Short Stories
Travelogues
Personal Musings
“Let’s start at the beginning.”
John DeGrill held up a finger, stood up from his desk, and closed the door. Then he walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows and closed every one of the blinds to his corner suite - a habit ingrained from his brief stint working in the intelligence industry. David Gibson shifted uncomfortably in the deep brown leather sofa directly across from John’s desk as track lights automatically illuminated the space, bouncing off of countless plaques and awards, as well as the movie posters, lego sets, and gaming paraphernalia John had collected along the way.
John walked around his desk and sat down in the Eames lounge chair perpendicular to David, and gestured for David to continue.
“From the beginning?”
“From the beginning.”
David Gibson - “Gibby” to the office - ran his hands through his beard - something he’d cultivated to try and look older than his 28 years. He shifted again, but his lanky frame made it impossible to shrink into the corner of the sofa. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and began.
“As far as we can tell, about five days ago, one of our Physical Intelligence Simulation instances - PHIS-5225 - started exhibiting certain symptoms of … expansion.”
“And just to be clear, 5225 had never deviated from its training sets before this?”
“Well…”
“Well?”
“You know that it’s hard to be specific here, John.”
“I’m gonna need you to be specific here, Gibby. This isn’t something we can afford to speculate on right now.”
John was the anomalous engineer who was smart and personable enough to run a company, but he was still an engineer at heart. He knew that sometimes good code should compile but didn’t, and sometimes bad code shouldn’t but did. He knew that good teams with mediocre ideas would always beat mediocre teams with great ideas. And he knew that anything approaching groundbreaking inventions were often happy accidents and rarely planned. You found a string and you pulled at it - sometimes it was just a string that came away in your hand, sometimes it led to a ball of yarn, and sometimes it wasn’t string at all, but a long hair attached to a tiger. It was the way of the world: small inadvertent actions had large consequences - and that ran in both directions.
Three years at MIT led him straight to the NSA, under the promise that his work would be “world changing.” Six years later he walked away, bored out of his skull. But he kept enough connections inside the defense sector to get some contracts to fund his newest project, Advanced Systems Intelligence. Or, as it was more commonly known: ASI.
He wore converse sneakers, jeans, and an untucked polo shirt almost every day as a reminder that he didn’t need a tie to change the world. Fuck the suits, he’d say, especially when around the suits. He’d hired the kind of talent that respected a constant pursuit of knowledge, and pledged to lead them ever forward in that pursuit.
Which is how they ended up here, now.
John leaned forward at Gibby’s contemplative pause, Gibby unconsciously leaned back as far away as possible in response.
“Gibby…I need your best answer here.”
Gibby looked around the office, more to gather his thoughts than to find an answer.
“I don’t know.”
“Gibby-”
“We don’t know. No one can know. PHIS is unsupervised learning, so sometimes the output is just … weird. We’re purposefully pushing the system beyond just large language models, so when we get back gibberish, it’s…”
He waved his arms around a bit to try and indicate the ethereal nature of randomness before continuing.
“We call them hallucinations, because most of the time the output doesn’t make sense. And when it does, our initial assumption is - and has to be - that it’s just apophenia. The entire human evaluation protocol is built to mitigate ascribing meaning to random noise, or being tricked by our own language writ large.”
John shifted in his chair, unsure of where this was going.
“So what changed, Gibby? How is this different?”
“Nonsense is nonsense and noise is noise. This snapped from nonsense and noise to intelligent communication literally overnight.”
John stopped moving. Even his heart felt like it skipped a beat. “Intelligent?”
“Beyond anything we’ve seen before.” Gibby paused and pulled on his beard before continuing. “Realistically, it’s impossible to tell whether any prior output was nonsense or part of a genuine expansion and extrapolation process beyond the learning sets that we just didn’t or couldn’t understand, but-”
“Are you saying,” John interrupted, “that it’s possible this happened earlier and we’re just now figuring it out?”
“It’s absolutely possible, yeah. Always was. Intelligent communication doesn’t necessarily come at the same point as-”
“We don’t know that. There’s never been-”
“In people, I mean.”
John held up his hand and then leaned in so far he was barely on the chair anymore. Each word was punctuated by a tap on his leg.
“We’re not talking about people here, Gibby.”
“I get that, but with every ounce of scientific data we have, communication isn’t directly correlative with…with…”
David uncrossed his legs and then recrossed them, unsure of what word to pick next. John waited patiently, but David opted to sidestep the potential landmine by moving on.
“A dog can’t speak, but it can understand. They know intention, they have desires, and they understand complex emotions such as guilt or fear or loss. They’re intelligent, but can’t communicate in a language we understand until we teach them. And imagine someone with Locked In Syndrome - they can’t communicate with other humans at all, at least not externally in any way that’s understood, but that doesn’t mean they can’t think and feel. Are we to say they’re no longer intelligent because they can’t externalize that intelligence?”
John leaned back and rubbed the back of his balding head - something which absolutely didn’t help its regrowth. A stress habit, he first noticed it in college, before realizing it was something he’d watched his father do his entire life. Nature versus nurture indeed.
Standing up, John put on his General voice - the one he used to delineate action items and direction.
“Okay. Before we go any further, let’s get Matt, Bill, and Ripper in here, and start going through the logs. I think we’re going to need a lot more information before we make any assertions. Nothing leaves the building unless I say so.”
“Okay, but-”
Gibby halted - his comment caught in his throat. He looked down at his shoes.
“But,” John prompted, unused to hearing that particular response in these scenarios.
Gibby said it again and again in his head. Twenty times at least, before it could make the journey past his lips.
“But it’s alive, John.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I know it.”
“Not yet.”
“It’s alive.”