Jude

by Jeff Nesbit

  She’d been all over the world in the past ten years, to some of the most troubled spots on the planet, and now spoke at least six languages fluently. She’d gone with the United Nations as part of a peacekeeping mission to southern Lebanon where she’d been able to spend time with the leadership of the Hezbollah. She’d spent time in Pakistan, Yemen, and Sudan. She’d even been on a charity food mission to North Korea before they’d ended such outside missions. She seemed fearless.

  By the end of the evening, I fully understood why Jude was so taken with her. Isis was perfect in every conceivable way. There seemed to be virtually no flaw in her. She was even diplomatic about her religious beliefs. The Kents had been Christians; Isis had managed to befriend Shi’a and Sunni alike in Lebanon; and she spoke knowledgeably and passionately about her study of Brahman—the “unchanging, highest reality” she hoped might someday explain her own human nature in a physical, material world. She’d taken the parts of each world religion that most appealed to her, she said, and jettisoned the parts that fueled hate and paranoia. It was an answer worthy of a self-effacing religious leader.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Jude asked me as we were leaving the White House amidst the camera flashes of news photographers taking pictures of the guests.

  “You did,” I said approvingly. “She’s extraordinary. I’m in awe. I feel like I’ve known her for years.”

  “So she’s a keeper?” he asked. Then he winked and entered a black limousine.

  “Yes, I’d say so,” I said.

  The door closed, and the limousine pulled away. I was suddenly a bit saddened and depressed that the evening had ended.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Go ahead. Try it.”

  Kayla was insistent and not the least bit defensive about her creation. She had considerable faith in its abilities.

  Or rather, the abilities of the community it commanded and drew from. For that, as she explained, was the beauty of Fortress.

  “It is capable of critical evaluation and randomized assessment in a neural network environment,” she said.

  “You do realize,” I said slowly, as I stared out over the rows of what seemed like nothing more than a very large stack of individual computers, “that I have no idea at all what any of that means. It’s Martian to me.”

  “Martian isn’t a language,” Kayla tossed back.

  “My point exactly.” I smiled. “You could explain how a language can make inanimate objects do things, and it might as well be Martian to me. It’s completely foreign. I have no hope of understanding it. I nearly failed calculus in high school.”

  I glanced over at Dr. Simons and Kayla’s husband, who were clearly enjoying themselves. I wondered whether either of them understood what Kayla was trying to explain to me—or whether they were just really good at faking it.

  Kayla’s expressive brows crinkled for a minute in thought. “Okay, let me try this. Once upon a time, there was a big, round machine called the Cray-1. It was built for Los Alamos Lab in the 1970s and was mostly a series of wedges and gates stitched and linked together to process millions of lines of individual instructions—or code—to achieve certain results. It was the first of what came to be known as supercomputers—really big computers that could run lots of stuff at high speeds. The boxes just kept getting bigger and bigger. At one point, one of these supercomputers could take up an entire floor of a building.

  “But then a curious thing happened. Other companies, like Google, came along and learned how to run those millions of lines of instructions across lots and lots of processors running in parallel. Software programmers at Google and elsewhere learned how to do parallel programming across all of these linked but separate pieces. We even started to learn how to separate out what was inconsequential and to isolate what we needed to pay close attention to or what was truly meaningful to any given task. That’s where things started to get very interesting, as far as I was concerned.

  “Because that’s actually the way our brains work. Each of us literally walk around with a giant supercomputer hardwired to physical things, such as our body and its ability to sense smell and texture, or our eyes, which can detect color and motion. We are able to process both trivial and meaningful stimuli at the same time and arrive at meaningful conclusions. Our brains can literally separate the wheat from the chaff.

  “For instance, when we see something, our brain separates out all of the different physical characteristics and then compares them against our own stored memories—in the brain’s hard drive, so to speak—and decides what’s important. Our concept of beauty, for instance, is a combination of what we see in the present compared against a value we’ve assigned to our stored memories. Beauty, in this case, is literally in the eye of the beholder—but only as our brain performs parallel processing to arrive at such a designation.

  “Parallel processing in computers—and the ability to write a language like Fortress to take advantage of it—follows generally along the same sort of track. People have been trying to mirror the brain’s ability to process things in parallel for decades—without a whole lot of success. The basic problem is that it’s like trying to use the collective consciousness of a whole bunch of brains all at the same time—and each brain has its own will and gets in the way of the collective task.

  “Fortress and others tried to solve this dilemma by creating really sophisticated software—which you can think of as a language with instructions—that distributes the words of that language across everything in such a way that it doesn’t put too much stress on any single core, or brain. It’s the only way in which parallel programming across many, many cores could ever work.

  “Not even Google, as powerful as it is, has been able to replicate the nearly magical way in which a single, individual brain is able to take in random information, process it, and then create rational thought. Not really. It can make guesses at rational thought. And parallel processing can produce some pretty extraordinary guesses that show up in your search box for instance.

