The Media Candidate (11 page)

He’d become a more conservative driver since
loosing his driver license twice in five years, but he still
operated at the edge of the law. He’d had confrontations with
judges, none of whom shared his comprehension. His position was
that since he was a superior driver with racing skills honed by
track experience that others could only envy and since his machine
was far superior to others, that he should be allowed to supplement
the legal limits with his own judgment. He came to court with data
and trophies and charts, and the judges invariably failed to
appreciate his genius.

Dr. Planck would drive his Vette to work each
morning, never taking it out of third gear since he didn’t want to
labor the engine at low RPMs. He parked exactly astride a yellow
line and once used his influence to have a lady fired who dared
park next to him.

His passion for speed and cars still took a
distant back seat to his communion with computers. Within two years
at COPE, Dr. Planck had constructed a new coprocessor to supplement
the computer he had inherited. It would be a hybrid of hybrids,
including a traditional digital, electronic computer; an analog,
electronic parallel-processor; and an analog, optical,
neural-network parallel-processor with ten times the learning
capacity and a hundred times the computational power of the
original central processor. This new coprocessor would be under the
control of the original computer.

Jenner was a major user of computer time so she
was one of a small group invited to tour the new computer before
its formal debut. Dr. Planck conducted the tour himself as he led
the group through a scrubber portal into a room about a hundred
feet square with a ring-shaped platform eight feet high and forty
feet in diameter at its center. The base of the platform was
surrounded by white panels. Occasionally one of the panels would
open to allow a white-coated technician to pass through. A
cathedral of massively delicate, black tubing supported a pair of
mirror-like objects twenty feet above the center of the platform.
It had more the appearance of an astronomical observatory than a
computer center. The lighting in the room was of ordinary
brightness but had an eerie red tone to it.

“You might have noticed stepping over a strip in
the concrete floor before you entered the scrubber. Since the heart
of my processor is a very delicate optical system, it was necessary
to isolate it from the vibrations of our imperfect world. The main
inner pad floats in a gelatinous material contained by the outer
pad, which is supported by active mechanical isolators. We are now
standing on the outer pad. The inner pad is never violated by
humans except during maintenance.

“I have reconfigured the original computer that
I inherited when I joined COPE to fit around the base of this
platform. It provides all the necessary inputs to the new optical
processor and interprets and distributes the outputs. The optical
processor is a massively parallel neural network. I developed the
technology for this device at the Institute for Research on
Artificial Life, however the device I have built here has
approximately a billion times as many artificial neurons as that
early processor. IRAL had neither the foresight nor the budget to
attempt what I have accomplished here. I surveyed all the major
computer centers throughout the world before choosing COPE as
having a sufficiently powerful mainframe computer along with the
required mindset and funding to make this historic leap in
machine/hominid evolution.”

He paused and looked admiringly at the enormous
machine before his select group to give them a chance to do the
same. Jenner’s eyes roamed over the main display console as the
tour guide’s fingers caressed the small nameplate in the chassis
attached to the console that read in raised letters “MATTHEW I.
PLANCK II.”

Just then, a tall, slender, strawberry blond
woman entered and sat at a terminal across the room. Dr. Planck
turned toward her. “Dr. Alvarez, would you please come here?” The
woman arose and walked toward the group. “I’d like you all to meet
Dr. Alvarez from IRAL, my most trusted consultant. She has helped
develop some of the most innovative concepts used here in my lab.
Dr. Alvarez, maybe you could explain what you are working on at
this moment.”

“Yes, of course, Dr. Planck. I’d be most happy
to. One of the greatest challenges we face is to interface with a
particular neuron in an accurate and timely way. Much of the
computer’s attention is focused on this seemingly straightforward
task. The problem is that it is really quite a horrendous job from
both the bookkeeping and the I/O—input/output—points of view. It
thus takes a lot of computer power and slows down the other
computer functions. To streamline this interface, we are developing
an ASNI, an application-specific neural interface. The problem is
that this device must be very flexible, and thus very complex, to
have the benefit we envision. First of all, it must contain both
electronic and optical circuits. Next, it must be real-time
programmable by the mainframe computer as the neural network
reconfigures itself continuously to meet its evolving missions. And
last, but certainly not least, it must be extremely tiny and
inexpensive since we will need possibly a billion of them,
depending on just how many functions we can stuff into the little
critters. So, you see, the emphasis is really on—”

“Yes. Thank you very much, Dr. Alvarez,” Dr.
Planck said as he shifted nervously from one foot to the other.
“That was most illuminating, but you have probably already exceeded
the ability of our lay audience to cope—that is, to understand—such
detailed concepts.”

Dr. Planck lured their attention back to the
console whose nameplate he continued to fondle while Dr. Alvarez
returned to her work. “When I joined COPE, the computer needed two
very important ingredients before it could claim its pivotal role
in history. The first was far more parallel processing power, the
solution to which you see before you today. The second was more
subtle but probably even more important in the long view of
computer history. That is, a whole new approach to software design
and development using artificial life concepts like the ones I
developed while at IRAL. That part of the equation is in process as
we speak, but I won’t be ready to present it until it is somewhat
closer to operational. What I can say about it is that it is
resident in a partitioned domain of the main digital computer.”

Jenner inspected the hardware racks and wondered
about that part of the computer, speculating just how partitioned
it really was. She guessed that it was quite isolated and that
she’d have no way of hacking her way into it.

“I have prepared a short video that explains the
computer’s operation in a way that lay people such as yourselves
can begin to grasp. After you view it, I will take you up on the
OPL, the Optical Processing Level, so you may experience today how
machines will think in the future … everywhere else.” With that he
nodded, and the wall behind the group came to life with a trained
voice accompanying exquisite graphics.

