Here are the first few pages of the upcoming book.
Dr.
Jacqueline Estrada was excited. Not the excited you get when you're young and
Christmas is just around the corner. Or your birthday. Or the prom/big game. Or
whatever. Dr. Estrada's excitement was a grown excitement. A mature thrill of
long-delayed expectation. The kind you feel when you're about to walk across
stage to receive your college degree. Or down the aisle to marry your beloved.
But Dr. Estrada's excitement was fuller even than those. She had worked so
terribly long and so terribly hard to get to where she was today. To where she
is, "just about to be," she corrected herself mentally. "Just
about to be, not quite yet, just about to be."
Her
demonstration was a simple one. As all good examples of scientific
breakthroughs are. "Have been." Archimedes jumping out of his
bathtub. Galileo dropping his iron spheres from the tower. The apple falling on
Newton's head. Einstein's dream of traveling on light beams. "The apple
story is probably proverbial but it's a good one nonetheless." Dr.
Estrada, thirty-two, daughter of immigrants, single, shy, naïve in that overly
book-learned way that academics have and just about to change the world.
"Just about."
She wore
her starched, white lab coat like a shield. It fended off both self-doubt and
unwanted suitors with its utilitarian formlessness. Donning the coat every
morning was her private ritual. When the coat was on she was all business,
details, serious. She surveyed the visiting dignitaries aligned in a Spartan
row behind the observation glass. "There's no need for such dramatic
precautions, "she thought. But the security team said otherwise.
Military
security for a military project. That's the one element she'd change. The one
element that didn't mesh with her vision of how this day would play out. In her
mind, she'd stand before an expectant crowd in the hallowed halls of a
venerated institute of higher learning to unveil her invention. But her funding
applications had fallen on deaf ears. Whispers of bigotry behind the grant
rejections hardened her already granite drive. "If not a university then a
private donor. Or NASA."
Two and
a half years later, two and half years of begging for monies to complete her
project, she ended up in Albuquerque, NM. Kirtland Air Force Base, to be exact.
Kissing cousin to Los Alamos Labs a bit farther north in the cloud shrouded
mountains. Shades of the Manhattan Project hung like unwanted yet instructive
didacts as she drove back and forth between the two laboratories on a weekly
basis. Ghostly tales that rose up from the not-yet-completed landscape of the
high desert. Watching the sunset's broken-sharded beams turn the sky into a
hyper-real, three-dimensional kaleidoscope of aquamarine, pale pink, stirring
blue and dusky rose, Dr. Estrada thought not for the first time or the last,
"It's like god was called away when he was making this part of the world
and he hasn't come back yet to finish what he started. Or, perhaps, he left it
for us to finish."
She
pulled the sharp, narrow lapels of her lab coat, brushed a wayward strand of
hair back in place behind her ear and signaled her assistant to turn on the
microphone so the gallery could hear her. She pointed behind her to a gleaming,
stainless steel table atop which sat two objects. At one end was the slightly
more rectangular than a true cube, obsidian super-processor. At the opposing
end was the artificial astrocyte and neuron conglomerate suspended in thick,
clear gel as it wrapped around the rods and beams of an inert scaffolding. The
grayish pink of the "artificial brain" turned the intersections of
the scaffolding into fuzzy squares. The rectilinear shape of the super-processor
was mimicked by the blocky checks floating inside the gel. "It looks not a
little like a moldy Rubik's cube," Estrada mused.
She
focused on the faces behind the glass and said tersely trying to control her
excitement, "On one end is the most advanced computer the world has ever
seen. On the other end is the first of its kind artificial brain." She
tsked softly as she thought, "'Artificial brain' is not accurate but it's
a good label for those who aren't familiar with the neuroscience involved.
'Freeform neuron embedded, sensory integrated processing system' is a mouthful
after all. More accurate but a mouthful."
She
glanced at the floor and clasped her hands behind her back as she stepped
deliberately closer to the glass separating her from the gallery. Chestfuls of
tiny medals and little ribbons stared back at her. Expensive suits and military
uniforms all cut from the same dower gray. Splashes of color from power ties
and their female counterpart scarves declared, "Convince us." She
looked up at the concrete slab of a ceiling and, also, at the source of her
inspiration. Her ideas always felt like they came down to her from some,
unknown and unknowable source high above.
She
began, "Not to bore you with details, the past few decades of research
into artificial intelligence has pursued one of two paths." She pointed
back to the ends of the table in turn. She liked pointing. She felt commanding
when she pointed and the eyes of the gallery followed. "Develop a means
for consciousness to arise from silicon chips. Or develop a human brain that is
as powerful as our supercomputers." She spun on her fancy heels, the ones
she saw in the window in Santa Fe months ago and had been saving for this very
occasion. "Both paths have met with - at best - limited results. It was my
insight," she paused to let that sink in, "to combine the two
approaches in order to develop a system, an organism that embodied the best
aspects of both. What you see before you is the first stage, shall we say,
perhaps the first rung on the next evolutionary ladder."
A murmur
of disbelief shimmied out from behind the glass. She had expected that. She had
wanted that. "Yes, I know. A bold statement. But a supported one as I am
about to demonstrate. In order to understand, truly understand the significance
of this development you must remember that down at the foundational level of
reality, past atoms and sub-atomic particles, past the whole of the particle
zoo as some of my colleagues like to call the quantum world, reality is built
on information. Bits, microbits, nanobits and bits and bits and bits of
information."
Estrada
allowed herself a knowing chuckle at her own joke. "It's even funnier if
you know information theory," she thought then refocused on the gallery.
"The universe is more akin to a great thought than the result of a massive
explosion. An infinite web of information ties everything - via quantum
entanglement and superposition - together. And I do mean everything. It is my
assertion that if we can build a 'brain,' for lack of a better word, that can
process even the slightest bit of the infinite information web in a direct and
tangible manner then we can unlock the secrets of the universe. They, I firmly
believe, won't even be secrets anymore. What up to now has been shrouded in
mystery to even the brightest minds of our species will under the combined
processing power of my Blended Intelligence read like an open book. A book of
the universe. A book we can flip through to find out anything we want to find
out. Any question we can conceive, the blended intelligence will be able to
answer."
Dr.
Estrada quick-stepped back to the table and its components. Her excitement was
starting to get the better of her. "Time to stop talking and give 'em a
show." She sat at a small console set to the side in order to give the
members of the gallery a full view of the demonstration. She checked the
readings trailing across her monitor. All were nominal. Just as it had been the
hundred other times she ran this experiment. She primed the energy input for
the system, held her hand up to the gallery then brought it down as she tapped
the "combine" button on the screen. In moments the separate intelligences
would merge into one coherent operating system. A new, blended intelligence
unlike any other before in history.
As she
brought her hand down, giant sparks erupted from the gel surrounding the
artificial brain. Estrada was knocked to the ground. The stainless steel table
began to glow red-hot. All Estrada could think as she clambered up from the
ground was, "What has gone wrong? This has never happened before."
Before she could approach the table, strong hands hooked under her armpits and
dragged her out of the room as she fought against them. Her last slice of
vision as the heavy, lead-lined door shut behind her showed the component table
starting to melt under its own weight, as it grew hotter and hotter still. A
lone question danced through her mind before she was hustled into the
protective bunker at the end of the hall, "Where had all that excess
energy come from?"
