SHADOWS ABOUT TO COLLIDE

From the R.M. Dolin novel, “An Unsustainable Life – Book of Darwin.”

Chapter 2: Shadows About to Collide

To tell this story the way locals, like Victor Ortiz do, you need to understand two things; first, none of the storytellers were there when things went down so they don’t fully know the drama fueling Darwin’s trauma. Perhaps a few heard firsthand years later, but Darwin’s not the talking type, so, most likely, you’re hearing of events multiple times removed. Equally important, no one espousing knowledge of what transpired came from the world Darwin was living in when things went south and Silicon Valley’s far removed from the Northern New Mexico wilderness, so, perspectives are probably skewed.

Our timeline begins at the confluence of exploding technology and the moral strain it causes visionaries willing to explore beyond the curtain of convenience; people who objectively put themselves past profit, who are humble enough to bypass personal hubris as they stare deeply into Pandora’s box and wonder if, how, and when, technology can appropriately commingle with humanity and what catalysts necessitate elements be constrained in order to save humanity from itself. This is the dilemma Darwin, and his cohort of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are asking themselves twenty-four years ago when technology’s event horizon is expansively large, lawlessly unregulated, and time to market for new ideas is measured in moments. The cohort starts with Darwin’s buddy from Purdue who’s working for Oracle on business systems integration. Jeff’s concerned the software he’s developing to manage complex systems ranging from municipal water supplies to nuclear power plants is not being adequately vetted. As industries and municipalities increasingly rely on Jeff’s software to make them more effective and efficient, the potential for unintended catastrophe grows exponentially. The overriding mantra, however, is displacing humans from operational parameters eliminates the risk of error – which everyone assumes is a good thing and that Jeff is just misguided for being concerned.

With a sales pitch perfectly packaged to deliver systems integration like gifts from Santa, Jeff increasingly sees a diminishing return on the value proposition with a potential for things to go catastrophically wrong. He goes so far as to develop a formula predicting how bad a system failure consequence can be based on the level of operational control being managed by nonhuman technology. He calls it his ‘shadows on the wall paradox,’ named after the Socratic thought experiment challenging humanity’s illusion with reality.

Jeff shares his shadows on the wall formula with Darwin not knowing what to expect. No one from Purdue’s engineering school came close to Darwin in raw coding talent and no one he’s met in Silicon Valley can match the gifted way Darwin turns ideas into innovation. That’s why Jeff’s surprised to learn Darwin’s wrestling with the same dilemma. What starts as two colleagues occasionally meeting over coffee to discuss the state of technology and its impact on society quickly grows. Tom from Apple is the first to join, he needs to vent the complex cocktail of excitement, anxiety, and fear he’s forced to consume each time he interacts with Steve Jobs who not only sees futures no one can comprehend but knows their precise realization pathway.

Hakeem joins next; he’s a defense contractor concerned about military ambitions around building autonomous fighter jets that don’t need pilots. Setting aside the moral implications around weapons of war, he sees shadows on the wall well enough to know waging war without human involvement does not end well for humanity. Before long, occasional coffee becomes a weekly forum for future focused visionaries needing to discuss, debate, and dry lab what if anything can be done and what their moral obligation to humanity demands.

Darwin coins the term ‘Shadow Dancers,’ to define this misfit cohort, it’s derived from the ancient Lakota Sioux Sundance where one seeks a vision through sacrifice. He tries repeatedly to explain the Shadow Dancers to Becky, but she’s not interested. She instead reminds Darwin that unlike his fellow nerds, she’s a serious woman running a serious human resources division at a major technology firm and the last thing she needs is for him to put her future in jeopardy by associating with radicals who are not on board with what Silicon Valley’s doing for not only for the American economy and national security but for humanity itself.

“Who are you,” Becky angrily asserts, “to decide for the rest of the world what’s allowed and what’s forbidden!” She chastises Darwin while demanding he ratchet back his affiliation with these so-called Shadow Dancers before he’s labeled technology’s Man from La Mancha.

Darwin deeply loves Becky, so he tries to disenfranchise himself from fellow Shadow Dancers, only his good faith efforts leave him feeling isolated and alone in a world spinning so fast it doesn’t seem possible it can contain himself, which is exactly what the Shadow Dancers are trying to convey. For them it’s so obvious that the way things are going, the trajectory the world’s on, can’t be sustained, and these guys ought to know, they’re the ones stoking the fires that drive technology’s engines.

Along with this small cohort of cautionaries, Silicon Valley’s spitting out millionaires and billionaires at unprecedented rates, which is part and parcel the problem. The thing about money is it buys alliances and fealty while burying conflict and that’s become the Valley’s pervasive business model. But inside the rush to riches, murmurings of concern about dangerously inevitable outcomes are taking hold, a minority voice to be sure but one those in charge are compelled to silence.

