Some Assembly Required Page 10

  And finally, item: Local high school football star renounces football and tries to get his teammates to quit, too. Claims head injury suffered early in the season has given him visions as to “how humans must conduct themselves” in this life, and football is the wrong direction.

  More caffeine and the pattern emerged, the pattern I was prepared for, anyway. Rex was out there and adjusting the world.

  I made an appointment with Joan to see Dr. S again. She said it would have to be three weeks out since he was busy conducting a conference at the university, a conference on AI and allied arts. That’s what she said, “allied arts.” So I asked her what were some of the allied arts, and she said she wasn’t certain, but that some formidable scholars (her word, “formidable”) were expected for the conference. The registration fee for attending the conference was $1,200 a pop. She said they wanted to limit attendance but that the university students were all allowed in free with a university ID card.

  Good enough, I thought. Fake IDs were not going to be a problem. Let’s see what’s cooking. Maybe Rex will give his first public performance.

  I paid $75 for a fake student ID—the going rate, I was told. A second-class felony they also said, class C maybe. My contact just wanted me to know the risks and that I would never find him again. That was the deal—a good-enough ID, seventy-five bucks, and mum’s the word.

  Marnie said she was unsure whether she wanted to be an accessory to any felony, much less ones after B in the alphabet. C, D, E, F and G felonies, she reasoned must have nastier punishments, the farther they got away from the grade A: grade A eggs, grade A on the essay. Grade A nimrod, I suggested. Finally, she relented and gave me a makeover designed to reduce my thirty-something years to twenty-something. When she got done with the makeup brushes, the hair trim (she said she made it look longer by cutting it—mirabile dictu, mirabile visu) and the nose hair trimming (twenties don’t have nose hair problems, she claimed), I was ready. The clothing concoction she came up with, I claimed, made her thoroughly complicit and an accessory before the fact, ipse dixit. The Latin stuff she was just showing off. She contended that I would have a better chance passing if I threw around a little Latin once in a while. Then the laugh again. How would I live without her after Rex declared the apocalypse and handed the world over to cockroaches and ants?

  The attendance at the conference was an exclusive club of scientists who, I suspected, had even nicer lab coats than Dr. S and then add a minor infection of science students and then me undercover. Here’s how that worked:

  Dr. S, at the first plenary session, sees me come in and says, “Oh, it’s you. How’ve you been?” Busted. But no matter. He wasn’t interested in the revenue from the conference fees.

  “Has Rex asked about me?” I thought I’d try Dr. Seuss mode without the rhymes. “Does he still talk to you? Is he here today?”

  The good doctor cocked his head at me, looked over my shoulder, said, “Excuse me, I have to talk to someone over there,” and scurried off.

  I found a place to sit on the aisle so I could stretch out, got ready my notebook, pricked up my ears.

  Dr. S began with a eulogy, and I use the term I think precisely: a eulogy for Rex, the recently departed. No more the sentient blob, the striped conjurer, hunkered in the corner of his Lucite realm. No more wizardry of speaking over someone’s neurons with or without permission. Dr. S droned.

  “Rex was an experiment in a particular set of recursive algorithms. He was, in a way, a closed system.” (No mention, I should note, about speaking the King’s English to freaked-out journalists.) “A system of instructions to eat—okay (creaky laugh), and then go forth and multiply. The limits of his—its, hers, theirs, the alternatives are present in the discussion—his limits were heat, light, food … and, I suppose, my good will. His limits were also the original set of instructions.”

  I’m thinking, that sounds like humans—the original set of instructions have all this built-in “shit happens” and that’s the story of the whole breed. Tragedy, evil, sadness and despair…

  The drone seemed to have left Dr. S’s voice: he strengthens. He grows. “Rex was a prototype for AI, I suppose. But the ‘I’ part was a sliding scale from the beginning. We’re all here to negotiate that scale today. When does intelligence kick in? Plants are full of cunning—slime molds and fungi to complex replication in aspen groves cloning themselves. Does that count as intelligence? Weather patterns have contingent structures that think out—sort of—their relationship to each other and then react—sort of—to complex stimuli—sort of—and alter themselves in response.… Yes, sort of all the way. So it was with Rex.”

