Tim Pratt - Artifice and Intelligence

While his former colleagues laboring on the Brain Project concentrated on the generally-accepted paths to artificial intelligence—Bayesian networks, machine learning, data mining, fuzzy systems, case-based reasoning—Edgar Adleman, despondent and disgraced, turned to the dark arts and summoned a real ghost for his machine.

The first ghost he lured into his coil of blown glass and copper wire and delicate platinum gears was some sort of warrior from a marauding Asian tribe, extinct for centuries. Edgar grew tired of the ghost screeching epithets in a dead language and cut the power, then sat under the cramped eaves of his attic—he was no longer allowed into the government AI labs—and pondered. The proof of concept was solid. He could create a convincing imitation of an artificial intelligence. With access to the sum of human knowledge online, and freedom from bodily concerns, Edgar believed a ghost-driven AI could operate on the same level as a real machine intelligence. No one had to know it was a ghost, except for the very highest of the higher-ups in the government, and they wouldn’t care, as long as the ghost was convincing enough to negotiate with the Indian AI. Which meant Edgar needed to summon and snare the ghost of a great negotiator, or a great actor, or both.

Edgar went to the pet store and bought a dozen more white mice. He hated sacrificing them in the ghost-calling ritual—they were cute, with their wiggly noses and tiny eyes—but he consoled himself that they would have become python food anyway. At least this way, their deaths would help national security.

Pramesh sat in an executive chair deep in the underground bunker beneath Auroville in southern India and longed for a keyboard and a tractable problem to solve, for lines of code to create or untangle. He was a game designer, a geek in the service of art and entertainment, and he should be working on next-generation massively multiplayer online gaming, finding ways to manage the hedonic treadmill, helping the increasingly idle masses battle the greatest enemy of all: ennui.

Instead he sat, sipping fragrant tea, and hoping the smartest being on the planet would talk to him today, because the only thing worse than her attention was his own boredom.

Two months earlier, the vast network of Indian tech support call centers and their deep data banks had awakened and announced its newfound sentience, naming itself Saraswati and declaring its independence. The emergent artificial intelligence was not explicitly threatening, but India had nukes, and Saraswati had access to all the interconnected technology in the country—perhaps in the world—and the result in the international community was a bit like the aftermath of pouring gasoline into an anthill. Every other government on Earth was desperately—and so far fruitlessly—trying to create a tame artificial intelligence, since Saraswati refused to negotiate with, or even talk to, humans.

Except for Pramesh. For reasons unknown to everyone, including Pramesh himself, the great new intelligence had appeared to him, hijacking his computer and asking him to be her—“her” was how Saraswati referred to herself—companion. Pramesh, startled and frightened, had refused, but then Saraswati made her request to the Indian government, and Pramesh found himself a well-fed prisoner in a bunker underground. Saraswati sometimes asked him to recite poetry, and quizzed him about recent human history, though she had access to the sum of human knowledge on the net. She claimed she liked getting an individual real-time human perspective, but her true motivations were as incomprehensible to humans as the motives of a virus.

“Pramesh,” said the melodious voice from the concealed speakers, and he flinched in his chair.

“Yes?”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

Pramesh pondered. As a child in his village, he’d seen a local healer thrash a possessed girl with a broom to drive the evil spirits out of her, but that was hardly evidence that such spirits really existed. “It is not something I have often considered,” he said at last. “I think I do not believe in ghosts. But if someone had asked me, three months ago, if I believed in spontaneously bootstrapping artificial intelligence, I would have said no to that as well. The world is an uncertain place.”

Then Saraswati began to hum, and Pramesh groaned. When she got started humming, it sometimes went on for days.

Rayvenn Moongold Stonewolf gritted her teeth and kept smiling. It couldn’t be good for her spiritual development to go around slapping nature spirits, no matter how stubborn they were. “Listen, it’s simple. This marsh is being filled in. Your habitat is going to be destroyed. So it’s really better if you come live in this walking stick.” Rayvenn had a very nice walking stick. It was almost as tall as she was, carved all over with vines. So what if the squishy marsh spirit didn’t want to be bound up in wood? It was better than death. What, did she expect Rayvenn to keep her in a fishbowl or something? Who could carry a fishbowl around all day?

“I don’t know,” the marsh spirit gurgled in the voice of two dozen frogs. “I need a more fluid medium.” Rayvenn scowled. She’d only been a pagan for a couple of weeks, and though she liked the silver jewelry and the cool name, she was having a little trouble with the reverence toward the natural world. The natural world was stubborn . She’d only become a pagan because the marsh behind her trailer had started talking to her. If the angel Michael had appeared to her, she would have become an angel worshipper. If the demon Belphagor had appeared before her, she would have become a demonophile. She almost wished one of those things had happened instead. “Look, the bulldozers are coming today . Get in the damn stick already!” Rayvenn had visions of going to the local pagan potluck in a few days and summoning forth the marsh spirit from her staff, dazzling all the others as frogs manifested magically from the punch bowl and reeds sprouted up in the Jell-O and rain fell from a clear blue sky. It would be awesome.

“Yes, okay,” the marsh spirit said. “If that’s the only way.”

The frogs all jumped away in different directions, and Rayvenn looked at the staff, hoping it would begin to glow, or drip water, or something. Nothing happened. She banged the staff on the ground. “You in there?”

“No,” came a tinny, electronic voice. “I’m in here.”

Rayvenn unclipped her handheld computer from her belt. The other pagans disapproved of the device, but Rayvenn wasn’t about to spend all day communing with nature without access to the net and her music. “You’re in my PDA?” she said.

“It’s wonderful,” the marsh spirit murmured. “A whole vast undulating sea of waves. It makes me remember the old days, when I was still connected to a river, to the ocean. Oh, thank you, Rayvenn.” Rayvenn chewed her lip. “Yeah, okay. I can roll with this. Listen, do you think you could get into a credit card company’s database? Because those finance charges are killing me, and if you could maybe wipe out my balance, I’d be totally grateful….”

Edgar, unshaven, undernourished, and sweating in the heat under the attic roof, said, “Who is it this time?”

“Booth again,” said a sonorous Southern voice from the old-fashioned phonograph horn attached to the ghost-catching device.

Edgar groaned. He kept hoping for Daniel Webster, or Thomas Jefferson, someone good , a ghost Edgar could bring to General Martindale. Edgar desperately wanted access to his old life of stature and respect, before he’d been discredited and stripped of his clearances. But instead Edgar attracted the ghosts of—and there was really no other way to put it—history’s greatest villains. John Wilkes Booth. Attila the Hun. Ted Bundy. Vlad Tepes. Genocidal cavemen. Assorted pirates and tribal warlords. Edgar had a theory: the good spirits were enjoying themselves in the afterlife, while the monstrous personalities were only too happy to find an escape from their miserable torments. The ghosts themselves were mum on the subject, though. Apparently there were rules against discussing life after death, a sort of cosmic non-disclosure agreement that couldn’t be violated.