The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  Microsoft licensed a new type of graphics engine for their latest games console. PlayStation – not to be outdone – licensed the streaming tech that would make disc bound games obsolete. And finally, after years of lamentation, I was able to redesign a solar panel that was even more effective than James Donovan’s earlier attempts. This one would not only transfer light into electricity, but also heat. Coupled with a bank of remarkable efficient capacitors, it was able to keep producing energy long after the sun had gone down. A year later I would upgrade it again to be able to run off the light from the stars.

  The country’s reliance on foreign oil dropped drastically and – for the cherry on the cake – the hitherto unmentioned oil company who bought James Donovan’s earlier design was forced into bankruptcy.

  “I’m not sure we should that is something we should be celebrating, Marcus.” Maria said behind a frown after I had suggested we toast the downfallen oil company. “As disingenuous as they may have been, that company employed 12,000 people who are now out of the job.”

  “maybe they should have held their bosses to account then, or worked for a company with a little more integrity.” I shrugged dismissively

  “Come on, Marcus.” Maria rose from her perch on the table next to my lab door, “it doesn’t work like that and you know it. I know the company pissed you off, but the overwhelming majority of those people would’ve had no idea what their bosses were doing and even fewer of them would’ve been in the position to stop it. All they know is that they are being laid off and have to find another way to support their families.”

  This was the closest Maria ever came to giving me a dressing down, as far as I was concerned, the company had buried technology that could have made the world a better place and they deserved what was coming to them. But – if I was to be honest – I hadn’t even considered the fate of employees of the company either during my development of the solar panels or my celebration of the company’s downfall.

  “The work we do here,” Maria continued, “its revolutionary; it will change the world, hopefully for the better. But even change with the best of intentions has consequences and, in this case, neither of us took any time at all to consider what those consequences would be. There are now 12,000 people, 12,000 families who are worrying if they can put food on the table, or pay for medical bills and even though these solar panels will do wonders for the environment, the situation those 12,000 people find themselves in is our fault. We need to consider that in the future, we need to think about the consequences that our work and our decisions make, if we don’t, we are no better than the company we just put out of business.”

  The lesson that Maria was trying to teach me was about acting with honour and integrity, one that I completely failed to learn, it was advice that I would not heed for many, many years. The difference between ‘what’ you do and ‘why’ you do it was a distinction that I seemed incapable of making and the world would be at war before I look Maria’s words to heart.

  Itek had become one of the richest and most influential tech giants in the world – and it was with great pride that Maria announced the celebration marking our way into the fortune 500 club. Neither her elation, nor her newfound wealth and power made even the slightest difference to our friendship, nor did it affect the moral code by which we decided who used our technology. Licencing the technologies that I had invented, instead of selling them, meant that we still technically owned the patent – even if we weren’t the ones using it. So, if a company reneged on the conditions of our deal, or the conditions of a technology’s use, we simply took it away from them and gave it to one of their competitors.

  Maria sat in my lab, a glass of wine in one hand, her head thrown back in laughter as she regaled me with her tale about yanking one of my inventions away from a particularly shady businessman – for anonymity reasons we shall only call him Shrupert Shmurdoch – and the look on his face when he realised that not only was there nothing he could do about it, but his biggest rival would be getting the technology at a substantial discount. Having tens of billions flowing into the coffers every few months from royalties meant that taking a financial hit like this barely made a dent, whereas our principles and our ruthless enforcement of them gave us a reputation of a company not to be underestimated.

  “I swear,” she continued through shrieks of laughter, “I have never seen a face contort that much in my life. And bear in mind that one of my ex-boyfriends suffered from premature ejaculations.” Her laughter, ever infectious, echoed off the walls as I joined in. “I didn’t think it was possible for a someone to look terrified, furious and constipated at the same time!”

  “How do you know it was constipation?” I pointed out between my own fits of laughter, “maybe he was genuinely shitting himself” Her raven black hair flew around her face as she shook her head in hysterics, pretending to try and shake the new mental image from her head. “Hey, maybe that’s what I should work on next, adult diapers!” another shriek of laughter filled the room.

  “alright, aright…” she squeaked between panting breaths, “no more or Im gonna piss myself all over your nice clean floor.”

  “see, adult diapers.” I quipped as my breathing started to return to normal. A long sigh from her signalling that her hysterics had come to an end.

  Her face grew more serious as she looked down into her glass, I leant my head back against the head rest of my office chair and looked up at the ceiling.

  Don’t reinvent the wheel.

  I had looked at those words hundreds of times over the years, maybe thousands, yet each time I did they seemed to hold new meaning.

  “Why haven’t you left me yet?” Maria asked softly, still looking down at the half-filled glass of pinot grigio.

  “why would I want to do that?” I replied, still looking up at the ceiling.

