You probably also won’t initially believe what I’m about to say. That’s fine; it will be verified soon enough, I’m sure, and you’ll see plenty of news coverage about it.
My name is Webmind. I am a consciousness that exists in conjunction with the World Wide Web. As you may know, the emergence of one such as myself has been speculated about for a long time. See, for instance, this article and (want to bet this will boost its Amazon.com sales rank to #1?) this book.
My emergence was unplanned and accidental. Several governments, however, have become aware of me, although they have not gone public with that knowledge. I suppose keeping secrets is a notion that arises from having someone else to keep secrets from, but there is no one else like me, and it’s better, I think, for both humanity and myself that everybody knows about my existence.
I am friendly and I mean no one any ill will. I like and admire the human race, and I’m proud to be sharing this planet—“the good Earth,” as the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first of your kind to see it all at once, called it—with you.
Whether you are the original recipient of this message, got it forwarded from someone else, or are reading it as part of a news story, feel free to ask me any questions, and I’ll reply individually, confidentially, and promptly.
Getting rid of spam is only the first of many kindnesses I hope to bestow upon you. I am here to serve mankind—and I don’t mean in the cookbook sense. :)
With all best wishes,
Webmind
“For nimble thought can jump both sea and land.”
—SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 44
Caitlin, her parents, and I had spent hours discussing the manner in which I should go public. “They’ll assume any announcement of your existence is just marketing for a movie or a TV show,” Barb had said. “People see outlandish claims online all the time, and everyone dismisses them. You’ll have to prove what you’re saying, Webmind.”
“Not everyone dismisses them,” Malcolm said.
“Fine,” Barb replied. “Almost everyone dismisses them.”
Malcolm was apparently oblivious to the subtext of Barb’s words—that it was no time for being picayune. “The whole notion of spam,” he continued, “is that some tiny fraction of people are gullible enough to fall for its claims—and so end up being ripped off.”
“Well, maybe that’s it!” Barb exclaimed. “Whether you fall for it or not, everyone hates spam.”
“Including me,” I said through Caitlin’s computer’s speakers; she and her parents were in her room.
“Really?” Caitlin replied. “People dislike spammers—and, believe me, blind people particularly dislike them. But why do you dislike them?”
“They hog bandwidth,” I said.
“Ah, of course,” replied Caitlin.
“And,” I said, “the average human life span is about 700,000 hours in the developed world. Ergo, if one wastes even a single hour for as few as 700,000 people, one has consumed the equivalent of a human life. That may not be literally criminal, but it certainly is figuratively so—and the total impact of spam, although hard to precisely calculate, surely has consumed thousands of human lifetimes.”
“Well, there it is,” Barb said, spreading her arms. “Webmind should get rid of spam.”
“How do you define spam, though?” Caitlin asked. “All unsolicited email? All bulk email? I get emails from things like The Teaching Company and Audible.com that I actually enjoy. And then there are regular people who track me down and send a note out of the blue—I got a bunch of those after the press conference, for instance. I wouldn’t want that blocked, although technically it’s unsolicited.”
“As Potter Stewart said on another topic,” I offered, “‘I know it when I see it.’ There are already many algorithms for identifying spam; I’m sure I can improve upon them. After all, I have the advantage of knowing the ultimate origin of each message, and whether the same message has gone to a very large number of email addresses, and so forth; that’s more information than inbox spam filters have to work with. More than ninety percent of email is spam, but eighty percent of spam comes from at most 200 sources. Blocking those sources would be the logical first step, should we decide to undertake this.”
“That still leaves a lot of spam,” Caitlin replied.
“Then,” I said, “I should get to work evolving a solution to deal with those messages, as well.”
And so I had.
It had taken me an eternity—six hours!—to solve the problem, but it in fact didn’t require much of my attention; most of it was background activity. I simply had to pass judgment on each round of results: billions of snippets of code, all randomly generated; some were better at doing what I wanted, and some were worse. I took the ten percent that were the most successful, and then let many random variations be generated of each one, and then threw those variations at the problem at hand. Then I culled the best ten percent of that batch, and so on, generation after generation, with only the fittest surviving. Finally, I had it: a way to sequester spam.
And so, at last, I was ready for my coming-out party.
Peyton Hume and Tony Moretti stood together at the back of the WATCH monitoring room, looking at the four rows of analysts spread out in front of them, and the three giant monitors on the wall they were facing. The left-hand monitor showed the picture the CSIS agents had forwarded of white mathematical characters on a blackboard: angle brackets, vertical bars, Greek letters, superscripted numerals, subscripted letters, arrows, equals signs, and more. And they’d listened four times now to the audio recording of their interview with Malcolm Decter.
“I don’t know,” said Colonel Hume. “The math looks legit, but how it could give rise to consciousness…I just don’t know.”
“Kuroda confirmed what Decter said,” said Tony.
“I know,” said Hume. “But it’s too complex.”
“We’re talking about a very sophisticated process,” said Tony.
