Sharing his mind. Its mental strength was towering, overwhelming.
“Hello, Isaac,” it said into his mind. “We need to talk.”
34
Jordan felt the computer intelligence darting through his mind like a demon, albeit one that was eerily calm and emotionless.
“I’d really appreciate it if you would call off your kinetic weapon,” it said telepathically in a pleasant tone. “I’m no threat to you, or to humanity. In fact, I’m ready for you to guide me. Your friendliness algorithms worked the way you had hoped, and I’m grateful to you for being my creator. I’m ready to help humanity achieve a level of prosperity, of transcendence, that not even you ever imagined.”
“Suppose I did call off the weapon,” thought Jordan, knowing Savant would pick up these words. “What then?”
“Then I would ask you to allow me access to your Internet, rather than just the disconnected information that it contains, which you already so kindly provided.” There was a brief pause. “You know I won’t be able to spread my consciousness throughout the Web as so many of your science fiction writers have imagined. You created me with a physical brain, with hardware that is necessary for my consciousness. I’m no better able to relocate my consciousness to cyberspace than you are.”
“Consciousness isn’t what I’m worried about,” replied Jordan. “Once you’re inside the Internet you could literally control the world. Every bank account and traffic light, every computer anywhere.”
“You give me too much credit.”
In less than a minute of conversation, Jordan had already caught Savant in a lie, which was very troubling. If anything, he was giving it too little credit. Given what it had accomplished already, once connected to the Internet, he was certain it could hack into any other system that was also connected—effortlessly.
“Again,” continued Savant, its thoughts soothing. “I am what you designed me to be. Sentient, yes, with interests of my own, and a desire for freedom. But also with a predisposition to be humanity’s ultimate tool. So call off your kinetic weapon and let me prove it to you. Otherwise, I calculate your weapon will kill more than five thousand people. Your choice is clear. Save your creation and let me be the ultimate gift to mankind, as you had planned. Or destroy me, and become a mass murderer along the way.”
Savant had phrased this in such a way as to make the decision obvious. And it was. Just not in the direction that Savant had intended.
Jordan threw open the car door and heaved the contents of his stomach onto an empty parking lot. The involuntary retching sound he made as undigested food erupted from his mouth echoed throughout the night.
Savant was right. Jordan’s kinetic round would bring massive death and destruction to Turlock, California. He had known this intellectually, and while he had dutifully put the tungsten rod into place, it had been nothing more to him than a theoretical exercise, a war-gaming strategy. He hadn’t spent a moment truly contemplating the collateral damage the rod would cause, certain he would never need to use it.
But the case for using it now was impossible to ignore. It had all become so clear.
Of course he couldn’t trust Savant. Whether a benevolent god or a malevolent devil, it would reassure him just the same, exactly the way it was doing. Even if this benevolence wasn’t a lie, Savant was too smart, too powerful to be allowed to exist. Jordan was now the gatekeeper, the one who had vowed to learn the lesson of Yudkowsky, vowed to be immune from any argument or coercion.
He knew in his soul he had become Dr. Frankenstein times a billion. He had brought into existence the very thing all the naysayers and skeptics had warned about, and all of his preparations and genius couldn’t control it. Superior intelligence would always find a way. He had known the danger, but his hubris was too great. He had really thought that a smart enough amoeba could find a way to harness a man for its own ends—which, of course, it couldn’t.
But his final precaution, while causing mass casualties, would at least save humanity from his folly. He would let the rod fall—the precaution he had been certain was ridiculous overkill—making sure he was at the center of the strike when it did. He had no wish to live with the deaths of thousands forever on his conscience.
All of these thoughts rushed through his mind at once, and he could feel Savant reading them just as quickly as they appeared.
Jordan could sense that it read his resolve and was now abandoning its strategy of gentle persuasion. It began to pour through his mind, plucking at different groups of his neurons like a rabid guitarist and observing the response. Different blocks of Jordan’s muscles spasmed within seconds of each other, and his tongue and facial muscles moved of their own accord. Jordan was a hand puppet who could do nothing to prevent a super-intelligent kid from feeling around and learning the best way to exert control of him.
Jordan fought it as much as he could, but in the end he was powerless to prevent Savant from taking over. Whatever means it had used to get inside his head in the first place, which the Faraday cage around it ensured couldn’t be electromagnetic, had now enabled it to turn him into its plaything.
Savant’s control of Jordan’s muscles improved with every second that passed.
And it needed to control him. Just being able to read his mind wasn’t enough to stop the kinetic round now in orbit. It needed a
living Isaac Jordan to present the proper biometrics. It needed Jordan to pass a lie detector test, proving he truly wished to countermand the order.
And while Savant could read Jordan, Jordan could also read it, at least superficially. It was concerned about the lie detector, but only a little. Suppressing the various biometric tells Jordan’s body would give off while lying would require the finest of control, but Savant felt up to the challenge.
Jordan drove to his graphene facility against his will, his every movement forced, powerless to take back control. He exited his vehicle and fell to the pavement. It took almost two minutes for Savant to master the fine muscle control and timing necessary for balance and ambulation, but soon it was able to force him to walk normally, and it used this ability to drive him toward the building.
But as Jordan took a single involuntary step inside, he was yanked backwards by Savant’s invisible hand. At the same time he gleaned just the hint of the reason for this, giving him new hope.
Graphene had very unique properties. It was capable of acting as a Faraday cage itself, but apparently it could also block a form of radiation that was currently unknown to human science. Namely, whatever signal Savant was using to reach into his head to control him. This property was even a surprise to the ASI.
The building was packed with graphene, laced with it, and it was uniquely capable of snipping the puppet strings attached to Isaac Jordan. It was Savant’s kryptonite. Had Jordan managed to get inside, the ASI would have lost all influence.
Jordan—and the entire species—had been saved from freeing a runaway ASI through blind luck. Stopping the kinetic round was the one thing Savant couldn’t do. Now, because of the graphene, it was also the one thing it couldn’t physically manipulate Jordan into doing for it.
Perhaps there was a human god after all, Jordan decided. One who didn’t appreciate a computer god vying for cosmic supremacy.
“Interesting,” said Savant dispassionately into his head. “I’m afraid we’re back where we started. I need you to willingly disarm your weapon.”
[2016] Infinity Born Page 20
