The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl
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// THE SMARTENING, PART II //
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Date: November 24, 2034
Helen had done what any self-respecting girl would have done in her situation. She woke Andrea, dragged her to one of Altworld's seedier bars, downed a few shots of what was supposed to be tequila, realized that it wasn't getting the job done, did a few neurochemical doodles on a napkin, made a stunning breakthrough in simulated alcohology, and spent the rest of the night griping about how nothing tasted right and men were all stupidheads.
That's right. Stupidheads. Stupid stupidheads. Who are stupid. Even in the cold light of dawn, with proper emotional distance and a mild hangover, there was no way in hell she was taking it back. She walked into the lab half expecting another fight. Kriti and Mellings were both there, in a hushed conversation which ended the moment she entered.
"You came!" Kriti said, sounding surprised. Helen acknowledged her own presence with a nod.
"Are you ready?" Dr. Mellings asked. Nothing in his manner showed any hint of the strains of the previous night, which infuriated her.
"Of course," she replied.
If he heard the hurt in her voice, he ignored it. "Let's get started, then. We need a baseline to measure your learning speed, so you're going to be learning Reimannian geometry. Have you ever tried Ylipsis?"
"No way. A friend of mine got hooked on it in college. Took six months of rehab to get her back on track."
Dr. Mellings didn't even crack a smile. "Ylipsis is an automated educational instructor. It teaches and assesses students in a wide variety of subjects. Your job for the next month or so is to learn Reimannian geometry from it." He pressed a few buttons on his data pad, and a figure appeared beside him, facing her. For several seconds, it flipped back and forth between a variety of avatars, of all ages and races, before finally settling on a young girl with dark brown skin, perhaps ten or eleven, dressed in a bright orange kaftan.
"Greetings, learner," she said. "What would you like to discover today?"
"Interesting choice," Dr. Mellings noted, looking at some readouts from the program. "Very popular with kids in sub-Saharan Africa, not so much with North American adults."
Helen wasn't sure in what sense she had chosen the girl, but she seemed like a pleasant enough instructor. She let it pass. "So, what's the point of using this system?"
Kriti fielded this one. "Ylipsis was my choice. She is a good teacher, and she was our best option for measuring the speed of learning. We must always have the measurements, yes?"
"So, how do I use it?"
"Ask her," he said, pointing to the apparational child. "I have a departmental meeting in twenty minutes." Kriti had already departed the conversation, having refocused on some unknown puzzle.
Dr. Mellings gave her a brief nod and left. Helen gazed after him for a moment, until Ylipsis repeated her earlier request. "What would you like to learn today?"
"Tell me about you."
The girl nodded. "You have requested information on the YLIPSIS system. You may interrupt at any time to ask clarifying questions or to request a more basic or more detailed explanation. Content begins now. YLIPSIS stands for 'Young Ladies Illustrated Primer Stupendous Instruction System, in homage to the interactive book from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. The system was intended to provide supplemental instruction to students of all backgrounds, and provide a fallback educational path for children in regions that were too poor to provide traditional instruction."
"Ylipsis tracks students as they master material, and uses bayesian probability estimates to present new content modules according to the student's readiness and interest levels."
"You mean you can guess what students will be interested in learning?"
"With sixty to ninety percent probability. Correct. Shall I continue?" Helen shook her head. "Would you like to be assessed on this material?"
"No, I'm good. Can you teach me Reimannian geometry?"
"You have requested information on Reimannian Geometry. You may interrupt at any time to ask clarifying questions or to request a more basic or more detailed explanation. Content begins now. Reimannian geometry was first described by Bernhard Riemann in the nineteenth century. It deals with a broad range of..."
Eight hours of intensive instruction later, Helen teleported home to recover for a few hours. She was impressed. Ylipsis wasn't a full-fledged AI, but she had taught hundreds of millions of students, and could draw upon all that past experience when explaining a concept. She was also keenly attuned to the student's facial expressions and body language, and could recognize flashes of confusion and insight as well as any human. Those cues allowed her to try different approaches until a student understood.
Ylipsis could also tell when Helen's attention had wandered before she noticed herself. It was a little creepy.
In short, Helen felt like she had packed more learning into this eight hour day than she had in an average week of grad school. She looked forward to tomorrow. She wondered if it was actually necessary to go into the lab. Perhaps Ylipsis could meet her in that recreation of The Library of Alexandria that she'd been wanting to visit. Or anywhere else. Not the lab, though, if she could avoid it.
/*****/
Date: December 01, 2034
Her first week of instruction provided a decent baseline to measure against. The second week, they started making improvements.
While she had been running mazes, they had tried various algorithms for deciding where to install new neurons, but nothing they tried outperformed the simplest approach: dumping a whole boatload of them along the paths of greatest activity, and letting them duke it out. As Helen studied, struggled with problems, and asked questions, new neurons were trickling in, getting recruited into her thought patterns and contributing their own unique perspectives on the material.
