Conscious

by Vic Grout

  She could tell that she had caught Andy’s attention with all this. He was nodding enthusiastically as she was concluding. This was as much his field as it was hers, of course; certainly when you put it the way she had. There should indeed be a lot of sympathy between them on that score. However, the particular examples he chose to support what she was saying, took even her by surprise.

  “Aye, that’s right,” he agreed. “And when we get hit by a big enough asteroid or that big bugger of a volcano under Yellowstone Park erupts, it probably won’t matter much whether you’re a human or one of these super-machines. It will quite probably do for the lot of us; there’s the ‘bigger picture’ for you!”

  *

  That seemed to round the evening off nicely. They downed their shorts and prepared to leave. Although still fairly early by London Friday standards, The Desk had successfully conducted its first meeting and agreed to reconvene – ‘same time, same place’ – in the New Year. As its members were quietly – and for three-quarters of them, somewhat unsteadily – vacating the premises, Bob’s attention was caught by a chain of lights hung around the window of a shop across the road. They were clearly programmed to turn on and off in timed segments, giving the impression of a pulse of light circling the display. However, as he watched, the pulse stopped, and was replaced by a random sequence of on and off for each light, resulting in a chaotic flashing effect. It only lasted a second or two before the normal operation resumed and the pulse restarted its circling pattern. Most people would have barely noticed but Bob was an experienced analyst and had a basic feel for things that should and should not happen. Even he, however, managed to give it merely a tired first look but not a second.

  ‘That sort of thing’s happening a lot lately!’ he thought; then, within the same second, stopped thinking about it, and thought of home.

  Chapter 3: Warning Signs

  The Desk collectively hugged on the corner, then turned their separate ways home; Andy and Aisha along the Strand towards Charing Cross, Bob towards the river for Embankment and Jenny for Covent Garden.

  As she walked towards the tube station, Jenny glanced at her smart-watch to make sure the tracking was on. It was but then she had second thoughts and pulled out her mobile anyway. She was getting to ‘that age’, she thought to herself; this was the modern equivalent of going back to check you’ve locked the front door when you know you have. Her older brother was staying with her at her flat for a few days and he would like to know where she was this time of night. Every few seconds, of course, the watch would send him her precise location on the system he was watching movies on at home (and probably to anyone else interested enough to be looking as well, she thought with a wry smile) so there was no real need to send an additional message. But she knew he worried and did not entirely trust all this ‘new stuff’ so she thought it might be best if she did.

  “Home in three quarters of an hour with any luck: Send to Richard,” she spoke quietly. There: that was job done. She should probably have that message stored on a voice-key somewhere, she thought; she seemed to say it often enough when Richard was visiting.

  Jenny still carried a mobile phone, almost like a security blanket. Most of the functionality she needed from day to day, including its own 5G unit, was now on the smart-watch but she liked the backup of the device in her jeans pocket. Also, as she sometimes pointed out to people when they queried it, she was more likely to lose or have stolen one than the other in different circumstances so this was just another level of security. Just to complete the set, she carried similarly-enabled smart-glasses in her jacket pocket but had not got to the point of wearing them much as yet. In fact, she reminded herself, she still had some basic configuration to do at home some time to properly link them to her online identity. (One day, she thought absentmindedly, all this would be replaced by something implanted directly into her head.)

  She turned into the station and headed towards the two new entry gates at the far corner. Jenny was a ‘volunteer technical evaluation expert’, or ‘veetee’, for the new Oyster Card system; no longer a card at all, in fact. In its alpha testing stage, the smaller, cheaper, more powerful, more robust RFID chip was hung, somewhat primitively, on a plastic strip around her neck. (Future NFC versions were planned to be integrated with people’s mobile technology.) On this occasion, it worked; as she approached, about a metre away from the gate, the Perspex panels sprung apart to let her through and closed equally rapidly behind her. That did not always happen, she reflected with a grin. Only last week – at Goodge Street, she had been running late and the gate had refused to acknowledge her. She had spent close to a minute contorting her neck towards where she guessed the sensor to be before an attendant had come to her rescue and let her through with a manual key. ‘You’ve just got to love that new technology,’ she chuckled to herself.

  Some things were already a bit more reliable though. Once downstairs, she waved her eCard at a bottle of apple juice in the vending machine half-way along the platform. The cover opened and she took her purchase. She recalled how there had also been issues with this technology in the first year or so but the system was more robust now. This transaction would be automatically recorded and the amount instantly debited from her bank account. The nutritional information would also be loaded directly into her personal diet plan and the plastic logged with her carbon footprint app, as would the train journey she was about to make. If she disposed of the empty bottle at a recognised IoE recycling station, the penalty points would be automatically credited back to her. She had enough faith in all of this working these days to probably not bother checking any of it later.

