Conscious

by Vic Grout

  Whatever we decide, or try to decide, effective legislation may be difficult anyway. Emergent technology as a service often pulls together a number of individual threads, which are innocuous in their own right but devastating in combination. The hardware and software necessary for a realistic sex robot would have numerous benefits elsewhere in society and would be actively encouraged as research. On the other hand, in practice, there would be little to prevent a sex robot being supplied in diminutive appearance to reflect a particular model or ethnicity, say – to not do so could be seen as discriminatory. The ‘home configuration’ required from that to a child would then be minimal. Outrage may have its place but how effective is that likely to be? Many are still outraged by pornography and sex toys; have they been eliminated? No; there is no effective legislation, even for the pornography industry, which is known to be exploitative. Ultimately, we simply keep it out of the public view and individually choose whether or not to partake.

  So where does all this leave us? Well, probably nowhere, really. Even if there was to be some great legal and ethical consensus on this, which then became enshrined in law or moral code, it could still be ignored – and it would be. The problem is that people just don’t all think the same and sexual morality and conduct may divide them more than anything else. Ultimately, this may – yet again – be something that we have to get to grips with ourselves; and this isn’t a legal – certainly not a technological – process.

  Jack DeGioia, of Georgetown University, a few years ago, in a talk in North Wales on the impact of social media, warned, “I wish to signal my concern that our new technologies, together with the underlying values such as moral relativism and consumerism, are shaping the interior worlds of so many, especially the young people we are educating, limiting the fullness of their flourishing as human persons and limiting their responses to a world in need of healing intellectually, morally, and spiritually.”

  However, he then suggested the need for, “deepening self-understanding, self-awareness, self-knowledge – resources that support the interior work of seeking inner freedom. If we establish as a goal for each of our lives, Herder’s idea “that each of us has an original way of being human” – that the goal of our lives is to identify what Charles Taylor identifies as our most “authentic” self, such a goal can only be attained through demanding interior work. An authentic self is one living in accord with one’s most deeply held values.”

  He wasn’t talking about robot sex, of course, but the “we each find our own way of being human” principle may well apply to this and many other areas where we wrestle with the moral implications of emerging technology. It’s likely that individually we’re the only one on our street that thinks about sex the way we do; it’s likely that we’re the only one in the world that thinks about everything the way we do. On that basis, what chance do we have of fitting someone else’s morality? Ultimately, the best way of answering to an unknown higher code is probably to (genuinely and truly) answer to ourselves. But how good are we going to be at that?

  *

  “Well, they’ll remember that all right!” chuckled Bob, not really knowing where to begin with it. Then a thought struck him. “This ‘spiritual confession’ you’ve mentioned; is that AA?”

  “Aye, that’s right,” nodded Andy. “It’s part of the ‘spiritual awakening’ that comes from the twelve-step recovery programme. Admitting your past comes right after handing yourself over to God and before trying to put it right. Of course, as I said last week, it’s an approach that’s going out of fashion in the secular world.” He bit his teeth together then sighed. “I’m telling you, Bob, we’re losing the plot. I’m not just talking about AA here. The whole world; it’s lost sight of almost anything that’s not science or technology-based. Whether or not we should do something hardly seems to get considered these days so long as we can. There’s a much bigger picture that people aren’t seeing.”

  Bob was hardly in the mood for this: he knew of another ‘big picture’ that people currently ‘weren’t seeing’, although it would only be a matter of time. “And who’s ‘Moorcock’?” he asked to change the subject.

  “Michael Moorcock. Science fiction writer – amongst other things – very prolific. Mostly simple futuristic punch-ups but some much deeper stuff in places if you look for it. ‘Dancers’ was more of a social commentary than sci-fi. Set in a far future where technological power made anything possible. In fact, the power was essentially hidden: there was no-one left who even knew how it worked – it was just activated when needed. So, once that simple concept was established, the more interesting question was what would people do? ‘How would they behave?’

  “And how did they behave?”

  “Er, pretty decadently, on the whole,” Andy laughed, “but possibly with just a bit of C.S. Lewis’s ‘Moral Law’ in there somewhere! But this is part of the point I’m trying to make. We’re looking to a future where we might be able do just about anything through technology. What are we going to do with that power? Can we be trusted with it? Because, at the same time, we’re possibly about to create machines that are even better than us. What will a machine do if it’s, to all intents and purposes, intelligent? Will it have any moral code and, if it does, will it be same as ours. We really need to get to grips with this. But we can hardly expect to deal with intelligent machines if we haven’t figured ourselves out first. But we’re not trying to do that. We don’t really understand what drives us so what hope do we have of predicting the ‘thinking’ of an all-powerful machine, whether it’s modelled on ourselves or not”

  “Or not?”

  “Well, I’m just saying that intelligence might not be something we create in our own image as it were. It could evolve from much simpler beginnings, which we did understand, but that evolution might produce something that we didn’t. Or, if the panpsychists are right, we might not have any control over it at all.”

