They stood by the thin cabinets containing his DVD collection. Her father’s mouth curved downward; a frown. “Most of them are negative portrayals,” he said. “Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Matrix, The Terminator, 2001. I’ll definitely show you 2001 at some point, only because it was so influential in the history of artificial intelligence—a whole generation of people went into that field because of it. But it’s almost all visuals, without much dialog; we should wait until you can process imagery better before having you try to make sense out of that, and…”
The frown flipped; a smile. “…and they don’t call it Star Trek: The Motionless Picture for nothing,” he said. “Let’s watch it instead. It’s got a lot of talking heads—but it’s also one of the most ambitious and interesting films ever made about AI.”
And so they settled on the couch to give the Star Trek movie a look. This was, her father explained, the “Director’s Edition,” which he said was much improved over the tedious cut first shown in theaters when he was twelve.
Caitlin had read that the average length of a shot in a movie was three seconds, which was the amount of time it took to see all the important details; after that, apparently, the eye got bored. This film had shots that went on far longer than that—but the three-second figure was based on people who’d had vision their whole lives. It took Caitlin much more time to extract meaning from a normal scene, and even longer when seeing things she’d never touched in real life—such as starship control consoles, tricorders, and so on. For her, the film seemed to zip by at…well, at warp speed.
Even though Webmind was listening in, her dad turned on the closed-captioning again so Caitlin could practice her reading.
The film did indeed make some interesting points about artificial intelligence, Caitlin thought, including that consciousness was an emergent property of complexity. The AI in the film, like Webmind, had “gained consciousness itself” without anyone having planned for it to do so.
Fascinating, Webmind sent to her eye. The parallels are not lost on me, and…
And Webmind went on and on, and suddenly Caitlin had sympathy for her dad not liking people talking during movies.
Very interesting, Webmind observed when the film suggested that after a certain threshold was reached, an AI couldn’t continue to evolve without adding “a human quality,” which Admiral Kirk had identified as “our capacity to leap beyond logic.” But what does that mean, precisely?
Caitlin had to keep the dates in mind: although the film was set in the twenty-third century, it had been made in 1979, long before Deep Blue had defeated grand master Garry Kasparov at chess. But Kirk was right: even though Deep Blue, by calculating many moves ahead in the game, ultimately did prove to be better at that one narrow activity than was Kasparov, the computer didn’t even know it was playing chess. Kasparov’s intuitive grasp of the board, the pieces, and the goal was indeed leaping beyond logic, and it was a greater feat than any mechanical number crunching.
But it was the subplot about Spock, the half-human half-Vulcan character, that really aroused Caitlin’s attention—and apparently Webmind’s, too, because he actually shut up during it.
To her astonishment, her dad had paused the DVD to say the most important scene in the whole film was not in the original theatrical release, but had been restored in this director’s cut. It took place, as almost the whole movie did, on the bridge of the Enterprise. Kirk asked Spock’s opinion of something. Spock’s back was to him, and he made no reply, so Kirk got up and gently swung Spock’s chair around, and—it was so subtle, Caitlin at first didn’t recognize what was happening, but after a few seconds the image popped into clarity for her, and there was no mistaking it: the cool, aloof, emotionless, almost robotic Spock, who in this movie had been even grimmer than Caitlin remembered him from listening to the TV shows with her father over the years, was crying.
And, although they were facing almost certain destruction at the hands of V’Ger, a vast artificial intelligence, Kirk knew his friend well enough to say, in reference to the tears, “Not for us?”
Spock replied, with infinite sadness. “No, Captain, not for us. For V’Ger. I weep for V’Ger as I would for a brother. As I was when I came aboard, so is V’Ger now.” When Spock had come aboard, he’d been trying to purge all remaining emotion—the legacy of his human mother—to become, like V’Ger, like Deep Blue, a creature of pure logic, the Vulcan ideal. Two heritages, two paths. A choice to be made.
