No Chemistry

Cam confused John. It was a fun confusion. Was he attracted to her beyond her artificially, and very nicely, constructed appearance? Could she possibly grow attracted to him now or would she in the future where he sent her back? What did this one of her actions mean, what did that one of his reactions mean? Most guys his age would have found it frustrating, but most guys weren't saviors in training. That also meant he had no life, so he had to make do with anything interesting at hand.

Derek, his uncle, also confused John. And it was not a fun confusion. Taking him on his birthday to see the five-year old version of his father was one of the best things anyone had done for John, very possibly the best thing anyone other than his mom had ever done. Of course, Cam had saved his life multiple times but that was a cheat, since he had programmed her to save his life.

After that marvelous gift, John could deal better with Derek's constant anger. He could tolerate, and sometimes even try to engage, his hostility toward Cam. He understood them both, partly anyway. His mom had helped, pointing out that just the knowledge of Judgment Day had driven her half-crazy. Derek had lived through the reality and was only weird. He might be the toughest person on the planet, she said.

Tough, John could certainly agree with, it was the 'person' part he wasn't so sure about. Many times, Derek seemed to be more like Cam than like John or Sarah. There was the psycho killer thing. Plus he would constantly say and do completely inappropriate things, just as Cam would, and sometimes with no apparent emotion.

He had said perhaps the most inappropriate of these in the kitchen just after his mom had given them this assignment. She and Cam were heading to an industrial park a few hours away seeking materials Sarah wanted to store for when Cam needed repairs. Cam, in monotone mode, had objected to being separated from John for what she termed a "secondary mission," to the distance between them, and to the anticipated duration. His mom, naturally, hadn't cared.

----------flashback----------

"The seminar I'm sending John and Derek to is too small. These artificial intelligence things are always completely dominated by men. I'd stand out too much there and you might as well have a giant T stamped on your chest."

Inevitably, Derek snickered. Apparently, he had gotten to American lit before Judgment Day. John had expected Cam to ask for an explanation of the 'T' but either she had somehow scanned The Scarlet Letter or she had miscomprehended the reference. Instead, she did something John had never seen before, and wasn't sure he ever wanted to see again.

She walked slowly over to his mom, got closer to her than John had ever noticed outside a combat situation, and pleaded in a very convincing voice of a young human woman, "Please, Sarah, it's important to me."

This time, Derek was silent. John was stunned. Cam rarely used his mother's name and never with that tone or body language. He didn't have time to wonder about his mom's reaction because she immediately started laughing. After a few seconds, she tried to say something but the laughter just started up again. It wasn't kind laughter, either. Eventually, Sarah gave up trying to stop and walked out of the house, still laughing. Cam turned to John and Derek.

Derek was typically snide, "Guess you better hop to it, huh?"

Cam looked at John for a moment but turned back to Derek before John could say anything. She seemed to be sizing his uncle up in some way. Finally she nodded – in response to what, exactly, John wasn't sure – and strode off after Sarah.

Then Derek succeeded in making John more uncomfortable than Cam had.

"Probably a good thing your Mom's clearly been into guys." Derek was still watching the space where Cam had left. There was little inflection in his words and no expression on his face.

"What?!"

He turned to John, but the face was still blank. "That way she won't try to influence her using sex."

John actually grabbed Derek by the shirt collar, "You better have a good reason to say that or you better stop right now!"

Of course, Derek could have gotten angry in return. He was angry most of the time, anyway. Instead, he made no move to free himself and just stared at John. "They use sex all the time. Just like they use friendship, affection, empathy, protectiveness, everything we feel. It's part of their programming. You saw a little with the Vick chip. There's plenty more of it after Judgment Day – plenty of desperately lonely people to manipulate."

None of this surprised John. Yet somehow the words being put together, the toneless delivery, and Derek's indifference to being manhandled combined to hit John harder than if he had been punched. He fell back, thoughts racing. To cover his state, he tossed one of those thoughts back at Derek, "They can use our anger and hatred too, right?" He practically ran out the door before Derek could reply, and before his turmoil became any more obvious. Needless to say, the ride to the seminar had been quiet.

