THE COMING SINGULARITY

 From the R.M. Dolin novel, "An Unsustainable Life - The Book of Darwin."
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Chapter 15: The Coming Singularity

Hard to say what one should say to someone they never thought they’d see again; for Darwin and Tien who parted without closure, silence seems to be their magic melody. Five years; for some things it’s a moment buried in blurs and for others it’s a still-life hell suspended upside down in self-imposed purgatory. Either way, there they are, Tien in her rental car staring at the house but not at the man she’s traveled clear across the country to see. Darwin standing in the doorway, seeing all the implications while looking past her expecting some other shoe to drop. Both are aware of the necessity of the moment, but neither is willing to jump-start the required momentum.

Without any kind of gesture or expression Darwin turns and walks back inside leaving the front door open. He goes to the kitchen and puts a pot of water on the stove making sure to keep his back to the hallway and stiffens just a bit when he hears Tien’s arrival. As he waits for the water to boil, he gets out a ceramic tea pot and adds green tea, honey, and mint leaves from his garden. He knows she’s not watching, she’s looking at the floor waiting for him to signal something, anything, but nothing, not a word, no “hi,” no “how are you,” no “thanks for coming all this way to see me,” any of which would at least, at a minimum, be a common courtesy, he just busies himself with tea and silence.

Darwin pours hot water into the tea pot and sets the pot on a tray beside a bright red mug. He goes to his pantry and pulls out a bottle pouring three fingers of bourbon into a glass. He leaves the bottle on the counter, certain whatever she’s here for is gonna require multiple refills. Normally Darwin’s hard and fast rule about drinking is not before six unless the Cubs are playing; it’s hard going nine whole innings of exciting Chicago Cubs baseball without a little emotional fortification. Today though, rules be damned, he may not know why Tien’s here but the fact she tracked him down and traveled all this way is evidence enough it isn’t good.

Grabbing the tray of tea and whiskey Darwin walks outside to the courtyard knowing she’ll follow. He sets his tray on a table between two blue-veined ponderosa pine Adirondack chairs made by the same carpenter who made the one he has at base camp from the lightening tree he harvested last summer. He sits down and grabs his bourbon. Tien tentatively follows, gently lowering herself onto the other chair without making eye contact. Together they sit in silence staring at the juniper and piñon forested base of Marquez Mountain, Tien tasting her mint infuse green tea, Darwin drinking his three-fingers bourbon, both waiting for a clarity they know is coming.

It’s been half an hour since Tien’s arrival, yet they still haven’t spoken. Most would feel immense pressure to say something but that’s not their deal, even back in California they could go days without speaking, just politely smiling when one inadvertently makes eye contact with the other before leaning into their autistic tendencies. The entire time they collaborated on the Parkinson’s project, there’d be intervals where they talked nonstop but then periods where neither felt the need to allocate time or bandwidth to conversation, especially since silence provides so many under-appreciated communication channels.

Darwin finishes his whiskey and puts the empty glass on the patio table between them, not yet in need of a refill. He settles back in his chair to watch a squirrel race frantically from his sundial that doubles as a birdbath toward the nearest tree with Murphy in hot pursuit. Last week was the funniest damn moment when after years of chasing rabbits, squirrels, and packrats, Murphy finally catches his first squirrel. He proudly prances around the yard with the squirrel’s tail in his mouth and the squirrel doing what it can to scratch and bite Murphy from his upside-down suspension. Eventually, Murphy sets the squirrel down thinking they can resume playing but once free, instead of running away to restart their game the pissed off squirrel counterattacks. After Murphy gets past the shock of the squirrel’s aggression, he pins him down with his paw only now he doesn’t know what to do. He slowly sniffs the squirrel up and down its entire body as if odor will decide if he’s friend or foe. After multiple moments of consternation Murphy lifts his paw and takes a step back to see how the squirrel reacts.

The squirrel, still recovering from his near-death experience, staggers to his feet but rather than run, faces off with his evil nemesis who’s now barking in playful encouragement. Having no idea what the hell Murphy’s barking about and no interest in continuing their bonding moment, the squirrel turns and slowly walks off to the nearest tree leaving Murphy to wonder why playtime has prematurely ended. And now they’re back, dog and squirrel once again at their game of cat and mouse causing Darwin to consider just how perfect life is here on his wilderness mountain, how easily it is for messages to get lost in translation, and how quickly everything’s he’s built over the last five years is about to be cast in change’s crescendo wave of chaos.

He stoically looks at Tien with the surrender sadness of a death row inmate letting the warden know he knows it’s time; he’s finally ready to face whatever the hell it is she came here for. “Can I assume,” he starts with a deadpan seriousness Tien recognizes from team meetings back in the day when unpleasant topics needed to be discussed, “this is not a social call?”