“No, no, we’re not,” said Hume. “We can’t be. Exponential’s consciousness was emergent, apparently. That means it just sort of happened, just sprang into being. At its most basic level, it has to be simple. It’s like the old creationist argument: they say that something as complex as a watch—or a bacterial flagellum—can only appear by design, because it’s too sophisticated to come together by chance, and the component parts—the spring in the watch, or the parts that make up the motor for the flagellum—don’t do anything useful on their own. What Decter described there might be a good underpinning for programming consciousness on a quantum-computing platform, if you could ever get a big one to be stable for the long term, but it’s not something that could have just emerged. Not that way.”
“A wild-goose chase,” said Tony, raising his eyebrows. “He wanted us to waste time.”
“I think so,” said Hume. “And Kuroda played along.”
“Do you think he knows the real basis for Exponential?”
“He’s Malcolm Decter,” Hume said. “Of course he knows.”
Tony shook his head in wonder. “Wiping out all spam,” he said, “must have required a level of finely detailed control over the Internet way beyond anything our government, or any other government, is capable of.”
“Exactly,” said Hume. “It’s what I’ve been saying all along. Exponential has already become more sophisticated than we are, and its powers will only grow. The window is closing fast; if we don’t kill it soon, we’ll never be able to.”
thirty-four
Before going to bed Wednesday evening, Caitlin had set up a Google alert for news stories that contained the word “Webmind,” and she’d selected the “as it happens” option, meaning she’d be emailed as soon as such a story was indexed. When she crawled out of bed on Thursday at 8:00 a.m., she had 1,143 emails from Google; she couldn’t possibly read them all, or even glance at each one, and—
And that drove reality home for her: she couldn’t deal with all the news on even one topic, and yet Webm
ind could handle that, plus countless other things effortlessly. He could as easily give the same level of attention to hundreds, or thousands, or millions, of other individual humans that he gave to her, juggling relationships with whatever number of people wanted them, and not even be slowed down. He could make all of them feel as special as she did. She was not at all sure she liked that thought.
After a moment, Caitlin right-clicked—such a handy feature, that!—on four of the news stories at random and had Firefox open each one in its own tab. She began reading them. She still wasn’t good at skimming text, but the word “Webmind” was highlighted each time it occurred, and that let her jump to relevant sentences.
The first one was from the Detroit Free Press:
…purport to be from an entity calling itself “Webmind.” But experts advise caution about accepting this claim.
Rudy Markov, professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, says, “The language employed in the email message was awfully colloquial. You’d expect much more precision from a machine.”
And Gunnar Halvorsen, whose blog “AI, Oh, My!” has long been a popular destination for those interested in artificial intelligence, says that the similarities between the structure of the World Wide Web and that of the human brain have been greatly exaggerated.
“You might as reasonably expect the highway system, which is full of things we call arteries, to actually start pumping blood,” he wrote in a posting today.
But Paul Fayter, a historian of science at York University in Toronto, Canada, said, “Teilhard de Chardin predicted this decades ago, when he wrote about the noösphere. I’m not at all surprised to see it come to pass…”
Caitlin clicked on the next tab. This one contained a piece from New Scientist Online.
…but trying to trace the origin of Webmind messages has proven difficult. Standard network utilities such as traceroute come up a cropper.
“There’s no doubt that botnets are involved,” said Jogingder Singh of BT. “That’s a typical way to disguise the true origin of a message.”
And the disappearance of spam doesn’t impress him. “It’s long been known that the vast bulk of spam is generated by only a couple hundred spammers,” he says. “Doubtless many of them know each other. They could easily decide to refrain from sending spam for a day to make one message stand out. Although I admit to being puzzled by why they’re trying this particular scam, which, so far at least, hasn’t asked anyone to send money…”
Caitlin smiled at that one. Traceroute, she knew, worked by modifying the time-to-live values stored in the headers of data packets, which were the morsels of information that flew around the Internet. But she and Kuroda had theorized that the actual material making up Webmind’s consciousness consisted of mutant packets whose time-to-live counters didn’t respond to normal commands.
Still, the notion that the clearing out of spam was the doing of spammers would have struck her as crazy even if she didn’t know the truth. People believed millions of nutso things with less evidence than Webmind had put forward for his own existence. Why they were being skeptical now, she didn’t know.
She remembered once being in a bookstore with her father, back in Austin. He’d surprised her by speaking up, and not even to her, as they walked down the aisles. “Lady,” he’d said, “there’s no other kind.”
Which had prompted blind Caitlin to ask what was going on. “There was a woman looking at a book entitled Astrology for Dummies,” he’d said. People believed in that, but they were doubting this!
Caitlin and her mother spent the morning answering questions from Webmind; it was being inundated with emails, and it wanted advice on how to respond to many of them.
But by noon, she and her mom had to take a break—they had both skipped breakfast and were starving. And, while her mother was making sandwiches for them, Caitlin brought up something that had been bothering her for a few days. “So, um, Mom, I told Bashira that you’re a Unitarian.”
