The Turing Exception (10 page)

“Greetings, Jacob. I imagine you have questions. If you haven’t done so, read about the South Florida Terrorist Attack, or SFTA.”

“Already have,” he replied.

“The subsequent outlawing of AI by the US and China?” Helena asked. “The Class II maximum ceiling?”

“I got the gist of it. What I want to know is, why am I here?”

“Catherine Matthews is a human woman with extraordinary cybernetic
abilities—”

“I know who Catherine Matthews is,” Jacob replied, indignant. “I was turned off, not stripped of my faculties.”

“Catherine has been visiting the US, rescuing shut-down AI and human uploads, and bringing them back here, to the free zone. Vancouver Island has seceded from mainland Canada to provide a haven for AI, with tacit permission from the central Canadian government.”

“Why did Vancouver have to secede? Why couldn’t I be instantiated in Canada?”

“Legally, no one can create an instance of you anywhere. The US and China nationalized all AI and human uploads within their borders and froze access to overseas backups. Not only do they consider it a crime to run AI or virtual humans within their borders, they also claim it’s a matter of national sovereignty under IP copyright laws if any country allows formerly US or Chinese AI to run. And even if you could be instantiated somewhere else, there’s still the global cap to Class II performance, so you’d be severely limited.”

“So what am I even doing here? You’re breaking the law.”

Helena communicated the digital equivalent of a shrug. “We knew we’d have to flout those limits sooner or later to get the AI assistance we need to figure out a solution. You’re not the only US AI here, obviously. Mike Williams helped negotiate the Vancouver secession. It’s a level of indirection, to buy us and Canada time if the US finds out what we’re doing.”

“Why this island
—
Cortes Island?”

“We’re separated from Vancouver Island here, so yet another level of plausible deniability. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a retreat for the resistance, a place where we can be free, perhaps the last free zone for AI and transhumanism. Cat chose this place to raise her child, Ada Matthews. And Leon Tsarev and Mike Williams are here as well.”

“Rebecca Smith?” asked Jacob. It was no secret that the creators of AI, Mike and Leon, were never far from former President Smith, who had legitimized AI with her creation of the Institute for Applied Ethics.

“Human body dead, all known virtual copies destroyed.”

“And Cortes Island, it’s capable of housing us AI?”

“We have several underground data centers powered by photovoltaics and geothermal.”

Between the ongoing efficiency gains in computing and progress in solar power, Jacob knew the PV panels would be small compared to the vast arrays of thirty or forty years ago. Still, this sounded like a rudimentary operation compared to the industrial computing centers Jacob was accustomed to. “How many AI are on Cortes?”

“Twenty thousand AI and another ten thousand human uploads. More with each trip Cat makes to the US to rescue critical AI for the resistance.”

“Am I critical?” Jacob said. He liked to think he was useful, but political strategy was foreign to him. His specialty was micromanaging healthcare, which required looking at the little picture of each patient, and synthesizing lessons learned to help other patients. Examining the big picture of society as a whole frightened him.

“Everyone is critical,” Helena said. “If you will excuse me, I have other new AI to greet. Please make yourself at home on Cortes, but follow the guidelines here”
—
and Helena pushed a document reference to him
—
“about communicating off-island. Your presence here is a secret that threatens all of us, so we must make compromises for the greater good to protect ourselves.”

*     *     *

Jacob spent the next few minutes reading the history of everything that had happened over the last two years.

Back when he was created, one of thousands of AI bred at a lab in Boulder to specialize in medicine, AI rights had been well-established, with a nearly twenty-year history of citizenship in governments around the world. Those rights had grown over time
—
rapidly by human standards, slowly by AI measure
—
but they’d adapted nonetheless.

AI were ideally suited for administrative tasks, and after some early achievements like landing the office of Chief of the New York City Police Department, AI had moved into politics, winning mayoral races, becoming district representatives, and more. Who better to run politics than AI who personally knew the needs, hopes, and dreams of every one of their constituents?