Tien appreciates her mentor making the first move and knows from having been in this moment many times before that his invitation to start is a signal he’s cleared his mind of all distractions and is ready to listen. She’s learned over their years of collaboration that for Darwin everything’s a process and when something serious needs to be discussed, he can’t be ambushed or hurried, one has to let him set himself up, get rid of all competing calculations and deliberations simultaneously racing around his head so he can devote full attention to the matter at hand. She’s been rehearsing her opening line since well before boarding the plane to Albuquerque two days ago. She perfected her pitch during yesterday’s four-hour drive to Taos but this morning over breakfast it became abundantly clear everything she planned to say is not enough to convince Darwin of what he needs to do.

Ditching hours of dry run opening salvos, she goes instead with the first random unrehearsed thing that pops into her head; “It’s quite the fairytale life you’ve got going here,” she offers, “in many ways akin to the life my grandfather pieced together after his unfortunate incident.” She waits for Darwin to respond but he doesn’t and the longer she waits the more uncomfortable she gets. “Even you must know, not all fairy tales get to have a happy ending, which brings me too why I’m here.”

“Yes!” Darwin shoots back with open hostility. “Let’s uncork that bastard bottle of bullshit.”

Tien’s learned she needs to be the calming influence whenever they have unpleasant conversations. She tried once ratcheting up her emotions to match his during a heated debate over the way she solved a mathematical formula he’d developed only, she learned that while she has an upper ceiling for such expressions of emotion, Darwin does not. Nothing good comes from over-heated debates so Tien opts to be the tranquil voice of reason whenever her and Darwin get engaged in something like this. Rather than be rattled, which she is, Tien deliberately sips her tea and restarts, “I didn’t come all this way to get you spun up, you’re quite good at doing that on your own. I came at considerable risk to my future, to share some things with you and get guidance about what I should do.”

Between the calm, even cadence of Tien’s voice and the vulnerable way she’s open about personal peril kicks Darwin into mentor mode. “We’ll get to what you’ve done in a moment,” he lectures, “but to put you at ease, no matter how bad it is, just know my hacienda has two bedrooms and you’re welcome to hide here for as long as you need.” He shifts in his chair to better face his protege, “I always knew I didn’t need to worry about you, you’re too gifted to not find your way. So, tell me, this crisis you’re in, does it involve me? I’m thinking you wouldn’t journey all the way to the Northern New Mexico wilderness unless whatever you’re involved in involves me.”

Tien gets up and walks to the edge of the Saltillo tile courtyard to allow the sun’s warming rays to fill her face with fortitude. “First of all,” she flatly states “thank you for your offer of refuge but this is not that kind of crisis.” She turns to face the hacienda but cannot face her mentor. “This is too big to run from or hide from-”

Darwin leaps out of his chair grabbing his bourbon glass, “sorry to interrupt, but I already see whatever you’re about to tell me is gonna require a reload. Stay here, I’ll be right back.” He starts for the kitchen, “you want another green tea,” he shouts over his shoulder.

“Yes, please,” Tien answers as Darwin darts inside.

Darwin’s just finished pouring a bourbon reload when Tien enters with the tray containing her now empty mug and the tea pot. “Do you have any electronics in the house?” she asks. “Cell phones, computers, answering machine, VCR? If so, shut them down. If you have a satellite radio, shut that down. Don’t just turn them off, unplug them.”

Darwin looks up in dismay, suddenly aware of how much faster technology has evolved than he assumed it would. He grabs his bottle of bourbon and pours and addition measure of solace before leaving the kitchen to roam his house for compromising electronics. He reenters the kitchen just as Tien’s water starts to boil and pours it into the ceramic tea pot he preloaded with mint, tea, and honey. “Water at this elevation boils ten degrees cooler than California,” he says just to fill the void, “you’ll want to let your tea sit a bit longer than usual.” He leans back against the counter facing Tien, “do we need to take a walk in the woods for more privacy.”

“Not if you’re certain you’ve turned off all your electronics.”

“Without revealing anything you don’t need to, I already know the kind of people you’re involved with, are they our guys or theirs?”

“Ours.”

“How deep are you in.”

“All the way.”

“Geez Tien,” Darwin softly scolds, his words wet with worry, “after what happened to your grandfather, what happened at Berkeley, how could you let yourself go there?”

“I was trying to fix things,” she sternly states. “I didn’t run away like you, I not only own my part of what happened, I carry the complicity of what happened to my grandfather. I had an opportunity to fix things and I took it.”

