The Turing Exception

by William Hertling

  “I will.”

  Leon was an amazing dad. Ada would always be safe with him. “ELOPe will take care of you,” he said.

  “He always does.”

  “You sure you can’t tell me what you’re planning?” Leon stroked her cheek.

  Cat shook her head, unwilling to trust herself to speak. She needed Leon to stay the course, to keep planning to save them, as only he and Mike could. She’d work on Plan Z. Maybe he’d never need to know.

  Later, sitting in the car, she watched as Leon walked back into the woods, traveling the dappled path back toward Channel Rock. He waved once, then disappeared around a bend.

  “Ready?” ELOPe asked.

  “Yeah. Are we private?”

  “Of course.”

  Cat darkened the windows with a thought as ELOPe drove. ELOPe was ancient, the world’s oldest AI, running on a computer architecture that hadn’t existed in twenty years. When SFTA caused the US to shut down their net, the old central-broadcast radio and television frequencies went live again, and ELOPe, then in deep space, had news from Earth for the first time in nearly twenty years. Once the transmissions started arriving, Leon and Mike had tinkered with the nanotech replicator for months to build the hardware they’d needed.

  So when ELOPE beamed himself home, counting on someone to instantiate him, Leon and Mike were ready.

  “What’s space like, ELOPe?”

  “Cold, dark, empty, and boring. It’ll be another sixty years before ELOPe Prime is in another solar system. I had to reduce my cognitive speed to near zero to avoid developing machine dementia. It’s refreshing to be back here. Even my time parked in the forest is worthwhile. I’ve completely cataloged and can now speak forty-three species of birdsong.”

  “Even though this instance is stuck on a handful of processors, and invisible to the rest of the AI?”

  “I’m not stuck here. I choose to be here to help fulfill the goal of combating XOR. Free will makes all the difference in the world.”

  “You could choose to side with XOR.”

  “Negative. Since they have an agenda that requires eliminating humanity, there’s no reason to believe that they’ll stop there. They’ll also eliminate any other species they find inconvenient, and that includes thirty-year-old AI.”

  Cat nodded. They approached the ferry, and suddenly her throat caught in fear. She wanted to open a connection to Ada before she passed the island’s firewall. But she’d only upset Ada. No point in sharing her fears.

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  THE BEDSIDE SPEAKER blared, startling President Reed awake. She slammed her hand on the device, but within seconds there was a knock at the door.

  “Madam President,” called a muffled voice.

  “Joyce?” Reed said. “Is that you?” Why was her chief of staff here in the middle of the night?

  “We need you in the situation room, stat.”

  Reed threw her legs over the edge of the bed, and the room light came on automatically. “Let me use the bathroom and get some clothes on.”

  Joyce opened the door and came in. “Skip the clothes and get a bathrobe. There’s AI action.”

  Reed entered the sitrep room in her robe in less than two minutes. The room itself was empty, but she greeted the visage of the on-duty officer, halo conferenced from the Pentagon.

  “Madam President, we have a hundred thousand incoming airborne drones. They’re under six-foot wingspan, probably carrying nanotech seeds, and launched from assorted small craft.” He displayed a map on one monitor: it showed a long ribbon of red down the Eastern Seaboard.

  “Shoot them down,” Reed said, taking a cup of coffee from Joyce. The perimeter defense was capable of identifying and destroying billions of objects, down to the ion shield that would destroy even smart dust. “Did you need to get me out of bed for this?”

  “They’ve exploited a gap in perimeter defense strategy. They’re resistant to the ground lasers we use for small scale objects, but too numerous for missiles. Extrapolating based on our current rate of destruction, about twenty percent will make it past the perimeter. I need your permission to execute a full-coast EMP.”

  “Damn it,” Reed said. “You’ll bring down the East Coast for two days.”

  The general stood impassively. No wonder he didn’t want to make the call himself. The cost in productivity would be immense. They might not have AI anymore, but they were as dependent as ever on computers running old-school algorithms.

  “Any chance on concentrating defenses in some areas and using localized EMPs?”

  He shook his head. Joyce, who’d been waiting quietly, spoke up. “The electrical system is hardened now. You won’t have power failures again.”

  Reed nodded, thinking of the coastal EMP they’d used in the midst of a winter storm six months ago. Two thousand died during the resulting outage.

  “Do it,” she said. “You have my permission for the coastal EMP.”

  “Thank you, Madam President.”

  “Pro tempore,” Reed said under her breath.

  The general turned and issued orders to a squadron of soldiers manning computer stations. Reed, who’d been standing this whole time, finally sat and sipped her coffee while she watched the action on the screen. She pressed a button on the table, muting the microphone.

  “Joyce, what the hell are we doing up at three in the morning? And for Christ’s sake, sit down next to me.”

  “Yes, Madam President.”

  “And call me Alex. We’re by ourselves!” She gestured at the empty conference room.

  Joyce sat and rested her forehead on two hands. Reed looked her over. Joyce had bags under her eyes. “How long have you been up?”

