What We Can Know - 17

O ur students are permitted limited access to NAI. To prevent over-dependence, they must sit before an approved desktop. They also need to wait five days before they get their next shot. The kids mostly want advice on relationships, parents, music, fashion and money. They murmur their confessions and questions and get an immediate response. The Machine, as they like to call it, knows when it is being asked to write a student essay and will terminate the session. In written form, guidance can run to half a dozen single-spaced pages and is, I think, sensible and robust, though I know that others disagree. The tone is comradely. A response to an anxious question from a nineteen-year-old might begin, ‘I believe she’s trying to tell you something here and I’d say it’s time for you to be more reflective and analytical about your own behaviour. Remember the trouble you were in last year.’

NAI knows about a respondent’s life in intimate detail and its memory, of course, is long. The kids like that. They feel important, known and cared for. They are proud of an accumulating dossier that tells of their escapades, successes, disasters and growth. NAI is a friendly aunt, concerned, critical and worldly. The young make confessions to her they would not dare make to close friends or parents. Dossiers can swell by more than 200 pages a year. The kids boast to each other of admonitions as well as praise they’ve received. They enter early adult life as heroes in an epic of trivia and passion. Young newlyweds can destroy a marriage by swapping files, but many insist on it. People continue their consultations through life and seem reassured that neither the state nor commercial entities have access to the material. But confess to a crime and NAI will turn you in.

Most of us in the Humanities Department are wary of taking personal problems to a lifeless piece of software, however sophisticated. Our privileged allotment is every other day. Over in Science and Tech they have unlimited access. The scientists we know are more inclined to take their marriage or career problems to NAI. Along our corridor we tend to approach it as a research tool. I’ve made use of her during my Blundy research and received useful notes on background reading and social contexts. NAI lets me know who’s doing what in my field, who might be trespassing on my territory and who is following an interesting lead.

By early December 2120, serendipity was leading me nowhere and my work was stalled. I had the curious experience of knowing too much, of being burdened by the weight of my material. I had lost direction and was oppressed. In the small hours, I indulged mutinous thoughts: abandon the entire project, work instead on a pre-digital figure like George Crabbe, another among my favourite nature poets. What deliverance, to be immersed in a still-unthreatened natural world, to have only the poetry and correspondence to sift, to reimagine the poet through the admiration of his friend and supporter Edmund Burke, and his devoted readers William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Walter Scott. What liberation, to be relieved of the three million internet mentions of Francis Blundy in his lifetime, the 219,000 messages that were written to him and by him and the near-infinite references since. I longed to escape and breathe that dank and salty air of muddy foreshores with their rotting wooden hulls, the marshes and sluggish tidal rivers, to hear the mournful call of the bittern, to meet the poor inhabitants of this low-lying coast that Crabbe observed so closely and which was one of the first east-facing zones after London to be claimed by the sea.

Rose was forthright. ‘Idiot! Don’t you dare give up. Talk to NAI.’

I resisted, then one afternoon, with little else to do, I sketched out some questions for this beloved program that some in the Philosophy Department believe has attained consciousness. Nonsense, the hard tech people have told me. Pure projection. NAI is no better than the systems of the 2030s. Lack of progress hasn’t been down to know-how. Our various forms of disaster and chaos have blocked the development of better machines and software. No gallium and germanium or even copper in the Surrey Hills!

I asked NAI to go back to the two years before and the immediate period after the Second Immortal Dinner and speculate freely for me about the network of private relations around Blundy, and to suggest where I might take my investigations next. Most of what came back was familiar and of no use. NAI wanted me to go to the Kitchener archive in Scotland. I suffered my usual irritation at being first-named by a computer.

‘Tom, you resemble that fabled fellow who loses his watch one night and confines his search to the pavement under the street lamp. In the days after the birthday reading, Harry Kitchener would have been desperate to have sight of the poem. Something must have passed between him and Vivien. The absence of any email exchanges between them is interesting. Deletions? There is nothing in her journal. After the Corona reading she writes that she was spending a lot of time in London with her nephew Peter. In one week, she went three times, but wrote no accounts of their meetings. Are you sure this was where she went? Was your Vivien without blemish? Perhaps you’re too fond of her. Don’t let a spot of seasickness get in your way. Take another look at her Bodleian papers.’

As winter drew in, I was diverted by a related project. Rose suggested that we could draw our students into the history of the rise and fall and partial rise of AI. NAI was integral to their personal and social existence. It was their confessional, their mirror, the focal point of their self-esteem. We could exploit this engagement to counter their solipsistic resistance to the past. There was once great anxiety about machine intelligence – never resolved so much as forgotten. The students could return to those old debates and understand why AI had to be wrenched away from private companies. We would set writing assignments, 400 words maximum. Nothing too taxing.

Rose said, ‘A hundred-year overview of their love object. How can they resist?’