  In fact, she mused, this whole Internet of Everything really had come on leaps and bounds over the last year or so. That it was happening in the first place was no great surprise to anyone with any level of technical awareness but the pace of development was impressive nonetheless. The idea of an Internet of Things had first been given serious attention around the turn of the millennium, initially as an ambiguous blend of new technology (the tags) and a new concept (get things talking directly to each other without involving people any more than necessary). The idea of fridges automatically reordering the milk, watering your plants remotely while you were on holiday and instant transactions such as her bottle of juice were seen as gimmicks at first but had quickly caught on. At some point, some of the big corporations had obviously decided that the Internet of Everything was a more impressive-sounding name than merely an Internet of Things and the IoT had seamlessly become the IoE. Probably somewhat premature, she had thought at the time; you’re likely to wish you’d hung on to that one until it was actually justified!

  Nevertheless, over-hyped or not, the IoE was here, and here to stay – and expand, it clearly would. Grand promises were being made to the world at large of intelligent integration on an almost unimaginable scale. Everyone and everything was to become part of initially closed, then local, then open, and finally global networks connecting people to businesses to public services to government to just about everything else you could think of. Already, buses and trains were, to a large extent, scheduling themselves, blocked drains were automatically calling up for repair, appliances at home were cooperating to run at the most economical times of day, traffic lights were now changing dynamically in response to shifting traffic patterns and, one day, everyone’s car would drive itself automatically anyway. There was even talk of an IoE toilet! Life would be easier than ever before. One day, but not yet: the IoE, like any new technology, was having the usual teething troubles. But that was not going to stop the developers. Already, even now, almost everything that functioned was likely to be networked: hardly anything was separate from the Internet any more.

  But clearly – surely clearly – there was a darker side to all this? There were a quite a few things being overlooked here, thought Jenny. Possibly foremost amongst what was definitely being overlooked was the fact that it would not be necessary to tag things to watch them. Unfortuna
tely, there still appeared to be a widespread, implicit assumption that ‘joining in’ with the IoE would be a voluntary choice. The belief was that individuals would choose to have their items (or themselves) tagged and identified. This had already been happening in practice, of course, for years, with so many people carrying a mobile device around with them: as a society, we were already sacrificing privacy for the ‘pay-off’ that technology delivered. But tags were not the only way of identifying things. Things (including people) could be recognised by their own characteristics. Once things were known in the system, they could be tracked.

  There were numerous ways in which people, and what they owned, could be drawn into the IoE, she reasoned. Cars could be tracked by their registration plates (in addition to the other things people filled them with); serial numbers could be scanned; fingerprints, DNA, even breath – as had been recently proved, could be detected as unique identifiers. Effective face-recognition might still be developing but it was improving all the time and realistic, accurate identification was becoming a reality. Also, any technology you carried would obviously identify you. The day would come, she was sure, that stepping outside your door would instantly integrate you into a global awareness, from which it was impossible to hide or escape. (Staying at home would probably not help much either.) Such was the vision Jenny was beginning to call the Real Internet of Things (which just happened to abbreviate nicely to RIoT). She had already written a few papers on the subject but none had received much attention and one had been rejected outright by a top journal as ‘speculative and unfounded’ but she remained undeterred. This RIoT would be a very different world, and not just in a technical sense, she thought: it was going to affect how everyone behaved. All kinds of new social questions would arise. How would we live our lives when we really could not hide? When our faces, for example, could be accurately and automatically recognised everywhere, how could there be any privacy? Would anyone ever be able to protect their personal information or to have any secrets?

  Also, she mused, what was being done with IoE technologies at that point in time was both limited and reasonably legal, but was that likely to be the way it stayed? The answer was almost certainly no on both counts. Without much doubt, we were destined for a form of global awareness system, which would be very difficult to control or escape from, and it was unlikely that legislation would offer much protection in either the short or long term. Jenny had seen this before. Conventional laws always lagged badly behind the technology, which the lawmakers usually did not understand. They could try, and generally did – often admirably, she thought, but they would always be ‘playing catch-up’. More significantly, there would always be loopholes and simple mistakes. She knew there was another essential privacy axiom related to this: once data was ‘out there’, it was out there; once an individual was drawn in, albeit involuntarily, they stayed in; there was no going back. That was the way ‘big data’ worked in practice. The wrongdoers might get prosecuted and punished but that was always too late for the individual; the damage could never be undone, even with the original Internet, even less so with the IoE (or RIoT).

  Another point was that it was all so very easy to mine data nowadays, often quite accurately, but it was so very easy for it to be wrong too. The business models of the Internet had always been different to their offline counterparts; profits were to be made from dredging through huge quantities of probably useless information in the knowledge that the occasional pay-off from the relevant material would still be worthwhile. Spam/phishing was the clearest illustration of this; even if 99.99% of recipients failed to respond, the exercise was still useful for the wrongdoer for the handful of cases that did. However, she returned to the same thought: once the information was in the common domain – approved, valid, validated or otherwise, the damage was done. An individual might consider it private or inaccurate but it was unlikely that any legislation would protect them effectively. They might be able to force it down on one page – even punish the perpetrators – but it would probably appear somewhere else. The reality would be that if anyone was interested enough to find out about us, they would be able to. If you considered the combination of this global knowledge of everyone with the RIoT’s ability to track their every movement, then obviously the connected world of the future would be a very different place indeed. ‘Big Connectivity’, she might call it.

