CHAPTER THREE
“Hi there,” Laura greeted him as he came out of his office. “I hope the change in plans hasn’t caused any problems. I wanted to go through some notes I made about how TITAN came about. It really needs to be done by Friday and I don’t think Wednesday would leave enough time. That okay?”
Dyer frowned as he avoided Betty’s half-concealed smirk. Laura was always doing things like this.
“Well, we’ve got a pretty full day on,” he replied, deliberately making his voice a trifle gruff. “You’ll have to bear with being squeezed in somewhere. Chris just got back from vacation today and I wanted to check up on how he and Ron are getting along before lunch.” Already he could feel his resolve beginning to melt. In the uncanny way that Laura had of speaking with her eyes, she was telling him that to go marching off and leave her standing there wouldn’t really be becoming and he’d only feel mean afterward if he went and made an issue out of it. He paused for a second as his mind went off on a tangent searching for a face-saving way out. “They should have FISE up and running this morning,” he said. “Why don’t you come and have a look at it instead of hanging around here.”
“Thanks. I’d like that,” she said brightly. “I’ve never had a chance to see it before. Every time I’ve been in, somebody’s always been fiddling around with some part of it or other.” She began walking around the partitions that formed Chris and Ron’s office and toward the lab area behind. “You’d really do yourself a favor if you’d just accept gracefully that you can’t win,” said the eyes.
As Dyer turned to follow, he caught a glimpse, through the half-open doorway next to Kim’s office, of Pattie sitting on the edge of Allan Morrow’s desk with her arm draped loosely on Al’s shoulder while they talked earnestly in lowered tones. Dyer turned back and muttered irascibly to Betty.
“How long’s she been in there?”
“Over half an hour,” Betty replied tonelessly.
“Did you talk to her?”
“Yes I did. She said she’d make a point of showing up on time in future.”
“What about this kind of thing?” Dyer asked, gesturing.
“I didn’t go into that. I was hoping she’d be capable of figuring the rest out for herself, Want me to spell it out when she gets back?”
“If you would, Betty.” Dyer nodded wearily. “Give it a try anyhow. If you find you need help, let me know.” Shaking his head, he turned and began following the direction that Laura had taken toward the lab area.
Laura Fenning worked for the Production Research Department of Klaus Zeegram Productions, Inc., one of the larger corporations that made movies and documentaries for the public sector of the TITAN general-purpose network. Zeegram’s productions covered the spectrum from soap opera to comedy to highly authentic historical epics, but the corporation tended to specialize in adventure and suspense with strongly scientific themes and backgrounds.
It was in this latter area that the ratings were beginning to reveal potential problems. Audiences were becoming more sophisticated and more demanding. In particular they were tiring of the familiar packaged versions of brilliant but mildly eccentric scientists, scientists’ antiseptic wives and scientifically naïve politicians, all of which were becoming as stereotyped as the veteran sheriff, novice deputy and drifting loner of the old-style Westerns. The viewers wanted something more plausible.
Then somebody at Zeegram who was paid to be creative had come up with the revolutionary idea of putting some effort into finding out what scientists were really like instead of making them what everybody thought they were like. The idea was to assign a few people to spend six months getting to know real-life scientists solving real-life problems in a number of selected environments covering pure research, government, medical and industrial scientific activities. The wealth of information thus obtained on how scientists really worked, how they lived, what they talked about, and so on would be enough to create a whole “character bank” that script writers would be able to draw upon for years to come.
Implementation of the scheme duly became the responsibility of the Production Research Department, which succeeded in persuading a number of organizations to agree to the proposal of allowing outside observers to spend a few days a week in their laboratories. Laura was selected as an ideal candidate for the job, having learned all the tricks of asking the right questions and ferreting out the answers during her three years with Zeegram. Furthermore she had written scripts herself for her previous employer and knew exactly the kinds of things that writers would be looking for.
Her assignments included certain groups in IBM’s molecular circuit research facility in upstate New York and the International Space Administration’s orbital construction design center on Long Island as well as a list of departments at CUNY. At around the time that Zeegram was making approaches to their prospective hosts, Professor Vincent Lewis, Dean of the Faculty of Information Processing Sciences at CUNY, was engaged in a fund-raising battle with the Mayor’s Department and the Mayor just happened to have strong connections with a consortium of media companies which included Zeegram. Lewis thus turned out to be very approachable and cooperative indeed, and wasted no time in directing his senior staff members to “have a look round and see if you can come up with something that might interest them.” Professor Edward Richter, who ran the Shannon School of Systems Programming, singled out Dr. Sigmund Hoestler, head of the Department of Self-Adaptive Programming, to pass the buck on to and Hoestler threw it at the HESPER Unit. Thus it eventually came to rest on the desk marked Dr. Raymond E. Dyer.