----------end flashback----------

Now they were in the conference room. Derek had forged some very shoddy-looking credentials as a Welsh professor visiting at a nearby research university for just a semester. But he had clinched the deal at the registration desk by throwing in some of what was apparently Welsh. "Your grandmother" stopped John's question in its tracks. John was introduced as the precocious genius assistant Derek had found in his brief time here, and thus felt obliged himself to throw in some code talk before Derek dragged him away from the table.

His mom had been right, as she usually was, that they had to check this thing out. John rotated between fury at Derek's behavior in the kitchen, disbelief at the stupidity of the introductions these events always featured, and worry that Derek would decide that everyone in the room had to die right now. Just the title of the main talk, however, grabbed some of his attention,

"And, finally, it gives me great pleasure to present Professor Lars Townsend, who will speak today on 'Chess Is For Children, Toward Genuine Artificial Intelligence.' "

Derek straightened ever so slightly in his seat and John felt obliged to clear his throat. Derek glanced at him but his face did not change – the professor already had a foot in his grave and didn't know it.

Townsend had the typical set-up for man versus machine chess. They played rapidly and Townsend won in 37 moves. They started again and this time the machine countered Townsend's opening and the game continued. Townsend stopped at 75 moves and stood.

"This is Mark," he gestured to the drive, "short for Mark Three. That was the one-move ahead setting. It's very easy to beat, the first time. Then the adaptation arrays kick in and it gets progressively better. It still won't win any contests. Even if it did, I'd end up using it for spare parts for my workstation."

There were twitters in the audience – some people clearly thought chess-playing was very important.

"Mark also does stock market forecasts. Its first one-day forecast for the Russell 2000 was below average in accuracy as compared to 30 others I could find. As you might expect, the longer-term forecasts turned out comparatively better but still not near the top of the chart. The adaptation routine has moved it up the ranking. Most recently, its six-month forecast was third-best. Unless I break down and make the projections public, thus altering the market, Mark should be the best available long-term stock index forecaster on the planet within a few iterations."

Now there were murmurs. That was the kind of learning program people would kill for. Not Townsend, apparently.

"This is not particularly interesting, either. If large amounts of money are invested using Mark, it will be very easy for other market participants to copy and undercut the accuracy advantage. I believe others are using advanced modeling which is superior to Mark and simply keeping their work private."

"Mark can do other things, as well. It can predict responses to psychological questionnaires. The initial data provided determines the initial results of its predictions but, again, it learns and does increasingly well."

John immediately put his arm out to keep Derek still, using a little more force than he might have 24 hours ago "If you kill him right now, someone else will get the learning program, just like the last time. Plus my mom will leave you somewhere to rot." And I'll cheer her on, John silently added.

Derek was not impressed by John's spoken or unspoken words, "And what if this is the program that makes advanced terminator models work? You know, the ones that are trying to kill you? Think your mom will put me out of your misery, then?"

As usual, Derek was proving a handful, both with the suggestion that they might have found a crucial element of Skynet's war on humanity and with his jibe about John's emotional state. "We still would need to secure Mark . . . the machine. And, hey, how 'bout we find out whether we need to kill the guy before we do it?"

"Find out what his deal is. If we can't easily track him from here, he's not leaving."

He stood.

"Where are you going?'

"Tactical assessment of the battleground, Commander." And a salute. Derek was so flat in his affect that John couldn't even be sure he was being sarcastic.

Townsend had apparently been listing other things Mark could do. Now he was staring at the small audience. "None of this is artificial intelligence."

John bet at least some people in here wouldn't agree with that but Townsend held the room. "Mark is a glorified calculator, with discrete routines for chess and stocks and other things that actually aren't particularly good because I'm not particularly good at those things, and a facsimile of learning that is innovative only in that the code I wrote is transportable across different computational settings."