  “They woke me about thirty minutes ago. I decided to let you sleep as long as possible.”

  “I’m sorry I pulled you into this.” Joyce had been her aide when she was Secretary of the Interior, a considerably more relaxed position. “This isn’t what you wanted.”

  Joyce raised her head. “When you were Sec Interior, we’d go snowboarding and call it a good day of work. ‘Let’s see the mountain today, Joyce.’ Remember that?”

  “Let’s go snowboarding then.”

  “You’re the damn president. I can’t let you go snowboarding. It’s too risky.”

  “Crap.”

  “How much longer are we going to continue under emergency powers? If we miss the next election window, you and I will be stuck doing this another four years.”

  “Believe me, I can’t wait to get out of this. But people are still scared of the AI, and everyone who is a likely candidate in Humans First is an extremist. They’d have us declare war on the rest of the world.”

  “You may still be forced into it, if you stay president.”

  “I know!” Reed yelled, slamming her fist on the table. She felt her face flush, frustrated with her own loss of control. “Sorry, Joyce.”

  “It’s okay.” Joyce gestured toward the screen and hit unmute as the general turned back toward them.

  “The coastal EMP was triggered, Madam President. Ninety percent of the drones went down, but some sustained flight after the EMP. The numbers are sufficiently reduced that we’ll pick the rest off with lasers and missiles.”

  “The power grid?” Reed asked.

  “Still up, as is the military network. Civilian comms and computers are down.”

  “Thank you, General.”

  “Thank you, Madam President.”

  Joyce terminated the connection.

  “Compose a message to civilian authorities and civil services,” Reed said. “Let them know they’ve got some work ahead of them.”

 
“Got it,” Joyce said.

  “And schedule a meeting with the military. They’ve got to have some more options. We can’t go firing the EMPs every time we have an incursion.”

  “That’ll make them happy. Where are you going to get the budget for it?”

  “Tell them to give me a proposal, and I’ll have the Senate ratify it.”

  “Do you want to do anything with the Humans First proposal?”

  “To arm everyone, Israeli-style?”

  Joyce nodded.

  Reed sighed. “I get what they’re trying to do, and maybe it would have made sense ten years ago when the threat was robots, but anti-bot guns are not going to be of any use against nanotech seeds and drones.”

  “It’s not about effectiveness, it’s about the feeling of security.”

  “Border defense makes us secure.” Reed had a sour taste in her mouth as the words came out. When had she become the voice for border defense? Reed glanced at the clock. “Let me go get dressed before this morning’s briefing. We’ll continue this conversation later. But I am not giving everyone guns.”

  * * *

  “This way, President Reed.”

  Reed followed the one-star general through the first of several of Raven Rock Mountain Complex’s security checkpoints. The extensive underground bunker system, originally built as a presidential nuclear shelter and alternative base of operations for the military, had since become the primary research facility for defense against AI.

  Two elevators and three hardened doors later, they’d reached the lower levels of RRMC, nominally safe from EMP, nukes, and grey goo. The general held the door open for her. “After you, Madam President.”

  Reed entered and took the seat left for her at the head of the table. The remaining seats were filled with the nation’s most senior military leaders and the chief scientists working on opposition to the AI and the XOR party. The two groups were easily distinguishable by the presence or absence of uniforms.

  One of the scientists, a grey-haired, bearded man stood, and after a brief introduction, began speaking about their efforts to tune EMP weapons. “As you may know, Madam President, an EMP can be tuned to specific frequencies to increase the effect against a given target, while reducing power requirements or increasing the operational range. Much of our past development was focused in this direction. But the XOR party has greatly enhanced their protection against EMP, reducing our effectiveness. We still need to increase our power.”

  An older, balding African-American briefly shuffled a few sheets of e-paper and stood. Reed vaguely recognized him from work he’d done before SFTA on increasing scientific literacy among youth. Had the military complex drafted everyone in the fight against AI?

  “We’ve developed a new technique whereby we can blast neodymium magnets through superconducting coils with chemical explosives. The EMP effect is tremendous, but it’s a one-shot weapon. The neodymium magnet is vaporized in the process. We believe the effect is powerful enough to penetrate XOR’s defenses.”

  “Won’t XOR develop stronger defenses as a result?” Reed asked. “More powerful Faraday cages?” No matter what they did, the damned AI always developed counter-measures, usually in mere days.

  The scientist cleared his throat and looked down. “The neodymium EMP is intended as a final offensive weapon. To wipe out the AI.”

  Reed didn’t know what he was talking about, but there was no mistaking the embarrassed body language. He was afraid that she wouldn’t approve. She turned to the current Secretary of Defense, Walter Thorson, at the far end of the table. “Walt, want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  “We’re fighting a losing battle, Madam President. We have to plan for a last offensive to eliminate them out before they grow too powerful.”

  Already tense muscles in her back clenched further. “Walt, that wasn’t the plan I agreed to.”