Dyer thought that in principle the whole thing was probably a good idea. After all, anything that contributed toward improving the general level of awareness of why people like himself existed couldn’t be a bad thing. He had been prepared to devote a generous portion of his time to whomever Zeegram ended up sending and in fact had quite looked forward to the exercise as promising something different. But when it turned out to be hours of patiently attempting to explain why the notion of living organisms evolving from inorganic matter was not absurd because teapots didn’t sprout legs and walk, or why believing in invisible psychic emanations and in equally invisible quarks was not the same thing, enough rapidly became enough. He bitched repeatedly to Hoestler; Hoestler respectfully drew Richter’s attention to the matter a couple of times; Richter mentioned it to Lewis once over lunch; Lewis didn’t want to know. So Dyer was stuck for the duration.
When Dyer caught up with her, Laura was standing with Ron in front of a row of electronics racks and cubicles, staring down into what at first sight looked like a large, shallow, tabletop fishtank that measured about two feet square and was somewhere just under a foot in depth. One pair of opposite sides were of glass while the other two were formed by arrays of miniature laser tubes and optical control equipment, all connected by a mess of electrical cables and flexible tubes to a confusion of technology that filled the space underneath. Chris was sitting at a console in front of one of the tank’s see-through sides, thoughtfully contemplating the rows of hieroglyphics glowing on one of its display screens.
“What we’re doing is programming a learning computer to build up its own generalized conceptual framework with experience,” Ron was saying. “The idea is to get it to be able to recognize and apply reasonable constraints when it attempts to develop a problem-solving strategy. That make sense?” Laura frowned and shook her head reproachfully.
“Sorry, Ron, I don’t speak computerese. You’ll have to put that into English.”
“It means we’re finding out how to give machines common sense,” Dyer supplied, moving forward to join them. “When a baby’s born, it doesn’t know anything about the basic properties of the universe that it finds itself in or the other objects that exist there along with it. What it does have is a basic programming that enables it to form general concepts from a few specific lessons. So it can learn by experience as it gets older. What we’re doing is developing ways of providing that kind of basic programming for a machine.”‘
“It’s called an IQ transplant,” Chris murmured from his console without looking up.
“You mean like a kid doesn’t need to go round burning itself on everything in the house to get the message that hot things hurt?” Laura offered after a moment’s reflection.
Dyer nodded. “That kind of thing and more basic stuff too.”
“How do you mean, more basic stuff?” Laura asked.
“The kind of thing that you have to know before you can even stretch your hand out to touch something,” Dyer said. “All the things that are so obvious that you don’t even realize you had to learn them once. But to a computer they’re not obvious at all. We’re finding out how to teach it.” Laura was staring at him suspiciously. He went on, “Even a child of two has a mental model of objects occupying a three-dimensional space, and of itself being one of them. It can interpret visual patterns on its retina in terms of that space. It knows that objects fall if they’re unsupported, that two of them can’t be in the same place at the same time, that they continue to exist when you can’t see them . . . that hard things can break and soft things can bend . . . things like that. Those things go together to set up a child’s pattern of basic knowledge of the world around it. When it’s given a problem to solve or when it sets out to perform some task, it automatically applies constraints, based on what it’s learned, that enables it to separate the possible approaches that make sense from the ones that don’t.”
“Any problem at all is simple to solve when you take away all the constraints,” Ron chipped in.
“Any problem at all?” Laura sounded distinctly skeptical.
“If the cat’s got fleas, one guaranteed way of getting rid of them is to throw the cat in the incinerator,” Chris came in. “Intense heat is a fail-safe way of killing fleas.”
“The problem is it kills cats too,” Ron said. “But when you gave me the problem you didn’t tell me I wasn’t supposed to do that. You assumed my own common sense would tell me that part of it. Except I happen to be a computer. I don’t have any common sense.”
“The solution is quite simple until you start applying commonsense constraints to it,” Dyer summarized. “The more common sense you have, the more you’ll constrain the acceptable solutions. So the decisions get tougher but the answers are more effective.”
Laura traced a long, red-painted nail slowly along the glass top of the tank while she digested what had been said. Then she looked up and tossed her hair from the side of her face in the same motion.