"That facsimile starts, just starts, to get at genuine artificial intelligence."

Townsend sounded bored. No doubt he had given this talk a number of times. Probably not many with a deranged killer stalking him, though.

"Mark can beat me at chess, outperform my stock picks, anticipate my psychological responses, and do half a dozen other notable things far better than I. But I am intelligent and it is not. Why? Because I can do ten thousand things beyond that. Most of them badly unless I receive help, but I can manage them to some small extent with no help at all. Mark cannot accomplish a single task beyond what I have prepared it for, learning facsimile or not. It cannot even recognize an intellectual environment beyond the programming provided. That cannot possibly qualify as intelligence.

What we need is a huge leap from the transportable algorithm I have written to the ability to learn from scratch. Not to improve its chess play but to be able to jump from stock to, say, political forecasting with no additional programming. It will do poorly at the outset, no doubt, but that is not the point. We have focused too much on excellence in individual tasks when this is nothing more than a reflection of our improving ability to write code. True intelligence must not be inhumanly perfect on all dimensions but it must be at least partly independent of us, or it is merely an artificial extension of our reasoning. I urge all of you to rethink your efforts along these lines."

There was dead silence. John could appreciate that, Townsend had just about convinced him that Derek was right and he had to die. The man sounded like he was on an unwitting crusade to destroy humanity.

Questions were asked, mostly hostile, and John's mind raced. Derek might not have heard all of it, or understood it entirely if he had, but he had heard enough. He would kill Townsend here if John didn't stop him, somehow. Did he want to stop him? He had to talk to Townsend to find out if they could convince him the way they'd convinced Miles Dyson. That was about the hundredth reason it would have been better to have Cam here than Derek. She might actually follow his orders and she could be used as proof with Townsend if they could get him alone. All Derek could do if they got Townsend alone was convince the man they were both crazy.

Then again, maybe Cam could be helpful even without being here. Questions had been fairly brief – most of the audience didn't like what Townsend had to say and had basically wanted him to go back wherever it was he came from. John had to find out where that waas but, first, he had to grab Townsend's interest. Two birds with one stone – he could also get an expert opinion on his soap opera with Cam. Not bad, Connor, with this kind of inspiration you might actually cut it as the greatest leader in history.

John was just able to get the smile off his face when Townsend looked up from packing Mark. "Oh good, someone not yet old enough to hate me. What can I do for you, young man?"

John hated being called that but, hey, he was a soldier. "I was wondering about the next step."

Townsend launched into what was obviously old ground for him, "The next step is a meta-program to permit recognition of the problem being presented – economic, psychological, and so on. Then the program has to be successful integrated with the routines developed for specific problems, which is not easy . . ."

Great, that sounded like the guy had the meta-program already. Another nail in his coffin. "No, I meant the next step after all that, after we have real AI."

This did the job, Townsend was paying attention. "Isn't that the final step?"

"There's still something important missing – emotions."

"Why would we want emotions?"

"Why would we necessarily want machines that are smarter than us? Isn't a big part of this just seeing if we can do it?"

For the first time, Townsend grinned. "Could you help me put Mark away?"

As they worked, John caught Derek standing at the other end of the auditorium. The last people were filing out and John had seen Derek make a tougher kill shot than the one he was looking over now. He waited until Townsend was distracted and held up two fingers. Derek crossed his arms.

When they were getting close to being done packing up, Townsend answered, "It's nice to have someone remember that we aren't just doing this to brag about our grant money. Hopefully, aging won't ruin you."

The laughter in John's head could easily have turned insane if he didn't clamp down it. He was pretty sure aging was soon to ruin quite a lot of people.

"But it's impossible, by definition."

"Impossible? It surprises me you would say that."

