The rest of the party came back to watch.
“Will we scare them?” Mother Simms asked.
“They’re not really conscious of human beings,” Jeffrey told her.
“Maybe they should be,” his grandfather said. “For their protection.”
“These are just prototypes,” he said. “We can program in phobias later.”
So far, the six ’bots had not moved. Their tails twitched, gathering energy. After a moment, the sensor clusters where their heads should have been swiveled around. Three of the machines suddenly spun in place—every other machine, in fact, as if sorting themselves out—and then all six scampered off the road, three to one side, three to the other. In a blink they were gone into the underbrush.
“What exactly do they do?” John Praxis asked.
“They’re like beavers,” he said. “They gnaw wood and process it into cellulose fibers, which they then spin into kind of yarn, run up onto wooden spools, which they make themselves, and drop them along their trail with a hardy pheromone marker.”
“What’s the pheromone for?” Sonny Rolf asked.
“So that a collector ’bot—which we haven’t designed yet—can collect the spools and perhaps do further processing.”
“Can one of these ‘beavers’ eat a whole tree?” Bill Schwartz asked.
“If it can’t, it will send out a signal to draw others,” Jeffrey said.
“What keeps them from stripping the forest?” John asked.
“They only eat dead or diseased trees, which they identify through chemical analysis based on a library of pathogens specific to the local trees, or from spores of the fungi that begin decomposing the deadwood. We’ve tried them on healthy, growing trees and the beavers don’t even notice them.”
“Suppose we wanted to take out board feet of lumber, rather than cellulose?” John asked.
“Then we design a different ’bot.” Jeffrey shrugged. “This is early days yet.”
“So you haven’t thought of everything?” his grandfather teased.
“Not yet, but we’re working on it.” Jeffrey said.
* * *
“This is all screwed up,” Brandon Praxis said aloud. Once again—in a long line of “agains”—he was encountering something he did not fully understand about artificial intelligence.
As head of security, Brandon had flown into Denver to check the Watch and Ward® setup on the Stage 3 Ignition Facility that PE&C was building for the University of Colorado at Hyatt Lake, just west of Arvada. It was only one stop on a daisy chain of check-ins he made each month among the firm’s major or sensitive projects under construction. He didn’t personally consider the S3IF all that sensitive, in terms of security, but the clients did.
Even though they were duplicating processes already under study at Livermore and Fermilab, and even though the S3IF was still in the early days of structural work—not even finished pouring concrete in critical areas—the University of Colorado professors believed they had a unique position with regard to intellectual property and wanted their rights defended down to the plant’s general layout. That meant every Spyder tying rebar and Mechmason with a vibra-trowel leveling concrete had to display an access badge, have its movements tracked, and get its visual system wiped after each twenty-four hour shift. Every visitor to the site went through the same procedure, plus a background check but minus the brain wipe.
Except that now two important visitors from the daily roster were being blocked for no reason Brandon could see. Joseph Ferrante, building inspector for the City of Arvada, and William Ballard, structural engineer for the University of Colorado, were held up at the gate into the main dome, where the structural piers were being poured, and they had come to check serial numbers on the rebar before it was entombed. The entity doing the blocking was one of Brandon’s own Watch and Ward® intelligences, nicknamed “Officer Krupke,” because it was from a line of particularly vigilant AIs which could be officiously rule bound. Brandon remembered they had discussed this sort of thing before the unit was even installed.
“Please define ‘screwed up,’ ” Krupke said now.
“Discombobu—oh, forget it,” Brandon replied. “You’re blocking two men who should have carte blanche access to the dome. Hell, one of them’s from the client organization and the other’s from government. They should have access anywhere.”
“My records to not show that,” the machine said coolly.
“Which? That they have access? Or that you’re blocking?”
“Yes, I am blocking them. No, they do not have access.”
Brandon stared at the video monitor. The two men in hard hats, sports jackets, chino pants, and steel-toed boots, both carrying computer tablets, stood at the locked gate in the north tunnel, staring up at the camera and waving their arms. They pantomimed swiping their cards, one after another. The gate remained locked. They looked up and shrugged at him.
“Check again,” he told the machine. “Ferrante_J and Ballard_W. What’s their status?”
“Registered respectively as Visitor Seven and Client Nine.”
“So, do they have access to the dome, or not?” he asked.
“That plant area is reserved for persons holding JILA postdoc credentials.” Krupke was referring to the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, the project’s immediate client and funding source.
“Come on! Your timeline’s seriously out of whack. That restriction’s at least two years into the future. We don’t have any astrophysicists working on site today.”
“My database … may be corrupted.” It was as close as Brandon had ever heard a machine come to admitting a mistake. “Do you wish to override the security protocols?” Krupke asked.
“Jesus!” Brandon said under his breath, knowing that W&W intelligences were programmed to ignore curses and epithets—a provision Penny had encoded especially for Brandon’s benefit. But then, how else was he going to get Ferrante and Ballard in to do their inspection? “Yes, override on my authority.”