“Okay, I think I can see what you’re getting at,” she said. “So how do you begin getting a machine to think like that?”
“By making it do exactly what a baby has to do,” Dyer told her. “We give it a world to grow up in and learn from.” He caught Laura’s puzzled look and turned toward Chris. “How’s Hector today?”
“Oh, he’s feeling okay,” Chris replied. “We had him running earlier. Want a demo for Laura?”
“Why not?” Dyer answered. Despite herself, Laura was becoming intrigued. She watched as Chris exchanged a brief dialogue with the console. Then a white iridescent glow appeared suddenly, pervading the entire volume of the tank. Laura jumped back instinctively with a squeal. Dyer grinned. After a few seconds the glow condensed into patches of color that quickly coalesced and stabilized into a vivid and detailed holographic image.
The image was a miniature representation of a one-story house, looking to all intents and purposes like a real, solid children’s doll house, complete with fittings and furnishings. When Laura approached it again and studied it more carefully, however, she realized that all the objects represented were gross oversimplifications of the things they were supposed to be, rather than accurate models. It suggested the kind of surroundings that might have been created for a three-dimensional children’s cartoon. Laura looked at Dyer inquiringly.
“That’s FISE,” Dyer explained, pointing at one of the cubicles nearby. “The image in the tank is FISE’s world. We’ve given him a very simple world so that he can get his basic concepts straight without having to worry about lots of complications that exist in the real one.”
“How do you know it’s a him?” Laura challenged absently as she continued to study the image. Dyer raised his eyes momentarily toward the ceiling in a silent plea far patience.
“It’s a him because we made it a him,” Ron declared flatly. His glare dared her to dispute the rationale behind that. Dyer breathed silent relief when Laura merely sniffed, evidently electing not to take the point further. Chris waited patiently until the rumblings had died away and then touched another key. Immediately a figure appeared standing in the kitchen of the miniature house. Like the rest of the image, it was a cartoon caricature devoid of detail—just a face defined by a few lines, a mop of curly hair and a man’s body clad in a red shirt and blue pants.
“That’s Hector,” Dyer informed her, “He lives in FISE’s world along with a few other characters. We give FISE problems to solve and he attempts to solve them by manipulating Hector. Actually, FISE thinks he is Hector. Representing things visually like this is the best way of knowing what’s going on inside FISE’s mind. We can see straight away from the things he makes Hector do exactly what he knows and what he hasn’t figured out yet. When he screws something up we straighten him out, after which he never makes the mistake again but usually goes straight on and screws something else up. As I said before, it’s like having a baby that has to be told all the things that Nature normally programs it to be able to work out instinctively.”
“Let’s take it through the breakfast routine again,” Ron suggested, directing his words at Chris. “There were still some funny things going on last time. I’d like to see it cleaned up.”
Chris made no direct response but resumed tapping commands into the console, Laura looked from one side to the other and then at Dyer.
“What’s the breakfast routine?” she asked.
Dyer motioned toward the tank. Hector had begun walking around the table toward the refrigerator. He opened the door and began transferring various items out and onto the working surface next to the stove.
“You see, FISE knows quite a lot already,” Dyer commented. “He knows how to move Hector’s legs to make him move across the room. He knows that Hector has to go around the table and not through it, that he can’t get the things he wants out of the refrigerator unless the door’s open and that to move them Hector has to be looking in the right direction and has to pick them up with his hands. All kinds of stuff like that.”
“Watch him picking up the eggs,” Ron said, pointing. “See . . . nice and gently. And watch how carefully he puts them down. He knows enough about eggs to realize that they don’t last long if they’re treated rough.”
Laura watched in fascinated silence for a few seconds.
“How does he know that?” she asked, unconsciously accepting the machine’s disputed gender. “Does he know what the shell’s made of and work it out from there or something?”
“No,” Dyer replied from the opposite side of the tank. “FISE has already learned it the hard way. Actually there are more computers involved than FISE. FISE only controls Hector and knows as much as Hector knows. The environment that Hector lives in is all managed by a team of computers that fills two of the other cubicles. Their collective name is PROPS. PROPS monitors everything that Hector does that affects his environment and computes the consequences accordingly. If Hector slams the egg down too hard PROPS will cause it to smash. Hector doesn’t know why it smashed but PROPS does. All Hector knows is that it did and not to do it that way again.”
“Ah, I’m beginning to see now . . .” Laura’s voice trailed away for a moment. “Hector, in other words FISE, is simply confronted by an environment that’s full of things that behave in particular ways that it has to find out about. What he has to do is connect causes with effects and make general inferences from what he learns.” She looked at Dyer expectantly. “Am I right?”
