False Value (Rivers of London 8) by Ben Aaronovitch

Author:Ben Aaronovitch [Aaronovitch, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781473207882
Publisher: ORION
Published: 2020-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

The Spectrum

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.

Anonymous

11

Still Alive Out There . . . Good

If there was ever a candidate to be patron saint of computers then it would be Alan Turing. Mathematician, war hero and tragic victim of homophobia. Apart from shortening the Second World War by a couple of years, he’s credited with doing much of the theoretical work that led to modern computing. If you want to distract some computer nerds, get a discussion going about his precise role, but don’t let it drift into speculation about either his suicide or the future of artificial intelligence – this can lead to actual physical violence.

I’m not kidding.

Back in 1950, when computers had barely made the jump from electromechanical to electrical, he postulated a test for whether a machine was intelligent. Or, rather, he cleverly sidestepped the fact that we don’t have a working definition of intelligence by asking whether a machine, in a blind test, could convince someone it was a person. Lots of very clever people have argued about whether the test has any validity, but I’m telling you if what I was talking to wasn’t a self-aware entity, then it was doing a fucking good impression of one.

‘A real AI, a real fucking artificial general intelligence,’ I said. ‘Oh my God.’

Skinner was grinning like a schoolboy and it made him look like a proper human being for once.

Forget Bezos, Musk, forget Tesla and Edison, Turing or Babbage or Lovelace. Skinner would be the most famous tech entrepreneur of all time – go Queensland!

‘You know,’ I said, ‘there are two outcomes from this. Either you’re about to become the richest man on earth, or life as we know it is over.’

There was a third possibility, of course – that he was totally faking it. But I kept that one to myself.

And a fourth possibility – that I was missing something – I didn’t want to think about.

Assume nothing, I thought, believe nothing – check everything.

Including what your partner is up to when you’re not looking.

‘Can I see it?’ I asked.

‘See what?’

‘The hardware,’ I said. ‘Wherever it is Deep Thought lives when it’s at home.’

Skinner gave me a mock frown, his good humour bubbling over any annoyance.

‘There’s no “hardware”,’ he said, making scare quotes with his fingers. ‘Deep Thought is distributed throughout the Bambleweeny intranet.’

Upstairs, above you, Deep Thought had said – it obviously thought it was concentrated somewhere, whatever Skinner said. We all live in that space behind our eyes. Where did Deep Thought think it lived?

‘Do you want a drink?’ asked Skinner.

I said yes and we went to Milliways, the executive staff refreshment room which only opened to top management’s ID cards and had a drinks cabinet the size and capacity of a wardrobe into an alternative world.

He had half a bottle of Johnnie Walker’s Blue Label already opened and so it seemed logical to start with that. Unlike expensive wine, I could really taste the money for once and we

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