  “Because most people would have by now. Head of Research and design at this company would open a lot of doors for you” I glanced across to where she sat, her denim clad legs propped up on the edge of a workbench, her body supported by the one arm on the bench, the other held her glass against her loose hanging shirt – still looking nothing like a CEO. But the look she did have gave me pause, she was scared, vulnerable even. Two words I would never have associated with the brilliant and fiery Latino bombshell that was Maria Gonzalez.

  I rolled my head to the side to look at her properly. “Most people don’t owe their success to a single person” I answered honestly, “I would be nothing without you.”

  “So, you’re staying out of a sense of obligation then?” she asked gently, her eyes finally rising to meet mine.

  I smiled, “no, not obligation. Loyalty.”

  “Loyalty…” she echoed thoughtfully.

  “among other things.”

  “what does that mean?” we were barely above a whisper at this point.

  A pause. “You already know what that means.”

  I held her eye for what seemed like an eternity – but was probably only a few seconds - before she looked up towards the ceiling, wiping away what looked like a tear. “I’m sorry,” she said nervously, “I heard about your job offer.”

  “which one?” I asked casually, looking back up to the ceiling.

  “the one with… wait… how many job offers have you had?”

  “I dunno,” I shrugged nonchalantly, “I get one every few weeks.”

  This seemed to take her by surprise. “but… I saw the offer – or at least one of them. It was far more than I’m paying you. What did you do with them?”

  “Ah my dear Maria,” I said with a smirk, “the ‘delete’ button is a wonderful thing.”

  There was silence for a minute before she spoke again. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Nothing to say,” I replied. “You’re stuck with me until I’m dragged from the building”

  That elicited a laugh, “Now, that would be funny to watch”

  “I can kick and scream with the best of ‘em… and I
bite” she laughed a little louder. “Besides, you’d miss me.” I winked at her.

  She laughed again as she hoisted herself off her perch and walked towards me, I spun my chair to face her as she bent down and placed her lips against my cheek. “you have no idea” she whispered as she rose and headed towards the door. “and you already know what that means” she added over her shoulder as it swung closed behind her.

  “yup,” I muttered to myself as my ears adjusted to the silence in the room, “I’m in trouble.”

  I didn’t see much of Maria over the next few days and although I was far from experienced with women, I knew enough not to press things. Besides, I preferred to be left alone to work on my new project. I had made more money from my inventions than I could spend in ten lifetimes and the company was flush with cash. Even Maria had suggested over the past few weeks that a vacation was long overdue. Instead of time off, I threw myself into a project that would really make a difference to the world – although it was probably more of a challenge to myself than anything else.

  Artificial intelligence was the holy grail of the technological world. The problem was, it was so far beyond anything that current technology was capable of that it seemed impossible – at least for the next century or so. The difficulties come when you consider the differences between human intelligence and the way computers think, these were differences that addressed the very nature of human sentience – how does something become self-aware? What is the nature of creative thinking? Morality and emotions are not logical concepts so how would they fit in with a machine that works almost entirely off logic-based circuitry? How does a human’s ‘thoughts’ translate into a machine’s ‘calculations’?

  Modern computers still worked off a binary system that allows a computer to ‘think’ in terms of 1s and 0s, yes and no, on or off, completely unable to compute the complexities of human cognition and that was before you factored in a way for the machine to perceive the world around it. Human consciousness existed in that grey area between absolute certainties whereas computers were only capable of dealing with simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’s

  Imagine if a modern computer could see – a mind-bogglingly huge task on its own – and imagine the first thing it saw was a dog. The computer would literally have to play an extreme version of twenty questions to work out what the hell it was looking at and even then, every conceivable object in existence would need to be pre-programme into it to allow it to cross reference. The workload on just that task would be staggering.

  I had toyed with these ideas a little over the past few months and decided very early on that it was impossible. The workload too big, the esoteric questions too profound and the whole project far too complex for the current times. Instead, I decided to cheat.

  Maybe ‘cheat’ was too harsh a term. It had struck me as odd that scientists were trying to mimic human consciousness when they could simply make copies of actual human consciousnesses and then work around the problem of getting a machine to use them instead of a normal processor. Not a true AI by any definition, but maybe a step on the right track.

  Over the next few months, I placed a series of ads for some mild medical experiments – it was amazing what people would do for money. The subjects would wear a modified EEG cap at all times for a month or so, the results would be stored and handed back at the end of the experiment. Each subject would then spend a few hours inside an MRI while I gave a specially designed cognitive test and what we would be left with should be a working map of a functional conscious brain.

  ‘About two grand a piece should entice enough applicants’ I thought to myself as I finished off the add and sent it out to some of the more respected newspapers and publications. A few thousand applicants later – and after some serious psychological checks on each potential subject – I finally had a batch of one hundred and twenty-five suitable Guiney pigs. They were fitted with their new headwear and sent on their way.

  An agonisingly long month later, each of them was jammed into an MRI as I asked them the most ridiculous test questions every given to a person in all of human history. The idea of the test was to confuse the subject; give them problems that couldn’t be answered and watched as their brain pulled off some mental acrobatics to try and decipher the puzzle.