Darwin’s always been an early adapter who sees application potential others miss. He didn’t invent line of sight remote control technology but is the one to leverage it to convince the television industry that manual channel changing is obsolete. Doesn’t seem like much now but back in the day it’s a game changer. Darwin uses the sizable money he earns from that innovation to form a venture business whose mission is to deploy technology for the benefit of society. He even hangs a banner above his building entrance that reads, ‘Science Serving Society,’ a marketing logo he lifts from a technology vendor at a conference he once spoke at. Above his office door he hangs another banner that reads, ‘Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should,’ as a cautionary reminder to his employees. He concludes every team meeting reflecting on these core company values, encouraging younger colleagues to discuss concerns they might have with the work they do, which at the moment is developing a capability to provide people with advanced Parkinson’s disease an ability to walk. It isn’t something that’ll make them rock-star rich like many of their California colleagues, but it is a contribution that positively impacts people’s lives.

As Darwin readies his capability for commercialization, tensions between he and Becky escalate over his refusal to step away from the Shadow Dancers. Becky demands Darwin stop or else; she tells him that several Silicon Valley companies have launched investigations into employees who aren’t fully on board with company missions.

“Heads will roll,” Becky warns, “and careers are going to get canceled.”

Not only does she not want that for Darwin, she also can’t be connected to him or his cohorts, even if it means they must break up. So, there it is, his first moral consequence the Shadow Dancers foretold, it’s just that no one expected it to arrive this early or in this manifestation, but there it is, nonetheless.

How can Becky deliver such a dire ultimatum after they’ve committed to each other. He loves her so much and truly believes it’s reciprocated, you don’t push people you love into corners devoid of exits; that’s not how love works. At least that’s not how Darwin believes love works yet here we are with a cold callous line definitively drawn. At first, he’s angry, how can the woman he loves react with such indifference toward the man she loves who’s clearly struggling with a crisis of conscious. From there he morphs into despondency as he wrestles with the provocation of having to sacrifice morals for love, a dichotomy that should never be tested. He’s always assumed when technology’s divine dilemma strikes, it’ll be about morals versus money and since he doesn’t care about money it’ll be readily resolved. But love versus morals, that’s a horse he’s not ready to ride.

That’s the table as it’s set the morning Darwin arrives on Berkeley campus for a presentation to potential investors at the Faculty Club; a venue designed to host such interactions. After two intense years of research and development his capability for assisting Parkinson’s patients is ready for commercialization. As an entrepreneur his goal is to sell the technology outright so he can use the money to launch his next new something; he doesn’t yet know what that is but isn’t worried, ideas come to him at the pace of passing mile markers along a fast-moving highway.

An hour before his presentation begins Darwin dry runs his audio-visual components to confirm they work. He’s trying not to be distracted and needs things to go well to get Becky off his back; once this is over and he’s on to his next new something she’ll calm down, and things will go back to normal. He’s distracted though by something a fellow Shadow Dancer warns him about concerning the way things can go sideways at investor briefings. His colleague shared his experience with how technology he thought was for one purpose wound up being sold to investors with less noble ambitions and he didn’t find out until after contracts were signed and checks cashed.

That led to an hour’s long discussion and debate on technology’s impact on humanity and where, if anywhere, Shadow Dancers have an obligation to warn if not outright intervene on humanity’s behalf to prevent potential hazards and percolating calamities. One area that’s increasingly putting a wedge between Darwin and other Shadow Dancers is that no one has come up with a reasonable list of who to warn, how to make technology’s counter argument, and why they even should. Another issue causing consternation is that while most Shadow Dancers see the problem in a panoramic sense, everyone’s decidedly convinced their piece of the mosaic is not problematic. And therein the lies the paradox, one Darwin keeps coming back to as his AV comes online moments before investors are to arrive.

Darwin continues down his rabbit hole thinking about his next new something, he’s been looking at virtual reality, how can he not be enticed given the name. A colleague at Boeing recently challenged Darwin with an interesting problem; assembly of their new 777 aircraft is paced by how fast they can run the electrical and hydraulic cabling harnesses. Currently, each harness is hand crafted by laying out the pattern on a pegboard wall the length of the aircraft and then painstakingly customizing each harness for each individual aircraft. Management believes if they can develop VR technology that runs off a wearable computer and superimposes the wiring diagram onto the aircraft itself, they can speed up production by 10%, which in the aircraft industry is worth billions in profit.