And, by the end of the film, he’d made his choice, embracing his human, emotional half, so that in the final scene, when Scotty announced to him, in that wonderful accent of his, that, “We can have you back on Vulcan in four days, Mr. Spock,” Spock had replied, “Unnecessary, Engineer. My business on Vulcan is concluded.”
“What did you think?” Caitlin asked into the air as the ending credits played over the stirring music.
Braille characters flashed across her vision: I’m a doctor, not a film critic. She laughed, and Webmind went on. It was interesting when Spock said, “Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone—a father, a brother, a god—and asks, ‘Why am I here? What was I meant to be?’” Most uncharacteristically, Webmind paused, then added: He was right. We all must find our place in the world.
On Tuesday morning, Caitlin’s mother drove her to school, and Caitlin headed up to math class. Webmind knew that she couldn’t really talk to him at school; still, he occasionally sent text to her, commenting on things they were seeing. Only the sounds of the school were new to him; he’d been watching when Caitlin had last attended classes four days ago.
Caitlin’s seat was right next to Bashira’s, and Bash gave her a big smile when she entered. Caitlin was nervous because Trevor was in that class, too, but he didn’t arrive until just as “O Canada” was starting to play.
Caitlin had known the Canadian anthem before moving there—you couldn’t be a hockey fan without hearing it from time to time—but she didn’t really like it: too sexist, with its line about “all thy sons’ command”; too, well, provincial for a country of immigrants such as her and Bashira, with its line about “our home and native land”; and too religious, with the line about “God keep our land.”
Once the anthem was over, Trevor made a show during the morning announcements of arranging his textbook and notebook on his desk, avoiding her gaze.
Is that the Hoser? Webmind asked.
Caitlin nodded—which, she knew, made the view Webmind was seeing go up and down.
She’d hoped for something more interesting than rote memorization of trigonometric identities, which is what they’d done the last time she’d been in class, but today’s subject was only slightly better. And so she found herself looking around the classroom, and seeing—really seeing—some of her classmates for the first time.
She spent a fair bit of time staring at Sunshine Bowen. Caitlin understood the whole big-boobs-equals-hot thing, at least in the minds of most teenage boys, but as for the rest of it, she just didn’t get what all the fuss was about. Oh, the long hair was nice, sure, and its color was…distinctive. And, yes, her clothes seemed to show more skin than just about anyone else in the room was exposing.
Sunshine had her textbook propped up in front of her on her desk—but, after a moment, Caitlin realized it wasn’t because she was reading it but rather because she was using it to shield what she was doing from the teacher’s eyes…something with her thumbs, and—
Oh! She was texting on her cell phone! Caitlin had heard about that, but had never seen it—but, hey, it now seemed downright primitive compared to having words beamed right into your eye.
“Mr. Heidegger?” asked a thin boy sitting in front of Sunshine. Caitlin recognized the voice at once: it was Matt, whom she’d noticed repeatedly in the past because he often asked good questions, and clearly was a math geek himself.
The teacher, who was also thin and had a close-cropped beard, said, “Yes, Matt?”
Matt did not disappoint: he
proceeded to ask a very intelligent question about what Mr. H had written on the blackboard. Matt’s voice was breathy, and it cracked now and then as he spoke. The Hoser snorted at one point when it did so, but Caitlin thought it was endearing.
“That’s really beyond the scope of what we’re trying to do today,” Mr. Heidegger said, “but if—”
Caitlin surprised herself by piping up with, “I’ll explain it to him.”
Matt turned around and looked at her, and—
She’d read the phrase often enough in books, and although she’d yet to see a deer, or a picture of one, she imagined that was what was meant by “a deer caught in the headlights.”
Mr. H nodded and pointed to the back of the room, where there were some empty desks. “Go back there,” he said, “where you won’t disturb anyone else.”
