Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  “It’s only a matter of time,” Kyle insisted. Simulate enough brain processes and you have a brain, hence a human-like mind.”

  “Isn’t there an upper limit on Boltzmann machines?” I asked. “The Heisenberg-Boltzmann limit. Outside my specialty, but I understand it’s like the Carnot limit on heat engines.”

  Kyle glanced my way. “That’s a technical obstacle, Mac. Something beyond Boltzmann machines wouldn’t have the same limits.”

  Jared shrugged. “The real problem is that your system is too Platonic.”

  Kyle did a double-take. “Platonic…Okay. I gotta admit that is one critique I never thought to hear about an AI. What do you mean?”

  “I mean your systems accept inputs passively, like wax accepting a signet ring. Your text-reading machines…You have to input the text it is supposed to pronounce.”

  “So what’s the cure?”

  Jared smiled faintly. “Aristotle. Your system needs to gather inputs actively, not receive them passively. Look. Do you see this chair?” Jared pointed to the padded boardroom chair beside him.

  Kyle looked, scoffed. “Duh?”

  “Right. But how? Photons are cascading into your eyeballs not only from the chair, but from the table, me, the computers, the other chairs, the wall behind me, and on and on. Yet, somehow you are privileging these photons and not those photons. You are looking at the chair. Everything we know comes from unintelligible energy fragments—not just photons, but sound waves, molecules—impacting against our senses like a wave on a beach. And from these fragments of meaningless sensory inputs we construct an understanding of the world. Humans—most animals, really—have intention. We seek out sensory stimulations and select among them to guide our decisions. We don’t just see, we look.”

  “You make it sound like a baleen whale,” I interjected, “seining the sensory ocean for the krill of information.”

  Jared laughed and slapped the table. “That’s good, Mac! I’m going to steal that for my lectures.”

  “Well,” said Kyle. “You do have a talent for putting your finger on the key points. It’s the frame problem again, isn’t it? How does my AI know which inputs are relevant and which it can ignore?” He stood and began pacing. “This is frustrating,” he admitted. “And the Turing test is just the first step. To get the electronic computer to mimic the performance of the human computer…”

  Jared shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”

  A multitude of responses chased themselves across Kyle’s face—impatience, irritation, dismissal. But then he folded his hands under his chin as he often did when he turned thoughtful. “I hadn’t thought I was describing something simple.”

  Jared smiled. “Visit me in Princeton, and I’ll show you.”

  THE GREAT ROOM OF CHINA

  Jared and Gladdys lived in an old apartment building that had been refurbished into suites back around the turn of the century and leased to faculty members. The rooms were comfortable, with flowered wallpaper and upholstered wooden furniture. “It looks positively retro,” said Kyle, after he had hung his coat in the hallway and looked around.

  Jared thanked him, but I had seen Kyle’s home in St. Louis, and I don’t think he had meant “retro” as a compliment.

  Kyle made a showy bow and kissed the back of Gladdys’ hand. “Madame!” he said, and patted the kiss firmly in place. Gladdys laughed and told Kyle he could never be serious.

  “I’ve made dinner reservations at Prospect House,” Jared told us. “I’m afraid I’ve co-opted our own dining table for the structured experience.”

  “Structured experience…” I suggested.

  “Yes, I’ll set up a scenario, give you your instructions, and turn you loose.”

  The table was dark wood with lion’s-paw legs and an extender in the center. It had been set up with two chairs placed across the narrow direction from each other. On the table between them was a stiff, foldable plastic screen with two horizontal slots on either side labeled IN and OUT. Jared seated Kyle on one side of the screen, and me on the other. Gladdys disappeared into the kitchen, where she busied herself making hors d’oeuvres and drinks. “I’ve watched him do this with his grad students,” she explained.

  Once we were settled, Jared said, “Now the first rule of this structured experience is…”

  Kyle cried out, “First rule of Structured Experience is you do not talk about Structured Experience!”