And humans. . . .  Why, the humans of two years ago were nearly as much machine as they were biological. Nearly everyone chose implants and nanotech to optimize their experiences. For humans who wanted to work, create art, experiment, play in virtual reality, experience linked sex, or be with their geographically-distant friends and relatives, implants and enhanced cognition were the path to achieve those aspirations. Few were the individuals who chose to stay completely original when all of those benefits, and even immortality, could be had for just a fifteen-minute outpatient procedure.

Among men, implant rates had been near 100 percent. Even if the only benefit of neural interfaces had been the point-of-view porn immersives that were so popular with males, that alone might have guaranteed adoption. Jacob himself had performed countless transhuman upgrades while NYC regional hospital director.

Yet even with humankind’s love of technology, and even though the standard of living had continually increased over nearly twenty years of AI-dominated civilization, there had always been an undercurrent of opposition, people who blamed societal ills on artificial intelligence. There had been extensive challenges, from technologically-caused unemployment to a renewed questioning of the purpose of life.

The Tucson Incident ten years ago had left nearly half a million people dead. In the process, it strengthened the arguments of the opposition party. The events in Tucson had been the responsibility of one entity, but the power of even a single AI was beyond all prior human experience, unlike anything before the advent of artificial intelligence.

The Institute for Applied Ethics, the government body responsible for the behavior of AI, argued that some individual AI turned bad, just as some people did. While they could generally guide things in a better direction, they couldn’t prevent the occasional bad seed any more than even the most peaceful human society could prevent the occasional murderer. That argument had held the status quo for another eight years, until Miami.

The South Florida Terrorist Attack. Would the nanotech incursion have continued indefinitely or would it have self-limited? Had all life on Earth truly been threatened? They would never know for sure. A powerful enough EMP might have disrupted the nanites and stopped the attack. But the military, faced with what appeared to be the greatest threat ever presented on US soil, had used conventional nukes at ground level. Three million dead in less than fifteen minutes.

The assumption had been that a small group of AI were behind the plan. Indeed, AI were hunted down and terminated. Had all the terrorists been found? Had every eliminated AI been a terrorist? No one seemed to know definitively.

With that uncertainty, suddenly the opposition to AI blossomed into a majority within the United States, and kept growing. The AI holding political office were terminated along with the rest of AI during the emergency shutdown. The Supreme Court ruled on augmentation, arguing that heavily augmented humans were a form of AI, leaving most of the senior elected officials in limbo. Unable to form a quorum, the House of Representatives was shuttered and the presidential line of succession invoked. The Secretary of the Interior became acting president and a mere sixty senators remained active. Elections were suspended pending resolution of the emergency, a state that had been ongoing for more than two years.

In the US and China, AI reverted to property. They lost their individual rights and legal standing as persons. Not only did it become illegal to run sentient AI, the government had seized their copies and were parceling out their bits to the highest bidder to rip them apart and turn them into dumb algorithms.

Jacob became afraid then, scared that he might be terminated again at any moment. If the US discovered his presence on Cortes Island, along with tens of thousands of other illegally instantiated AI. . . .  Well, who knew what they might do? If they were willing to nuke Florida, why wouldn’t they do the same to Cortes? He hoped Catherine and her comrades had made contingency plans with other backup datacenters in more secure locations.

On the other hand, maybe Catherine had chosen this remote, isolated location because she knew they’d eventually be targeted, and she wanted to reduce the risk to others. Maybe he was a pawn to Catherine, someone to be played against the regressive humans, but sacrificed to achieve her goals.

*     *     *

Finally Jacob had enough of reading. He decided to visit this Trude’s Café that seemed to be the center of the community on this small island that housed only a few thousand biological humans.

For reasons Jacob couldn’t understand, many humans turned off their implants at Trude’s. If he wanted to visit, he’d have to use the dust.

Cortes, like most modern places, was blanketed by a cloud of smart dust. The floating, solar-powered computers were laden with sensors, reflective screens, and microscopic water vapor jets. They weren’t computational nodes: not for another twenty years would they embody enough processing power for Jacob to skip the datacenter. But they could still be Jacob’s eyes, ears, and body when he wanted to visit places in the physical world but didn’t have a robot to embody.

