Cyber Rogues (7 page)

“Why not?” FISE inquired.

“Because you’re still standing up, that’s why you dumbhead, Before you start eating you should be sitting down.” Hector promptly grabbed the plate and sat down on the floor. Ron moaned miserably, dragged himself over to the nearest cubicle and stood pounding his forehead on its top panel. “I can’t stand it. I’m gonna wind up as nuts as it is. Chris,
do
something with it for Christ’s sake.”

Eventually Dyer and Laura left Chris still tapping to the accompaniment of Ron’s yelling and moved away from the lab area and back toward Dyer’s office. On the way, Laura reminded him that they had not yet looked at the TITAN notes she wanted to check over, and suggested they could do so over lunch. Dyer hesitated instinctively for a second, then agreed. What the hell? he thought. For once Laura had seemed to go out of her way to avoid being trying.

When they passed Betty’s desk, she gave him a message that Hoestler wanted to talk to him first thing after lunch.

“You’d better bring your coat,” he said to Laura.

“I’m going to have to throw you out as soon as we finish. I won’t be coming directly back to the lab.”

While Laura was slipping on her coat, he noticed that Pattie was at her desk, poring diligently over the figures in front of her and seemingly terrified of lifting her eyes from them. Which reminded him . . .

“You go on,” he said to Laura as she moved toward the door. “I’ll join you out in the corridor. There’s one quick thing I’ve just remembered.”

A few seconds later he strode into the office that Al Morrow was using and closed the door softly behind him. Al looked up from the coding sheets he had been checking. His face started to break into a grin, then fell abruptly as he saw the expression on Dyer’s face.

“You’re making a prize asshole of yourself,” Dyer stated simply. “I’m telling you here and now to pack it in.”

Al flinched as if he had been struck in the face. Then the color started rising from his collar and a look of pained indignation compressed his features. He swallowed hard and his grip tightened visibly on the armrest of his chair.

“I guess I haven’t been keeping very good time,” he mumbled awkwardly. “Okay. All I can say is I’ll put that right. Today was kinda—” Dyer cut him off with a curt shake of his head.

“It’s not just that and you know it. I’m talking about all this screwing around with Pattie. You’re making it a public spectacle and that isn’t a smart thing to do. I’m telling you to wise up.”

“I don’t want to get into an argument, Ray,” Al protested weakly. “But that’s a kinda personal matter, if you know what I mean. What I do in my own time outside the—” Dyer shut him up again with a wave of his hand. He knew what was coming next. He had already heard all the outraged justifications and noble speeches in defense of young love threatened in its prime.

“I know what you’re gonna say. Just don’t say it,” Dyer went on. “You’re acting as if you just found out about sex for the first time in your life. Well maybe you have, but the rest of the world knew all about it a long time ago so we don’t wanna hear about it. Okay?”

Al turned a deep shade of scarlet and glanced around as if looking for a convenient black hole to jump into. Dyer observed him with satisfaction and allowed his tone to soften a fraction.

“As far as I’m concerned there are two Patties,” he said. “One lives outside this place and does what the hell she pleases and the other one works for me. The one that works for me is company business because the company has paid for her time, not you. And I’m telling you what a professor told me when I was at Harvard Medical School: ‘Thou shalt not dip thy quill in company ink!’ That’s all I’ve got to say. From this point on it’s forgotten. Okay?”

A couple of minutes later he rejoined Laura in the corridor outside.

“Sorry about that,” he said as they began walking. “We’ve been having a slight staff problem.”

“Pattie mixed up in it?” Laura inquired casually. He turned his head toward her in surprise.

“Yes. Who told you?”

“Nobody,” Laura replied lightly. “Just feminine insight.”

“Oh Christ. We’re not back to that, are we?”

Laura gave a short laugh.

They walked on in silence until they emerged into the main corridor that led to the staff restaurant.

“I was thinking while I was waiting for you,” Laura told him. “Why is he called FISE. Does it stand for anything in particular?”

“Functional Integration using Simulated Environment,” Dyer said.

“Oh. I see. That sounds impressive.”

“But Chris has got his own version.”