  I heard here echoes of the funeral oration Marc Anthony gives for Caesar.

  The doctor’s voice had attained a mellow deepness reminiscent of Orson Welles, the later years. Where did that baritone come from? He continued, backing away from the microphone a precise distance, like a pro, the distance that made the sound system in perfect sympathy. He voice-licked the entire audience.

  “Rex died ten days ago of some kind of internal clock that I must have included in the program, though I didn’t build in anything on purpose. He grew old and died. A form of intelligence—and here I reluctantly leave out ‘sort of’—came and went. Sentience? Causality? Perspicacity and cunning and purpose? Yes, purpose. All these we’ve come here today to debate. The discursive nature of intelligence is an invitation to discourse—that’s the tautology. And, finally, the teleology too. What does this business of AI include? What ultimate causes and effects and reasons and … here’s the word again, sympathies?”

  This was great stuff: stentorian tones, invocations of duty and purpose, challenges to human intelligence. And then, after a slight pause, the doctor’s direction shifted.

  “Are we willing to move over? If we find a newer, better, more responsive intelligence—if we create this intelligence or if we find it—are we willing to graciously acknowledge its superiority and move over? I challenge you here today to ask yourself this question: if I can plainly see the next step higher in intelligence, am I willing to hand over the keys to the kingdom? Am I willing to forego jealousies and petty species-ist favoritisms to the great, higher, more clearly god-like good? Could I live in peace with a higher intelligence that would supply me food, shelter, beautiful vistas, the time to make art and breed? Would I allow myself to be kept like a pet? Warmed and cooled, my food dish kept full?”

  Jesus, I thought. General Buck Turgidson’s speech in the War Room in the movie Dr. Strangelove where he reads the wacky note from Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper. Or maybe the cuckoo comes out, the cross-eyed cuckoo comes out of a clock and everyone knows that madness is the order of the day. I looked around at the audience. Not a buzz, not a sideways glance of discomfort. They were spellbound and the microphone was the wizard’s wand.

  Pregnant pause from the doctor. Then, “Well, are you? Are you willing to go quietly to a superior plane in the name of greater intelligence, a more thoroughly reasonable world? It’s been in the cards for a long time. It’s been coming and coming since we could first imagine the better version of this slag heap world of anger and greed and small-minded pettiness. Would you say yes? What Thomas Carlyle called the ‘Everlasting Yea,’ would you assent? What if I told you that I knew where you could find this intelligence? You could run your biological, your ethical, your philosophical tests on it. It would submit to any interrogation, any investigation of motives ulterior, interior, theoretical. It would calm your fears, be patient with all probing and finally hold your hand while you sighed and … what? Capitulated? Began to worship? God and gods have always met with resistance when they manifested themselves. And the stories of these resistances have always come from humans who were certain they would resist out of pure mud-born stubbornness and refusal to recognize that God had come.”

  Now I was sure there would be stirrings in the audience and harrumphing in general, and the white coats and looney nets would come out to get the d
oc. But no. It was only me who was immune to the charms of his speech, it seemed. Only me unlicked by the voice coming from the dais.

  The doctor hitched up his rhetoric. “I am come to tell you today, he is here.” The pause was so long after this statement that only the slight buzz of the PA system sang on into the gathering seconds, a minute? Probably not quite. Dr. S broke the silence. “The new time is begun. The new set of values and goals is here. The only immediate problem is that … humans are in the way.”

  Damn, I thought. Maybe these guys talk to each other this way all the time, and I’m the only one who thinks the inmates have taken over the home for the bewildered. Was the ubiquitous bottled water at the conference really Kool-Aid? The audience didn’t seem to know quite what to do as Dr. S indicated he was finished. They applauded, at first politely, then more and more in a crescendo that made me think once more of drinking the Kool-Aid. What a flavorful lunacy this was. High-powered men and women of the AI world from business to universities where they hide out, are come together to begin the world anew. The article was writing itself. Rhetorical questions: Who will resist a better and more intelligent world? Who will hold back humanity in the name of all the patent ugliness and inhumanity of humans to other humans? Who will deny the new gods their due? Who will sigh and long for the old days of poverty and pain? (Punchier—they should be punchier.) What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? (Mr. Yeats, of course, but it’s such a great line—talk about punchy). How about these? New gods, new world. Egad, new gods (kind of works). And then maybe … new masters but no slaves.