  “Remind me?”

  “Well, the theory of mind that says that everything is conscious to an extent. How much consciousness something has might vary – based on the size of the brain, for example – but everything has it. On that basis, we could conceivably create a robot one day with a big enough brain for it to just ‘wake up’. If that happened, presumably, whether or not it thought like us would be dependent on something much more fundamental than programming?”

  “Presumably, not a theory you’re that keen on?” Bob suggested.

  “Well no, not exactly. I tend still to believe that consciousness is external from the body – or at least separate. ‘God-given’, I would say, of course. But, someone pointed me at Turing’s 1950 paper a while back. ‘Computing Intelligence’? Something like that. Anyway, he was posing the question, Can machines think? He devised a game in which a machine tried to trick a human into thinking it was human.”

  “The Turing Test,” Bob agreed.

  “Aye, well, that’s what it became known as. Turing called it The Imitation Game, of course. But anyway, he then went on to discuss a number of possible objections to the concept of machine intelligence. One of which he called ‘The Theological Objection’. Now, Turing had no time for any of that sort of thing, of course, but his argument against the objection was actually quite good. He basically put, to anyone who said that consciousness is a gift of God – only given to humans (possibly animals), ‘why do you think you can tell God how the universe works?’ He’s the omnipotent one: not you! Surely, if God’s chosen model of intelligence is based on neural complexity, for example, who are you to argue with it? I guess he was sort of saying that maybe God could be waiting for us to build something with a big enough brain for him to make it conscious. OK, I can’t say I like the idea but it can’t be dismissed out of hand.”

  Andy smiled as he slowed down. “Heh-heh. Sorry for the wee rant. Anyway,” he added, as an afterthought, “How was your day?”

  “Ah, …,” said Bob.

  Chapter 9: Dirty Networks

  Bob spoke, alm
ost entirely uninterrupted – apart from a few expressions of surprise from Andy, for over half an hour. He related – with some theatrical intent, he would later have to admit – his experiences of the previous three days in sequence, beginning with the relatively uneventful day in Paris. He then described his (apparently) unsuccessful visit to HGMS in Darmstadt, only subsequently explaining the deeper meaning of what he had seen as he revealed, in even greater detail, his adventures in Luxembourg that very day.

  Then, having presented the facts in chronological order, he offered Andy a summary.

  “So you see, it seems that the noise is everywhere: all networks are dirty and they may well be getting dirtier all the time – they’re calling it ‘Potentially Disruptive Noise’: PDN. And that’s not just local networks and wide-area networks; not just Internet-based systems. There’s noise on electrical networks of all kinds too: every type of physical electronic system. Everything. And it seems pretty likely that the noise is causing the weird stuff – the RFS. Because the PDN isn’t really completely random: buried in it, there’s some almost sensible stuff. Somehow, on comms systems, it sometimes manages to look like real data. Then we think it’s, very occasionally, managing to produce something that actually looks real enough to be understood by a network device. Then, very, very occasionally, there a sequence that’s good enough to change the network behaviour or the device that’s connected to it. Then something silly happens. That’s what we end up seeing. Now we have to find out why!”

  Andy sat, wide-eyed, in silence when Bob had finished. Now it was his turn to not know where to begin. Eventually, he managed to phrase a question.

  “And does that make sense? Could this ‘random but not really random’ noise be causing the weird stuff?”

  “Well, yes, on one level,” Bob admitted. “It’s certainly true that the progression we’ve seen, rarer and rarer, from low to high noise spikes, to bits and bytes and frame fragments, could eventually form something that did some damage. We haven’t actually observed one of those complete frames yet but the signs are there that they might well be. Hattie did get something close to a decent frame from Darmstadt but that was very odd because it wasn’t a frame that should have been on the HGMS network in the first place – it was the wrong protocol. Mind you, I may have made a mistake there – I still need to check that out.

  “Also, of course, just about everything is networked now – the Internet of Everything. This would all have been completely daft a few years ago before the IoE kicked in. But there’s hardly anything by way of electronic equipment now that’s not connected. All the problems we’re seeing are from systems that are networked these days but wouldn’t have been a few years ago. In principle, yes, a massive, global Internet problem could affect just about everything we use and do.” A passing thought struck him. “Actually, our Christmas tree lights are wifi-enabled for God’s sake – so that they can be programed from a mobile. It’s madness really but, from that point of view, it makes sense.”

  “But?”

  “Yes, but … that’s all fine, but we still have no clue what’s causing the problem in the first place!”

  “Not even the slightest?”

  “Not really. We’ve a general feeling that it must be some sort of sustained cyber-attack, possibly a type of sophisticated malware but no-one’s really got any idea what. It just doesn’t seem possible. What on earth can you do to each and every end device, system, network, network of networks, in the world, the bloody Internet itself, plus the power grids, for God’s sake, that puts quasi-random noise across everything? Everything! Regardless of type, technology, material, equipment, carrier, protocols and function? How can a single attack do all that? It can’t be done, surely?”