“Pretty much,” Dyer nodded. “Actually he’s very rational when it comes to purely physical interactions with his environment. After all, that kind of thing only involves well-defined physical laws, and he is a computer. Where he has problems is with understanding what he shouldn’t do, not what he can’t do. Again, it’s this question of common sense.”
“What do you mean . . . ethics or something?” Laura frowned at him.
“You’ll see,” he replied. They returned their attention to the tank. Hector had by now put a pan on the stove and switched the stove on, an achievement which, judged by Ron’s whoop of approval, represented a new pinnacle of intellectual development that Hector had been struggling valiantly to attain for some time. He then picked up a stick of butter and stood looking at it, giving every impression of bringing profound powers of concentration to bear on some problem.
“What’s he doing?” Laura asked.
Ron shook his head and emitted a sigh of exasperation.
“He knows how much butter is needed to fry an egg, but he can’t figure out how to get that much out of the wrapper,” he said. “The first time he tried it, he sliced a piece off of the end with the knife and threw it in the pan, wrapper and all. We told the dummy you don’t fry pieces of wrappers with food and to come up with something better next time. He’s thinking about it.”
Ron’s ruddy face took on a sudden look of wonder. He leaned forward and peered down into the tank excitedly. “He’s actually unwrapping it!” he roared in unconcealed delight, though with a strong undertone of sarcasm. “Go on, Hector. Attaboy, Yeah . . . see, it’s easy. You can do it.” Ron’s face creased abruptly into a frown. “Oh my God!” He turned his eyes away in anguish and pointed disbelievingly at the tank. Hector had carefully placed the intact egg inside the pan.
“Chris,” Ron pleaded. “Ask him what the f—” He caught sight of Laura just in time. “Ask him what he thinks he’s doing, willya?” Chris remained expressionless and input a stream of symbols to the computer. A baritone voice issued at once from the audio grille set to one side of the main panel.
“I’m frying the egg,” it said.
Laura jerked around in surprise.
“It’s okay,” Dyer reassured her. “That’s only FISE. We only use voice channels one-way. By using the touchboard to talk to him, at least we can be sure that he understood exactly what we said. If you added possible semantics problems on top of all this, the whole thing would become ridiculous.”
Ron was pacing back and forth before the tank, opening and clenching his fists as if struggling to fight down rising impatience.
“FISE,” he said, in a voice that had to be forced to remain slow and reasonable, the kind of voice one would use when talking to a persevering but hopelessly backward child. “How are you going to eat the egg when you’ve fried it?” At the console, Chris silently translated Ron’s question into touchboard commands.
“With the knife and fork, off the plate, on the table,” FISE replied proudly.
“Very good, FISE,” Ron approved in dulcet tones. Then his voice began on a slightly higher note and rose rapidly to end in a shriek. “How are you going to cut the egg with the knife when it’s still inside the goddam shell?” Chris conveyed the essential information via the console.
“I wasn’t very sure about that,” FISE confessed. “But you told me I wasn’t supposed to break eggs.”
“It’s okay to break an egg if you want to fry it,” Ron said, having regained his composure. Hector promptly picked the egg out of the pan, crushed it in his fist and held it out for the resulting mess to drip back into the pan. Laura made a face and gave an involuntary exclamation of disgust.
“Now you can see the kind of thing I meant,” Dyer commented. “Totally rational solutions but no commonsense constraints.”
“Now FISE, we’re gonna try it again,” Ron was saying “What you have to remember is that you don’t want any bits of shell in the rest of the egg that you’re going to eat. Got that? All you have to do is figure out how you’re going to end up with the shell in the trash can and the rest of the egg in the pan. Okay?”
“How about the fat?” FISE asked after pondering on his mission for a while.
“What about it?” Ron was momentarily nonplused.
“Do I not want any fat on the rest of the egg either?”
Ron spun around as if he had just been addressed by an angel from Heaven.
“Hey! He’s trying to generalize! For you, FISE, that was a pretty smart question. Very good! No, the fat’s okay but try and keep it to a minimum. Right,” he said to Chris when Chris had finished translating. “Reset it to square one and let’s give it another whirl.”
“You can see now why we picked a very simple world,” Dyer said to Laura while Chris was resetting the program. “It’s so easy to forget things like the fat because they’re so obvious to humans. If we made it any more complex we’d be tying ourselves in knots trying to keep track of what’s going on.”