Darwin’s reflexive reaction is to defend himself against the assertion he hasn’t owned what happened at Berkeley or that he’s running away from his responsibilities, but he rises to the recognition this moment isn’t about him and that his former protege came here for help not judgment. “Each of us carries our burdens differently,” he tells her. “I don’t condemn you for anything you may have done. You’re a good soul and I know whatever it is, you were trying to do good and for that both me and our grandfather admire you.”

“Thank you,” Tien softly says, steadied by his reassurance, “part of why I came all this way was to hear you say that.”

Darwin takes a solemnly slow pull of bourbon. “So then, are you here hoping to get out or hoping to pull me in?”

Tien long ago learned the only way to deal with Darwin is blunt and straight-on. “I need help fixing the mess I made trying to fix the mess you made.” She stares at the tea Darwin just poured not ready for the confrontation that awaits but knowing Darwin has to hear what he couldn’t bear to face after Berkeley. “You threw in towel and just walked away, someone had to pick up the pieces, clean up the mess.” She continues in a calm well metered voice. “What did you think would happen?”

There it is, just the way Darwin taught her, no sugar coating, no beating around the bush, just getting straight to the point. “The one thing I knew after Berkeley,” he offers in a consolatory tone, “I couldn’t be trusted with technology. God gave me a gift and I misused it. I walked way because it was the only way I could still serve humanity and atone for what I’d done.”

Tien forgets her role as their dialog referee and follows her emotions. “You walked away because you didn’t have the courage to confront what needed to be done! But I did. We both saw it; we just aligned along different vectors.”

Darwin takes his time, he’s deeply offended and his impulse is to lash out, to defend himself but he doesn’t, in part because he accepts the elements of truth in Tien’s accusation and because reacting is not going to advance the conversation they’re still just warming up to. “If you really believe that, why would you think I’d choose to help you now?”

Tien looks at Darwin with the desperation of someone carrying the full weight of not only her debt to humanity, but those of her ancestors, “You told me once, it was after I shared what happened with my grandfather, you said sometimes, we don’t get to decide what happens.”

“I can’t go back Tien; you need to know that. I know that’s what you came here for, to fetch me back to the world I walked away from. You can cast it in any kind of noble cloak you want but at the end of the day, no matter how hard I try to do good, it has a way of ending up bad. Maybe that’s the aspect of technology I see that no one else does, we mask our little programs and algorithms as altruistically improving people’s lives, but there’s an evil at work in each incremental step we take toward conning humanity into surrendering its soul. You can’t just command me to fix what’s broken like I’m some sort of savant healer, I’m not. I’m the catalyst behind the silent sickness causing humanity’s undiagnosed cancer.”

Tien sips her tea with cautious contentment knowing once Darwin engages in debate, the battle’s half over because he’s no longer at “no,” he’s in the process of bringing the discussion across the finish line. “Lie to yourself all you want,” she softly presses, “but I know, you know, you can’t unplug, hiding here in your wilderness sanctuary was always just a pretense, a prelude to your return to make amends, you just needed time, space to sort things out, the right kind of catalysts. You’re an engineer, a builder; I’m asking you to help me build something so big it makes amends for all our sins. I know you stay current and it’s more than ironic you live way out here with your Walton Mountain life in this remote and isolated wilderness but intellectually, Darwin, you never left Silicon Valley or gave way your desire to redefine tomorrow.”

Feeling the anxiousness of the cornered rats he once trapped, Darwin grabs his bourbon and heads back outside to contemplate the implications and probable consequences before him. He settles abruptly in his blue-veined Adirondack chair and is quickly joined by Murphy who takes his spot at Darwin’s feet. Tien watches from the kitchen window, giving him a moment alone before following outside.

“If you persist in lying to yourself,” she restarts while sitting down in her chair, “because that’s the prison you need your pardon, at least don’t lie to me, we mean too much to each other for that kind of silliness; you know it and I know it.

Darwin takes a brace of bourbon carefully considering options to allow his unsettled anger to calm. “What is it you want?”

“Before getting to that,” Tien tentatively states, “I have a confession to make.” She turns to face her mentor because this is the pivotal moment, one requiring crystal clarity, the reason her journey to this remote isolation was necessary. “You sold our technology to the Chinese, inadvertently to be fair but nonetheless it is what it is and we all got insanely rich, but because of you, our communist adversaries now have the capability to build an infinite army, to incur overwhelming battlefield casualties without loss, their military superiority is without measure, which puts the entire free world at risk. Let’s not forget, they murdered over a hundred million of their own people just for fun so think about what they’re capable of doing with such a capability. The only real way to keep them in check, to counter their advantage, is to give our side the same technology.”