  Jared did not get the reference to Fight Club. “Well…,” he said uncertainly, “yes. No talking until the debriefing. But here’s the scenario. Mac, you will select cards from this white deck…” He handed me a thick pack of laminated cards, printed in red Chinese symbols. The one on top read 喂 or wai3. I looked at Jared curiously.

  “But I only know a little…”

  “I know.” He hushed me, and handed me a cheat sheet along with a set of instructions. The cards had index numbers in their corners and the cheat sheet listed the translations. A second sheet was indexed by context: In the Café, On the Bus, and so forth. My only instruction was “Respond to the output as seems best to you. Record on the log sheet the card number inserted and the card number received in response.

  Then he handed Kyle a tabbed tray of red cards bearing white symbols. I learned later that these were indexed in strict numerical order with no translations provided. Kyle pulled the first card from the tray to inspect it and muttered, “Searle…?” before Jared shushed him, too.

  “Are we ready?” Jared asked. Kyle asked for another minute or two to arrange his cards and instructions. When he finally admitted readiness, I inserted card 001 in the slot. Hello.

  A moment later a red card emerged from Kyle’s side. Hello.

  I was startled but Jared squeezed my shoulder and put a finger to his lips. So I shrugged and consulted the conceptual index, where I saw a group titled Lost Luggage; and since I had once misplaced a bag in Shenzhen Bao’an Airport, I decided to lead with that. I found card 250 in the pack and inserted it. Excuse me! I think I left my suitcase here. Have you seen it?

  I could hear some fumbling around on the other side and was just about to make some comment when a red card emerged. I recognized the symbol for I’m sorry, and when I checked the rest of the translation it read There is no suitcase here.

  I hunted through my deck and found four responses appropriate to Kyle’s statement. I selected one: Then my suitcase is lost! All my clothes and personal things were in it.

  Our silent conversation continued in like manner. When Jared called a halt, I had my imaginary suitcase back and Kyle had received an imaginary tip for his imaginary initiative in helping me. All’s well that ends well.

  “Okay,” Jared said. “Time for the debrief.”

  I started to say, “Kyle, I didn’t know you could read Chinese!” But Kyle was saying, “Searle’s Chinese Room…” Then, to me, he added, “I can’t.”

  “I only had that cram course when I went to the Shenzhen Conference, but…”

  “Look, Mac, all I had was a matrix that said if I got a card with this number, I was supposed to give you a card with that number. I had no idea what was going on…Oh, shit!”

  Gladdys had returned with a tray of cheese, meat slices, and crackers and some wine glasses. “About half his students have the same reaction, dear.”

  I was a beat and a half behind, but I got it, too. “The Turing Test is meaningless,” I said. “Even if you mimic human output, you haven’t necessarily captured the same algorithm the mind uses.”

  “Kyle,” said Jared, “you carried on an intelligible, if stilted, conversation in Chinese. Did you understand what was on the cards? Did you even know that you were conducting a conversation? Did you have the same mental experience you have when you speak English?”

  Kyle pursed his lips. “No,” he admitted. “You know, it’s one thing to read about Searle’s Chinese Room, quite another to experience it…” He fell to introspection. “The usual rebuttal,” he said after a moment, “is th
at the room as a whole is intelligent…”

  But Jared only smiled. “Kyle, if you didn’t know what the conversation was about, what makes you think the card deck knew?”

  “Could be the analogy just doesn’t hold. To fully simulate a Chinese speaker you would need millions of filing cabinets and response matrices, and responses would take so long that…”

  “The principle is the same. Kyle, you were acting just like a digital computer: processing syntax according to an algorithm. But even if you capture all the syntactical rules in a super matrix you can’t capture the semantic meanings.”

  “If the system were complex enough…,” I suggested.

  Jared nodded. “Complexity is necessary, but…‘Methinks it is like a weasel’ is just a string of marks, and making the marks does not generate the meaning. It’s necessary but not sufficient.”

  Kyle began to nod. “I see what you’re getting at.”