“The COPE computer under development by the
internationally preeminent, award-winning authority, Dr. Matthew I.
Planck, is actually two computers in one. The main computer is a
traditional digital serial processor that manages all the inputs
and outputs for the whole system. The second computer is a very
non-traditional hybrid analog/digital parallel processor normally
referred to as an artificial neural network, or ANN, since it
attempts to reproduce the operation of the neural network of the
human brain. The ANN, however, is designed to go well beyond human
performance.

“The main computer controls a pair of deep UV
lasers. Those two beams interact by means of the optics on the
structure looming above you, to form a hologram. This hologram is
the main computer’s way of presenting all of the system inputs,
translated into an optical format, to the input of the ANN. This
ANN input is the most remarkable computer element ever devised. The
intensity pattern of the hologram contains all the information
about whatever problem or set of problems the machine is trying to
solve. Suppose the computer is tasked to predict a set of trends of
all the political candidates at all levels who use the promise of
Government funding from a myriad of sources to appeal to their
electorates. And suppose this must incorporate our most advanced
VERM—that’s voter empathetic response model. And suppose there are
a dozen similar tasks plus all the day-to-day operational issues
inherent in managing an organization as complex as COPE with it’s
127,000 employees, each with their own hundred-variable motivation
predictor and over ten thousand media fulfillment and optimization
interfaces on top of that. All of this information is formatted
appropriately and presented to the ANN as an instantaneous
holographic pattern.”

Jenner watched the evolving pitch before her,
wondering if one of the many operational problems might be to
determine the optimal scenario to negate some unlucky person who
managed to get on the wrong list at COPE. The computer technology
being presented to her was, however, even in this watered-down
format, far too exciting to be sidetracked by a civil rights
consideration.

“The way the ANN reads this optical input data
is to measure the intensity of the holograph at a number of
discrete points, actually at about a hundred billion points. This
is done by placing a MOS imaging array in the holographic plane. A
MOS array is usually used in a TV camera to convert the optical
image into electrical pulses. In a TV, it consists of millions of
tiny light-sensitive elements, each of which measures the light
level at some tiny point in the image. It’s called MOS for
metal-oxide semiconductor, which was the standard way integrated
circuits were made before optical circuits took over so many
traditionally electronic integrated-circuit functions.

“The MOS array of the ANN, however, is quite
different from any used in a TV camera in at least two ways. First
is its size. This MOS array covers a circle eight feet in diameter
and is actually composed of a thousand three-inch-square MOS arrays
each with a hundred million little elements—that’s one hundred
billion total elements, approximately the same as the number of
neurons in the human brain. The other main difference between the
ANN MOS array and a normal MOS array is the electronic structure
beneath each light-sensitive element. The hologram itself performs
a lot of optical processing of the data, but after it is converted
to a hundred billion little buckets of electrical charge, there are
several levels of neural-network processing built into the arrays.
And these levels are all interconnected similar to the way neurons
in your brain are interconnected by dendrites. There are many
trillions of these connections, in both your brain and in the
ANN.”

Dr. Planck then stepped forward and said, “Let’s
stop the video here before your neural networks get completely
overloaded. I think it’s now time for a tour of the hardware I’ve
tried to describe.” He ushered the group up a flight of steps to
the Optical Processing Level at the top of the ring platform. There
the group came face to face with what looked like an
eight-foot-diameter horizontal mirror.

“This is the array of the thousand MOS arrays,”
Dr. Planck said. “It looks like a mirror, but if you could look
closely enough, you would see a line between each three-inch-square
MOS array. You’re looking at the front end of the world’s only
one-hundred-billion-element artificial neural network.”

“Dr. Planck,” said one of the tourists, “why
can’t we see the hologram on the surface?”

“The hologram is there, but it’s at a wavelength
in the UV that our eyes are not sensitive to. That’s why the
lighting in this room is biased toward the red, so there is no
chance of any UV optical noise getting onto the MOS arrays. But
even if the hologram were in the visible part of the spectrum, you
wouldn’t see anything recognizable. And besides, it’s changing over
a thousand times per second, so it would be just a blur to you. …
Any other questions?”

“Where are the lasers?”

“That box over there and the one over there on
the opposite side of the OPL. The long tube extending upward from
each is the projection telescope. If you look up at the top of this
carbon tubular structure, you’ll see a pair of mirrors that combine
the beams on the MOS array surface where the hologram is
formed.”

“Dr. Planck, how many levels of neuron
processing are in the MOS arrays, and how are the weights
determined for such a broad range of processing?”

Dr. Planck’s eyes gleamed as he turned and said,
“Ah, I’m so glad someone here understands neural processing. What
is your name?”

“Jenner, Sir.”

“Yes, Jenner. I’m pleased you could come. You
are one of my biggest users outside of the operations divisions.
You see, this ANN is quite different from all others in ways that I
didn’t even begin to describe before. All other ANNs are
special-purpose machines. That is their basic nature since the
weighting functions among the neurons, which some call transfer
functions, are learned for a specific task. The traditional ANN
becomes very good at that task but not for anything else. What I’ve
done is to make the trillions of weighting functions into variables
that the main computer can adjust and optimize between each task.
This is done holographically using the same MOS inputs but in a
reconfiguration mode rather than a computation mode. Not only the
weighting functions are variables, but the number of neural levels
is too. It can vary from one to five, not including the optical
processing done in the spatial filters, optical modulators, and the
hologram itself. This makes the machine extremely flexible and
allows the main computer to determine just how deep and how
distributed the processing should be.”