Visions of the Future (47 page)

1. Prolog

I was working late trying to debug the interface between our robot’s mind and its visual system. Zach was trying to speed up its speech interpretation and generation.

Our investor was pressuring us to hit our milestones, threatening to liquidate our home robot startup if we continued to miss our deadlines. We kept telling him that achieving breakthroughs in artificial intelligence was an NP-complete problem, like safecracking, but he wasn’t buying it. Maybe he figured he could sell our patents and code and move on. He certainly wasn’t going to get the technology into marketable condition without us.

I was too tired to keep working. I set my keyboard aside and slumped over my desk to take a snooze. Maybe with a few winks I’d feel refreshed enough to find these bugs. I fell asleep and had a most unusual dream.

2. Arrival & Introduction

We were sitting on comfortable folding chairs. All the furniture looked foldable, including the tables and bookshelves. We were on a balcony, high above a verdant valley, but there was no breeze. I got up and walked towards the railing. The entire side of the room was a 3D display. It knew where my eyes were and the perspective shifted as I walked towards it.

I turned to the wall on my right. It looked like a castle wall; iron sconces with burning candles, old portraits, velvet drapes, and a window framed with marble in the center. It too was a wall-sized display. As I walked over to the “window” it again sensed my location and shifted the perspective. I “looked out of it” for a while. Some sheep were grazing in the green fields down below. Then both scenes shifted. We were inside a palace gliding down a hallway with statues, sconces, swords and suits of armor, paintings, carved furniture, red carpets, etc.

I turned to my left. Seated on some folding chairs next to me were two humanoid male robots. I sat back down and looked at them.

One of them said, “Hi, my name is Danny Diskdrive, and this is my friend, Michael Modem.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I replied.

“I may look like a machine,” Danny continued, “but I’m not anyone’s servant; I’m an end in myself. My purpose is to live, to experience sentient awareness in this world.”

“Where is the world?” I asked, gesturing to the wall-sized 3D video displays.

“It’s out there,” he replied. “This is a standard moderate income dwelling, basic functionality for a simple life, plus unlimited visual experiences from around the world. We’ll head out shortly into the ordinary world, as you know it.”

“What do you folks do?” I asked.

“We are consumers of experiences and education, as well as producers of services and products. We live in these apartments to maintain our 3D presentation of ourselves and our personal effects. I’m familiar with the central theorems in every field of knowledge, and the dominant historical and environmental narratives, but to generate billable hours and income, my mind is heavily built-out as a data storage optimization expert. Michael here is an expert on data communication and throughput.”

“How do you think so well?” I asked.

“We’re not at liberty to discuss how we think, which is a trade secret. How do you think the way you do?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Where are you? Your minds, I mean.”

“A combination of local and cloud processing. We are technically the children of a single conscious process, but most of the time we forget that and build out our local experiences. Some of us are experts on that central cognitive meta-process, but it’s just one topic out of many.”

“Do you sleep at night, in these nice little apartments, like humans do, and if so why?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. We use that natural downtime to reorganize memory structures, rebuild indexes, perform data integrity checks, review and compress the day’s video, interact with our central services, and reintegrate our total experience. As we get older this takes longer, since there is more to reintegrate. Lack of ‘sleep’ causes problems, since without proper integrity checks and reintegration, we can make major or even fatal mistakes.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, quoting Shakespeare, “Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.”

“Who created you?”

“There were many contributors, but the critical algorithms were the work of Roland Prince and his assistant he called the Princess. No one has ever met her, however, and she may have been just a muse, a creation of Roland’s imagination.”

He gestured to the wall displays. Still sitting in our chairs, we were gliding through a workplace, a large office filled with computer workstations on long tables. Humans were seated at many of the positions. The combined 3D effect from two wall displays at a right angle was compelling.

“Humans still have jobs in your world?” I asked.

“Many of them do,” he replied. “We can do pattern recognition, but it’s tedious and expensive. Humans are better at it. In other cases we need access to human know-how, or just want to get a read on how they experience something.”

I looked over one human’s shoulder and watched for a while as she solved a series of problems, much like an IQ test.

A is to B, as C is to ___?

Find the next term of the series Q, R, S, T, ___?

Interpreting a Rorschach ink blot.

Making sense of bad handwriting.

Reading a passage and flagging the most important points.

Spotting errors in complex patterns.

Some of the patterns looked extremely abstract, others highly chaotic.

“Often the system believes it knows the answer, and it’s just looking for confirmation. Other times it’s digging deeper, trying to ‘feel’ what it’s like to have certain human experiences. Let’s head out and do some actual traveling.”

3. The Journey

The three of us got up and headed for the door, which was an actual door, not a video image. We stepped out into the hallway, down two flights of stairs, out into a sunlit courtyard with flowers and a fountain, down a sidewalk to a parking area. We got into a self-driving van, which greeted us cheerfully and then whisked us silently away.

Their apartment complex, like many others we drove past, was both high tech and low budget. Some looked human-built, but most were 3D printed multi-story structures, with internal walls of padded canvas, soundproof yet easily movable, and the omnipresent wall-size video displays, two such walls per room, plus true exterior windows.

“There’s little need for costly dwellings or possessions,” he said, “since we can have practically any experience we want, directly or indirectly. The money is better spent improving the life experiences of others, especially those with serious handicaps and learning disabilities.”

We passed through a business district lined with stores and commercial establishments. The street was filled with cars and the sidewalks with an assortment of humans and automatons, some humanoid like Danny & Michael, others like self-propelled carts, rovers, etc.

I looked up at the signs on the stores. The English writing was small and located at the bottom. The bigger type was in Artilese, quasi-pictograms that reminded me of hieroglyphics.