  By then Gladdys had led us into the parlor where she had laid out the appetizers. I followed along. “So,” I said as we settled into the chairs and sofa, “mimicking human performance—the Turing Test—is the easy part. But establishing that the human and machine outputs are produced by the same process is the hard part. All this ‘Chinese Room’ stuff…I hate to puncture Jared’s balloon; but I think there was a Chinese-speaking intelligence involved. Whoever wrote the cards and put together the response matrices had to know Chinese.”

  Now it was Jared’s turn to appear troubled, and Gladdys laughed as she handed us our wine glasses. “Jared has a problem extending the analogy.” She tapped the side of her head with her index finger. “That intelligence has to be outside the box.” Then she smiled and lifted a drink in toast.

  ONE FLU OVER

  It was five years later, during the big epidemic, when everyone went about wearing those face-masks and getting their shots, when we all met again. Jared had contracted the flu and had fallen deathly ill. And while he was not as close to me as he was to Kyle, still he had dated my sister and we knew each other better than most.

  The worst of it was over by then and the airports were open once more, so I caught a regional to Newark, rented a car, and drove down to Princeton Hospital. Traffic was light and people still tended to avoid one another. Like soldiers in the waning days of a war, those lucky enough to have escaped so far had no desire to become the last fatality. It was, sadly, the smoothest trip that anyone had ever taken down the Jersey Turnpike.

  The University Medical Center stood on a side street, past an old cemetery, which struck me as bad feng shui for a hospital. I drove through to the parking lot and walked back to the main building. It was a chilly, blustery spring quite in keeping with the mood of the country. The information desk was enclosed within a Plexiglas shell under positive air pressure so germs would not waft into the booth. I presented my certificate of inoculation and passed through the sanitizing airlock into the main hospital. The UV lamps, air jets, and gas spray were supposed to sterilize visitors, but I thought they might be only to reassure them. It certainly cut down on the number of visitors.

  I found Jared in a third-floor room originally designed for two but now holding six beds. Two were empty, which I took to be a good sign. Jared was closest to the window, with an enlightening view of the cemetery on Witherspoon Street. He seemed to be asleep, and I turned to tip-toe out; but he opened his eyes and said, “Gladdys…? Oh! Mac! You came all the way from Chicago? You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Chicago’s not exactly the far side of the moon,” I told him. “You look…good.”

  “I look awful. But at least I don’t look dead, and that’s good enough. You seem fit, though. You never caught it, did you?”

  I felt as if I should apologize. “The incidence rate in Chicago was way below national average. No one knows why. Random chance. Gladdys emailed me. She said you were recovering.”

  “She didn’t catch it, either. Lucky.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Down in the cafeteria with Kyle.”

  “Kyle’s here, too?”

  “Sure. He moved to New Jersey a year ago; lives an hour or so up north. And no, not so much as a sniffle for him, either. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you.” He paused and coughed into his arm. It was a dry, hacking cough and by conditioned reflex I pulled back a little from the bed. “And Maddy?” he said.

  There was a small commotion by the door, where the duty nurse blocked a middle aged couple from entering. “But we’re her parents,” I heard the man say. The nurse told them only one visitor at a time was allowed per patient and the man deferred to the woman.

  I turned back to Jared. “So, when do they let you out?”

  “When the government subsidies run dry. No, that’s too cynical. They’re all scared that they’ll release someone too soon and the epidemic will start up again, and they’ll be blamed. So, they’ll hang onto me a while yet.”

  “There was more than one epidemic, you know. Atlanta identified three different strains. That’s why the preventive program didn’t seem to help.”

  “‘Screw the Flu!’—and it broke out anyway.”

  I shrugged. “If they hadn’t done it, there would have been four.”

  “I suppose. I heard you developed the mathematical model for the epidemic.”

  “Me and a bunch of others, for all the good it did. When we identified areas where the new vaccines would do the most good—the Firebreak, we called it—we ran smack dab into a wall of congressmen horrified that we didn’t regard every district as equally entitled to the shots. Look, they told me not to get you all agitated.”