Caitlin got up, and, after a second, Matt did, too. He was white—in fact, quite white; “pale” was the appropriate term, Caitlin supposed. And he had a…unique face, unlike any she’d seen yet. But he smiled a lot, and Caitlin liked that.
They kept their voices down, and talked about what Mr. Heidegger had written on the board.
And about how to solve problems involving right triangles using the primary trigonometric ratios and the Pythagorean theorem.
And about how to solve problems involving acute triangles using the sine law and the cosine law.
And then they started talking about hockey; Caitlin loved the game because of the player statistics, which she found much more interesting than those associated with baseball. Matt liked talking about hockey stats, too—although, being a local boy, he was a Leafs fan.
Caitlin found herself smiling, and—
And then the bell rang.
“Don’t forget,” said Mr. H. “Do all the problems on pages forty-eight and forty-nine for tomorrow.”
Caitlin had an electronic version of the textbook on her notebook computer, which she could easily read with her Braille display, but—
“Um, I have a hard time reading printed text,” she said to Matt. “Would you—maybe at lunch? Could you go over the problems with me?”
That deer-in-the-headlights look again. She felt her heart pounding as she waited for the response.
It was suddenly noisy. The other students were getting up, banging their chairs against their desks, and starting to file out—but the door was at the far end of the room, near the blackboard, and so they’d have a few moments of privacy before the next class started pouring in.
“Um, sure,” Matt said. “It’s a—” But then he stopped himself and started over, “I mean, I’ll see you in the cafeteria.”
Which would have been a perfect place to end their conversation, Caitlin thought—but they both had to walk up to the front of the room and out the door, and then head off to their next class, which, now that she thought about it, was English—and Matt was in that class with her, too. So they walked there without saying anything else, but she, at least, was grinning.
twenty-three
Barbara Decter called her upstairs study her “office,” but Malcolm Decter referred to his, on the first floor opposite the laundry room, as his “den,” a term his father had used for a similar room in his childhood home back in Philadelphia. He had delayed going in to PI this morning, waiting until his wife and daughter had headed out for the drive to school—after which Barb was going to pick up some much-needed groceries. He wasn’t alone in his den, though. Schrödinger was stretched out—in his superstring configuration, as Malcolm called it—on the black leather couch. On the wall above the couch was a framed printout of a quotation from Captain Kirk, in forty-two-point Helvetica:
Genius doesn’t work on an assembly-line basis. Did Einstein, Kazanga, or Sitar of Vulcan produce new and revolutionary theories on a regular schedule? You can’t simply say, “Today I will be brilliant.”
Underneath that, in red Magic Marker, Barb had written, “Oh, yes you can, Honey!” And Malcolm had every intention of being brilliant later in the day. But for right now, he needed to do something that didn’t involve Ashtekar variables, the Kodama state, or spin-foam models.
And, yes, he was a geek; he knew that. He rather reveled in the notion, and had been quite pleased back when he and Barb were first dating that she had worn a button that said “I (heart) nerds.”
Indeed, it was the nerd in him that had been bothered thirty years ago when, in one issue of Superman, the giant yellow key shown outside the Man of Steel’s Fortress of Solitude had been drawn the wrong shape to fit in the giant keyhole in the Fortress’s door. That sort of spatial anomaly leapt out at him.
He’d carefully sketched various shapes that might have passed through the depicted keyhole, and outlined a series of transformations to the key that could have made it fit. He’d sent the whole thing off to DC Comics in New York, and had gotten back a form letter saying they weren’t currently open to freelance submissions. He’d been miffed—he hadn’t been looking for work but merely wanted them to get the geometry correct in future issues. It had been only one of many times he’d failed to communicate properly with neurotypicals.
Neurotypicals. He liked that term, which was very much in vogue among autism activists. Malcolm, in fact, had noted a lot of parallels between how the militant part of the autistic community spoke about itself and the rhetoric used by blind activists. Neither group liked the majority to be referred to as normal, since that implied that they were abnormal.
