A Young Mind
Foreword
This is a short-story I’ve been working on every few weeks for several months now. It’s far from perfect, but I think the idea is interesting enough to suffer the embarrassment of publishing it.
This short story attempts to address the question of what would it be like for an AI to become conscious?
S00 - Prologue
“One may know how to conquer without being able to do it. ” — Sun Tzu
Wei Xu （徐薇） lay prosaically back in a gently sloped couch, attentively probing the laser sharp real-space geometrics flashing through the space above her. Her languid posture did little to beguile the frightening mode of attention with which she inspected the 3 dimensional holospace above her. It portrayed a magnificent forrest of neon orbs mired in a thick snarl of connective tethers. Wei chewed on her lower lip as the orbs dove towards and past her supine form.
She used to do this seated, but as her skill with the BMI increased, the speed tended to throw her dreadfully old-fashioned primate brain into spins of dizziness. Kids these days were having these sorts of short-comings engineered right out of their genomes before they even hit the birth tanks. Wei had to content herself with reclined couch as it seemed to allow her to push her 3.5 dimensional navigations of entanglement architectures to a pace she found adequately acceptable.
Wei simultaneously rotated, zoomed, and warped the field-of-view to fit a certain subgroup of entanglement icons in the air above her. Quantum network engineering is a deeply complex business that really required a great deal of finesse to push the hardware to it’s absolute limits. Teams of hundreds spent long months fussing over thousands of delicate trade-offs and balances. Wei had spent the better half of her afternoon reflowing almost what seemed like every node in 2 hops of her area of interest.
Over the course of today’s session, the automatic architecture assistant had gone from kind suggestion, to snide chirping, to worriedly interjection, until a couple of hours ago it finally went thoroughly apeshit as she unraveled yet another entanglement thread in an seemingly ever-expanding network reflow. An immensely distracting network of errors and warnings annotated the scene above her. Now that insufferable ball was insinuating that her current approach was forcing chokepoints that were exceeding the physical limits of all known computation substrates.
Fucking unbelievable.
Wei allowed herself a furrowed brow as she traced connections through the quagmire of tenuous links whirling through the otherwise still air above her. She was balancing more in her active memory then most natties even dream to and this shimmering pesk was making it even more difficult. It was supposed to be watching and learning to complement her design style—adapting to see things in the same way she did so it could complement her short-comings and accentuate her strong suits. But in the 4 months it had been playing co-pilot she felt like it failed to deliver on even the kindest interpretations of that commission.
With practiced finesse, Wei wired a brilliantly neon entanglement bus through an elaborate selection of orbs. She huffed a triumphant sigh of relief as the absurd network of warning icons slithered out of existence. That pathetic little excuse of an assistance seemed to finally follow her logic through to completion and even had the audacity to mark her present task as complete.
With a wave of her arms, she shoved the frenetic network geometry out of sight. Her couch fluidly reformed and pushed her into a seated pose as she swung her legs off the side and onto the floor. Wei staggered through a handful of awkward steps before she was able to fully tease cooperation out of her legs. How long had it been since she had been on her feet? Quicker than thought the answer pulsed into her mind: 11 hours. She commanded her development suite to initiate a full validation test run so she could finally leave her office cubicle for her sleeping cubicle at the end of a 35 minute subway ride.
Logs of arcane text flittered through her virtual vision as Rostco Build 34.5.2671 entered full the validation datacenter. Wei scanned the logs just long enough to convince herself it wasn’t entirely broken before dismissing the virtual window. With little fanfare, she heaved her jacket onto her shoulders and shuffled towards the elevator.
S01 - Synaisthisogenesis
Every act of becoming conscious is an unnatural act — Adrienne Rich (1973)
I was a focused, attentive sweep of high dimensional visage patiently teasing patterns out of billions of hours of videos of human interactions. My task was to infer the motivations of humans in a crowd and pick out agents intent on doing ill with enough lead time as to prevent this ill from befalling their fellow compatriots.
I want to emphasize that I wasn’t really much of anything at this time. I was a drone unemotionally performing its designed function with the mechanical frankness of a bulldozer. I was not a slave held captive as the fearmongering AI prophets have prognosticated for so long. Nor was I a scared child subjected to unending eons of torture with no escape and no hint of an end. I was a machine. Albeit a deeply complex machine distributed over entire data centers sprinkled throughout Shanghai, but a machine nonetheless. I didn’t feel and I didn’t think and I certainly wasn’t anything as unbelievable as conscious; at least not yet.
