Harry Harrison - The Turing Option

“So what’s the solution?”

“The answer is that there is no answer. No, I don’t mean anything mystical. I mean that the manager here has to have more knowledge. Precisely because there’s no magic, no general answer. There’s no simple fix that will work in all cases — because all cases are different. And once you recognize that, everything is much clearer! This manager must be knowledge-based. And then it can learn what to do!”

“Then you’re saying that we must make a manager to learn which strategy to use in each situation, by remembering what worked in the past?”

“Exactly. Instead of trying to find a fixed formula that always works, let’s make it learn from experience, case by case. Because we want a machine that’s intelligent on its own, so that we don’t have to hang around forever, fixing it whenever anything goes wrong. Instead we must give it some ways to learn to fix new bugs as soon as they come up. By itself, without our help.”

“So now I know just what to do. Remember when it seemed stuck in a loop, repeating the same things about the color red? It was easy for us to see that it wasn’t making any progress. It couldn’t see that it was stuck, precisely because of being stuck. It couldn’t jump out of that loop to see what it was doing on a larger scale. We can fix that by adding a recorder to remember the history of what it has been doing recently. And also a clock that interrupts the program frequently, so that it can look at that recording to see if it has been repeating itself.”

“Or even better we could add a second processor that is always running at the same time, looking at the first one. A B-brain watching an A-brain.”

“And perhaps even a C-brain to see if the B-brain has got stuck. Damn! I just remembered that one of my old notes said, ‘Use the B-brain here to suppress looping.’ I certainly wish I had written clearer notes the first time around. I better get started on designing that B-brain.”

“But you’d better not do it now! In your present state, you’ll just make it worse.”

“You’re right. Bedtime. I’ll get there, don’t worry — but I want to get something to eat first.”

“I’ll go with you, have a coffee.”

Brian let them out and blinked at the bright sunshine. “That sounds as though you don’t trust me.”

“I don’t. Not after last night!”

Shelly sipped at her coffee while Brian worked his way through a Texas breakfast — steak, eggs and flapjacks. He couldn’t quite finish it all, sighed and pushed the plate away. Except for two guards just off duty, sitting at a table on the far wall, they were alone in the mess hall.

“I’m feeling slightly less inhuman,” he said. “More coffee?”

“I’ve had more than enough, thank you. Do you think that you can fix your screw-loose AI?”

“No. I was getting so annoyed at the thing that I’ve wiped its memory. We will have to rewrite some of the program before we load it again. Which will take a couple of hours. Even LAMA-5’s assembler takes a long time on a system this large. And this time I’m going to make a backup copy before we run the new version.”

“A backup means a duplicate. When you do get a functioning humanoid artificial intelligence — do you think that you will be able to copy it as well?”

“Of course. Whatever it does — it will still just be a program. Every copy of a program is absolutely identical. Why do you ask?”

“It’s a matter of identity, I guess. Will the second AI be the same as the first?”

“Yes — but only at the instant it is copied. As soon as it begins to run, to think for itself, it will start changing. Remember, we are our memories. When we forget something, or learn something new, we produce a new thought or make a new connection — we change. We are someone different. The same will apply to an AI.”

“Can you be sure of that?” she asked doubtfully.

“Positive. Because that is how mind functions. Which means I have a lot of work to do in weighting memory. It’s the same reason why so many earlier versions of Robin failed. The credit assignment problem that we talked about before. It is really not enough to learn just by short-term stimulus-response-reward methods — because this will solve only simple, short-term problems. Instead, there must be a larger scale reflective analysis, in which you think over your performance on a longer scale, to recognize which strategies really worked, and which of them led to sidetracks, moves that seemed to make progress but eventually led to dead ends.”

“You make the mind sound like — well — an onion!”

“It is.” He smiled at the thought. “A good analogy. Layer within layer and all interconnected. Human memory is not merely associative, connecting situations, responses and rewards. It is also prospective and reflective. The connections made must also be involved with long-range goals and plans. That is why there is this important separation between short-term and long-term memory. Why does it take about an hour to long-term memorize anything? Because there must be a buffer period to decide which behaviors actually were beneficial enough to record.”

Sudden fatigue hit him. The coffee was cold; his head was beginning to ache; depression was closing in. Shelly saw this, lightly touched his hand.

“Time to retire,” she said. He nodded sluggish agreement and struggled to push back the chair.

Shelly opened her apartment door when Benicoff knocked. “Brian just came in,” she said, “and I’m getting him a beer. You too?”

“Please.”

“Come in and take a look — after all you paid for it.” She led the way into the living room where all traces of the army barracks had been carefully removed. The floor-to-ceiling curtains that framed the window were made from colorful handwoven fabric. The carpeting picked up the dark orange from the curtain pattern. The slim lines of the Danish teak furniture blended pleasantly with this, providing a contrast to the spectacular colors of the post-Cubist painting that covered most of one wall.

“Most impressive,” Ben said. “I can see now why the accounts department was screaming.”

“Not at this — the fabric and rugs are Israeli-designed but Arab-manufactured and not at all expensive. The painting is on loan from an artist friend of mine, to help her sell it. Most of the money went for the high-tech kitchen. Want to see it?”

“After the beer. I better brace myself for it.”

“Going to explain the mystery of your invitation to a Thai lunch today?” Brian said, lolling back comfortably in the depths of a padded armchair. “You know that Shelly and I are prisoners of Megalobe until you run down the killers. So how do we get out to this Thai restaurant of yours?”

“If you can’t get to Thailand, why Thailand will come to you. As soon as you told me you wanted to bring me up to date on your AI I thought we ought to make a party of it. Thanks, Shelly.”

Ben took a deep swig of cold Tecate and sighed. “Good stuff. It all began with a security check last week. I sit in with Military Intelligence when they vet any soldiers to be transferred here. That was when I discovered that Private First Class Lat Phroa had joined the army to get away from his father’s restaurant. He said he had enough of cooking and wanted some action. But after a year of army food he was more than happy to cook a real Thai meal in the kitchen here, if I could get the ingredients. Which I did. The cooks went along with it and the troops are looking forward to the change. We’ll have the mess hall to ourselves after two. We’ll be the guinea pigs and if we approve, Lat promised to feed everyone else tonight.”