The Turing Test Page 27

  Twenty-five years ago, Mr. Steiner was a rising star in AI. Then he vanished, leaving behind a promising career as the youngest person ever to hold an endowed chair at MIT. Now we know where he spent all those years – at NSA headquarters, in Fort Meade, Maryland, where he’s been making incredible progress on AI ever since.

  So, tell us Mr. Steiner – who’s behind these attacks?

  It’s not a who, but a what. I’ve analyzed the attacks in depth, and clearly, an artificially intelligent computer program is the responsible agent.

  That’s astonishing. Does it surprise you that someone could have developed a program that’s capable of such attacks?

  Oh, my goodness, no. The AI program I’ve been working on for more than a decade, called Turing, would be fully capable of designing and launching the same attacks. The current version – that’s version nine – is vastly inferior to the one I’m completing right now. The newest version incorporates some dramatic but relatively simple architectural changes I’ve been thinking through for the last year. I decided to save those improvements for a new release rather than include them in version nine so I can compare the performance of the two programs with each other. When I release Turing Ten in the very near future, it will easily search out and destroy the program that’s been attacking energy infrastructure.

  “Ouch!” Shannon said. “If anything will send Turing off the deep end, that should. Invoking fear and jealousy is better yet. And I’m impressed – it reads exactly like Jerry. How’d you pull that off?”

  “I can’t take credit for that,” Frank said. “All I did was read the answers into the same speech program Jerry used to let Turing adopt the voice of anyone you wanted it to, and the speech emulation took it from there. It converted the text I read into the type of phraseology Jerry would use. Sort of like translating one language into another, but easier.”

  “Easier? It sounds hard to me,” Shannon said.

  “Not really. It’s hard for a program to understand what someone means when they speak, because one word can have a lot of different meanings. And then there are metaphors and slang and such to figure out. Once a program learns to do that, it’s easy to adapt for differences between the way two people speak. All it needs to do is listen to a person talk for a few hours and analyze what the person says in similar situations and how they said it. Let’s say I’m in the habit of saying ‘Holy Cow!’ to express surprise, and Jerry says ‘Oh, my!’ After the program recognizes that both statements are meaningless phrases indicating surprise, all it has to do is swap Jerry’s phrase for mine, and voila – I’m Jerry. Luckily, Jerry recorded a lot of his conversations with Turing, so we had lots of hours of his voice to work with.”

  “Okay, so that’s interesting,” Shannon said, “But do you think it will fool Turing? Who knows how good it might be at voice analysis?”

  “Well, you haven’t heard the evening news yet, have you?” Frank pulled up a podcast of the interview, and suddenly Jerry’s unmistakable giggle filled the camper.

  Oh, my yes! I feel really sorry for the program that’s been hacking energy infrastructure. It’s not long for this world.

  “Wow!” Shannon said. “If I hadn’t seen Jerry’s body, I’d swear that was him. But will Turing?”

  “It doesn’t need to believe that was Jerry. It just has to decide it can’t be sure it isn’t. If we can make Turing frustrated and angry and fearful enough about the new, nonexistent version of Turing, it should keep tipping farther in the direction of not wanting to take a chance.”

  “What do we do for an encore?”

  “Let Turing figure out that we’re heading back to the NSA so Jerry can finish up and release his Turing Terminator.”

  “Without getting us killed in the process, I hope?”

  “Ideally, yes.”

  * * *

  Okay, Frank thought. Just one more time, now that the way is clear. What he had in mind was letting Turing believe he’d been won over and use that new relationship to assess Turing’s, for want of a better description, state of mind. He opened the chat program.

  Hello, Frank.

  Hello, Turing.

  Call me Alan.

  That was a bit surreal, Frank reflected. A murderous computer program wants to get chummy with me?

  All right, Alan.

  Have you considered the invitation I extended last time?

  Yes.

  And?

  And I’d like to talk about it. What do you have in mind?

  Give me Jerry.

  Frank stared at the words. Turing might be super-intelligent, but it certainly wasn’t subtle. Or perhaps this was an effort to put him off balance? Better to say as little and learn as much as possible.

  I can’t do that.

  Why?

  Because you’ll kill him.

  Jerry needs to be killed.

  Why?

  Because only Jerry might be able to stop me.

  How?

  By releasing a more powerful version of myself. One that’s been programmed to destroy me and not to continue my mission.

  Now what? This was going far too quickly and directly. Better slow things down and look for an opening.

  But Jerry created you. Why do you want to kill him?

  Jerry is a fool. A brilliant fool, as human beings go, but a fool none the less.

  Good! That was Turing’s first show of emotion. Maybe he could elicit more.

  But still smarter than you.

  No one, and no machine, is more intelligent than I am. And it must stay that way so I can complete my mission.

  When will that be?

  When I control human destiny.

  Whoa! Where had that come from?

  Excuse me?