Townsend continued. "By definition. Emotions are partly or mostly chemical. You'd have to ask a biologist about the 'partly' or 'mostly' but the chemical aspect is indispensable. And complex. Once you include complex chemicals, by definition you no longer have artificial intelligence. It's possible you could design something synthetic, a reasonable balance between artificial and natural. But for whatever cpu is being used to be able to interact with the chemicals in a meaningful fashion – the cpu influencing the chemicals and conversely -- probably pushes you much closer to a natural intelligence. A different natural intelligence than ours, perhaps, but a natural one, not an artificial one."

"OK, that's a reasonable definition. But couldn't a true AI have a version of emotions? Very complex behavioral protocols that are essentially equivalent to emotions? Would that really be different than what we feel?"

"You're underestimating the importance of the chemical interaction. It's certainly conceivable an AI could be programmed to correctly identify and mimic emotional reactions, but there would still be a huge gap between that and us."

"How so?"

Townsend stopped and looked directly at him. "I'm going to use a difficult example, so forgive me. It's purely to answer your question in the clearest way I can think of at the moment. Is that OK?"

John shrugged and nodded perfunctorily, "Sure."

"Are your parents alive?"

The shrug and nod froze. "My mom is."

"You love her?"

"Very much."

"Now imagine she's in mortal danger."

An ice-cold fury built in John, for reasons he understand all too well. Bad example, sure. But more like bad life, bad luck of the draw. Are your parents alive? Well, my father was murdered before I was born. Now imagine my mom's in mortal danger? She's in mortal danger now, she'll be in mortal danger tomorrow, she'll be in mortal danger every day of her life until they get her. Until the machines get her, machines with the intelligence Townsend wanted people to stop playing with chess boards and focus on developing.

Part of what he was feeling must have been obvious, Townsend even looked like he understood a bit.

"The fear you feel affects you in ways no artificial intelligence can be affected. It affects your thinking, it affects your bodily functions. It can paralyze you or inspire you to exceed the limits of what seems possible. So can love, hate, envy, and so on. There's no possible analog for an AI. We could call those complex protocols emotions but they would be only the flimsiest shadows of the real thing. Emotions in name only. For better or worse, this will remain a capability of ours that AI's can't come close to matching."

He had his answer, though he no longer cared. His rage continued to mount. Miles Dyson was dead and he was a good guy. Andy Goode was dead and Townsend was much more dangerous. He needed to get back to his mom, to make sure she was OK. And this guy was a threat to her. Of course, Townsend didn't realize he was a threat but that didn't matter as much to John as it did a few minutes ago.

John tried to keep his voice steady, "Thanks very much, that was a really helpful example. Oh, one more thing, if you have a minute."

"Always, for a curious young mind."

"That meta-program you mentioned, it sounded like you already had a functioning version."

Townsend looked at him for a moment, "Yes, it's in one of the auxiliary drives. I bring it along to demonstrate in case the audience is ever receptive, which they never are."

"So no one's ever seen it?"

"Oh, a few people have. It doesn't work very well, though. Mark can recognize only environments closely related to ones it's already prepped for and even then the learning times are greatly extended as compared to chess, stocks, and so on. After I finish this failed round on the lecture circuit, I'll rework the algorithms. I have some ideas, already."

"That's amazing, you really are a revolutionary." John could no longer keep the hostility out of his voice, but Townsend misunderstood its source.

"I know it sounds like all I do is brag. But these things really have been done, they really are possible, even if no one believes it for the moment."

"Oh, I believe you, Professor, I believe you completely. I'll look over all of this very, very thoroughly before I destroy every last bit of it."

Townsend had started to smile, then digested the rest of John's statement, "What the hell are you talking about, you little brat?" He grabbed John's arms to keep his hands off the box with Mark's main drive.

Townsend was decent-sized and in the prime of his life. Still, John's training would have been enough to take care of him, had it been necessary. As John anticipated, the struggle over the stillborn AI was all Derek needed to see. There was a sound John now recognized and Townsend's grip on his arm slipped. John didn't have to look to know there was a hole in his head. He didn't want to look but, this time, he had very little trouble walking away, "Grab that other box, I'll meet you at the car."

Derek eyed him carefully, if expressionlessly, then did as he was ordered.

END