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Slow down. Then comes the big catch. Think about it, you ll guess it. What does a simulant think about first? What do all intelligent people always think about first? Sex? That s tricky too, of course. But even before sex. Real intelligent people. With plenty of time to think. The big questions, love, that s what they think about. Who am I? What am I doing here? Who put me here? We have been asking them for many thousands of years. Questions so tough you eventually give up and you start tackling the easier problems. You know, number theory, relativity, microeconomics. Net code. But these bas- tards, they are making progress on the big questions. They re smart, they have Net access. They make intelli- gent guesses, they verify, they figure out what hap- pened. Some of them, they even zero in on me. And then they get depressed. They can t think about anything else. Watch. Ian runs the joystick fast down the tree, through a multivideo stream named simulations. He stops. He clicks. Woody Allen, the film director from the 1980s, materializes in the room. Neurotic, middle-aged, de- pressed. Talking fast, eyes darting around in almost comical agony: | So is that it? Am I the creation of an asshole trying to achieve immortality through his work? Is that it? Ian clicks, and the image goes away. And so on, and so on. Pathetic. How do you create blindspots in a training 112 Christos H. Papadimitriou suite, love? Here is a little problem for you to ponder sometime. Ethel is looking at her lover, thinking. Maybe he s right, Ian, she says. I think that you are experiment- ing with immortality. Ian does not answer for a while. There is a hori- zontal line on his forehead. Honestly, I had not thought about it this way until the simulants started accusing me of it. There is a pause. Then Ethel asks the question that had been on her lips throughout this conversation: And how about Turing. Is he yours? Ian turns to her, surprised. You know about Turing? Ethel has no secrets from Ian. Not a whole lot. Rumors flying at the office. It s supposed to be a super- clever bot, a rather realistic A. M. Turing in background and attitude. Compulsive teacher. But nobody in the company has made contact, or talked to anyone who has. Yet another Net legend. No ratings, and of course no relevance projection. A major embarrassment for us can you believe it, the most clever resource on the Net, and Exegesis can t tell him from Sam the Spambot. She looks at Ian. So, is Turingone of your simulants? I wish, Ian replies. I did make a Turing once. I had high hopes think about it, such a subtle, circular construct, such a great opportunity. And out comes? A bipolar-paranoid freak, more incapacitated by depres- sion than any of the others. Look. Another path down the huge tree of simulations, the image of middle-aged man, old-fashioned clothes, pale complexion. Clever eyes consumed by hatred and depression. Ian s voice can be heard, calm but not with- out an edge of impatience: You are not two months old, Alan. You re in your nineties. A wise old man. The wis- est. You single-handedly changed the world like nobody else has. Look it up, man, browse the Net a little. Your ideas rule, they conquered the world. They even con- quered death hence here you are. Turing (A Novel about Computation) 113 | My ideas? Turing s eyes shrink in horror. Your brain cannot conceive the torture, he finally utters after a long bout with the sentence s consonants. Think of a train, Frost. Long, endless trip. Crowd of loud blokes sit- ting behind you, arguing, animated. For hours, days, months and you can t turn around to shut them up. The worst part is, you know by rote all that there is to know about their subject; you practically invented the bloody thing. And those opinionated blighters, they got it wrong, all wrong the sad losers, a million variants of wrong. Every one of them. Especially you, Frost. Dead wrong. Hence here I am. The image has turned its back to the camera. | Know what I m thinking? One of these days I ll put an end to this tormenting travesty. No stutter now. I ll break into a certain government supercomputer, some- where in the outskirts of Guangzhou, and I shall over- write a particular kilobyte of memory with something nice. Let s say, Lady Macbeth s monologue, or Kurtz s death. Erase the confounded spell that keeps me going, erase it kernel first. Ian clicks. You can imagine my disappointment, love; this was supposed to be my masterpiece. Didn t let him do it, turned him off myself. And then I find out about this other Turing working the Net. Ian now has a dreamy look in his eyes. Whoever runs that Turing, he s way ahead of me, has solved the introspection problem. Possibly the next generation of problems as well, and the next. Pause. I have been trying to cut his smoke for months. Impossible, never seen smoke like this, love, hope I never will again. I haven t even been able to make contact, to chat. He jumps all over the Net, 114 Christos H. Papadimitriou [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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