  The final, albeit minor misconception, she thought, as the incoming train hooted towards the platform, was that this use and abuse of ‘big data’ would be limited to governments and major institutions. The past few years had seen a succession of cyber-security spy scares and business hacks, each one more politically or commercially damning or damaging than the last, and it should have been obvious to everyone by now that there was no such thing as private data any more. The only surprise really was that people were still surprised! But, clearly, it would not stay that way for long; use or abuse of big data and big connectivity would not remain the preserve of the powerful elite. Data had value; anything with value could, and would, be sold on; those doing the selling would sell it wherever there was a market. All this personal information would find its way into common distribution – it was naïve to think otherwise; the great new god of data-obsessed technological entrepreneurship and private enterprise, ‘Technocapitalism’, would see to that!

  As Jenny stepped aboard the empty train and slumped exhausted into the nearest seat, a discomforting scenario played, almost dreamlike, through her mind. She was at some event, a few years into the future, meeting someone for the first time during a coffee break. He introduced himself as ‘John Green’. As he was speaking, the headset she was wearing (smart-glasses, maybe, or perhaps it was an implant) scanned his face and analysed his voice and breath and other characteristics. It matched it all against an online global database and reported back to her, in seconds … “No, this isn’t John Green. This is Paul White. He’s 45 years old and lives in Sheffield; married with three children. He was arrested in 2007 for shoplifting and declared bankrupt in 2011. He works as a landscape gardener but his attendance record isn’t very good. He smokes and has a chronic lung condition, which is making it difficult for him to get insurance. He votes Liberal Democrat. His favourite type of porn is …”

  She came around just in time to get off at her station and ambled slowly home, still deep in thought. As she walked towards the shared front entrance of the apartment block, the security camera of the adjacent door whirred into motion. She knew that her neighbours spent much time away from home and used a number of these, controlled remotely over the IoE if they felt like it, to watch over their property from afar. Now, however, this particular device was obviously not interested in her: it never looked her way. It seemed broken somehow. Instead, it performed a curious – and pointless – Z-shaped movement before tilting backwards and coming to a stop, gazing impotently upwards towards the dark, cloudy sky.

  ‘That kind of stuff’s been going on a lot lately!’ she thought, forgetting it immediately upon turning the key in the door and stepping inside.

  *

  Aisha and Andy walked briskly towards Trafalgar Square, quiet for the first part of the short route. Andy was the first to break the slightly uncomfortable silence.

  “I’m really intrigued by this notion – if I’ve understood it right – that internal awareness comes from the whole body rather than just the brain,” he offered as a conversation strategy. It seemed easier to start with a question that appeared to divide her from her peers than one that possibly divided the two of them. “Are you getting a lot of support for that?”

  But Aisha saw through it easily. “I have not really asked,” she smiled. “I am not even putting that forward as a particularly serious proposal. What I am saying is that I think it is quite likely that we do not need to look beyond the body for whatever it is that causes its contents to be capable of high-level reasoning. I do not see the need for an independent mind, or soul. Yes, there is much that we do not understand
but it remains possible that self-awareness is merely the result of neural complexity, whether solely in the brain or not. It may be that if you take a system with sufficient complexity and give it fuel, it becomes sentient – whatever that may mean in practice. But maybe it is more complicated than that; perhaps the complexity and power are all part of an integrated system we do not yet understand. These are just different ways of looking at the question.” Her smile turned to a grin. “It is even possible that your God has designed it that way, really!”

  “True,” conceded Andy with a sigh. “It’s possible. If I remember rightly, Alan Turing’s original ‘theological defence of artificial intelligence’ was along those lines. He pointed out that we shouldn’t say that a machine couldn’t be intelligent because that would be telling God how the universe worked! God might like AI, for all we know! But, at the same time, science itself comes from God. He’s laid down the rules. If something can’t be done then we can’t change that – and that’s the same whether or not you think God made the rules in the first place.” Aisha grimaced some form of acceptance and they ended the evening as friends. They would never be anything less. In fact, Andy felt comfortable enough to propose something he would not have done five minutes earlier.

  “Actually,” he suggested, “I need to write a wee piece for one of these ‘spiritual science’ publications I’m involved with.” He used term in a deliberately self-depreciating tone. “I was thinking of doing something combining the ‘What is machine intelligence?’ question with Jenny’s ‘technological singularity’ thing. But I’d like to take it from the basic definitions rather than pure technology. If I was able to put together something over the next day or so, which I was happy with, would you like to look it over – and perhaps add your thoughts – before I show it to the two ‘techies’?