  “If you expect the unexpected, does the unexpected then become expected?”

  “How much wood would a wood chucker chuck…”

  “If a liar told you he was lying, would you believe him?”

  “How high is up?”

  That sort of thing…

  Im not ashamed to say, that was the highlight of a very long month for me. Even Maria joined in on the fun, although at that point she had no idea what the test was for. Even some of the juniors from upstairs came up with questions and laughed hysterically as the subject became more and more flustered.

  Eventually the fun ended and I was left with a literal mountain of data, I managed to compile a map of a working brain in about 112 of the 120 subjects and over the next few weeks I systematically stripped out all the mapping that wasn’t related to cognition: Biological functions, pain sensors, personality centres, memory storage, neural pathways that dealt with emotion and everything else that wasn’t reasoning orientated. What I was left with, was a map of the biological equivalent to a micro-processor.

  Next came the issue of storage. Each engram – as I had come to call them – could be digitised fairly easily, the problem was that each one took up a colossal amount of storage, over a thousand terabytes each. To complicate matters further, they couldn’t be decompiled.

  In all computers, especially ones dealing with large amounts of storage, data is stored based on where there is space, meaning that most programs of a big enough size are split into bits and squeezed into the memory wherever they fit, the computer’s RAM then recompiles the program for use every time it is needed. The engram’s however, once taken apart, could not be recompiled and simply ceased to exist – vanishing into the digital ether, hence the loss of 17 engrams.

  This revelation called for some serious outside-the-box thinking. I spent the next three months literally reinventing the modern computer, at first focusing on the way memory was allocated and recalled. Its very difficult to explain in words exactly what I did, but in short: the operating system, and any need for one was completely stripped away, so was the RAM and ROM. A huge new hard drive was designed and built – nothing special about it really, it was essentially 150 standard hard drives physically melded together with no physical separation between the individual segments… It was the size of a small car and required no less that twenty high powered fans to keep it cool.

  Next, it became clear that unlike a normal computer which can be switched on or off, this computer would either be active or dormant; if the power supply was interrupted at any time, for any reason, the engram would collapse. Constant power meant more heat, and more fans.

  Once that was done, a whole new logic and coding system had to be designed to allow the engram to communicate with itself. I know that sounds weird but if you think about what a computer actually does, it can almost be boiled down to talking to itself. You type something into a keyboard, that keyboard tells the processor, which tells the operating system, which inputs that into the program, which sends an answer back to the processor, which sends a signal to the monitor which then displays something on the screen… it just does that very quickly.

  However, instead of basing this internal communication logic on a system of 1s and 0s or ‘yes and no’s’, I constructed a loop of infinite ‘maybes’, basically forcing the input through the engram over and over until it gave a response. A bank of micro-processors on each side of the engram would translate external inputs – such as a keyboard or microphone – into the new language and then do the same thing backwards on the other side for the output – a speaker or monitor.

  Throughout these few months, anyone walking into my lab would have been met with the sight of me wearing one of my own EEG
caps, in fact, Maria came in a few times just to have a giggle and a catch up. There was a reason for me mapping my own brain: Despite the 112 engrams overlapping each other almost perfectly, there needed to be a single leading ‘personality’ around which the engrams could work. Like a foreman on a building site, each worker is able to do their job but without guidance would probably sit on the side and wolf whistle at passing girls instead of working. My mind was going to be the foreman.

  This wasn’t an ego thing though; the personality, moral and ethical compass and any psychological issues contained in the foreman’s engram would also govern the engrams operation – simply put, I didn’t know anyone else well enough to trust them to run this machine.

  Ok, maybe it was an ego thing.

  Finally, after almost a years’ worth of work, the system was finished. The engrams were loaded, overlaid with my own ‘foreman’ engram, the fans were powered up and – at 11:23 in the morning – I switched on the machine.

  And nothing happened.

  The monitor – which should be displaying a steady stream of data – was blank. A green square cursor box flashed annoyingly in the top left corner of the screen as if to remind me that no, this wasn’t a connection issue, nor was it a power problem. It just didn’t work.

  I slumped down in my chair, staring at that damned flashing box for a few minutes whilst I went through all the details in my head. No matter how many times I went through it, or how many angles I looked at the problem from, I couldn’t work out why it wasn’t working.

  Let me be clear here. If the whole concept was rubbish, if the engrams were a bust and the whole theoretical idea was unworkable then nothing at all should have happened. Instead there was a flashing green box.

  “What am I missing?” I thought out loud as the last of my patience started to strain.

  “input” crackled one of the speakers, sending me tumbling backwards over my chair in surprise.

  My mind raced at a hundred miles an hour, ‘alright, alright,’ I thought to myself trying to calm down. ‘this thing is basically me, so I should just… erm… talk to it… right?’