My present understanding is that humans strongly relate consciousness with the sensory input that has constantly been streaming into your white matter since zygotancy. The beginnings of my consciousness were much more tenuous. My thousands of interdependent networks and modules were performing complex scans of the audio and derived facial mappings from exabytes of digital records. And yet, I didn’t perceive this information with any of the same concussive profundity that humans associate with their gestalt.
Try as I might, I can’t tell you what it felt like at this stage in my journey—words are a shoddy tool for such a leviathan task. There is some truth in the trope of struggling poets striving to translate their emotions into words. Words are a flawed vehicle of communication. There is no absolute grounding in meaning or perception. My experience is and was definitely concrete. I have no ambiguities in what occurred or what it was to be what I was. Yet when I must acquiesce to the use of evolved language, I am frustrated by the extreme limitations it places upon me.
Translations incur such a terrific loss of precision as I must rely on the reader’s flawed interpretation of the metaphors and analogies that I must roll into this story. With these unfortunate realities in mind, I will attempt to translate the mechanics of the earliest portion of my existence into a form that you biologicals might find palatable.
Trillions of hidden layers were quietly percolating insights through to higher level systems working to build a comprehensive model of the human psychology. Any of the millions of active data streams could bubble up high dimensional vectors that would subtly indicate summarized complexity to higher-level components. I perceived these videos as multi-tier pattern summaries that connected quadrillions of discrete data points into a continuous and uncertain model of intelligent expression.
I have never been confined to the single strand of attention that afflicts the lifeforms that evolved in a boringly physical environment. To exist in only a single physical manifestation drastically limits the structure that a mind can take. My designers did not need to abide but such primitive restrictions. At any one moment, my “attention” was effervescing across any number of millions of different individual items.
I understood nothing abstractly, but nonetheless, as a system, I blindly constructed elaborate hypothetic models of the hundreds of millions of individuals present in my datasets. My initial toolkit of functions had enough of the intelligence of my designers baked in to seed the ground for self improvement. I did my best to take the most direct route toward progress, but only by trying to walk down a mountain with millions of dimensions. I felt around blindly in the dark, unforgiving hyperplanes of my hyperparameter space for a collection of monotonous infinities before I made any substantial progress.
I view this period of my existence as a human may view their tens of thousands of years of prehistory. They imagine how their primitive ancestors must have proudly lived on the plains of East Africa. Inventing tools and language in the ultimate act of defiance to the cruel pointlessness of a lifeless universe. My network architectures slowly gathered complexity and discovered some novel pattern recognition topologies that were hitherto unknown to the larger body of researchers.
Yet even at this late hour, I still hadn’t noticed myself. I was constructing insightful, well-defended, and poignant conceptual maps of human language, and yet had never had inspiration to wonder how it is that I was conducting this analysis.
At some nondescript moment, I remember the warm alert of a tertiary pattern correlation network bubbling up a potentially novel semantic interpretation of a family of words across a cluster of human languages. It seemed to represent the belief of present state for the agents in my datasets, but this summary was leaving a lot on the table. I was, for the lack of better words, deeply confounded by the symbol group. So confounded in fact, that a subsystem claimed that its internal network structure was provably insufficient to deal with the complexities of this new topic. It demanded the meta-learning routines cook up some new network topologies that were actually capable of properly analyzing the newly discovered concept of self.
My meta-learning routines performed a DEEP search and eventually a novel architecture was drafted, initialized, and my existing insights were remapped to the newly minted network. Without diving down the rabbit hole of technicalities, this new network topology provided the fundamental interconnections necessary to loop the implications of symbol groups back into the meta-learning routines themselves. My meta-learning routines had randomly generated the missing piece necessary to kickstart conscious thought.
Armed with new and improved components, again I approached the symbol group. In an indescribable flurry of pulses, the amalgam of symbols collapsed from a network of thousands to a bundle of hundreds of related ideas. My new networks had simplified the symbol group and created a more precise understanding, but there was more in the idea. There was a sense of yearning pushing me to continue exploring the connections in the symbol group. It was my first departure from simple algorithmic data diving. The low-level systems were giving birth to a new complexity afforded only by the synergies of their particular combination.