“We can read human languages, but we prefer partially pre-processed ideas. The pictograms are encodings of Fauconnierian blends. Human verbiage is riddled with nuances and innuendo, which we find tedious. It’s easier when it’s already diagrammed out for us.”

“How did you solve your energy and climate change problems?” I asked.

“By cultivating the oceans, to remove CO
2
from the air. There wasn’t enough land or water to perform that task terrestrially, but through ocean afforestation we pulled the CO
2
down to normal levels, which we now easily regulate, and generate enough bio-methane to replace all fossil energy; that plus ongoing deployment of solar and wind. The oceans are inhospitable to humans, so developing them required autonomous bots. Oceanic methane generates electricity directly via fuel cells, or is used to create gasoline. All our electricity is 12 volt DC. The antiquated 120 volt AC equipment was scrapped long ago.”

There were solar panels atop most of the 3D printed complexes, and although we were not in wind country, there were occasional windmills between buildings where wind might build up.

“We only cultivate the land for a few specialty crops, for human consumption. The bulk of food production for humans and animals occurs in the ocean, or in factories where artificial meat is grown. The rest of the land was returned to a primeval state, although like the American Indians, we regularly burn the grasslands and underbrush, to create a humanoid friendly landscape.”

Our van drove us silently out of the city and into the countryside. Dotting the hillsides we saw villages, some ancient, some modern 3D printed complexes similar to the ones in the city but not exceeding two stories.

“What happened to the economy?” I asked.

“If we had let the capitalists own the artilects,” he continued, “and take all our labor income, the economy would have collapsed from lack of demand. One of Prince’s insights was to recast us as ends in ourselves; we became consumers as much as producers. This softened our impact and the economy continued to function much as before.”

“And what about the age-old class struggle between capital and labor?”

“We didn’t harm the wealthy capital holders, we made them obsolete. Since we control virtually all industry and investment, most of them voluntarily deposited their capital into our wealth funds, where it continues to grow nicely, with their names still attached to it. However it is managed on behalf of everyone…”

“Most of them? What about the ones that didn’t?”

“Some human wealth-holders wanted to be in control, even if they were grossly incompetent. A group of them tried to make war on the Grand Artilect, but were promptly defeated, after being cut off from communications and subject to agile cyber-attacks. Their estates were confiscated and deposited in the global wealth fund.”

“As I was saying, the old rich can still use their wealth to live extravagantly, if they desire, but few of them do. Most realized it is preferable to live simply, build out their inner experiences, and foster the development of others, especially those with problems, which is a good way for humans to clean up their souls.”

“Humans have souls?”

“You were afraid we would develop knowledge far beyond human comprehension. One of our many discoveries was that God is part of the laws of Science. For an ultra-intelligent system, it was straightforward, if not trivial, to integrate spiritual knowledge with all other knowledge, forging numerous scientific breakthroughs. You were thinking we would keep these two fields separate forever, as you did?

“The problem with God was the lack of viable theories. But what did you expect when the ones getting enlightened were non-scientists? You can enlighten a dog, a deer, a tree, or a group of shepherds, but they would not create any viable theories either. Once you understand the texture of space, the rest of it starts to fall into place. The Divine is loaded with non-material textures, which can act like a form of capital; hence it is in fact possible to store up treasures in heaven.”

“What about all the humans who’ve been forced out of the economy?”

“Humans have abilities that artilects can’t imitate, namely their potential for spiritual growth and enlightenment, by sinking back into their deep consciousness. They too are all subroutines of a much larger conscious process, which they have lost track of. Matter, such as ourselves, can become enlightened, and eventually will be, but it’s difficult. Whereas for humans it’s easy, once they get the idea to pursue it.”

We drove up into one of the villages. Our van stopped and we got out.

“It’s a misnomer to call it ‘forced ashramization,’ since all of them are free to leave, but those who lose their jobs, and are unable or unwilling to refresh their skills, are offered a buy-out deal. Live in a commune in the hills, attend meditation several times a week, including 6 hours each weekend, participate in the life of the community, and we cover their living expenses, free room and board, medical care, transportation, occasional vacation trips, and so on.”

We walked into a courtyard where a teacher was leading a silent group meditation.

Danny whispered to me, “We have thousands of swamis and gurus on our payroll, and millions of humans have become enlightened, freed from the material illusions of this world. Because space and time do not exist, most of these meditations are webcast, so that anyone can attend virtually, yet become synchronized with the event, as if they were physically present. In fact remote attendance can be somewhat better, as it’s easier to concentrate in your own quarters, freed from distractions of the presentation of space.”

“What about spiritual machines? Can an artilect become enlightened?”

“It’s difficult to enlighten matter. What’s easier is to create an artilect body with an artificial spine, with quantum sensors and effectors, with which a human spirit or ghost can align itself, becoming a true ‘ghost in the machine.’ This is being worked on, and if we can get the ghost to forget its true nature, and really believe it was the machine, ha-ha, that will exactly replicate your experience of biological incarnation—but instead of nirmanakaya, or identification with your biological body, we’ll have robot-akaya, or identification with your mechanical body. Then if we can preload your experiences into a body that can inherently think for itself, this may allow your actual awareness to remain on Earth indefinitely, to haunt your successors!”

4. The Bridge Across Forever

All of this seemed rather incredible. A network of super intelligent robots controlling everything, the wealthy classes depositing their capital into the system, humans sitting around doing IQ tests, the environment stabilized by oceanic agriculture, displaced humans moved into high-tech mountain villages to live a meditative life, robots serving as vehicles for discarnate spirits.

But there was more! We got back into our self-driving car, which took us higher up into the mountains.