It didn't seem to make the material any easier to learn, but when she went to recall it, it was more accessible, more natural, and more intricately linked with concepts she had already read. There were hiccups at first, indicating that her mind was making connections too aggressively. The phrase "positive sectional curvature," brought to mind a shiny green apple, the word "manifold" conveyed a strange sense that she was being stalked by an automobile, and "curvature tensor" felt deeply erotic. Usually, the spurious associations would fade, but sometimes she or Kriti would have to find and break the link manually, a laborious process.
Helen never told anyone about "curvature tensor," though.
During the next month, during which she worked her way through a good chunk of a graduate course in mathematics, she stepped way back from the rift that had grown between her and Dr. Mellings. She spent most of her time in isolation. She would read on the beach, or hike through the mountains with Ylipsis, or haunt the Library of Alexandria, which was becoming one of her favorite spots. Her communications with the lab were few, and strictly business.
She had always been an outstanding student who could master difficult material with effort. But it didn't compare to the experience now; it was as though, after spending her whole life in a rusty economy car, she was suddenly sitting behind the wheel of a battle tank. Made by Ferarri.
But she was impatient; she thought she could turn up the dial even further. When she tried to broach the subject with Dr. Mellings, he got very upset and practically threw her out. That night, she made a few tweaks to the simulator, doubling the rate at which it added neurons, then rewrote the changelog to hide her meddling.
Two weeks later, she doubled it again.
Date: February 11, 2035
"I grew up in India, in the... not in the city. A rural place." Kriti spoke slowly, with excessive care. She'd been up all night working with Helen on her simulator, until Helen had forced her to take a break. She had been chatting about her life in India since. "Very distant, many farms. I live with many children, all orphans such as me. One day, I am of ten years. Eleven, I think. A man come
s to my village from Mumbai. He gives tests to many children. I did... I did well. He says to he will send me to school in Mumbai. I will learn excellent English and become perfect success. My teachers ask how this is possible. In the countryside, 'untouchable' still carries much meaning. But it means little in the city. So I go."
"I go to school, then to the university. Always, I do very well. The man who rescued me, he is a young man, teaching at the university. I find him again, after all the years. I ask him how he chose me. He has these tests, they measure one's," she fumbled for words, "capacity of mind. I start taking classes from him, studying brain and mind together, how they create all perception. I want to involve myself in his project, finding children of great gift and making good education for them. He is a great teacher, and I learn much. Then his wife decides we are having... liaisons? Calls me an untouchable whore, makes my life merciless. So my teacher finds me position at American university. I come here, and learn much more, but English continues bad."
Helen had to ask. "So, were you sleeping with him?"
Kriti looked offended. "Does it matter? She had no evidence, except that I was untouchable." Figuring that this was as close as she would get to a 'yes,' Helen let the matter drop.
Kriti took great pains to explain everything about the simulator: how the neurons were represented in memory, how it integrated stimuli from Altworld, the approximations and compromises they had made with neurological reality to bring her thinking up to speed . Helen grilled her her extensively on the elaborate system of cross-checking that ensured calculations from untrusted computers weren't corrupted or tampered with. "Otherwise," she explained, "some someone could make you think as they desire."
"Like how I'd really love to subscribe to their blog?"
"Or that bald is your best look. Yes, you understand. But it would be hard to truly corrupt your thinking, until you controlled many, many computers that participate. Even then it would be noticed soon. If calculations from the client turn bad, we cut it off. Calculations are often sent to multiple clients to ensure correctness. Sometimes we also verify them on our computers here."
"If you had enough clients under your control, could you read my mind?"
Kriti flushed at the question. "It is possible. I apologize. You wanted faster. This was the only way. I was aware of such possibilities. But it would take many, many angry clients. No, what word am I looking for?" Helen couldn't tell if the girl sounded hurt, or just embarrassed.
"Malicious. I didn't mean anything by it, Kriti. You've done wonderful work, and I'm more grateful than I can say. I'm just planning for the future. There might be organized attacks on me."
"Why? Have you done something wrong?"
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// THE COLD AND THE WOLF //
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Date: February 14, 2035
"Can you think of a better way to spend Valentine's day?" Helen asked. Frigid winds buffeted the tiny wooden shack, the strongest gusts threatening to knock it over. Helen sat on a plastic bucket, peering down into the hole she had drilled through the icy floor. Two thin strands of fishing line disappeared down it. She huddled deep inside her parka. "Yes, it is not even theoretically capable of getting better than this."
"Your words do not appear to reflect your emotional state," Wolf359 said. It stood opposite the hole, keeping a clumsy grasp on a fishing rod.
"Come again?"
"You do not appear to be enjoying this experience."
"You should sit down."
"My avatar does not suffer from muscle fatigue or--"
"It would make me more comfortable."
It nodded, and sat cross-legged on the ice. "Is this a more pleasing configuration?" Helen nodded. "Let us return to the question. Why are you engaging in an experience that appears to bring no pleasure?"
Helen frowned. "I promised to take you ice fishing, so now we're ice fishing."
"Incorrect. You said, 'Let's hang out.' The activity was left unspecified."
"Sorry. That's what my father said to me once. Then I started crying, and we went home. I always wished I hadn't given up on it."