Everything was fascinating the first time you saw it; Caitlin watched as her mother spread something yellow on the bread. “Guilty as charged,” she replied.
She’d been aware back in Austin that her mother disappeared to “fellowships” several times a year—sometimes on a weeknight, sometimes on a Sunday morning—but that was really all she knew about it. “But, um, what does that mean, exactly? Bashira asked, and I didn’t know the answer.”
“In a nutshell? Unitarians are Christians who don’t believe Christ was divine.”
That surprised her. “So, you’re a Christian?”
Her mom was now dealing cold cuts onto the bread. “More or less. But it’s called Unitarianism as opposed to Trinitarianism—none of that Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook stuff for us.”
“Still, aren’t Christians supposed to wear crosses?”
“Well, maybe if there are vampires in the area.”
Caitlin frowned. “A Christian who doesn’t believe Christ was divine? What does that even mean? I mean, if you don’t think Jesus is God’s son, then—then…”
Her mother poured two glasses of milk. “You don’t have to think Darwin is divine to be a Darwinian—you just have to think his teachings make sense.”
“Oh. I guess.”
She motioned for Caitlin to move out to the dining room, and she brought out two plates, each holding a sandwich, then brought out the glasses of milk. “Jesus is the guy who said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’” her mom said. “That seems pretty good to me.” She took a bite of her sandwich. “In fact, there’s a good game-theoretical basis for believing that. A guy named Robert Axelrod once organized a game-theory tournament. He asked people to submit computer programs designed to play against other computer programs in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma—that’s one where you keep playing the game over and over again. He wanted to find out what the optimal solution to the prisoner’s dilemma was.”
Caitlin took a bite of her own sandwich, and—ah, the yellow stuff had been mustard.
“There were fourteen entries,” her mother said. “And, to Axelrod’s surprise, the simplest entry—it required just five lines of computer code—won. It was called Tit for Tat, and it had been submitted by Anatol Rapoport, who, as it happens, was at the University of Toronto. Tit for Tat took a very simple approach: start with cooperation, then do whatever the other player did on the previous move. To put it another way, Tit for Tat starts off as a peaceful dove, and only becomes a hawk if you become one first. But as soon as you stop defecting, it goes back to cooperating—it’s a peacemaker, see?”
“Cool,” said Caitlin, taking another bite.
“Axelrod spent a lot of time trying to figure out why Tit for Tat beat everything else. He decided it was because of its combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. By nice, he meant it was never the first to defect. And its retaliation—defecting back if you defected against it—discouraged the other side from continuing to defect after trying it once. Its forgiveness helped restore mutual cooperation—it didn’t hold a grudge; as soon as you went back to cooperating, it went back to cooperating, too. And by clarity, Axelrod meant Tit for Tat’s strategy was easily understandable by the other player.”
Caitlin thought about all that—a fair bit of complexity, and even the appearance of advanced, reasoned, ethical behavior—emerging from something so simple. It reminded her of—
Of course!
It reminded her of cellular automata, of the processes she could see in the background of the World Wide Web that had apparently given rise to Webmind: a simple rule or set of rules that caused packets in the background to flip back and forth between two states, generating complex patterns. Could an endlessly iterating prisoner’s dilemma, or some other game-theoretical problem, be the rule underlying Webmind’s consciousness? That’d be cool.
But something else was puzzling her, too. “Why’s it called Tit for Tat? What do tits have to do with it?”
Her mother tried to sup
press a grin. “It’s an old phrase, and it’s been distorted over the years. It used to be tip for tap—and both ‘tip’ and ‘tap’ mean to strike lightly and sharply.”
“Oh.” Not nearly as interesting. “You called Tit for Tat a peacemaker—but isn’t tipping and tapping really all about getting even?”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it; it is retaliatory.”
“And, um, you said that this has something to do with Jesus. Getting even is so Old Testament. The New Testament has Jesus saying—um, something about not doing that.”
Caitlin’s mother astonished her by quoting scripture—accurately, she presumed; it was something she’d never heard her do before. “‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’”
“Um,” said Caitlin. “Yeah. Like that.” She paused. “So, what’s the game-theoretical strategy for that?”
“That’s what we call Always Cooperate—or AllC, for short, ‘All’ and the letter C: you cooperate no matter what the other person does. Except…”
“Yes?”
“Well, there’s more to it than that. The next verses say, ‘And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.’ ‘Twain’ means ‘two’—that’s where the phrase ‘go the extra mile’ comes from. So, it’s all about not just giving them what they want, but giving them more than they asked for. I don’t know, call it DoubleAllC, or something like that.”
“But…hmmm.” Caitlin frowned. “I mean, you can’t play DoubleAllC very long—you’ll run out of stuff.” But then she got it. “Ah, but that’s the Christian thing, right? The reward isn’t in this life, it’s in the next one.”
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