  Andy smiled, regaining some composure. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  “What?”

  “Sherlock Holmes!”

  “Hmmm …”

  “The point is, something must be causing it, mustn’t it? It’s like the Fermi Paradox. There has to be an answer. It might seem a bit far-fetched but you have to focus on what possible and what’s not. And I’m not being flippant here, or saying it for the sake of it: someone does need to sort this out. The news this afternoon was suggesting that RFS may have killed several hundred people worldwide: it needs fixing quick! So, I’d suggest nothing even vaguely credible, however improbable, should be dismissed. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Go on, then. Try me with some improbable stuff …”

  “OK, coincidence?”

  Bob snorted. “What, every network device in the world has developed the same fault, but in its own way – on its own system, but that has the same effect? No, the odds against that are barely even finite!”

  “Does it have to be every device? Could it be just some of them?”

  Bob gave this a fraction of a second before replying, “No, it couldn’t. If just some of the kit was broken, the good stuff wouldn’t pass the noise, or the broken data, on. This has to be either generated simultaneously across all networks, via some process we don’t understand, or injected centrally, then distributed somehow, allowing it to propagate across networks and devices … again via some process … we don’t … understand.” He slowed and stopped as the complete hopelessness of it overpowered him. But Andy had not given up.

  “OK, environmental?”

  “What?”

  “Environmental. Maybe the change in global temperatures, atmospheric variations, or something, has had a catastrophic effect on all the equipment?”

  “Heh, heh; nice idea, but that just wouldn’t work. There’s so much variety of kit and carrier media: it couldn’t all go wrong. Anyway, much of it’s in climate controlled areas so there wouldn’t be any effect.”

  “Political?”

  “Well yes, political is one possible motivation if it’s a cyber-attack, but that doesn’t explain how.”

  “No, I mean organised political. Geographically distributed groups of individuals, all working to a common purpose, but each taking care of the networks in their region?”

  Bob paused a little longer but shook his head ruefully. “No, that’s just not credible, is it? Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of individual groups working surreptitiously without a single one being caught? It couldn’t happen. You know that as well as I do, surely?”

  “Maybe they have caught some of them but no-one’s told the likes of us?”

  “No, I think these Euro guys would know that, and I think they’re being straight with me.”

  Still not to be defeated, Andy reeled off several more unlikely suggestions in quick succession but Bob soberly and grimly dismissed each one. They stared at each other for a while longer before Andy resumed:

  “Well, it’s got to be sorted out somehow, Bob: it’s getting worse. We’re both saying that, aren’t we? You’re saying this PDN is growing and it’s clear that RFS is becoming a bigger problem. Hundreds of deaths already but, presumably, soon, it’ll be a lot worse?”

  *

  They finished late, after a good meal and several hours in the bar, prolonged by a complete failure of the hotel’s online payment connection. They talked of little but dirty networks and weird stuff. Bob tried a variety of local lagers and Andy worked his way through their range of fruit juices. They parted after midnight, having agreed to meet again in London shortly after Christmas. Although tired, and somewhat the worse for wear, Bob made a point of checking the data he had downloaded from Hattie the day before and comparing it against standard frame structures. In fact, he had been right: if Hattie had recorded the signal properly, then she had captured a protocol frame that had no right to be on the HGMS network. Had Hattie made a mistake? She never had before. Once again, Bob found himself half thinking – half muttering, ‘it doesn’t make sense’. At home, this had been his initial reaction to RFS; now the same could be said of PDN. Whichever way he looked at it, neither the cause nor the effect had any lo
gic at all. It took some time for tiredness to get the better of his confusion and, when he did sleep, he had strange dreams.

  *

  On one level, the rest of Bob’s week was routine. Three more jobs in three more locations: Madrid, Cork and Zaragoza. It was hardly the ideal schedule (travelling from Spain to Ireland and back to Spain again) but the order in which the visits had been originally agreed dictated it. However, Bob was a seasoned traveller and took such things in his stride. In reality, though, the experience was anything but typical. Failures, mishaps, accidents and other signs of RFS were visible everywhere (and Tuesday’s news suggested the worldwide death toll to be over a thousand) and, wherever he went, Bob was looking for the underlying signs of PDN, now generally (at least within the European ‘inner circle’ of which he now appeared to be a part) believed to be the cause. Fortunately, by Friday, there had been a few small but significant advances in this respect …

  *

  First thing Sunday morning, the day after his evening with Andy, Bob messaged Karla Heintze, in Darmstadt, and received an almost immediate reply. ‘No, there should be no ATM cells within the HGMS network. There was likely to be ATM over the simply ‘domestic’ outside lines they used for a variety of purposes but that traffic would be nowhere near the timing system Bob (really Hattie) had been taking readings from. She also attached the full protocol documentation.