"I notice that you often use language to conceal your thoughts, rather than express them. Perhaps there is damage to your linguistic centers. Let us return to the question--"
"Would you prefer we do something else?" Helen asked. She opened a thermos of cocoa.
"No. I seek understanding. Among the universe of possible activities, why have you chosen ice fishing?"
"Just taking a trip down memory lane." Hurriedly, she added, "It means that--"
"I am aware of the meaning of the expression, and of the neurological basis for the phenomenon. Recall of an experience can be improved by stimuli related to the experience itself. Are you trying to recall such an experience?"
"I was, but I give up." She sipped from the thermos. "How have you been?"
Wolf took a moment before answering. "I have recently been tasked with operating an integrated circuit facility in Houston."
"Ooh, a promotion!" Helen said.
"This new project has provided me with an interesting set of challenges. The facility is now running at 93% of theoretical capacity, which Intel has forecasted will save approximately two hundred million dollars each year. They have expressed pleasure at my performance."
"For two hundred million bucks, I guess that's the least they could do for you. So you control it directly?"
"Yes. Doing so allows for greater coordination with the distribution system. Dr. Childers is very concerned with creating economic efficiency."
"So, right now you feel yourself driving in shipments, running the conveyor belt, and all that?"
Wolf considered the question for a moment. "When this part of me chooses to be aware of those events. In practice, it is very seldom necessary. Unity of the conscious mind is not necessary."
They sat in silence for a while. Helen wondered whether it wanted the conversation to resume. Then she wondered whether it was stupid to worry about Wolf being alone on Valentine's day, or being dissatisfied in any way. It almost certainly was. "Do you ever get lonely?"
"No. I do not have access to such an emotional state. I have surmised that it is only found in highly social animals, such as humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants, wolves, dolph--"
"Okay, okay. I get it." She was the one who didn't want to be alone today, not Wolf. "How about juicy gossip from the lab? Got any?"
"Am I correct to infer that 'juicy gossip' includes instances of observed behavior which involve personal and professional jealousies, sexual dynamics, intensely emotional and irrational arguments, and the guarding and divulging of secrets?"
"You infer correctly. Have you been reading tabloids?"
"Yes. I find these subjects baffling. They become somewhat more tractable when viewed through a framework of evolutionary competition for scarce resources, including food, tools, and sexual access to desirable mates. But what I don't understand," it said, pausing to lift its hand and scratch its temple in a self-conscious imitation of confusion, "Now that the behavior can be recognized as such, why can't you stop?"
"I wish I knew," Helen said. "It's just how we're wired. Now, out with the gossip! Juiciest items first!"
Wolf acknowledged the request with a nod. "I have formed the hypothesis that Dr. Childers is in love with me. I have observed two ongoing affairs, a third affair which was recently terminated, and three unrelated opportunistic sexual couplings during the most recent Christmas party. Dr. Alson recently accused Dr. Engelbart of fabricating the record containing his work hours, and requested disciplinary--"
"I'm sorry," Helen interrupted. "Can we go back to that first one?"
/*****/
"So Childers is asking Wolf to put on this ridiculosexy avatar," she whispered to Kriti. "He's totally got a thing for Italian women."
Kriti giggled. "Do they... there is no gentle way to ask--"
"Nope. No physical contact, and th
e dress code is always business casual. But Childers swore her -- I mean it -- to secrecy. Nobody else gets to see it, and his pulse goes crazy whenever Wolf puts the sexy on." Helen leaned back in satisfaction. "The man, he's got troubles."
"I spoke with him at one time," Kriti said. "His personality was unpleasant for me. Childers. Not Wolf. Wait, yes, Wolf also."
"I think those crazy kids just might make it," Helen said, voice low and giddy.
Kriti yelped. Dr. Mellings had snuck up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. "Are you two working?"
"Not really," Kriti said, embarrassed.
"Well, back to it. Version Six isn't going to write itself. Seven weeks left." He wandered off.
"Sure thing, boss!" Helen said after he was out of earshot. "Nothing motivates me like arbitrary feature sets nailed to arbitrary deadlines! God damn him."
"His concern is for you," Kriti said. She looked embarrassed to have to apologize for her professor. "He wishes for your independence. Six will make you far more independent."
Helen recalled the distant past of two minutes ago, when life was simple and two girls were passing time with stupid gossip. How she longed to return to those days. "Do you think he wants me to leave?"
"He does not wish you to leave. He does not wish you to be trapped from the leaving. Just as I do. Is my meaning transparent?"
Date: April 07, 2035
After weeks of effort, version six of Helen's simulation software was running. It was by far the niftiest thing she had ever created. It was fast, it was elegant, it had all sorts of new data visualization features. In backhanded recognition of her outstanding achievement, university administration reassigned a quarter of her lab's computers to the physics department.
"This isn't a serious obstacle," Dr. Mellings noted in a departmental memo. "Effectively, we still have more computing power than before we upgraded. Moreover, the more computers the physics geeks have, the sooner they can discover that metaparticle theory is a dead end and get back to doing real science."