Greg Egan - SS - Crystal Nights.pdf

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CRYSTAL NIGHTS
Greg Egan
* * * *
* * * *
Illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe
* * * *
Greg Egan last appeared in these pages with ‘Singleton’ (IZ176). His novel
Incandescence will be published by Gollancz in the UK and by Night Shade
Books in the USA in May. A story collection, Dark Integers and Other
Stories , is out in March from Subterranean Books. For more information on
these books and much more please visit Greg’s website at gregegan.net.
* * * *
1
* * * *
“More caviar?” Daniel Cliff gestured at the serving dish and the cover irised
from opaque to trans-parent. “It’s fresh, I promise you. My chef had it flown
in from Iran this morning.”
“No thank you.” Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips then laid it
on her plate with a gesture of finality. The dining room overlooked the
Golden Gate bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to
spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she
was growing impatient with his small talk.
Daniel said, “I’d like to show you something.” He led her into the
adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the wall
screen showed a Linux command line interface. “Take a seat,” he
suggested.
Julie complied. “If this is some kind of audition, you might have
warned me,” she said.
“Not at all,” Daniel replied. “I’m not going to ask you to jump through
 
any hoops. I’d just like you to tell me what you think of this machine’s
performance.”
She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She ran some
standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand
almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could
double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them
off with one finger. There were a lot more than she’d been expecting, but
she wasn’t seeing double.
“That’s extraordinary,” she said. “Is this whole building packed with
networked processors, with only the penthouse for humans?”
Daniel said, “You tell me. Is it a cluster?”
“Hmm.” So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it wasn’t
really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on
algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelise; however smart the
compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried
out strictly in sequence.
The FLOPS rating was unchanged.
Julie said, “All right, it’s a single processor. Now you’ve got my
attention. Where is it?”
“Turn the keyboard over.”
There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square and five
millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined it, but it
bore no manufacturer’s logo or other identifying marks.
“This connects to the processor?” she asked.
“No. It is the processor.”
“You’re joking.” She tugged it free of the dock, and the wall screen
went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasn’t sure
what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screw-driver and take the
thing apart, probably. He said, “If you break it, you own it, so I hope you’ve
got a few hundred spare.”
“A few hundred grand? Hardly.”
 
“A few hundred million.”
Her face flushed. “Of course. If it was two hundred grand, everyone
would have one.” She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought slid it
a little further from the edge. “As I said, you’ve got my attention.”
Daniel smiled. “I’m sorry about the theatrics.”
“No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?”
“A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No electronics to slow it
down; every last component is optical. The architecture was nanofabricated
with a method that I’d prefer not to describe in detail.”
“Fair enough.” She thought for a while. “I take it you don’t expect me
to buy one. My research budget for the next thousand years would barely
cover it.”
“In your present position. But you’re not joined to the university at the
hip.”
“So this is a job interview?”
Daniel nodded.
Julie couldn’t help herself; she picked up the crystal and examined it
again, as if there might yet be some feature that a human eye could
discern. “Can you give me a job description?”
“Midwife.”
She laughed. “To what?”
“History,” Daniel said.
Her smile faded slowly.
“Ibelieveyou’rethebestAIresearcherofyourgeneration,”hesaid. “I want
you to work for me.” He reached over and took the crystal from her. “With
this as your platform, imagine what you could do.”
Julie said, “What exactly would you want me to do?”
“For the last fifteen years,” Daniel said, “you’ve stated that the
 
ultimate goal of your research is to create conscious, human-level, artificial
intelligence.”
“That’s right.”
“Then we want the same thing. What I want is for you to succeed.”
She ran a hand over her face; whatever else she was thinking, there
was no denying that she was tempted. “It’s gratifying that you have so much
confidence in my abilities,” she said. “But we need to be clear about some
things. This prototype is amazing, and if you ever get the production costs
down I’m sure it will have some extra-ordinary applications. It would eat up
climate forecasting, lattice QCD, astrophysical modelling, proteomics...”
“Of course.” Actually, Daniel had no intention of marketing the device.
He’d bought out the inventor of the fabrication process with his own private
funds; there were no other shareholders or directors to dictate his use of
the technology.
“But AI,” Julie said, “is different. We’re in a maze, not a highway;
there’s nowhere that speed alone can take us. However many exa-flops I
have to play with, they won’t spontaneously combust into consciousness.
I’m not being held back by the university’s computers; I have access to
SHARCNET anytime I need it. I’m being held back by my own lack of
insight into the problems I’m addressing.”
Daniel said, “A maze is not a dead end. When I was twelve, I wrote a
program for solving mazes.”
“And I’m sure it worked well,” Julie replied, “for small,
two-di-mensional ones. But you know how those kind of algorithms scale.
Put your old program on this crystal, and I could still design a maze in half a
day that would bring it to its knees.”
“Of course,” Daniel conceded. “Which is precisely why I’m
inter-ested in hiring you. You know a great deal more about the maze of AI
than I do; any strategy you developed would be vastly superior to a blind
search.”
“I’m not saying that I’m merely groping in the dark,” she said. “If it was
that bleak, I’d be working on a different problem entirely. But I don’t see
what difference this processor would make.”
“What created the only example of consciousness we know of?”
 
Daniel asked.
“Evolution.”
“Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make
the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of
variation more targeted.”
Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious,
human-level AI?”
“Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to
measure her words before speaking.
“With respect, I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”
“On the contrary,” Daniel assured her. “I’ve been planning this for
twenty years.”
“Evolution,” she said, “is about failure and death. Do you have any
idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo
sapiens ? How much suffering was involved?”
“Part of your job would be to minimise the suffering.”
“ Minimise it? ” She seemed genuinely shocked, as if this proposal
was even worse than blithely assuming that the process would raise no
ethical concerns. “What right do we have to inflict it at all?”
Daniel said, “You’re grateful to exist, aren’t you? Notwithstanding the
tribulations of your ancestors.”
“I’m grateful to exist,” she agreed, “but in the human case the
suffering wasn’t deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any
alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been
a just creator, I don’t doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he
sure as hell would not have used evolution.”
“Just, and omnipotent, ” Daniel suggested. “Sadly, that second trait’s
even rarer than the first.”
“I don’t think it’s going to take omnipotence to create something in our
own image,” she said. “Just a little more patience and self-knowledge.”
 

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