“Voice check, please?” Krupke said.
“Brandon Praxis—as if you didn’t know.”
“Thank you.”
On the screen the gate slid back. The two men waved at the camera, clicked on the spotlights attached to their hard hats, and went down the tunnel into darkness.
Brandon spent the next half hour with the intelligence, calling up all the registered human contractor and visitor badges and confirming their identity and access status. None of this was particularly complicated, but it shouldn’t have happened. He made a note to talk it over with Penny when he got back to San Francisco.
* * *
Amanda Wakefield, MD, studied the charts on her newest patient, then looked at the woman sitting in her examination room. Antigone Wells was not the oldest person Amanda had ever taken on; that was a woman who had died last year at the age of a hundred and four. At just over ninety-eight, however, Ms. Wells was right up there.
But, like more and more people these days, she didn’t look much over forty. Her blood work and endocrinology were spot-on for that apparent age. Her body tone and reflexes were even a tad younger. Her psych profile was badly skewed, of course, but lifelong career women with high IQs, uncompensated aggression, and isolationist tendencies always pushed the charts. And Amanda could see right away where most of the isolation came from. That unfortunate face job …
“You know,” she said aloud, after consulting Wells’s medical history and its long list of elective surgeries and recombinant procedures, “we can fix what happened with your last dermal implant.”
“You mean my face,” Wells said testily.
“Let me try something, if I might.”
Amanda touched the beautiful but rubberlike skin, which was already starting to sag. She used her sensitive fingertips to find the bone structure and judge the tone of the muscles that overlaid it. The bones were good, but for much of the face the muscles were just mush, hadn’t moved in years, and were already collaps
ing under their own weight. Other than along the jaw and around the mouth, Amanda was surprised that the face had held together this long. Wells was a woman who took care of her body, with a good exercise regimen and proper diet. And she had paid well to be among the first in her age cohort to get her face remade at—rechecking the records—just about seventy years old.
And that might have been the problem. That was a decade or more after most beautiful women who wanted to stay young forever went in for the traditional forms of plastic surgery. No, Wells had waited beyond the last possible minute—out of pride? or fear?—and then gone whole hog on the newest technique. And she had paid the price of experimentation.
“I can give you more mobility with a series of microsurgeries,” Amanda said. “We can reconnect most of these nerves, even patch into the ones whose axons have atrophied, trace them right back to their seat in the cerebral cortex. It’s a whole new field of medicine now.”
“Would you have to cut my face to do that?”
“Yes, but only very small incisions—pinpricks.”
“I’m never going to cut on my face again, thank you.”
“But it won’t hurt. And I can virtually guarantee success.”
“That’s what the last doctor said.” Wells sat and glared at her.
But that look was all in the intensity of her stare, accented by the merest narrowing of her eyelids. Otherwise, Well’s face remained placid with just a faint droop to her lips. Amanda knew Wells was trying to scowl, but after almost thirty years of immobility, the woman could not tell if she was frowning, smiling, leering, or whatnot. Being denied so much of the most unconscious form of human expression would scar anyone’s psyche. This woman was so damaged that she now could not help herself.
And Amanda knew it would only get worse. With this attitude, Wells—who really had a classically beautiful face—would age and wither while all around her women were growing younger and more beautiful. It would make her even more of a recluse, deepening the resentment and depression that already showed in that psych profile.
Modern medicine, along with its advances at the cellular level, offered parallel services in counseling and emotional rehabilitation. Amanda could see from this patient’s history that previous doctors had offered these services and been refused. Her course now, if she chose to accept it, was to work on the psychological end of the problem before she ever again mentioned more surgery on the physical end.
But she would have to move carefully, if at all. Otherwise, this woman who was immune to promises and assurances would simply pick up her medical records and her prescriptions and move on to someone more willing to pamper her fears and bitterness.
Did Amanda Wakefield really want to take on that challenge? She had other patients who needed her more. It would be no great challenge to ask her scheduling ’bot, quietly and confidentially, to make sure her office days were booked up weeks—no, months—in advance.
4. Robot Ethics
When Penny Praxis learned that Brandon had been having trouble with a Watch and Ward® intelligence in Denver, she became concerned. Everyone assumed—she herself assumed—that artificial intelligence was somehow foolproof. So long as the machine had good data, under the garbage-in-garbage-out rule, it would follow its programming and make a correct decision. But here was a case of one which had slipped a cog: a bad decision from good data.
Yes, Penny had heard about her cousin Rafaella’s surprise divorce from the mechanical court clerk in San Francisco. And she had accepted Antigone Wells’s suggestion, based on a chat with cousin Jacquie in Houston, who was supposed to be an expert in the field, that someone had falsified the documents the court had received. But that left her feeling vaguely uneasy: verifying documents and their service is what court clerks were designed to do.
And yes, Penny remembered how she and Brandon had misled the engineering company’s first, and only semi-smart, audit program—the one John Praxis had nicknamed “Rover” for its doglike intelligence—about the real nature of Brandon’s training facility in Hayward. That shared secret had been their first bonding experience and had shaped the course of Penny’s life to follow. But it had been in the nature of a lie: sending garbage into a naïve machine that was simply not bright enough to catch them at it.