“Really? What does Chris call it?” Laura asked.

Dyer grinned. “Fastest Idiot Seen on Earth,” he told her.

CHAPTER FOUR

“So was that what they call an intelligent computer?” Laura’s voice was lined with mildly mocking satisfaction as she removed the plate of curried chicken from the small dispensing hatch in the wall at the end of the booth. Dyer turned his head from gazing out over the river far below the window alongside them. He missed the intonation and answered her matter-of-factly.

“It’s obviously got a long way to go yet, but it’s about as advanced as anything you’ll find anywhere.”

“Advanced!” She stared at him incredulously. “Ray, if you weren’t looking so serious you’d have to be joking. If that was an intelligent machine, Stegosaurus was a genius.”

“Aw, you’re missing the whole point,” he told her with a shadow of irritation as he realized the turn the conversation was taking. “Computers are evolving backward.”

“If that means they’re becoming more stupid, I think I agree with you.”

“No. I didn’t mean that and you damn well know it.” He paused in the middle of picking up his fork. “Look. In natural evolution, instincts came first, common sense later and intellectual capabilities last. It had to be that way because the only thing that mattered was the ability to survive. An animal has to develop an awareness of its environment and learn how the things in that environment operate if it figures on staying around for very long. Intelligence as we understand it has an enormous survival value too, but that comes later.”

“If you accept the idea of evolution,” Laura reminded him pointedly.

“I don’t want to go into all that again,” he muttered, then resumed his former tone. “Computers didn’t evolve from survival-dominated origins. They were
designed
to do very complex, very specialized things, very efficiently. They can mimic Man’s intellectual feats superbly well. Not only that, they’re a lot better at some of them than we are . . . for instance they’re faster, more accurate, and don’t get tired or fed up. But they don’t possess any of the commonsense awareness of what they’re doing or what’s going on around them that animal ancestors had to evolve in order to stay healthy. That’s what I meant when I said they’re evolving backward. They’re good at what we ended up with, but they don’t have what we had to start with.”

“So that’s what you’re doing?” Laura conceded grudgingly. “Trying to teach them how to tie what’s going on all around into a picture that means something?”

“You could put it that way,” Dyer said with a nod. He returned his attention to his meal and began eating at last.

“So what’s the point of it?” Laura asked after a while. “Okay. You’ve spent millions of dollars and ended up with a computer that’s smart enough to know how to fry an egg. What are you supposed to do with it?”

“All kinds of things,” Dyer replied, sounding deliberately nonchalant. He shrugged while he finished chewing. “Give it a fusion power plant to run. Manage a space mission . . . take charge of New York City air-traffic control. Whatever . . .” He knew he was being provocative and took quiet pleasure from observing the desired effect.

“What!” Laura almost choked. “Put that imbecile we just saw in charge of a power plant? It can’t even take charge of a kitchen. Tell me you’re not serious.”

“I am serious. The computers that run all those things right now are a lot dumber than the one you just saw . . . if you insist on judging them by human standards, anyway. On the other hand, if you base your opinion on the ability to crank through fifty million calculations in a second then they’re quite smart.” He paused, unable to contain a smile, and added, “Your problem, you see, Laura, is that you’re too much of a chauvinist.”

“I’m a what . . . ?” The conditioned reflex in her started to respond but she saw what he was doing and checked it deftly. Dyer complimented her inwardly. “They’re labor-saving gadgets, sure,” she continued. “They’re good for doing all the repetitive mechanical stuff—I’ll buy that. But you’ll always have to have people in charge. You’re not telling me you think you can come up with a machine that’s capable of exercising human judgments too . . . not after what I’ve just seen. That I won’t buy.”

“But programming the computers is labor too,” Dyer pointed out. “And when you want them to do more complicated jobs, it gets to be hard labor. So why not have the computers generate their own programs?”

“Because they don’t understand the problems that the programs have to solve.”