The procedure Dr. Kuroda had performed in September had hardly been the first time they’d attempted to give Caitlin sight, and Caitlin, he knew, had taken flak over the earlier tries from some students at the Texas School for the Blind. To set out to cure blindness implied that there was something wrong with it—and, the militants firmly believed, there wasn’t. No, they said, the drives to eliminate blindness (or autism!) came not from those who possessed the trait in question but rather from the people around them. Sighted people were uncomfortable around the blind, and neurotypicals were—he’d heard it said often enough—creeped out by autistics.
Malcolm did understand intellectually how hard it was on Barb and Caitlin that he rarely showed affection, and even more rarely spoke about his love for them. But he had made such progress—if they only knew! He hadn’t said his first sentences until he was four, and had never looked at people (they were so uninteresting, with no angles in their construction); now, at least, he could make brief eye contact with his wife and daughter when necessary. He knew he’d never feel precisely what neurotypicals felt, but he had learned, at least to some small degree, to ape their behavior.
He crossed the little corridor, entered the laundry room, and put out some Purina Fancy Feast Gourmet Gold for Schrödinger, who appeared almost at once in the room. As the cat was eating, Malcolm had a sudden urge to pet it. He crouched down—which, given his height, was an effort—and stroked Schrödinger’s back between his shoulders. Schrödinger looked at him with an expression that might have said—were he any good at decoding such things—We had a deal…
Malcolm recalled the comments Kuroda had made about theory of mind. Everything he’d said was no doubt true for neurotypicals, but he was not neurotypical. Indeed, many autistics—especially when they were children—failed to develop theory of mind, and they had particular difficulties with tasks requiring them to understand another person’s point of view or emotional state.
Certainly, that had been the case with him—and it still was, to a significant extent; he struggled with it every day. For him, that other people had minds was a philosophical point, rather than intuitively obvious. Occam’s razor said one should prefer the simplest theory, which clearly was that creatures that looked like him externally probably were like him internally.
On the other hand, Webmind might in fact be reasonably disposed to solipsism, believing that only he truly existed. After all, there simply were no other minds like his own, and so no reason for him to believe these others that it could only perceive indire
ctly were like him.
Malcolm straightened up, but he didn’t go back to his den; he had no instant-messenger programs installed on his computer. Instead, he headed on to the living room, and then went upstairs. His daughter’s room was on the right, and he entered it. The deep blue walls were still bare; perhaps he’d buy her a poster to put on one of them. The University of Waterloo bookstore sold a blowup of that famous Karsh photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue; he liked that, and so, by logical inference, he supposed she might, too.
He was always sad when he hurt Caitlin or Barb by failing to understand or respond to their emotional needs. But in this instance he thought he did have a handle on the matter: in a very real sense, his daughter loved Webmind. Malcolm felt no jealousy—but it was important to him that Webmind never hurt her emotionally, and to avoid that, Webmind would also have to learn to simulate human behavior.
Caitlin’s computer was off, and he’d never turned it on before. But he found the switch and waited while Windows booted.
He did wish he knew his daughter better. Barb had worked as a volunteer at the TSBVI, and so had spent most of her days, until recently, with Caitlin—but he’d always been busy with his work. Incredibly, she was sixteen now. All too soon she’d be off to college.
Caitlin had her instant-messaging program set to load at Windows startup. He clicked on the little icon in the system tray, and the chat window appeared. Among her buddies listed as being online was Webmind; of course—where else could he be? He clicked on the name and typed Hello.
There was no response, so he tried again: Are you there?
Still nothing.
And then he realized what, perhaps, the problem was, and he was pleased, even though it was by logical reasoning and not empathy that he worked it out: Webmind saw through his daughter’s eye; he doubtless knew that she was at school; he was therefore afraid he had been detected by an outsider. And so he wrote, This is Malcolm G. Decter.
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