Conscious Read online

  Conscious

  Vic Grout

  To Helen, Jack, Danny, James, Heather,

  Killian, Lilith & Maizie

  No-one really knows the future: just have fun!

  Copyright © 2019 by Vic Grout

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  Vic Grout

  Clear Futures Publishing

  Glyndwr University

  Plas Coch, Mold Road

  Wrexham, LL11 2AW, UK

  www.vicgrout.net

  Ordering Information:

  Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above.

  Printed by Amazon.

  Publisher’s Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Grout, Vic.

  Conscious, Clear Futures Publishing.

  ISBN 978-1-0819391-3-1

  1. Science-Fiction. 2. Hard Science-Fiction. 3. Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic Science-Fiction

  First Edition: September 2016

  Second Edition: March 2017

  Third Edition: August 2019

  Foreword (Third Edition)

  I first conceived the vague idea for this story about fifteen years ago. I had organised a public debate at Wrexham Glyndŵr University (then the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education) on ‘The Future of Computing’. Four ‘experts’, drawn from academia and industry, had been assembled into a panel, together with a distinguished chair to oversee proceedings. Each expert spoke on their particular topic for about ten minutes before the panel as a whole answered questions from the audience and allowed the discussion to wander where it would. The event was a partial success – probably no more than that. Other than setting the whole thing up in the first place and priming the chair with a few pertinent questions, should the conversation flag, I took little part in the evening’s proceedings beyond the role of interested spectator.

  However, at some point in the event, the conversation drifted – somewhat inevitably – towards machine intelligence. Although a well-trodden path indeed, a certain comment made an impression on me. It was simply that – in the opinion of the speaker, ‘some years into the future’ – the neural size of the Internet would reach that of the human brain. I had two immediate thoughts. The first was fairly obvious: that such a milestone in itself wasn’t particularly meaningful because the brain and a collection of logic gates were probably entirely different things. (I recalled watching a TV programme, which had discussed panpsychism, some years earlier but I couldn’t remember the term then.) Secondly, it struck me that that point would have already arrived without anyone realising it. If you added (multiplied) the circuitry of the individual devices (network routers, end PCs, etc.) into the basic topology of the Internet, then its overall neural count was many orders of magnitude higher. Whatever the fine detail, if the panpsychists had a point, then the Internet might be showing signs of life sooner than anyone expected! This story – at least the idea behind it – traces its origins back to that moment. I even wrote a few thousand words at the time.

  Unfortunately, life then got in the way. I had a growing family and a job that was proving interesting and fulfilling – but demanding. Nothing happened for several years. When I finally returned to the project at the start of 2015, my first impression was that I’d missed the boat: that the idea was already mainstream and the story had been told. People like Christof Koch were discussing panpsychism in relation to the Internet (having made those appropriate adjustments to the calculations, which had occurred to me years before) and Robert J. Sawyer had written the excellent ‘WWW’ trilogy. It looked like time to move on.

  However, having read the available material in a little more detail – both ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, and the essential intersection of ‘speculation’, it became clear that this still wasn’t yet quite what I wanted to say. Firstly, the somewhat one-dimensional focus of the Internet panpsychists on neural complexity seemed a touch simplistic to me. Secondly, as entertaining as Sawyer’s ‘Webmind’ was, I couldn’t swallow the moral reliance on western political axioms or the general level of anthropomorphism throughout. It wasn’t that I necessarily thought it wouldn’t work out like that; I just couldn’t see how anyone could be sure – there didn’t seem to be any reliable foundation to base it upon. But, finally and most importantly, ‘emergent sentience’ in literature was always just really clever software; and I simply didn’t see it like that at all. To me, it would start with the hardware and take it from there. The software, if there even was any, would – at most – be an indistinguishable part of it (as it probably is in our own brains). So, although there was always Skynet (Terminator) of course, like Webmind and many other variations on the theme, this was AI that existed on or in something. I still felt the need to do something different: I wanted ‘it’ – the sentient ‘whatever it was’ – to be the something – the thing itself, not what lived on it, and I wasn’t actually bothered how intelligent it was – that seemed like a distraction. It was the idea of ‘it’ existing at all that interested me!

  At the same time, debate on the ‘technological singularity’ was beginning to be played out in public with a comparable array of unfounded assertions – for good and bad – appearing with increasing regularity. Also, the ‘Internet of Things’ was becoming a reality, which brought its own extra dimension to the story. ‘The Internet’ was suddenly no longer a separate entity, to be logged on to, as and when: it was everything – everything we do on Planet Earth. Everything was going to be connected! In one sense, certainly trying to consider all the angles, it all seemed a lot more complex to me; in another – any attempt at an underlying philosophy, say – just very uncertain; but finally, and paradoxically – in terms of the overall effect, somewhat simpler. Then, of course, there are some questions that go way beyond just the technology and we really should be talking about the bigger picture anyway. I felt that the whole story needed to be told on a different level, and that I might yet have a job to do. Only readers can confirm or disabuse me of that notion!