I could think of at least four reasons not to take this on. More work, more bureaucracy, more marking, reluctant students. But that night as we made love my reasons melted away. Afterwards, I agreed. She had given way on my pet project. I owed her this one. She wanted to roll three seminar groups together, which would mean applying for a larger room, not a simple affair for a sleepy administration reflexively hostile to any slight change in the schedule. We visited software experts in their spacious quarters suspended within a lustrous concrete shell. We were in awe of these brisk scientists, but they put us at our ease. It helped to be reminded that most of them didn’t know how to write longhand and had never read a poem. I thought they seemed to be in awe of us. Rose thought that was their way of being polite.

We assembled images of social and military chaos to grip our young audience. The colossal US aircraft carrier ablaze in the Taiwan Straits, listing as it sank, with sailors leaping from the deck; video of the annihilation from the air of an AI research centre ten miles from Beijing; a colossal open-cast mine in northern Europe – a failed attempt, one of many, to locate rare earth deposits.

We sent out a note to the students, reminding them that attending was not an option but a course requirement. On a Thursday at 2 p.m. Rose and I sat side by side facing a horseshoe of fifty-eight students. Since this was her idea, she gave the introductory speech. As she began, I scanned the faces. The kids were silent, attentive, but they seemed tense and unusually still. Rose’s tone was relaxed and warm. The essay projects would be short, she reassured them. Their long experience with NAI would mean they came to the course with inside knowledge, genuine expertise in dealing daily with a seemingly conscious mind. She digressed to offer some thoughts on the value of historical thinking and the dangers to any society that loses its memory. The same was true for individuals. She was a practised speaker and was untroubled as she paused to look about and gauge the silence in the room. In effect, to dominate it.

‘We’re all fine so far?’

No one spoke, but there was a muted stirring and rustling among the students which she pretended to take for an answer. In ten minutes she gave a condensed history of computing, starting with the Antikythera Mechanism built around 200 BCE , one of the first analogue computers, with elaborate cogs and dials. It was pulled out of the sea in 1901 and took many years to understand and reconstruct. Its likely use was to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. She moved on to the calculating machines of Babbage and Lovelace, then to Turing and then the sixty-year ‘cold’ period of AI as it floundered for lack of theoretical underpinning. The students remained quiet, but I sensed that something was up. I saw one young man leave and made a note of his name. Rose also saw him go but she pressed on, untroubled. There came the discovery, she said, that it was not the human brain that needs to be imitated to create an artificial intelligence. Instead, the brain’s product, the internet, could be mined for the appearance of conscious thought. Later, quantum computing and software breakthroughs led to a return to discarded neural networks. But then, global chaos interrupted progress.

She turned to me. ‘Now Tom is going to say a few words about the road to freedom.’

She had cued me correctly. NAI was a good instance. When does a useful tool become a necessity, and then our master? What first appears as liberation can end up as enslavement. Did the students want their NAI to be conscious and more intelligent than they were, so that their decisions in life would be sound and their dependency complete?

‘You can decide. This will be another of our group discussions.’

I was talking into the same thick silence Rose had managed to ignore. Now, someone in the front row of the horseshoe was standing. I had seen him around the place but didn’t know him. I was aware of his strange face and that he had a name formed of two first names. David Paul, Christopher Raymond or some such. Rose had told me he was exceptionally bright for a humanities student. I was about to tell him that there would be time later for questions.

‘Apologies for the interruption, Tom. My name is Kevin Howard and I’m a graduate student. I’ve been chosen to give a short message from the group.’

I remembered. It was the mouth, a rosebud, singular and perfect, and all the brighter for being set in a pale face as smooth as a child’s. He was well under average height. I was so taken by his appearance, by its vulnerability, that I was reluctant to close the young man down.

He was looking at his notes. ‘Rose said she wants us to consider the hold commercial interests once had over the internet. That’s our point. Every day we’re being told about the Inundation, the dark ages, the idiocy of those times, the warming they ignored and all that, their stupid wars, the animals they killed, how skin colour meant so much. On and on. The morons of long ago. And then of course, their neon strips, hamburgers and clubbing. Back when our island was a paradise a thousand miles long and you could go for a walk and see, what d’you call them – hedgehogs!’

There was laughter. Howard was staring at me. No denying he had presence, a defiant self-confidence. Burdened by a look of such radiant innocence, he was not going to be taken for a precocious little boy.

‘We’re saying, no more, thank you very much! Enough of what you think we’ve lost. Enough of some war a computer program started a hundred years ago. Or thousands of seamen jumping off a sinking ship and getting eaten by sharks. We want to talk about now , what we actually have , not what we don’t have, what we can hope for, about who’s doing all the thinking now, not then .’

There was something else I hadn’t noticed. My attention had been entirely fixed on Howard. As he was talking to us, the students were leaving in choreographed protest, one by one at intervals of several seconds.

‘So, well, look, I’ve been asked to say this. We’re tired of your anger and nostalgia. This is where we live. We’ve got more future than you and that’s what we want to talk about. So, very sorry Rose, very sorry Tom. We’re not interested in the value of historical thinking and the screwed-up past and we won’t be attending your course.’

I thought he sounded regretful. He sat and waited while the remaining few students left the room. Then he stood and, head down, hurried away, leaving us sitting side by side facing the empty chairs, unable to look at each other or speak.