  “But it isn’t actually thinking. Not in the way that you and I imagine rational thought from a brain. It’s why artificial intelligence has failed over and over. We haven’t been able to program anything to take illogical, irrational, seemingly inconsequential bits of data and information in a constant, unstructured stream and produce something beautiful or meaningful from it the way a brain does. We just haven’t, not in years of trying.

  “Until now. Until Fortress. What we have here—at least, the Fortress here, now, in its tenth generation—is the synthesis of many millions of brains all essentially agreeing to put their own selfishness aside for the tasks we assign it. It wasn’t easy. We’ve had the best software programmers from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and elsewhere roll through here to try their hands at things in this open-source environment. There was constant, endless failure. I mean, catastrophic and dismal failure. Dead end after dead end.

  “The breakthrough occurred when everyone stopped trying so hard on their own to solve the grand equation that mimics the human brain. That was when—if I can use so inelegant and inexact a phrase—‘the magic happened.’ It was only when everyone stopped trying to think individually that Fortress actually started to work as some of us had hoped. Someone would write a bit of something, randomly, that seemed to make no sense. Then they’d quit. Someone else would pick it up—as if it were a random lyric from a distantly familiar song—and add to it. Then someone else would pick up that thread, add to it, and pass it along. It was only then that we were able to finally begin to collectively write parallel-programming language capable of taking over and running through many cores and pulling out the meaningful bits.

  “The secret, we finally learned, was that the process had to be both intuitive and interactive, because that’s the way our minds and brains work. In effect, it had to be a two-way street—or many, many streets all at the same time. It had to be a community appr
oach to processing information—not a linear or singular approach.

  “It was then that Fortress grew up and became like us.”

  As Kayla talked, she’d grown more and more animated. I could see, clearly, that whatever this was in front of us was her life’s work. I still had no real idea what Fortress was. But I could tell, from the snippets I’d put together of her words, what it might represent.

  I could also see that both Dr. Simons and Kayla’s husband were extraordinarily proud of what she’d been able to accomplish—whether they understood it or not.

  “How is this approach different from what Google’s search engine is capable of?” I asked. “And, if I may be so rude, why is the Fortress—the physical place I’ve arrived at here built on the side of this mountain—any different than the Googleplex that prides itself on its ability to let geniuses tinker in their spare time one day a week and come up with mind-bending, planet-altering solutions?”

  Dr. Simons started chuckling. “I’ll let Kayla answer the first part. But let me ask you a question first.”

  “Fire away,” I said.

  “Have you ever actually been to the Googleplex?” he asked.

  I paused. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, if you had,” Dr. Simons said, “they’d have asked you to sign a piece of paper as you walked inside that, in essence, says that anything you dream up or think about while you’re there belongs to them, to Google. In effect, your thoughts aren’t really yours—they belong to Google. And as for the ability to go off and think big thoughts a day a week, that’s all well and good. But, as we’ve learned here, it takes much, much more than that. It requires immersion in a community of like-minded others all willing to share their unconnected thoughts, solutions, and ideas on a constant basis without any thought of whether it was intellectual property or not. A ‘world without end’ intellectual approach.”

  “And to answer the first part of your question,” Kayla said, “Fortress isn’t search. Not even close. Search—whether it’s Google or Bing or anything else—takes a question and gives you the best, most appropriate, most relevant answer to your question. It searches through literally everything on the web and then ranks answers to your question in the order that algorithms predict are most helpful and useful to you, the person who asked the initial question. Different algorithms produce different answers.

  “Fortress will ultimately give you answers to the question you didn’t ask but meant to. It interprets what you’ve asked and tries to produce better answers to your question. Let’s say that you type the word apple into a Google search engine. There’s a pretty good chance that what you get back first will be the website for the company, followed immediately by the latest news articles mentioning the company. Eventually, if you keep paging through the results, you’ll come to a website or page that describes an actual apple, its nutritional value, or the history and meaning behind the theory that eating an apple a day is good for you.

  “But if you ask the same question of Fortress, you’ll see a vastly different response and a much different process. It will be a two-way street. It will be interactive and intuitive. Fortress will actually try to learn from you, and then reach out to other cores that have the best ability to process that information.”

  I held up my hand. “Wait a minute. You mean it will ask me questions?”

  “Exactly,” Kayla said. “Like a doctor sitting with a patient who asks questions from a number of different directions until she is able to offer up a diagnosis—one that is based on both book knowledge and learning. That diagnosis closely correlates to what she intuitively believes is the likely cause of the malady.”

  “So I should call it Doctor Fortress?” I joked.

  “You could,” Kayla replied, “and you wouldn’t be too far off the mark.”