  Jared chuckled. “It’s you getting all agitated.” We chatted for a few minutes longer. He pretended to be interested in my new paper, but was too fatigued to pull it off. Finally, he lay back and said, “Could you go down to the cafeteria and send Gladdys up here?”

  “We’ll talk again later.”

  “Sure. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Same old Jared. I took the elevator back down and found the cafeteria just off the lobby. Gladdys sat at a table in the corner. Kyle was holding her hand, saying something in a soothing tone. He looked over when I entered, leapt up, and pumped my hand. “Mac! Great of you to come!” Gladdys, too, rose and hugged me briefly.

  “Have you seen him?” Gladdys said. “Is he awake again?”

  “Yes, he asked for you.”

  Gladdys hesitated and Kyle put a hand on her wrist. “It’s all right,” he said. “The contagious phase is over or they wouldn’t allow visitors at all.”

  “Then why all the safeguards? Will you come with me?”

  Kyle shook his head. “One at a time. You know the rules.”

  When Gladdys had gone, Kyle sighed. He looked at me sidelong. “The razor’s edge, Mac. Once you’ve been on it, nothing is ever quite safe again. She and Jared live in an apartment suite here in Princeton. You’ve been there. Breathing the same air half the day; breathing each other’s exhalations. He caught it; she didn’t. The bullet missed her by this much.” His thumb and forefinger calibrated the miss. “Do you blame her for being scared? Ten percent mortality for those who caught it.”

  “Which means ninety percent survival,” I told him. “And not everyone caught it. The odds were in her favor.”

  Kyle gave me a look of pity. “Mac, there’s more to risk than mathematics.”

  “Now you’re sounding like Jared.”

  He made the vampire cross with his forefingers. “Avert the evil,” he said. Then, turning serious, he picked up his disposable coffee cup. “Jared can make light as much as he wants; but he was scared, scared clean through. Ten percent may be small next to ninety; but it looks big enough when it’s in your face.” He drank, put the cup back down, and looked around the nearly empty cafeteria. He did not look at me when he continued. “I was scared, too.”

  “Jared told me you didn’t even get the sniffles.”

  “No. For him. I was scared for him. He and I have been…” He sear
ched for a word.

  “Korpsbrüder?” I suggested.

  “Whatever the hell that is.”

  “Jared described you that way once. It’s some Heidelberg thing where students fight with sabers and give each other scars and then are bound together for life.”

  Kyle barked a short, sharp laugh. “Did he say that? Then I guess that’s what we are. Korpsbrüder…” He tried the word out. “Friendly fights. Friendly scars. We have given each other a few…”

  “Are you still with Angela?” I asked before he too could bring up Maddy. My sister and the kids had come through the epidemic, but her husband Paul had not.

  “Angela…” Kyle faced me once more. “It’s hard to keep a relationship going when people won’t touch each other even with ten-foot poles. Maybe I’ll find someone new, now that it’s over.” He stood and carried his cup to the mulcher and shoved it in. When he sat back down, he said, “You know what’s the problem with life? Death. That’s the problem with life.”

  I allowed as how it might well be. I decided I needed a soda and went to the vending machine. Kyle shadowed me.

  “I couldn’t bear to lose him…,” he said. “I know. It makes me sound like he and I were…But you know we weren’t. It’s just…There’s got to be a way around it. If we were to download our entire mind into a computer…”

  I turned, puzzled by the non sequitur. “Around what?”

  “Death. Around death. If we can load our minds into computers, we would never get the flu. Never die.”

  “Computers get viruses, too,” I pointed out. “Systems crash.”

  “Yeah. But you can always back-up and restore. It was Jared who finally convinced me that I had the wrong approach to the sims.”

  We sat down again at the table and I popped my soda can. “How?”

  “We were trying to simulate a human being. When was the last time you ever met a human being?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  Kyle’s lips broadened. “He tricked me with it. We were trying to program a generic human; but people are all particular. Each one of us has certain capacities, learnings, interests, hobbies, experiences that make us who we are. There is a wholeness to a person. That’s what people were picking up on with our sim. It lacked depth.”