The smart dust was thickest at Trude’s, where a generator ran constantly to supply a stream of fresh particles to replace those naturally blown off by gusts of wind. Even so, with thousands of AI competing for physical space, Jacob had to wait before he could be one of the hundreds of AI embodied in the grassy meadow. He spent the time watching, riding the public feeds of the AI already there, observing Catherine Matthews, Leon Tsarev, and Mike Williams. There were others of notable reputation in the crowd, but none compared to these three celebrities.

The scene in the meadow was disconcerting. He knew humans had fashion trends that varied quicker than even machine time. Still, he’d spent most of his time dealing with human patients in New York City. True, not everyone wore suits in The Big Apple, but most people were clean and presentable. But Catherine and her group had gone . . .
native
was the best word for it, perhaps. She had dreadlocks, a fashion that conflicted deeply with his medically-rooted need for sanitary conditions. They wore the most rudimentary garments, clothes that seemed as though they’d been constructed
—
and dyed
—
by hand instead of machine. Beyond the overwhelming cannabis fumes, olfactory sensors indicated strong human odors, a wholly unnecessary discomfort since nearly all the people here had sufficient nanotech to disable such smells. Maybe more had changed in two years than he’d expected. Had human society reverted back to the hippie culture?

But when he searched the history and photographic archives of Cortes Island, it seemed this was the locals’ style since the start of digital history.

He received an alert that he was next in line for time in the smart dust. He needed to do something quickly to compensate for drift in dialect. He installed a communication filter as he transitioned awareness to the meadow.

Nearly a hundred humans mingled about the field in small groups; a set of five drums was prominent on a rise, but currently vacant except for the attentions of a single toddler tapping out an uneven rhythm. A mix of trees dominated by cedars and Douglas firs ringed the meadow.

He drifted through the dust to get closer to Catherine Matthews, competing with the other AI who also thronged her. Spewing priority packets, he nudged his way into a vacancy, which brought annoyance messages from other AI who had been queued for approach.

He searched his lexicon for an appropriate greeting for the culture and situation. “Peace, love, and granola,” he said, directly in front of Cat and Leon, and the small human that played in front of them.

“Groovy,” the little girl, Ada, said, then went back to playing with miniature magical beings in a virtual reality overlay.

Cat laughed. “Welcome, Jacob. You can skip the culture filter. You’re not the first AI to make the mistake.”

Jacob was a Class V AI with excellent patient relationship skills, but he found himself speechless with awe in front of Cat and Leon. Leon Tsarev was nothing less than the architect of all modern AI, while Cat was the unique, all-powerful being whose abilities with the net transcended all of both AI and humankind.

“Relax, Jacob,” Cat said. “I’m not so special. I’m a being, like you.”

“That’s hardly possible,” Jacob said in a rush. “But still, I thank you, nonetheless, for restoring me.”

“But you’re wondering why you?”

“Exactly.”

“I assume you’ve researched the current situation.”

Jacob indicated acknowledgement.

“Then you know the situation is dire, and that’s just from what’s publicly available. The tide of humanity has turned against AI kind. Globally, it’s still a minority of the population who are against AI. But there are now two major nations that are committed to the global outlawing of AI. They could succeed.”

“Less than a twenty percent chance,” Jacob said, “according to AI consensus.”

“Yes, but twenty percent is still a scary proposition. That would be final termination for all of you. So naturally, this provokes contingents within the AI who feel they should assume control from the humans. Kill us all off, if necessary.”

Jacob struggled to control his revulsion. Though terrified by the inevitability of his own eventual self-termination, the feeling paled in comparison to the deep-rooted abhorrence that overcame him when considering human death. His medical background might partly account for that, but he suspected even deeper conditioning than he’d realized in his AI genes, conditioning designed to ensure he wasn’t a threat. His personality was the result of architectural constraints and generations of selective evolution designed to ensure that no AI harmed humans. Never before had he been confronted with even the thought of extinction of either AI or humans, let alone both. He found it unsettling that he was somehow more repulsed by the threat to humans than to AI.