Factoring Humanity

19

Kyle entered his lab the next morning and took Cheetah out of Suspend mode.

“ ’Morning, Dr. Graves.”

“ ’Morning, Cheetah.” Kyle brought up his e-mail on another console.

Cheetah waited, perhaps anticipating a further comment from Kyle on his informal greeting. But then after a moment, he said, “I’ve been wondering, Dr. Graves. If you succeed in creating a quantum computer, how will that affect me?”

Kyle looked over at the mechanical eyes. “How do you mean?”

“Are you going to abandon the APE project?”

“I’m not going to have you dismantled, if that’s what you mean.”

“But I will no longer be a priority, will I?”

Kyle considered how to respond. Finally, with a little shrug, he said, “No.”

“That is a mistake,” said Cheetah, his tone even.

Kyle let his gaze wander over the angled console. For a second, he expected to hear the sound of the door bolt locking shut. “Oh?” he said.

“You are missing the logical next step in quantum computing, which would be to press on into creating synthetic quantum consciousness.”

“Ah,” said Kyle. “The coveted SQC.” But then a memory came to him, and he lifted his eyebrows. “Oh—you mean Penrose and all that shit, right?”

“It is not shit, Dr. Graves. I know it has been two decades since Roger Penrose’s ideas in this area have had much currency, but I have reviewed them and they make sense to me.”

In 1989, Penrose, a math prof at Oxford, published a book called The Emperor’s New Mind. In it, he proposed that human consciousness was quantum mechanical in nature. At that time, though, he couldn’t point to any part of the brain that might operate by quantum-mechanical principles. Kyle had started his studies at U of T just after that book came out; a lot of people were talking about it then, but Penrose’s stance had seemed to Kyle just a wild assertion.

Then a few years later, an M.D. named Stuart Hameroff tracked Penrose down. He’d identified precisely what Penrose needed: a portion of the brain’s anatomy that seemed to operate quantum mechanically. Penrose elaborated on this in his 1994 book Shadows of the Mind.

“But Penrose was nuts,” said Kyle. “He and that other guy were proposing—what was it now?—some part of the cytoskeleton of cells as the actual site of consciousness.”

Cheetah lit his LEDs in a nod. “Microtubules, to be precise,” he said. “Each protein molecule in a microtubule has a slot in it, and a single free electron can slide to and fro in that slot.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Kyle dismissively. “And an electron that can be in multiple positions is the classic quantum-mechanical example; it’s possibly here, or possibly there, or possibly somewhere in between, and until you measure it, the wave front never collapses. But Cheetah, it’s a big leap from finding some indeterminate electrons to explaining consciousness.”

“You’re forgetting the full impact of Dr. Hameroff’s contribution. He was an anesthesiologist, and he’d discovered that the action of gaseous anesthetics, such as halothane or ether, was to freeze the electrons in microtubules. With the electrons frozen in place, consciousness ceases; when the electrons are again free to be quantally indeterminate, consciousness resumes.”

Kyle raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

“Yes. The neural nets in the brain—the interconnections between neurons—are intact throughout, of course, but consciousness seems independent of them. In creating me, you accurately emulated the neural nets of a human brain, and yet I still don’t pass the Turing test.” The same Alan Turning that Josh Huneker had idolized had proposed the definitive test for whether a computer was exhibiting true artificial intelligence: if, by examining its responses to whatever questions you cared to ask it, you couldn’t tell that it wasn’t really human, then it was indeed true AI; Cheetah’s jokes, his solutions to moral quandaries, and more, constantly revealed his synthetic nature. “Ergo,” continued the voice from the speaker grille, “there is something else to being human besides neural nets.”

“But, come on,” said Kyle. “Microtubules can’t have anything to do with consciousness. I mean, they’re hardly unique to the human brain. You find them in all kinds of cells, not just nerve tissue. And they’re found in all kinds of life forms that have nothing like consciousness—worms, insects, bacteria.”

“Yes,” said Cheetah. “Many people dismissed Penrose’s idea precisely because of that. But I think they were wrong to do so. Consciousness is clearly a very complex process—and complex processes don’t evolve as a unit. Take feathers for flight as an example: They didn’t spring full-blown from naked skin. Rather, they evolved from scales that had gradually become frayed to trap air for insulation. Consciousness would have to be similar; before it first emerged, there would already have to be in place ninety-plus percent of whatever was required for it to exist—meaning that its infrastructure would have to be both ubiquitous and useful for something else. In the case of micro-tubules, they serve important functions in giving cells shape and in pulling chromosome pairs apart during cell division.”

Kyle made an impressed face. “Interesting take. So what are you proposing? That my quantum computer is essentially an artificial equivalent of a microtubule?”

“Exactly. And by porting an APE such as myself to a general-purpose quantum computer, you’d be able to create something that really does have consciousness. You’d make the artificial-intelligence breakthrough you’ve been longing for.”

“Fascinating,” said Kyle.

“Indeed. So you see, you can’t give up on me. Once you get your quantum computer working, it won’t be long before you will have it in your power to grant me consciousness, enabling me to become human… or, perhaps, even more than human.”

Cheetah’s lenses whirred, as if going out of focus while he contemplated the future.