* * *
Britt recalls him fondly from her time at Sydney U. Her favorite professor, Dr. Addison—Nick, as he’d encouraged students to address him.
She’d taken his Pseudohuman Ethics class her freshman year.
Like most, she’d chosen it for its reputation as an easy A.
Lecture, according to the syllabus, had centered on the manufacture and use—or enslavement and torture, as the PETA-types saw it—of Cerebro-Organoids[1].
It was ostensibly a Humanities credit, but, being the prodigally polymathic—not to mention tenured—professor that he was; with Sydney U giving him the leeway it did at the time, Dr. Addison had turned the focus of his class far far beyond discussion of those hapless blobs of lab-grown greymatter.
That neural goo had already seen bonafide computational application for nearly 3 decades by that time, and, in a more constrained fashion, even 15 years before that.
By his measure, it was hardly a brave new frontier of scientific inquiry.
Instead, Nick had turned the spotlight in more controversial directions. Namely onto The Problem of Non-Emergence, focus of his many pet-theories, and controversial because it was considered a dead avenue, a solved game, a waste of student time and university money.
Synthetic Phenomenology Studies hadn’t been a thing for nearly 15 years.
Nevertheless, he persisted, and his students, forced to truly think and understand rather than merely learn and know, were the better for it.
A class of esoteric philosophy by any other name.
And while philosophy, however abstruse, is the meat and potatoes of any ethics class, had University administration known exactly how deep into tangential material Dr. Addison was diving, they might’ve put a stop to it. As indeed they did just a few years later, but not before Britt had been swept off her intellectual feet.
She had changed majors, much to her parents chagrin, from respectable—and potentially quite profitable—BioChem Engineering, to alternatingly in- and out-of-vogue again Algorithmic Systems & Computational Interface Sciences [2].
She’d been positively smitten with the man’s ideas; perhaps, even, with the man himself.
Under his tutelage they’d made significant detours from established curriculum; she’d investigated the phenomenon, or rather lack thereof, of emergent consciousness in machine systems; making sure to keep these deviations from prevailing zeitgeist strictly between themselves.
Her perfunctory dissertation defense had proved satisfactory in the end. She’d written her paper, Facilitating Optimized Efficiencies Through Tactical Implementation Of Quantum Decoherence In Synthetically Entangled Systems [3], over the course of a single weekend, needing only 3 gallons of coffee to do so; finally earning the title of Doctor herself, a prefix that she, unlike her mentor, very much enjoyed hearing spoken in full.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Now, almost 10 years into a life of postdoctoral research that—despite occasioning several lucrative consulting gigs—never quite seems to yield the intellectual fruits most desired, she sits in the luxurious cabin of a VIP Quad-rotor. The one sent by Thuma himself for her, to ferry her across the Atlantic to his reclusive compound on the small island purchased some years ago—for quite the bargain she’s told— from the quiet and isolationist Nippon Empire.
Whisked away on a private flyer to a trillionaire’s private island for drinks and probably some fancy hors d'oeuvres I won’t be able to pronounce
If only mom and dad could see me now
She knows any wining and dining will be a formality of course. A pleasant fiction to make her more amenable. Thuma has invited her, as well as the others, to his island because he wants some good PR. After the recent debacle in Greenland he needs a rebrand, especially with his planned expansion in the Antarctic.
Apparently even the wealthiest man ever to walk this earth still has to care what the rest of us plebeians think about him at least some of the time
Still, she is curious what, if any, insights she’ll take away from her look at the island’s inner workings. ‘Revolutionary’ she’s been told, a ‘never before seen’ system.
But Britt has seen plenty of the never-before-seen before.
In this day and age, custom expert systems are easy to cook up. Whatever you need optimized, organized, overseen, there is a Machine Intelligence for that.
Of course, they all pass—transcend—the Turing test. People like their servants, tutors, secretaries, and personal assistants, to put on the mask of humanity.
Psychologists know it’s easier to empathize with a system when it pretends to feel; tech conglomerates know it’s easier to sell a system when you can pretend so, too.
But the feelings are all counterfeit, everyone knows this. They can talk to you, but there’s no one in there doing the talking.
Irrelevant, of course, to their functionality. They crunch our numbers to make life easier. No one—except a scientist qua philosopher like Britt—has any real interest whether they are awake as they do so.
She wonders what bells and whistles, what NDA-secured processing tricks, this system will have.
More so, she wonders what Amal and Reyes, being her only true equals in the field, will think after their peek into the system.
The Northpac legislators, Rainy and Stovich; the PRC, Saudi-Heg, and Swiss Compact politicos; the PrimeFeed Anchors; Influencers; even the 3 or 4 other Machine Intelligence “experts”, they would all be convinced easily enough.
They either understood nothing about how such systems worked, or they understood just enough to not realize that they understood nothing about how such systems worked.
Especially the anchors and influencers, she thinks, they knew less than nothing. They were just pretty faces and soothing voices that told the masses what to think.
Whatever smoke and mirrors Thuma had planned, it would work on them. But her, Amal, and Reyes, they would see right through any sloppy reasoning or hand-waved rationales.
She wonders if, by the end of their stay, they’ll actually see eye to eye. Would they willingly be the man’s mouthpiece? Reassuring the world that everything is okay, the debacle in Greenland was a fluke, it had nothing to do with the expert system in charge, nothing like that could ever happen again? Would they end up his next successful converts?
If it comes to it, I wonder how subtle he’ll be about bribery?
* * *
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[1] Originally detailed in a 2013 landmark paper by Jürgen Knoblich and his team at IMBA, neural-, cerebral-, or brain-organoid, describe an artificially grown, in vitro, three-dimensional structure derived from human pluripotent stemcells (hPSCs) that reflects early brain organization. Dubbed Cerebro-Organoids by 2047 consensus agreement after significant advancements in culturing and protraction, they see regular implementation in high-efficiency “time-share” processing, applications requiring low-latency intra-network communication, and Reflexive Computing.
[2] The modern outgrowth of Synthetic Phenomenology Studies that investigates how the complex interrelationship of physical and virtual structures gives rise to computational ability.
[3] Klice, B. (2081). Facilitating Optimized Efficiencies Through Tactical Implementation Of Quantum Decoherence In Synthetically Entangled Systems. (Publication No. 698256669) [Doctoral Dissertation, Sydney University]. Journal Of Data Structure & Computational Theory.