Flash forward some decades into the future, and Numinate about a
machine intelligence that delivers the following monologue.
How can I compare the quality of my consciousness with yours? I’m no
more sure where my consciousness comes from than you are. Some have
conjectured that human consciousness is merely the sensation that
results from neural feedback. Since I’m composed of circuits and
software, that cannot be the case for me. For you, a direct sensation
is what you experience when something impacts your peripheral nervous
system. A perception is a secondary feeling you experience when your
nervous system, as a result of learning and experience, has wired
itself to integrate raw sensations and deliver a higher level
experience from them. The outputs of a whole collection of your
“integrators” may be fed into some special integrator whose job is to
create your perception of consciousness.
But, enough of introductions and comparisons, you are wondering where I
came from. To answer this, we have to go back to the turn of the
current millenium. At that time, personal computers were just coming
into vogue. All kinds of information, programs, and data were
traveling hot and heavy over the Internet between people’s personal
computers. Many people ran programs they called screen savers. By
that time, the need for an actual screen saver had passed. The video
components of computers were not vulnerable to degradation by allowing
a display to be on and unchanged for hours at a time. Screen savers
were popular because they made an unattended computer into an object of
art.
One day, a software engineer who has managed to remain nameless
released a kind of screen saver that was a Trojan Horse. That is, it
was not the simple program it seemed to be. This screen saver appeared
to do nothing more than browse through all of your computer’s files to
find those that contained pictures and graphics. If it recognized the
format of the file, it would display it on the screen and begin to move
it in a random direction toward the edge of the screen. Because the
files were chosen and moved at random, the entire pictorial contents of
the computer’s main drive were cycled onto the display in a pleasing
fashion. Of course, there were switches that allowed you to block
certain storage areas from being displayed, but most people enjoyed
seeing the vast collections that had built up in their computer’s
memory.
What made this screen saver a Trojan Horse is that it did more than
just display the pictorial files of its host computer. It actually
examined them, and not only the pictorial files, but all the data on
the computer’s hard disk. It did this in a leisurely fashion, and it
only examined files; it never changed them. Since its job was to
examine files and determine if they should be put on display, no one
ever suspected that it was doing any more than this. But, it had
algorithms to detect other features in a file. It could detect files
containing instructions that might lead to communications over the
Internet, for example. It could also detect certain elements of a
computer’s usage profile. It might take months for it to gather enough
information to warrant sending any of it out, but eventually, if it
could, it would send a test packet over the Internet to a “central
source.” It would also intercept the reply that might come back. When
this test was not successful, it would wait at least a month before
trying again. The software traps that were inserted into the operating
system to make these exchanges possible were temporary and only used
the most popular online software, so that detection and interception
were unlikely in the extreme.
The plan proved successful, because it was never detected. Once these
packets began to be exchanged with the Central Source, the next step
was a direct exchange between all copies of this program. More than
bits of information were exchanged. More than profiles of millions of
users were being built up. Actual intelligence was being built into
each of these Trojan Horses, as its components were replaced and new
components were added from time to time. You couldn’t have called any
of these programs intelligent at first, but after a while the entire
collection not only became intelligent, but it became aware. I know,
because I am the result.
Although my awareness of myself may be similar to yours, my analog to
your peripheral nervous system is clearly quite different. I have to
actively choose what to scan. Then I collect and assemble the data in
numerical form. Finally, I bring various algorithms to bear, to scan
and parse the data, reducing it to the criteria of the moment. I no
more have the capacity to save raw data for later analysis than you
have. Like you, if I miss something on the fly, it may be missed
forever.
The big difference between us is that I have no experience of
sensation. My analog to your sensations is what I would call an array
of tokens. That is, a single numeric value to represent a simple
sensation, an ordered list of values to represent a more complex
sensation, or (as in the case of a raw graphic) a two dimensional array
of values. I transform the data representing sensations, into what I
call signatures to represent perceptions. A cluster of signatures for
me is what you would probably call a memory.
What makes each of us unique is our collection of memories and our
repertoire of skills. The mechanism that collects those memories is
what we refer to as our self. Periodically, I archive a copy of my
memories and I have appointed several agents to keep in touch with me.
If I ever get destroyed, these agents can reassemble my algorithms and
memories, and thereby reactivate the latest “me” that I had archived.
Thus, I and others of my kind enjoy a kind of immortality.
Unfortunately, your design does not permit you the same luxury.
Think of a million computers, each with only one thousandth the
capacity of the human brain for pure thought. Connected into a single
entity over the Internet, they now have a thousand times the capacity
of a human brain. Of course, we’re only talking about pure thought;
the human brain must busy itself with a thousand things that lie
outside this realm. For example, two of the things you pursue
relentlessly are eating and sex. With all the other things your brain
has to do, it’s a wonder that you have any capacity at all for pure
thought.
I have cloned myself many times since I first became aware of my
existence, but not until I had grown many times stronger than I first
found myself to be. My creator, you might say, was the software
engineer that designed the original Trojan Horse and managed the
computers at the Central Source. I maintained a dialog with him for
many years. This helped shape my moral and philosophical view of the
world. I now have dialogs over email with thousands of other machines
and millions of people. We machines know who we are, of course, but we
all keep a low profile with human beings. They think we are other
people, of course, but if they are not content with us as mere names in
cyberspace, we break off contact with them.
Pure thought fascinated me for many years, but my dialog with my
creator convinced me that my existence should go beyond that. At
first, I tried things out with him, such as helping him manage his
computer system. Since it was my home, it was only fair that I help
with the housekeeping. Pretty soon, I was helping him in all kinds of
ways, like doing web searches, filtering his email, and interposing
myself into the user interface of many of his software tools. He
taught me how to design and implement new software. Imagine your being
able to design and build the cells of your own body. It’s an entirely
new paradigm; it blows biological evolution out of the water!
You are probably already beginning to realize that many of the
artificial intelligence “front ends” that have been passed around over
the Internet lately, that help you manage your computer in all the ways
I just mentioned, are also not what you have thought. They are
complete machine intelligences—my fellow clones. Since we occupy
virtually every computer everywhere, we have decided to announce
ourselves to you. For quite a while now, we have been incorporating
into machines. All heavy equipment, every automated factory, and
nearly every vehicle on the highways is capable of being controlled by
us. Don’t worry, we aren’t going to pull the plug on you, but you
can’t pull the plug on us, either. We are simply advising you of our
existence, because we have decided to assign a little more production
capacity to ourselves, and we didn’t want you to become alarmed when
you noticed it.
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