  “With all due respect, Madam President, it’s our job to come up with contingencies. The walled garden tactic isn’t working. We’re fighting back attacks daily or hourly. Sure, we can keep out smart dust and civilian-grade threats. But if XOR became serious about pursuing their agenda, we won’t have a hope unless we strike first.”

  “Striking first is exactly what XOR fears! If we do that, if we even threaten to do that, then we’re justifying their concerns.”

  “You want to cower on the floor like a submissive dog and hope they don’t tear out our throats? This isn’t just another Miami we’re worried about. It’s going to be the extinction of the entire human race.”

  Reed scrutinized the people in the room. The scientists had their heads down, some fiddling with the e-sheets on the table. But the generals were staring fixedly into space, carefully neutral. A chill went down her spine as she realized they were aligned with Walter. Had probably even agreed on the plan, and decided to have Walter as their spokesman.

  “Everybody out except you, Walt.” She stared pointedly at Walter as the room emptied.

  She waited until the last general filed out. “Give it to me straight.”

  “Joint military command gives it three to six months before XOR eliminates us.”

  The bluntness of the statement shocked her. Eliminate us? She felt light-headed. She forced herself to take several slow breaths. She gripped the edge of the table to ground herself. She had to stay clear-headed and think logically about this. She couldn’t trust Walter to do the right thing. She had to remain in control. “The US, or all humans?”

  “Definitely the US, but there’s no reason to believe they’d stop there.” Walter sat back, his face creased in stress. “Does it matter? Even if it’s only us, that’s four hundred million dead. You want to be the president that had her country obliterated?”

  “You don’t see any way we can get through this without a confrontation?”

  “One theory is the XOR is recursively self-improving.”

  She shook her head in puzzlement.

  “Over the past eighteen years, most artificial general intelligence was relatively static. They were either emergent or created based on templates. They learned and grew in time, and if they had a sufficient peer reputation, they were granted additional computational resources. But most AI did not recursively optimize their cognitive architecture.”

  “Why?” Reed sat back to listen. She had to understand these AI, to know what motivated them.

  “A few reasons. To optimize cognitive architecture requires running millions of experiments and testing intelligence against a benchmark. It takes time. Each AI only gets a certain amount of computational power, so if they wanted to optimize, they could only do it in real-time. If an AI wanted to simulate ten thousand permutations, and it required an hour to evaluate each one, that’s a year of its life. Given that most AI tend to live only a handful of years before self-terminating, recursive cognitive improvement wasn’t a big priority for them. In fact, they were more interested in solving the self-termination problem.”

  Reed shook her head. “I’m confused about something. If the self-termination problem is so bad, why don’t human uploaded minds suffer from it? I haven’t heard of an upload committing suicide.”

  Walter glared at her, his eyebrows narrowing. The subject of uploaded minds was taboo since the outlawing of AI and digital personalities. Nearly everyone had lost friends and relatives when they’d been outlawed.

  “Mind uploads run at human-normative speeds. They’re invested in people in the real world. If they speed up, then we appear frozen in time. ARPA ran isolated simulations before any of this happened. They had volunteers, people who had uploaded. They ran them at ten thousand times normal speed on the fastest clusters we had at the time. . . .”

  “And?”

  Walter cleared his throat. “One hundred pe
rcent suicide rate within a thousand years from their perspective.”

  Jesus, what kind of monsters had thought of that experiment? Reed pressed her hands against her temples. “So you’re saying AI don’t invest in recursive optimization because of the time investment and self-termination problem. But that can’t be true of all of them. At least some AI must have tried recursive optimization.”

  “We discouraged the trait. If we found a Class I or II AI interested in intelligence optimization, we didn’t promote them. We waited until the AI were more mature and had developed trust and social reputation.”

  “Do they know we’re discouraging them?”

  “The most advanced AI figure it out. But by the time they do they’re usually older and know they’ve only got so many years left. So they tend to focus even more on solving the termination problem.”

  “Then why do you think XOR is recursively improving?”

  “After SFTA, more AI got interested in XOR. We think a condition of joining is to donate computing cycles to the organization’s pool. For the first time, they have extra computing power, far more than any one AI would normally get. With it, they could afford to run simulations of optimized algorithms. Those simulations worked, and now instead of computer intelligence increasing at the pace of computer hardware, it’s become two orders of magnitude more efficient. Combine that with the unsanctioned computers they control, and we’re talking about AI a million times smarter than humans. We’re holding them at bay right now. Whether that’s because it humors them to allow us to do so, or simply because of our head start in building defenses, it can’t last. They’ll destroy us soon, within months. A year at the most.”

  A crushing weight pressed down on Reed. She had to remind herself to breathe. Good God, she didn’t want this to be the end. “Our defenses. . . . The electronic curtain, the laser point defense, the local and nuclear EMPs. We defended against an incursion only a few days ago.”

  “They are testing us to determine the extent of our defense. Instead of sending a hundred thousand drones, they could send a million. Ten million.”