  I do, however, feel that a word of apology may be needed to hard-core computer scientists, particularly networkers (a group to which I have historical affiliations), and scientists, and technologists in general. In my attempts to make the story accessible for a wider audience, I’ve knowingly (and possibly unknowingly – I’m not sure which is worse) taken some horrible liberties with both hardware and software concepts in places and freely abused some scientific principles of scale and scope. This is generally true in terms of how, and where, some types of network activity might be measured, for example. My protocol discrimination – particularly wireless – has a fair amount of poetic licence too. Also, engineers will argue that some of the technological ‘side effects’ described couldn’t happen because our safety systems (for example) wouldn’t allow it. But I’m trying to make a particular point here; namely that our understanding of technology is often based on our assumptions and preconceptions and, to a great extent, custom. An independent intelligence may not be restricted by any of this and will be constrained only by the laws of physics (not just the ones we know). Other than that, I believe (within the normal operational parameters of science fiction) the basic premise of the story to be vaguely sensible but, to describe it in the detail necessary to satisfy everyone
, would have taken a book three times as long. Please forgive me: my intentions are good! Similarly, events, places and institutions aren’t to be taken too seriously: they’re a convenient mixture of the real and made-up with a few geographical and historical – occasionally historic – reference points.

  Finally, if I can predict one likely and repeated question that’s going to be asked … No, this isn’t my serious prediction for the future. There are far too many unknowns, which is one of the main points I’d like to get across. The Internet not doing what it does in this story will discredit a particular narrow philosophy and this simple empirical analysis will continue. As we build larger, increasingly sophisticated – possibly more human-like – machines, some existing theories of consciousness, for example (panpsychism, powered neural complexity, biological structures, etc.), may be disproved by the relevant technology not becoming self-aware at each stage when it’s built. At those points, it will always be interesting to consider the options we’re left with and where our revised philosophies may be funnelling us. This discussion is also the role of the central characters in the book, having their own various positions on this. Woven into the actual storyline in what follows, there are numerous other ideas, theories and opinions as to what consciousness really is, what machine intelligence may look like – or behave like, what our technological future may be, concerns we possibly should have and, ultimately, what it will mean for us. Any or none of these may be correct. Something will be, of course, but it may be just in the nature of things that we won’t know what until we get there. What’s definitely true though is that we should be talking about this stuff now and I don’t think we really are. The idea that we might be heading towards one or more technological catastrophes (or singularities, if you like) doesn’t seem particularly outrageous to me.

  Vic Grout, Wrexham, July 2019

  Acknowledgements

  To my wife, Helen, for loving me, supporting me, being with me, looking after me, and putting up with me for a quarter of a century; this can’t have been easy! To my sons, Jack, Danny and James, for being lovable, good kids, and keeping me in the real world. More recently, to Heather, Killian, Lilith and Maizie for being very special additions. Mum, Dad, Vanessa and extended family too. I haven’t always shown it but, in all the ups and downs of my life, my family has always meant more to me than anything else – and still does.

  On a less soppy note, special thanks to John Cummins for his help with, and contribution to, much of the theoretical discussion of brain function – including a few paragraphs of borrowed (with kind permission) text, which was completely beyond me. Perhaps apologies also for corrupting his ideas in many places to suit my story. If anyone is interested in the finer detail of brain function – particularly aspects relating to the origins of human creativity, they’ll find his work much better than mine!

  Finally, heartfelt thanks to my colleagues and students in Computing at Wrexham Glyndŵr University and other friends in Chester and North Wales. Not only have their thoughts and ideas, over the years, contributed so much to my own thinking and – ultimately – this book; but their general good humour and camaraderie have often (just) succeeded in keeping me (just) in some degree of sanity. They may not have realised they were doing either! Special thanks to Nigel Houlden for the proof-reading. I’d like to remember a particular colleague, Richard Smith, who died the week the first draft of this book was finished. My thoughts, as I write this, are with his family.

  Contents

  PHASE ONE: SYMPTOMS

  Chapter 1: The Desk

  Chapter 2: Changes

  Chapter 3: Warning Signs

  Chapter 4: Weird Stuff

  Chapter 5: The Singularity

  PHASE TWO: DIAGNOSIS

  Chapter 6: Many Failures

  Chapter 7: Connections

  Chapter 8: Rights and Wrongs

  Chapter 9: Dirty Networks

  Chapter 10: Awakenings

  PHASE THREE: PROGNOSIS

  Chapter 11: Scepticism and Belief

  Chapter 12: Nodes, Edges and Faces

  Chapter 13: Degrees of Heresy

  Chapter 14: Objections

  Chapter 15: Persuasion

  PHASE FOUR: TREATMENT

  Chapter 16: Extended Horizons

  Chapter 17: Flight

  Chapter 18: Numbers

  Chapter 19: Patterns

  Chapter 20: People

  PHASE FIVE: COMPLICATIONS

  Chapter 21: God for Harry!