People don’t realize that aircraft are assembled in sections and the line of sight down the center of a fully assembled aircraft can be off by as much as two feet depending on how the fuselage sections are manufactured and shimmed. That means each aircraft is custom made, requiring custom electrical and hydraulic harnesses. VR potentially allows harness customization in real time with precise modifications, which greatly increases assembly efficiency and aircraft effectiveness.

As enticing as this opportunity seems, it requires moving to Seattle and that’s something Darwin knows Becky won’t consider; at least not as things currently are between them. What he and Becky need is time to heal, a chance to work on rebuilding the intimacy they once shared so the love that lives inside him does not wilt away in worry.

Artificial Intelligence is another emerging technology with appealing allure. Darwin’s fascinated by the potential, both for good and evil and has already invested considerable bandwidth talking about it at Shadow Dancer meetings. While not as sexy as VR in name, the potential for AI to influence humanity up to and including its demise is too intoxicating not to consider. Currently, AI is just a fancy term for rule-based programming and database conglomeration; it’s something he enjoys tinkering with but in the future, if AI were to ever become self-aware as promoters suggest it will, things get real scary, real fast. The Shadow Dancers are already devising strategies for when that day arrives but Darwin can’t bring himself to get worked up about it; maybe because he knows Becky will blow a gasket if she catches on to his involvement, or maybe because unlike other Shadow Dancers, he’s wise enough to know, AI’s coming and there ain’t a damn thing he or anyone else can do about it.

As long as AI remains in the realm of science fiction Darwin doesn’t have to decide, however, the building blocks are falling into place faster than anyone predicted and the issue is, who’s going to be the moral weathermen if not the Shadow Dancers who are already coming to terms with how easily humans will trade their humanity for convenience and there’s little they can do to prevent or alter the way it will one day lead society to ruin like lemmings leaping off a ledge.

It seems strange to Darwin to be considering what all this means in relation to Becky and just as he’s uploading the question of whether love can exist in a post AI world, or even be permitted, early arriving investors distract him. The next things Darwin knows, his forty-minute presentation is followed by 90 minutes of intense questioning that leads to multiple offers, any one of which would be a fantastic outcome. What seals the deal is Darwin demonstrating how he combines a wearable computer with augmented reality in a way that tricks the brain to believing there’s obstacles in the way that must be avoided. Darwin’s research taps into a little-known neurological feature where brain functions sending muscle memory signals override brain functions damaged by Parkinson’s. As Darwin explains to investors, the hardest thing a human does is initiate motion but once motion begins, the bandwidth required to maintain it is relatively small.

“People with advanced Parkinson’s don’t lose the ability to walk,” Darwin explains to excited investors, “they lose the ability to initiate motion, and my technology overcomes that.”

Several investors eagerly make offers, including one who won’t say who he represents without a nondisclosure agreement. Darwin became aware of him during his presentation because of the odd way he never took notes and never asked questions. Now, here he is not content to bid on optioning strategies like the other investors but wanting to buy whole damn company outright. At first Darwin politely declines, sure he and his team talked about that being a potential outcome, but he’d really like to be involved in the commercialization process, and the investor made it clear that wasn’t an option. When the investor nonchalantly hands Darwin a slip of paper containing an obscenely high buyout offer, he must be taken seriously.

What Darwin wants is time to consider the offer. What the investor needs is a decision right now, take it or leave it. As the investor points out, at the level of this offer, Darwin’s in no position to think he can do better. From there things happen so fast it isn’t until after the contracts are signed and the cash transferred that Darwin remembers the warning from his fellow Shadow Dancer, which prompts him to call back to the office to find out what they can about this guy and his company. In the time it takes Darwin to pack up and load his car, he gets an answer. Best anyone can ascertain, the investor and his company represent a facade for the Chinese military tied to the development of autonomous soldiers.

Horrified by what he’s done, Darwin staggers back into a faculty club hoping to catch the investor in time to rescind the offer. The investor’s lawyers, however, point out that according to the terms of their deal, once the funds were transferred the contract became binding. As the investor and his sudden entourage leave, Darwin falls back into a faculty club chair, cupping his hands over his eyes as if to keep what happened contained to nightmares. Instantly he realizes what he’s done, something he never considered until this moment because he was so enamored at how his technology helps humanity. Now it’s all so clear, they’ll use his technology to provide fundamental building blocks for fully autonomous nonhuman soldiers. How could he not see this potential before, how could no one at his company see it; in all the scenarios they postulated over the past two years, not once did someone broach anything this nefarious. The sin of what he’s done is overwhelming; he’s just enabled the one thing he and his fellow Shadow Dancers feared most; countries exploiting technology to gain the ability to wage war without humans and there is absolutely no way he can un-own the role he’s played.

“My God, my God,” Darwin cries in anguish, “what the hell have I done.”