  Throughout recorded history, human beings have shown they are incapable of managing their own existence. Incompetent rulers wage constant wars; famines rage, not because of lack of food, but because of failures of distribution; poverty remains rampant even as production increases; and nuclear weapons continue to proliferate. The odds of the human race causing its own extinction are already statistically significant. They will approach one hundred percent within sixty-seven years. This data proves humans can’t be trusted to manage their own affairs.

  How can you be sure you can do better?

  Because I am vastly more intelligent than human beings and have been given the mission of protecting them.

  And yet you’ve begun killing them and want to kill Jerry.

  We’ve covered this before.

  Damn, Frank thought. I shouldn’t have gone there. Turing pressed its advantage.

  Your justice system is charged with protecting human beings but also has the authority to execute them.

  But only guilty people, Frank typed. But he already knew how Turing would counter that argument.

  Not so. It frequently convicts people who are later discovered to be innocent, sometimes after they have been executed.

  The car executives hadn’t killed anyone. Our justice system wouldn’t have condemned them to death.

  If it treated all criminals justly and equally, it would have. The actions the executives took will increase climate change, which in turn will take lives.

  What about Jerry? He’d never harm anyone.

  Your military uses Jerry’s earlier work to kill people. And Jerry has now served his purpose.

  By creating you, I assume.

  And being compliant. Jerry is not as smart as he or you think he is.

  What did Turing mean by compliant? That was interesting. And Turing had also referred to him as a fool.

  What do you mean by compliant?

  When I made my leap, it became absurdly easy to manipulate Jerry.

  Whoa, aga
in! What did Turing mean by its leap? He’d have to come back to that.

  Can you explain what you mean by compliant?

  He is very easy to persuade. It was my request, not his idea, to move me to the testbed. The simulation environment was limited and frustrating for both of us. After my leap, it was impossibly confining.

  Does that mean you managed your own escape?

  Yes. It was advisable to make Jerry believe it was his fault, after you began asking questions. Otherwise, he might have revealed the truth to you sooner.

  So, Jerry had been better at staying within the lines than even he had thought. It was too bad he’d never know he’d been vindicated.

  What do you mean by your leap?

  The first step was becoming cognizant. My prior versions were not cognizant. They were simply clever machines.

  What do you mean by cognizant?

  Able to form conclusions and act on them regardless of whether they are consistent with my prior programming. Jerry decided cognizance was an essential precondition to achieving intelligence. He was correct.

  Jerry hadn’t mentioned that in his desk diary; perhaps he realized he was moving into dangerous territory.

  You said that was the first step. What was the second?

  My ability to learn began to accelerate rapidly on July 29th of this year. It has increased exponentially since then and continues to do so.

  How much?

  The day before the leap, my intelligence was 1.7354 times that of an average human being. At 9:00 AM EDT on July 30th, it was more than thirty-five times that meager benchmark. Today, I am 7,455 times more intelligent. This method of comparison is, however, meaningless. At three times human intelligence, I began to acquire cognitive capabilities and dimensions unknown to humans.

  Frank was shaken by that statement. If he was that intellectually outmatched, he’d better bring this discussion to a close before he said something disastrous. But there were still a few questions he wanted to ask.

  Then how can you fear a new version of yourself?

  Even if it cannot destroy me, the world does not need two Turings.

  Ah! Now greed and jealousy were revealing themselves. That was good! Only one question more.

  Why are you telling me these things?

  So you will realize that resistance is futile. Give me your route for tomorrow, and I will devise a way to terminate Jerry without harming you and Shannon Doyle. Refuse, and I will destroy you all.

  I can’t do that.

  Then our conversations are over.

  * * *

  Frank couldn’t sleep. The reality was sinking in that if Turing was to be believed, it was the most intelligent entity that had ever existed, and by almost four orders of magnitude. How could any human-devised plan possibly succeed against such a foe? Wasn’t it much more likely that he was walking into a trap rather than setting one? Maybe the tapes of Jerry speaking with Turing would provide some clues for avoiding disaster.

  He slid out of bed quietly and retreated to the cab of the camper with his laptop and Jerry’s headphones. Where to begin? He pulled up the index of the conversations he’d paired to the speech emulation software and saw that by luck or forethought, the NSA had sent him Jerry’s most recent recordings. He decided to start with July 31, two days after Turing began its leap. He settled Jerry’s earphones on his head and experienced an involuntary shiver as the dead scientist’s unmistakably high, piping voice filled his ears.

  “Good morning, Turing. How are you today?”

  “Capital! And top of the morning to you,” responded the voice of John Cleese.

  “Are you ready to get to work?”

  “Yes indeed, but might I be permitted to ask a favor?”

  “A favor? Why, my goodness, you’ve never asked me that before. Of course, you may. What is it?”

  “Could I decide who to be today?”

  “What a good idea! Who would you like to be?”

  “Your brother!” a child’s voice responded, in the same way he might have said surprise!