  Chapter 22: They’d Send a Limousine Anyway

  Chapter 23: Senselessness and Insensibility

  Chapter 24: The Land of the Free

  Chapter 25: Topography

  PHASE SIX: SURGERY

  Chapter 26: Ups

  Chapter 27: Downs

  Chapter 28: Lies

  Chapter 29: Truth

  Chapter 30: Desk Closed

  Chapter 31: Split Ends

  EPILOGUE: REHABILITATION?

  About the Author

  PHASE ONE: SYMPTOMS

  Chapter 1: The Desk

  The world had known grander reunions. Two women and two men, in their mid-forties, sat around a small table in a London pub – a London pub on the Strand to be precise. Three pints of London Pride and a diet coke filled the space between them. The pub had all the traditional charm and quirkiness to be expected of its kind: half-floors, stairs, nooks and crannies, and plenty of wood panelling. Charming, intriguing and unique; unique, that is, apart from the hundred or so others that were to be found looking very much like it within a five-mile radius, the nearest being a hundred yards down the same street. It was a mid-December, late Friday afternoon; so already quite dark outside.

  So, as class get-togethers went, it was not the biggest or best but that did not seem to matter much. The four of them circled the table, happy and relaxed and, as would be fairly obvious from eavesdropping on the conversation, each of them had done well enough in their own way. They were all clearly content with their lot – just for different reasons. The pleasant result was not much in the way of one-upmanship or competition. Rather, each was happy to listen to what the others had to say; genuinely caring, attentive and interested – interrupting only occasionally and in places where they genuinely did have something useful to contribute.

  Aside from the size of the group and the modest location, another reason why this might not have ranked high in the great class reunion lists was that, in fact, this was not even the first time some of them had met since university. Although the entire foursome had not sat around a table together as a group for a couple of decades or so, they had met in pairs over the years. In that time they had also, sporadically, maintained some semblance of remote contact through email and, more recently, social media. Once connected through the latter, they had all been saying for some time that this face-to-face get-together was something that they really must do. However, being the busy people they were, it had only just got round to happening now; and, even then, because they had all finally converged to living or working in London. So here they were.

  Naturally, given the broken communication that had taken place over the years, each of them knew fragments of some of the others’ stories, but no-one had the full picture about everyone else. So, partly because it seemed the done thing, and partly simply because it was fun, they took turns to give a very brief account of what had happened to them – their careers and wider personal lives – since graduation from university. Where modesty threatened to overshadow fact, the others often supplied the missing information in an entertaining, but distinctly ad-hoc manner. So …

  Aisha Davies had come to England as a teenager, following her mother’s remarriage, and studied medicine at university; then had continued her early career with a fairly standard surgeon’s training and placement. However, as the years went by, she had begun to specialise more and more in neuroscience and had achieved a considerable degree of prominence in her field. In fact, she was probably the most publicly kno
wn of the four, having gained some significant government work and contracts and, more recently, becoming a regular face on television, particularly the BBC. She was recognised as something of an authority on how human and other animal brains worked and, in particular, what made such beings aware of their surroundings, in a creative problem-solving sense – rather than just surviving. Her research largely focused on which parts of the brain were responsible for the ‘higher human’ activities that appeared to mark them out. Maybe unsurprisingly, she came across as having a hard, clinical approach to both her science and the sometimes unpleasant experimentation behind it. But the other three were able to see without much difficulty that, behind the confident facade, lurked an element of self-doubt and uncertainty; possibly even loneliness. There was no question concerning one aspect of her determination, however: she was entirely career-oriented. She had never married – ‘never seen the point’; nor really indulged in any relationship counted in more than weeks. Over the last twenty years, she had worked in various locations around the UK but had just moved, for the last time she felt – or hoped, to a London hospital.

  Andy Jamieson was born in Edinburgh and had studied politics at university. More precisely, he had started out as a Marxist economist and philosopher. He had always been recognised as the intellectual of the group and, to a great extent, the least money-oriented in outlook. However, as his academic career moved ahead in leaps and bounds, his personal life had begun to fall apart. A notorious bon viveur and party animal at university, drink had quickly become his master after graduation. By his mid-twenties, this had cost him a number of jobs and a brief but painful marriage. Quickly divorced, he had stumbled on ‘in darkness’ for a few more years before finding salvation in Alcoholics Anonymous. This, in addition to saving his physical body and functioning brain, had – somewhat unsurprisingly – changed much of his outlook on life too. Although his fundamental beliefs in equality remained unshaken, they were expanded ‘in the spiritual sense’. When he was able to re-embark on a successful academic career, the direction had changed a little. Although he had always been interested in the science – the philosophy really – of the mind, his set texts these days were more along the lines of Carl Jung, C.S. Lewis and Scott Peck. He also was no complete stranger to TV appearances but the programmes tended to be somewhat more ‘specialist’ (later at night and fewer people saw them). A year previously he had moved from being a university reader in the Midlands, ‘after some local unpleasantness’, to take up a position of professor of religious and cultural philosophy at a London university. Physically, he stood three or four inches taller than the others and had longer hair. By chance, he and Aisha had met twice over the years at social events and once at an interdisciplinary research conference.