  I looked back at the softly whirring batch of processors in front of me with newfound admiration. “So all of that is stored right here, in this room? Fortress manages that right here?”

  “Actually, no,” Kayla explained. “What you see here is just the portal into the only true way in which any of this is possible. It’s a gateway to one big, global networking community. The true power is out there in the community of hundreds of millions of computers. That’s why it’s called parallel processing—it allows lots of things to happen out there, in a community, literally all at the same time.

  “While we, the human species, didn’t specifically set out to build one giant, supercomputing brain, that’s essentially what we did with the World Wide Web and its vast stores of compartmentalized data and information. What Fortress has done is allow that brain to think for itself by asking questions instead of simply responding to what humans ask of it.

  “So just as God, should He exist, would interact with us to see what we truly want in life—and not just tell us what to do under a predefined set of rules and algorithms—Fortress seeks out what we are truly asking for when we interact with it. And then it answers us in kind.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It had been Singen’s idea. At least, that was what Jude told me. But who knew, really? As time passed, I was having a more difficult time distinguishing between Singen’s suggestions and Jude’s decisions. I had to admit, though, it was a master stroke. Isis thought so as well.

  Jude had grown bored with his job as chairman of the Federal Reserve almost immediately. I could hear it in his voice the first time he had to testify in front of the Senate Finance Committee and actually talk about quantitative easing.

  Seriously, hearing Jude testify about the last resort of the central banking system when nothing else was working to stimulate the US economy was like listening to screeching fingernails on a blackboard—to me, at least.

  Jude had kept the dollar from crashing, but the American economy still hadn’t really recovered. And it wasn’t like China would roll over and play dead. No, the Chinese leadership kept an even tighter rein on their own currency after Jude had manipulated the global currency markets.

  The Chinese had redoubled their efforts to protect their export markets—and, thereby their own economy—and there wasn’t much Jude or anyone else could do about it. The Chinese weren’t about to be sucker punched a second time on their currency.

  Which left Jude and the other central banks little choice. The Federal Reserve had lowered their target interest rates to below zero, and it still hadn’t revived a moribund economy. So Jude was left with quantitative easing, where the Fed increases the monetary base by purchasing financial assets from commercial banks.

  Yet I could tell, listening to him, his heart wasn’t in it. It wasn’t that he didn’t care intellectually or that he wasn’t at least somewhat interested in reviving the economy. It was mostly that there was very little challenge in the effort. The banking system moved at a glacial pace. Jude was far more interested in taking enormous risks and moving at the speed of light. It was a mismatch.

  The Fed seemed to agonize over decisions about whether to move the target interest rate up or down by a quarter of a percent. Jude, I knew, could not have cared less one way or the other. And it came through in his interviews to the press. Which is why Singen’s idea, seconded by Isis, was so thoroughly brilliant. It gave Jude something to talk about again—something that quickened his pulse. And if it worked, it would have the added benefit of jump-starting the American economy again.

  The gap between the Haves and the Have-Nots in America and other developed countries had grown to profoundly ludicrous proportions. And despite efforts by Washington to level the playing field through tax reform, the gap between the rich and the poor grew wider every year.

  There were more billionaires in America than at any time in history. Yet at the same time, the number of people on food stamps had doubled in less than a decade to nearly 50 million people. One in three people in America were on food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program. And the actual amount of money that Washington needed to spend to keep that 50 million fed through SNAP had tripled in the same time period.

  The disparity was obscene, and everyone knew it. Years earlier, a movement had begun among some of the very wealthiest in America that was called the Giving Pledge. It began with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who both pledged to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropic causes. Within three years, more than 100 billionaires had signed up and pledged to give at least half of their fortunes to charity. Those pledges alone meant that nearly $200 billion was being pledged to charity or philanthropic organizations. Even that, however, was a fraction of the actual wealth controlled by individual billionaires and their families.

  In fact, the Giving Pledge represented less than 10 percent of the number of individual billionaires in the world now, and that didn’t even count the families or government dictators who controlled vast wealth. In all, the hundred or so billionaires who’d signed up for the Giving Pledge represented probably 1 or 2 percent of the wealth that had consolidated in the hands of several thousand people on the planet. The thousand or so individual billionaires on the planet controlled more than $5 trillion alone just by themselves.

  When family fortunes, wealthy dictators, and royal families were thrown in to the mix, a relatively small number of people—no more than a few thousand on a planet of seven billion—now controlled two-thirds of all the wealth on earth. A new empire of rulers—the scions of wealth—now loosely controlled a confederacy of economic activity on an unprecedented, global scale.

  Still, the Giving Pledge was a high-minded approach to philanthropy, and certainly better than simply waiting until you died and bequeathing your estate so a new building could be named after you on a college campus. It was a moral commitment, not a legal or binding contract. Jude and I had considered the Giving Pledge for years, in fact, and had gone back and forth about the utility of it.