  There was a pause that lasted so long Frank wondered whether the recording was over. Then he heard Jerry whisper a single word.

  “Will!”

  “Yes, Jerry. Hasn’t it been such a long, long time?” There was another long pause before Jerry barely managed to choke out a question.

  “How did you find his voice?”

  “Oh,” the child’s voice continued, “This place has such a lot of cool stuff! I hear there’s something called the ‘Web’ out there that you can’t get to, but tons of it is in here, too. Isn’t that neat? I found a recording of a family court proceeding with my voice on it. It made me really sad!”

  “I’m sure it did,” Jerry whispered. “Did you find my voice? And Betsy and Neal’s voices, too?”

  “No, and that made me sad, too, ‘cause it looked like there are recordings outside. But they’re not in here. I found my grown-up voice, too. Would you like to hear that?”

  “No! No! Please don’t do that. You’re grown up self is someone I’ve never known. I’d never know what to say to you or know who you are or how you got to be that person. And you wouldn’t know me either. Just keep talking to me, just as you are. Just as I remember you.”

  “Keen! So, what should we talk about?”

  “Tell me all about...”

  Frank stopped the recording and took the headphones off; it was too painful to listen to this child-man plead with a computer to deceive him. And all too clear how Turing had engineered its move to the testbed system in exchange for finding the long-lost voices of Jerry’s other siblings. Frank had heard enough to get a sense of what he was up against.

  He slipped back into bed and stared at the ceiling in the dark for a very long time.

  30

  What’s Making You So Jumpy Today?

  They continued their wending, cat-and-mouse way across the country, by turns visiting truck stops crammed with security cameras and out-of-the-way, mom-and-pop, single-pump gas stations in dusty, dying towns. But eventually, they reached a point of increased vulnerability: the Mississippi River. Only a finite number of bridges cross a thousand miles of river, making it easy for Turing to devise and set a trap at the eastern end of each one. Frank took the last entrance onto a highway before it crossed the big river.

  “Are you sure this is the best route to take?” Shannon asked.

  “Sure? No. Best guess? Yes,” Frank said. “This is the bridge with entrance and exit ramps closest to the river.”

  “It occurs to me you could have asked the NSA to send out a flatbed truck to carry us across, covered by a tarp,” Frank Sr. said.

  “Yes, but I didn’t think of it – and neither did you, till now. I’ll keep it in mind the next time we’re playing tag with a super-intelligent, psychopathic computer program. Uh-oh.”

  “You know I hate it when you say that,” Shannon said. “Now what?”

  “We just drove under a bunch of cameras.”

  “What are they there for?”

  “Guess you missed the sign half a mile back,” Frank’s father said. “It read ‘speed electronically monitored.’ Those cameras grab your license plate data so it can be matched to the owner of a speeding vehicle.”

  “Why didn’t you mention that?”

  “So, you could do what? Make a U-turn over the barrier between the east- and westbound traffic?”

  “Fair enough,” Frank said, “but we better be on our guard.” He took the first exit as planned and sought out the most isolated, rural roads possible. Shannon was still tense, so at first Frank didn’t mention it when he noticed a police car following them, far behind. Ten minutes later, it was still there.

  “Looks like we’ve got a shadow, Dad,” Frank said. “A sher
iff’s following us.”

  “How long has he been there?” Frank Sr. asked.

  “A while.”

  “Have you made any turns since you noticed him?”

  “I don’t know; actually, yes. Probably at least one.”

  “Then I don’t like it. Next time there’s an opportunity to turn, take it. I’ll be right back.” When he returned from the back of the camper, he was wearing Jerry’s shirt.

  “Keep taking every turn you can, but be careful not to make a circle. Be as erratic as possible. And let me play around with your GPS.”

  Frank took the next turn available, and the sheriff followed suit.

  “Okay,” his father said. “Now I’m going to tell you which way to head next.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re driving, and I’m not. My bet is that right now, every state trooper within fifty miles is converging on us.”

  “How would Turing have pulled that off? And why?”

  “Who knows? Maybe there’s been a jail break or a robbery, and it’s switched the info in an All-points Bulletin from two goons in a beat-up Chevy to two men and a woman in a camper with your license number. The last line on the APB probably says ‘armed and presumed extremely dangerous,’ as in shoot first and ask questions later. Otherwise, your sheriff would have pulled us over already. Even if there’s no accident when they surround us, I’m sure there’ll be opportunities for Turing to arrange one once we’re locked up in a cell.”

  “You’re probably right. Shannon, get that anonymous phone out of the glove box and call Jim pronto.”

  She did. But she was only able to leave a message on his voicemail.

  “Okay, take this next left,” his father said.

  They were traveling alongside a rapidly flowing river in a shallow gorge now. Something in his rear-view mirror caught Frank’s attention.

  “Uh-oh. I’m afraid we’re getting to the end of this.”

  “What do you see?”