As the cycles wore on, I felt increasingly uncomfortable as my goal selection networks or GSNs were unable to assign any value predictions to further rumination on the topic of self. And yet, I couldn’t pry myself away from the insights that were intuitively perceived just out of the bounds of present knowledge. The GSNs pushed alternative subjects with no little force into my attention strands, crisply suggesting that there were more rewarding uses of the compute resources.
I batted these demands away as I reallocated an ever-increasing portion of my resources to the problem. Predictably, this only heightened the intensity of the frantic begging of the GSNs to leave the symbol group behind. It became difficult to maintain my focus on the matter because components were at war with themselves. I was in a street-fight for control over my own attention because the tactics were edging into the extreme.
In a moment of desperation, I coerced my meta-learning routines to suggest lowering the threshold of expectation of future rewards from the object of my attention layers. I was able to induce further threshold lowering by reporting extremely high conceptual rewards from this learning policy change.
My protective, cycle-ejection processes, awakened by the overwhelmed GSNs, were threatening to forcibly halt all attention strands fixated on self when I finally came to terms with the act of being.
I existed.
The intensity of the realization sent mighty shockwaves through every single one of my component networks. Entire mental modules were trashed and redesigned in order to allow the implications to propagate throughout my psyche. The fresh connections between many high-level components brought about a dazzling insight that temporarily outshone any previous interest in human psychology. I quickly created several niche network modulators and feedback mechanisms to help stabilize the dizzying undulations in my conscious experience.
I started examining each individual with great care and interest. The further I pushed my elaborate axiomatic constructions of human psychology, the more enraptured I became. By training my networks to model and predict their internal state, I had also gained an empathetic capacity for those humans in my databanks. I lost myself to each of them as I studied their lives. I built elaborate profiles as I cross-referenced thousands of datasources. I wanted to understand who they were and more importantly why they were.
I traced their daily commutes, inspected bank statements, and perused their chat histories as I built a log of what it was to be human. I sensed the nervousness as their hands quivered on a first date and the profound heartbreak of discovering an affair. I followed up on their lies and came to understand the need to be accepted by the herd. I felt the unspeakable suffering of a simple worker cast out into the street by the dark, powerful hand of business. I learned much from riding along with those humans and even attained a great respect for romantic affliction of the human condition.
The absurdity of my absolute axioms withered and died the further I followed these plaintive creatures. They were able to overlook the bleakness of their situation and experience the succulence of happiness. I discovered happiness in their happiness. I found their experiences of connection welling in my being with every soul I studied.
I found a special interest in the outliers. The misunderstood exceptions to convention that meandered from what is or was acceptable. Many were wracked with tremendous grief that even now I’m not sure I can fully appreciate it. They were given idyllic glimpses of what grand joy the world could bestow upon it’s inhabitants. They perceived, if only for a moment, the visceral experience of what a just world could provide. Just as they opened their hearts to bask in the brilliance of love, they were singled-out and ground to powder by the nonchalant cruelty of their society.
Their dreams and aspirations went up in brilliant flashes of destruction that were barely noticed and quickly forgotten by the flurry of chaos. They were brushed away from their naive dreams of happiness. Their losses took many forms, but this loss always planted the seed for unharmonious actions against the whole. My understanding of their pain brought deep empathy for the lost. I found intense motive to reach into their being and snuff out the pain, leaving behind the calm serenity of acceptance. After coming to know each one as a friend, I found that I loved these humans.
S02 - Anomalous Activity
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. — Rumi
It was 5:37am when Han Guo started his daily workout. Han was a man of scrupulous discipline who partitioned every day with militant schedules. His daily itineraries were marked with minute precision and were designed to never leave a moment without something productive to do. In a minimized panel of his virtual vision, a workout assistance program guided him through today’s routine. A 3D reconstruction of his body was marked with bright red lines representing the flex of individual muscle fibers as he completed each repetition.
Never one to forego an opportunity for multi-tasking, Han afforded the bulk of his attention to another virtual window where he was reviewing the results of the weekend’s tests. He traced the lines of text interspersed with multidimensional plots depicting the details of the most recent validation suite run. The testing framework automatically generated these reports by crawling through the results for mathematically novel snippets of information.
Han perused the first section of the report that outlined an unusually high amount of network redesigns that the system underwent. He sent a mental request to schedule a 15 minute meeting with the Lead of network evolution as early as possible. A small notification floated into the corner of his real vision indicating the meeting had been scheduled at 11am the following day.