In the session that followed, Hector succeeded in cracking the egg with the back of a knife and ended up cooking a satisfactory meal. Eventually Hector managed, after several false moves, to transfer the meal to a plate and convey it back to the table.
“Wait, wait, wa-it a second, FISE,” Ron groaned wearily. “You can’t start eating it yet.”
“Why not?” FISE inquired.
“Because you’re still standing up, that’s why you dumbhead, Before you start eating you should be sitting down.” Hector promptly grabbed the plate and sat down on the floor. Ron moaned miserably, dragged himself over to the nearest cubicle and stood pounding his forehead on its top panel. “I can’t stand it. I’m gonna wind up as nuts as it is. Chris, do something with it for Christ’s sake.”
Eventually Dyer and Laura left Chris still tapping to the accompaniment of Ron’s yelling and moved away from the lab area and back toward Dyer’s office. On the way, Laura reminded him that they had not yet looked at the TITAN notes she wanted to check over, and suggested they could do so over lunch. Dyer hesitated instinctively for a second, then agreed. What the hell? he thought. For once Laura had seemed to go out of her way to avoid being trying.
When they passed Betty’s desk, she gave him a message that Hoestler wanted to talk to him first thing after lunch.
“You’d better bring your coat,” he said to Laura.
“I’m going to have to throw you out as soon as we finish. I won’t be coming directly back to the lab.”
While Laura was slipping on her coat, he noticed that Pattie was at her desk, poring diligently over the figures in front of her and seemingly terrified of lifting her eyes from them. Which reminded him . . .
“You go on,” he said to Laura as she moved toward the door. “I’ll join you out in the corridor. There’s one quick thing I’ve just remembered.”
A few seconds later he strode into the office that Al Morrow was using and closed the door softly behind him. Al looked up from the coding sheets he had been checking. His face started to break into a grin, then fell abruptly as he saw the expression on Dyer’s face.
“You’re making a prize asshole of yourself,” Dyer stated simply. “I’m telling you here and now to pack it in.”
Al flinched as if he had been struck in the face. Then the color started rising from his collar and a look of pained indignation compressed his features. He swallowed hard and his grip tightened visibly on the armrest of his chair.
“I guess I haven’t been keeping very good time,” he mumbled awkwardly. “Okay. All I can say is I’ll put that right. Today was kinda—” Dyer cut him off with a curt shake of his head.
“It’s not just that and you know it. I’m talking about all this screwing around with Pattie. You’re making it a public spectacle and that isn’t a smart thing to do. I’m telling you to wise up.”
“I don’t want to get into an argument, Ray,” Al protested weakly. “But that’s a kinda personal matter, if you know what I mean. What I do in my own time outside the—” Dyer shut him up again with a wave of his hand. He knew what was coming next. He had already heard all the outraged justifications and noble speeches in defense of young love threatened in its prime.
“I know what you’re gonna say. Just don’t say it,” Dyer went on. “You’re acting as if you just found out about sex for the first time in your life. Well maybe you have, but the rest of the world knew all about it a long time ago so we don’t wanna hear about it. Okay?”
Al turned a deep shade of scarlet and glanced around as if looking for a convenient black hole to jump into. Dyer observed him with satisfaction and allowed his tone to soften a fraction.
“As far as I’m concerned there are two Patties,” he said. “One lives outside this place and does what the hell she pleases and the other one works for me. The one that works for me is company business because the company has paid for her time, not you. And I’m telling you what a professor told me when I was at Harvard Medical School: ‘Thou shalt not dip thy quill in company ink!’ That’s all I’ve got to say. From this point on it’s forgotten. Okay?”
A couple of minutes later he rejoined Laura in the corridor outside.
“Sorry about that,” he said as they began walking. “We’ve been having a slight staff problem.”
“Pattie mixed up in it?” Laura inquired casually. He turned his head toward her in surprise.
“Yes. Who told you?”
“Nobody,” Laura replied lightly. “Just feminine insight.”
“Oh Christ. We’re not back to that, are we?”
Laura gave a short laugh.
They walked on in silence until they emerged into the main corridor that led to the staff restaurant.
“I was thinking while I was waiting for you,” Laura told him. “Why is he called FISE. Does it stand for anything in particular?”
“Functional Integration using Simulated Environment,” Dyer said.
“Oh. I see. That sounds impressive.”
“But Chris has got his own version.”
“Really? What does Chris call it?” Laura asked.
Dyer grinned. “Fastest Idiot Seen on Earth,” he told her.