The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 16

Peter was not about to let his newfound celebrity interfere with his Tuesday evening dinners with Sarkar at Sonny Gotlieb’s. But he did have something very specific that he wanted to explore with Sarkar, and he began without preamble. “How do you create an artificial intelligence? You work in that field — how do you do it?”

Sarkar looked surprised. “Well, there are many ways. The oldest is the interview method. If we wanted a system to do financial planning, we would ask questions of several financial planners. Then we reduce the answers as a series of rules that can be expressed in computer code — ‘if A and B are true, do C.’”

“But what about that scanner my company built for you? Aren’t you doing full brain dumps of specific people now?”

“We’re making good progress toward that. We’ve got a prototype called RICKGREEN, but we’re not ready to go public with it. You know that comedian, Rick Green?”

“Sure.”

“We did a full scan of him. The resulting system can now tell jokes that are just as funny as the ones the real Rick tells. And by giving it access to the Canadian Press and UPI news feeds, it can even generate new topical humor.”

“Okay, so you can essentially clone in silicon a specific human mind—”

“Get with the twenty-first century, Peter. We use gallium arsenide, not silicon.”

“Whatever.”

“But you have hit upon what makes the problem crisp: we are just at the point where we can clone one specific human mind — a shame that such a technique did not exist in time to scan Stephen Hawking. But there are very few applications in which you want the knowledge of just one person. For most expert systems, you really want the combined knowledge of many practitioners. So far, there is no way to combine, say, Rick Green and Jerry Seinfeld, or to build a combined Stephen Hawking/Mordecai Almi neural net. Although I had high hopes for this technology, I suspect most of the contracts we’ll get will be for duplicating the brains of autocratic company presidents who think their heirs are going to be interested in what they have to say after they’re dead.”

Peter nodded.

“Besides,” said Sarkar, “total brain dumps are turning out to be a tremendous waste of resources. When we created RICKGREEN, all we were really interested in was his sense of humor. But the system also gives us everything else Rick knows, including his approaches to raising his children, an endless amount of expertise about model trains, which are his hobby, and even his cooking technique, something no one in his right mind would want to emulate.”

“Can’t you pare it down to isolate just the sense of humor?”

“That’s difficult. We’re getting good at decoding what each neural net does, but there are many interconnections. When we tried deleting the part about child rearing, we found the system no longer made jokes about family life.”

“But you can make an accurate duplicate of a specific human mind on a computer?”

“It’s a brand-new technique, Peter. But, so far, yes, the duplication seems accurate.”

“And you can, at least to some extent, decode the functions of the various neural interconnections?”

“Yes,” said Sarkar. “Again, we’ve only tried it on the RICKGREEN prototype — and that was a limited model.”

“And, once you’ve identified a function, you can delete it from the overall brain simulacrum?”

“Bearing in mind that deleting one thing may change the way something that seems unrelated will respond, yes, I’d say we’re at the point at which we can do that.”

“All right,” said Peter. “Let me propose an experiment. Say we make two copies of a specific person’s mind. In one of them you excise everything related to the physical body: hormonal responses, sexual urges, things like that. And in the second one, you remove everything related to bodily degeneration, to fear of old age and dying, and so on.”

Sarkar ate a matzo ball. “And what would the point be?”

“The first one would be to answer that question everyone keeps asking me: what is life after death really like? What parts of the human psyche could persist separate from the body? And, while we’re at it, I figure we’d do the second one — a simulation of a being who knew he was physically immortal, like someone who has undergone that Life Unlimited process.”

Sarkar stopped chewing. His mouth hung open, giving an undignified view of a masticated dumpling. “That’s — that’s incredible,” he said at last, around his food. “Subhanallah, what an idea.”

“Could you do it?”

Sarkar swallowed. “Maybe,” he said. “Electronic eschatology. What a concept.”

“You’d need to make the two brain dumps.”

“We’d do the dump once, of course. Then we’d just copy it twice.”

“Copy it once, you mean.”

“No, twice,” said Sarkar. “You can’t do an experiment without a control; you know that.”

“Right,” said Peter, slightly embarrassed. “Anyway, we’d make one copy which we would modify to simulate life after death. Call it — call it the Spirit simulacrum. And another to simulate immortality.”

“And the third we would leave unmodified,” said Sarkar. “A baseline or control version that we can compare to the original living person to make sure that the simulacra retain their accuracy as time goes on.”

“Perfect,” said Peter.

“But you know, Peter, this wouldn’t necessarily simulate true life after death. It’s life outside the physical body — but who knows if the soulwave carries with it any of our memories? Of course, if it doesn’t, then it’s not really a meaningful continuation of existence. Without our memories, our pasts, what we were, it wouldn’t be anything we’d recognize as a continuation of the same person.”

“I know,” said Peter. “But if the soul is anything like what people believe it to be — just the mind, without the body — then this simulation, at least, would give us some idea of what that kind of soul would be like. Then I could have something intelligent to say the next time I get asked that ‘What’s life after death really like?’ question.”

Sarkar nodded. “But why the research into immortality?”

“I went to one of those Life Unlimited seminars a while ago.”

“Really? Peter, surely you don’t want that.”

“I — I don’t know. It’s fascinating, in a way.”

“It’s stupid.”

“Maybe — but it seems we could kill two birds with one stone with this research.”

“Perhaps,” said Sarkar. “But who would we simulate?”

“How about you?” asked Peter.

Sarkar raised a hand. “No, not me. The last thing I want to do is live forever. True joy is possible only after death; I look forward to the felicity to be given to my realized soul in the next world. No, they were your questions, Peter. Why not use you?”

Peter stroked his chin. “All right. If you’re willing to undertake the project, I’m willing both to fund it and to be the guinea pig.” He paused. “This could answer some really big questions, Sarkar. After all, we know now that both physical immortality is possible and that some form of life after death exists. It would be a shame to choose one if the other turned out to be better.”

“Hobson’s choice,” said Sarkar.

“Eh?”

“Surely you know the phrase. Your last name is Hobson, after all.”

“I’ve heard the expression once or twice.”

“It refers to Thomas Hobson, a liveryman in England in, oh, the seventeenth century, I think. He rented out horses, but required his customers to take either the horse nearest the stable door or none at all. A ‘Hobson’s choice’ is a choice that offers no real alternative.”

“So?”

“So you don’t get an alternative. Do you seriously think that if you were to bankrupt yourself buying nanotechnology immortality that Allah couldn’t take you anyway if He wanted to? You have a destiny, as do I. We have no choice. When it’s time for you to go to the stable, the horse nearest the door will be the one that is meant for you. Call it Hobson’s choice or qadar Allah or kismet — whatever term you use, it’s the foredestiny of God.”

Peter shook his head. He and Sarkar rarely talked about religion, and he was beginning to remember why. “Are you willing to undertake the project?”

“Sure. My part is easy. You’re the one who is going to have to face himself. You will see your own personality, the inner workings of your own mind, the interconnections that drive your thoughts. Do you really choose to do that?”

Peter reflected for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I really do choose that.”

Sarkar smiled. “Hobson’s choice,” he said, and signaled the server to bring the check.