“Exactly.” Dyer nodded in satisfaction. “They don’t understand the problems because they’re not equipped to be able to understand them. They don’t have the basic capability to learn and connect things together that any newborn baby has . . . or they didn’t have until HESPER machines came along. But supposing you could educate FISE to the level where he knew enough about real-world concepts to be able to make commonsense decisions for himself reliably. Then you could put him through a specialist course on—I dunno, say something like steel-making—so he knows all the things you have to aim for in order to run a steel plant efficiently. Then you let him practice for a while, maybe by connecting him to another computer that’s pretending to be a steel plant. Because he’s smart he can learn from his experiences and because he’s a computer he can learn fast. Pretty soon you’ve got a hotshot manager who can run rings around any team in the business. Then you ship him out into the real world, give him a real plant to run and let him get on with it. The beauty of it is he’ll do all the right things, but you haven’t had to go through the hard labor of programming in every specific detail of every situation that might ever arise and every specific detail of what to do if it does. All you gave him was the basic capability to learn. The rest he figured out for himself.”

Laura continued to eat in silence for a while, keeping her eyes directed down at the plate before her. Her fashionable clothes, meticulously styled hair and faultless grooming made her look out of place among the casual shirts, denims and well-worn traditional jackets of a university restaurant. There was no doubt, Dyer thought, that in purely physical terms she was stunning. He found himself trying to picture what she would look like stripped of the close-fitting velvyon dress that changed its hue from midnight blue to silver as she moved.

Laura looked up at him. “If FISE is a learning computer, what’s a HESPER computer?” she asked. “I thought HESPER was supposed to be some kind of learning computer too.”

“It is,” he replied simply, “Or more precisely, it’s a programming technique. It stands for HEuristic Self-Programming Extendable Routine—a set of interrelated programs that form a structure that can learn as it goes.”

“I’m not sure I see the difference.”

“It’s a question of degree,” he said. “HESPER systems are specialized to handle one particular kind of application. You could set up a HESPER system that will optimize itself over a period of time, say . . . play a game of chess. The more games it plays, the better it gets until you can’t keep up with it. But that’s all it’s good for. But something like FISE would possess a broad base of general concepts. It could learn to handle anything. So all you’d have to do is develop it once and get it right instead of having to set up thousands of different HESPER systems all the time. It would supersede HESPER programming in the same kind of way that HESPER is taking over from the classical distributed parallel programming that’s been around since . . . aw, the 1980s, 1990s.”

Laura looked at him quizzically for a moment as if she expected him to draw some conclusion from his own words. Then she sighed and shook her head.

“Can’t you see how irresponsible the whole thing is?” she asked.

“Irresponsible?” There was no surprise in Dyer’s voice. Everything had been going too smoothly.

“Criminally! They’ve been plugging HESPER machines into the TITAN network all over the world for over a year now, haven’t they? So those things are out there, going through their learning processes and being put in control of manufacturing plants, transportation systems and everything else, yet from what you’ve just told me they’re even dumber than FISE is. How can you say it isn’t irresponsible to give idiots like that a fusion plant?”

“Because they’re not the same thing,” Dyer insisted. “HESPER machines are designed simply to be able to get steadily better at doing a particular job. They’ve been thoroughly tested, they’re well understood and there’s nothing mysterious about them. FISE is a first step toward something radically different. You can’t judge them both by the same criteria.”

But Laura was only just warming up.

“How can they be well understood when they’ve only been going into TITAN for a year?” she demanded. “You said yourself they need time to learn and that they don’t have any common sense anyway. What’s to stop them starting to do things that don’t make sense?”

“They can only work inside the limits they’re designed for,” Dyer told her. “If a HESPER machine is set up to coordinate the communications traffic across part of the net, it can only learn how to do the job better. It can’t make things worse because it isn’t programmed to, and it can’t do anything else because it doesn’t have any generalized capabilities.”

“But it extends its own programs as it goes along,” Laura retorted. “That’s what you just said the last time I was here. So machines are out there that are putting stuff into those programs that nobody knows about. So how can anybody know what they might do? You have to admit that nobody can claim to understand them completely anymore. That means there’s a whole planetful of people being used as guinea pigs. Who ever asked them whether or not they wanted all these machines running everything anyhow? Nobody asked me.”