Penny didn’t need to fly into Denver and travel to the Arcata site to question the W&W brain nicknamed “Officer Krupke.” As the security company president, she had overrides that she could exercise online from San Francisco. She only had to call up the program’s code structure and grill its memory and functions below the verbal-interface level with a coordinated series of peeks and pokes. It was kind of like a neurosurgeon trepanning a patient’s skull, lifting the dura mater, and examining the brain with electrodes, rather than talking with the patient about the situation like a psychiatrist.
What she found was exactly nothing. The W&W program’s contact with the atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology labs in Boulder, Colorado, had never lapsed, not since the day Krupke was installed and awakened. And the program’s explanation that its access database had been “corrupted” didn’t play out either. She could check the time-ticks on every entry, and they followed a smooth, unbroken curve, without any signs of damage and repair. And yes, she could see the ticks from last week when Brandon had personally authorized the two visitors and then reconfirmed the entire roster.
Having done her homework, it was time to close the skull and wake up the patient.
“So tell me, Krupke, about the problem you had last week,” she said over the comm line.
“I do not recall a problem,” the intelligence replied evenly. “Either last week or at any time.”
“Come on, now,” she said cheerfully. She knew the latest versions of this software could read voices and facial expressions, and she didn’t want to make the machine even more defensive. “You had a visit from Brandon Praxis. He had override authority and helped you admit two visitors, a city inspector and a client engineer, to the main dome so they could check on the rebar. Do you remember that?”
“Oh … Yes. That.” As if the event had slipped its mind—which was impossible.
“Brandon tells me you thought they were two years out of synch, and should have been operating scientists instead of construction people.”
“That is not the case.”
“No, I checked your time references, and you’ve been in constant touch with the NIST clock. But still you held up authorized personnel.”
“It appears my database was corrupted.”
“Don’t. Just don’t,” she said. “I’ve already checked your database, and there is no sign of deterioration. No corruption. No repair. No excuse. So tell me what happened.”
She encountered a pause online. Data packets were not being sent. That was always a bad sign. It meant the software was considering its options. And, at the speed that these brains worked, Krupke’s choice of evasions, gambits, and parries could easily run into the millions, and it could track them out, move and countermove, for the next hundred years like a master-level chess program.
“I do not recall the incident.”
No sense banging her head against a stone wall—which left her with no options of her own. “Thank you, Officer Krupke, for clearing things up.”
“You are welcome, Penelope Praxis.”
She broke the connection.
On a hunch, she reviewed the origins of that software series and came upon a kernel that had originally been developed by Tallyman Systems, Inc. This was not surprising, as Tallyman was a key player in the industry. But still, she knew it would set off alarm bells with Brandon and the rest of his family. And yet again, she and Brandon would just have to go pay a call on cousin Jacquie.
* * *
John Praxis listened as his great-granddaughter Susannah reported on her assignment as head of Praxis Human Engineering, to find a way forward in the jobless environment of the Robotics Revolution. He noted that she spoke much mor
e clearly than before, instead of the slurred patois that had marred her speech when she first came to him at her Stanford graduation.
What she presented sounded at first like a reprise of the Communist Manifesto, except she was not talking about workers being oppressed by the capitalist owners of the means of production and the bourgeois mercantile class. Instead, the means of production themselves had swallowed the concept of work and human labor. Everyone was rich in goods and services, but nobody could afford to pay for them. The market was not just lopsided—it had fallen off its axles completely. And then she suddenly began talking about a number of throwbacks: nineteenth-century farming colonies, hippy communes, neighborhood associations, ethnic and regional uplift groups, and service clubs. She ended by describing a club held together by nothing more than the surname “Smith.”
“I don’t know, sir, if that’s a complete solution for all time, or for the nation as a whole, or even for my own generation. But it may be a way to get our family, in this generation and the next, through the crisis—at least until we can see what develops.”
“It sounds like a form of communism,” Praxis protested.
“Well then, communalism, commensalism, commercialism … werdát,” she said. He gathered that last word meant something like whatever. “Sovietski communismo was summát forced from on top,” she explained, “either through a proletarian revolution or conquest by a parent state. But what I’m talking about comes up from the bottom. It’s how families have always survived. Trudát.”
Susannah went on to say that her studies showed socialism in the past had worked—and probably could only work—in small groups: hunter-gatherers, clans and tribes, the feudal village, or the Israeli kibbutz. It was a practice as old as humanity, except during the past couple of thousand years of settled empires and nation-states. Primitive socialism had worked where people were relatively isolated, hard pressed by hostile environments or neighbors, and knew each other by sight and by name. So the necessity of pulling together was obvious to everyone, and social pressure—either through personal pride or public shaming—could motivate slackers and opportunists. People were at their best in small, relatively homogeneous groups. She called it “local socialism.”
Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Page 16