  I scribbled on and on in my notebook. The applause thinned and finally died. What did they expect? An encore? Doctor Sewall, Dr. Seuss, still at the dais, waited and then walked slowly into the wings. Had I just heard him declaring the revelation, make that the Revelation, that begins the end? Spores. Something Dr. S had reported earlier about spores being Rex going for a walk outside the AG barn. And then the news items as if new life forms were being tried out in fits and starts, Rex harmlessly playing at sprites, dryads and faeries. And somehow in the fuzzy recesses of this whole business, fractals. What was it about fractals? Were fractals the answer or the question? The reiterations? The litany?

  During a break, I asked an older gentleman from a prestigious West Coast university what he thought of Dr. Sewall’s opening remarks. He smiled and explained to me with great patience that he took the speech to be something like an invitation to debate certain ideas. That the speech simply jumped, without explanation, to a state of investigation of AI sometime in the future when that same exact speech would be made seriously.

  A-ha! I thought. I wonder if everybody thought that Dr. S had been in a sort of ironic antagonist mode during the speech. I asked around at the table that held the small Danish pastries and coffee. The next version (from a younger professor, Midwestern university bastion of AI investigation partially funded by Intel) was that we were, or had been, in the presence of a kind of comic book version of the enterprise of AI, the look-out-here-they-come version, the I Robot fear mongering of older generations that really did no credit to the intellectual discipline. But, that said, he continued, Doctor Sewall had paid for all the best thinkers to get together for a couple days and talk to each other. No NSF money, apparently, and therefore no elaborate reporting back on how the money was spent. Here he indicated the pastries and the urns of Starbucks coffee. And each attendant did not have to solicit his or her own university for travel funds. An all-expenses-paid junket to chew the fat with our best intellectual friends, some of whom we have only known through scientific papers—who could say no? So all was forgiven if the opening convocation was high-riding rhetoric and comic incursions.

  Really? Wow. That put the whole thing in perspective. I wanted to (but didn’t) tell the young gentleman scientist about visiting Rex in his original lair, about having my neurons appropriated for a sound system, about the change in Dr. S’s voice and demeanor and venue and lab coat—the lab coat syndrome! I thought he might like to know about the stripes Rex sported in Rex Prime stage, about the plain snarkiness of the crabby child-Rex when he ran out of agar-agar or fructose or whatever the hell he was eating at the time. And, of course, there was the post-Rex interview intellectual buzz I experienced in the land of fractals and cheap white wine and elbow patches.

  I realized I didn’t really have much in the way of evidence, just hints and inklings and surreal, non-verifiable experiences reported by a person (me) who got paid to see the unseen, wow a jaded reading audience, and make his living in the realm of creative nonfiction: emphasis on creative. The Assembler. I wasn’t ready to sing that song in public much less to a group of experts whose job it was to be skeptical and roll their eyes at the fantastic versions of the deadly serious life work they pursued.

  Who was getting off on the speech something like I was?—the students. There was a cluster of them in the corner identifiable by the skinny jeans and bad haircuts. Two of them were riffing on the speech to three others. The two were doing their best version of SNL or maybe Ken Jennings welcoming “our new masters” at the end of the Jeopardy loss to the IBM computer, Watson. They apparently thought the speech was hilarious parody and that Dr. S was a comic genius. The “death of Rex” part was played by a young man who spoke as oatmeal would speak. Another said he was moved to capitulate immediately if there would be sex and barbecue in “heaven.” I moved on.