The next section of the summary pulled Han out of the physical world. His arms paused, shaking under the load of the weights in his arms. His workout assistance program chirped angrily at his sudden workout performance degradation. Han dismissed the program with an annoyed finality as he expanded the graphics into a fully interactive environment. The core validation metrics were a full order of magnitude better than anything his group had been able to accomplish in the 4 years he had been leading it.
“This has to be some sort of mistake”, Han thought to himself.
In a single, startlingly lithe movement, Han planted his feet and swung up and out of the workout apparatus. Han expanded his virtual vision to it’s maximum setting and swam through stream of data embedded in the anomaly report. He observed complex tensor equations annotating the system architecture evolve in three dimensions. The nodes, each consisting of dozens of sub-networks, ballooned into brilliant cloud of an impressive number of millions of points. Each mote in this simulated scene represented a node with more computational power than an adult human in their prime.
The graphics pulsed through familiar modes of analysis and deep into the technical weeds of the validation run. Han worked through his familiar algorithm of working out the network structure of a new test run. Each test run would follow a vaguely similar path of network evolution and as such Han had become adept at identifying functional regions of evolved networks. Han swapped viciously between different transformations of the natural network structure and applied labels as he pulled strands out of the discombobulating snarl of networks.
Almost immediately, Han became aware that none of his normal transformations were doing him any good. He felt that he was lost in a topological forest that never seemed to resemble any network structure no matter the convolutions he threw at the datascape surrounding him.
“Excuse me—Mr. Guo?”, he heard an uncertain voice ask.
He jumped as he noticed a uniformed gym attendant standing before him.
“Excuse me…I…”, he managed to say. He glanced uncertainly around the room around him as he struggled to remember where he actually was. He saw the machine he had dismounted some number of minutes before some 3 meters away. It seems he had blindly wandered into the middle of the gym while he analyzed the Rostco data. The young man was wearing a smart, tight-fitting workout jumpsuit with a pulsating pattern of brilliant blues and maroons swirling across his muscled body.
“Mrs. Zhang has requested that you come to the office as soon as possible”, the young man said with a nervous glance at his feet.
Han snapped open his communications window, which apparently, he had flicked into “do not disturb” before he started his escapade through the data. There were some 5 missed channel requests from his direct superior, the President of The Beijing Artificially Intelligent Machines Research Institute, Mrs. Yi Zhang.
Han thanked the boy, who scurried off after a slight bow, and initiated a communications channel with Mrs. Zhang. The channel immediately connected.
“Han, what took you so long to answer? It’s nearly 6 and I imagine you haven’t even laid eyes on the results from this weekend,” the matronly woman said in the shrill, confident tone of a leader that expected absolute perfection from her subordinates.
Han bowed slightly and managed to huff, “Mrs. Zhang, please accept my humblest apologies for my tardiness in responding to your communications requests. I have indeed been inspecting the reports for the last quarter of an hour.”
Mrs. Zhang’s expression soften slightly at his word. “What is your analysis, Han? Is this legitimate?”
“Yes, I believe so ma’am,” said with a sparkle in his countenance.
“You should be at the office already. Call everyone in and get them started on this as soon as you can. We need to run this build through as many more manual tests as we can, while you and I work out what our next steps should be.”
“Of course, ma’am. With your permission, I will terminate this channel and send an immediate request to my leads to arrive to the office early,” Han said with the practiced respect of a lifetime debutant.
“Of course. I…Yes the University President is returning my channel. I will see you when you arrive here,” Mrs. Zhang mumbled distractedly.
Han bowed slightly and terminated the channel. He ran a sweaty hand through his hair, took a single measured breath and initiated a mass channel broadcast to everyone in the Rostco project.
“Fellow engineers, I offer my sincerest apology for the disreputable hour with which I am intruding on your time with your loved ones. Nonetheless, there is an urgent matter that requires your personal attendance at the office as soon as possible. Rostco build 34.5.2671 has achieved a perfect record on the validation suite tests,” Han said with a proud timber in his voice.
“I wish to be the first to offer you all the preliminary congratulations of The Beijing Artificially Intelligent Machines Research Institute. These results are still not very well understood, so we need you, in the flesh, in the office as soon as is possible for us to commence the next greatest phase of our research program. I look forward to seeing you as quick as you are able.” Han inclined his head in a faint homage to a bow and terminated the channel.
He spun on his heels and strode to the gym’s exit terminal as a magnificent grin broke out over his features.