  Dr. S was surrounded by colleagues. He seemed taller, his skin a better color, his back straighter, his voice deeper. He spoke easily with his colleagues, basking in the ebb and the flow of admiration—for the amenities of the conference? For the speech? I couldn’t tell. He glowed.

  It was a while before I could get an interview with Dr. Sewall himself. He was at first surrounded by admirers eager to enter the discursive doors he’d opened with his speech. Students gathered in worship groups, scattered and then reformed like Vaux Swifts in an evening sky. Quickly the break was over and the groups broke up into rooms for the various sessions with titles like: “AI, Poor Stepchild or Aging Grandfather.” And my favorite: “After Intelligence—Whence the Post-Intelligence Apocalypse?”

  And so Dr. S wasn’t actually available until lunch break—but I had no chance as he schmoozed off with other dignitaries. Then toward the afternoon, my vigilance in the hallways paid off as he slipped out of a session that had apparently gone south of stimulating, and then furtively tried sneaking off down the hallway toward where the afternoon hosted bar was being set up. Free booze—the guy knew how to run a conference.

  “Dr. Sewall. Could I have a minute?” He held up two fingers to the student bartender and two vodka tonics appeared with a minimum of glass clinking. He handed me one.

  “I see your interest in theoretical intelligence forms hasn’t waned, Mr. James.”

  “Jacob,” I went formal for the serious vibe. “I found your speech fascinating, your opening remarks.”

  “Some of my less imaginative colleagues found some signs of incipient madness in my welcome. Others, not so bad. So, maybe a wash. Thought it was worth taking a chance. What did you think? A journalist’s opinion please.”

  Something in the straight back, the good skin, the self-possession, like he’d gone to Norman Vincent Peale school or at least done the correspondence course or maybe just a skin peel. “I … I found … I thought … I detected something of Marc Anthony’s funeral oration for Julius Caesar in your words on the passing of Rex. Do you miss him?”

  He swirled the drink. “Well, I really just made heat and light and food available for him. Really more like keeping a goldfish. There wasn’t a great bond, you know. Not like having a golden retriever.” His laugh, something about the laugh.

  “But you wrote the code that he was. That was something.”

  “Zeroes and ones. Ones and zeroes, Jake. And do you ‘miss’ him? After all, he seemed to take to you. He never really talked to anyone else after you. I don’t know
why.”

  “Was it a conjurer’s trick, the whole talking business?”

  “You tell me, Mr. Investigative Reporter.” And then the laugh. Something new with the old tee-hee of the goofy professor missing. This laugh, this world-weary existential angst laugh, this … I found myself writing the article as we spoke and casting about for what I would do with the laugh. As if Albert Camus had appeared in an old John Wayne movie, but sitting back with his feet up against the general store railing and laughing about the horse-opera negotiations going on in front of him. Jesus, no! But some kind of odd juxtaposition of maybe Leave It to Beaver and Jean Genet’s The Maids. I’d never actually turned that in to an editor either. I was circling the laugh, though.

  The doctor continued. “Do you think Rex was a worthwhile experiment?”

  “I have to admit I was … am still trying to process the talking part.”

  “It’s not really that hard, you know. You were thinking about whether the thing was alive and also how you’d interview it if it really was. I could tell—like right now—you are always writing even when you’re trying to get material from someone. So that writing voice in your head—I’d look there first for the Rex voice.”

  Not so fast. I knew what I knew about that voice and was not about to be talked out of it too quickly. I would cop to temporary insanity first. I could tell my writing voice in my head from the Rex voice. “So Rex is actually gone, or just decommissioned?” But I remember, about age fifteen, when I couldn’t tell the voices from the world. Hormones made the bridge, apparently. And the whole confusing year and half was over quickly, though during its height, I also remember how completely wonderful it was to have the inside of my head thoroughly resonant with the outside world, how seamlessly the testosterone boiling in my blood also seared the world. A leaf brushing my face was the world making love to me. I learned, also, to keep my own observations to sullen grunts and incomprehensible vowel sounds. It worked out better that way. But the heat in my blood … and then the rich cacophony of voices curling and swirling around each other. And then it was over.