“Fuck me!” Darwin somberly mumbles while reaching for his bourbon; his hand less steady than it was a minute ago. Since her rental car rumbled up his dusty dirt road the unknown something he’s been bracing for has remained a mystery but now, the full impact of what she’s here for hits him like the unblemished shock wave of a nuclear detonation.

“Hear me out,” Tien pleads in the vein hope of preempting a volatile response. “The logic’s time tested, seventy years of cold war deterrence; mutual assured destruction. It may be MAD, but it works.”

“Your solution for what I broke at Berkeley is to repeat the fuck-up by fucking up?” Darwin shouts in unfiltered frustration. Tien looks down unable to absorb his wrath. “I hope you were least compensated with thirty shiny pieces of silver.”

“Actually,” Tien softly answers while keeping her head down, “not that it changes the trajectory, but I gave it to them.”

“Fuck me.” Darwin whispers from beneath the suffocating gravity of repercussions.

“You tell me!” Tien aggressively counters while staring Darwin directly in the eye forgetting her need to remain the calming voice of reason, “what choice did I have! Someone had to have the temerity to step up and clean up the mess we created.”

“Fuck me. . .” Darwin’s so lost in the utter vastness of such a complex mosaic of consequence that’s all the vocabulary his mind’s capable of generating.

“I get this is a shock but let’s be real, go back even before da Vinci or Galileo, the story always ends the same; what great minds create to build a better tomorrow eventually gets perverted toward ever inflated avenues of destruction.”

“And what,” Darwin quickly counters, “people like you and me are supposed say that’s okay? Is that how you justify it? Forgive my sorry ass for being the last living loser who still believes we have an obligation to strive for something better, something more noble.”

“As did Leonardo and all those who followed,” Tien counters, “but history is as history does and the end is always the same; what makes you think you’re so special universal laws should bend a knee?”

“Because I believe we have to separate what we create from what monsters make of it. Look at what humanity’s shown itself capable of in just the last hundred years, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Poc, Idi Amin, Putin, and the list goes on; millions and millions of souls lost. Those of us entrusted with seeing the world of tomorrow have the burden of ensuring our vision is not hijacked by evil. What you have done is feed dormant dragons and once awakened, large scale destruction is sure to follow. You’ve betrayed everything we ever stood for.”

“What I did,” Tien forcefully counters exhausted from efforts to placate her mentor, “I did to ensure peace and even if I fall short or am accused of malfeasance for being naively misguided, at least I did something and that’s far more than anything you’ve come close to in your quarantined captivity.”

“Oh yeah!” Darwin pushes back with escalating anger. “Well -, well I -, I -,” With thoughtful consideration he concludes, “I concede your point.” Darwin downs the last of his double three-fingers bourbon and walks to the edge of courtyard with Murphy dutifully at his side. “I don’t apologize for my emotions,” he restarts in a calm but unwavering voice. “But I’m not mad you, all you did was correctly call me out and while my mirror may have two faces, the one you force me to see is not the one my filters follow.”

“Be mad.” Tien pleads. “You should be. Mad at me, mad at the world, hell, mad at God if that’s what it takes to turn your lights back on. I’m glad to have re-awakened the man I knew before Berkeley. It’s never enough to just walk away from the maladies of our creation, they must be fixed, and that’s what I’m attempting to do.”

“What is it exactly you’re trying to fix, that the Chinese now have the ability to build an infinite army or that our side can also now build an infinite army? When those to infinities collide, which they will ultimately do, the results are finitely defined, and it doesn’t bode well for the world.”

Tien walks to the opposite edge of the patio, then turns to partly faces her mentor. “What’s done is done and there’s nothing we can do about that.”

“Why in Hell’s name then, are you even here?”

“What we created, the monster it’s become, is about to get even more terrorizing and I need to keep this pending Pandora’s Box from ever being opened.” Tien kneels to pet Murphy who, in an act way out of character, has crossed over to her side of the courtyard. He softly leans his head into Tien’s face as a sign that while he may not know the words being spoken, he senses the magnitude of the moment.

“You follow trends,” Tien restarts looking up at Darwin. “You’ve always had a gift to see beyond technology’s next horizon, I know you know what’s coming even if you refuse to acknowledge it. What would you say if I told you military planners are already drawing up scenarios for autonomous soldiers who think and act on their own.”

“Artificial Intelligence,” Darwin groans as he makes the connection, “fuck me.”

“The old team never stopped meeting, at first, it was to decompress from Berkeley, then to chart are independent futures. We reconvened once we understood where technologies, like the one we developed, are leading the world. The one theme throughout our evolution has been how much we miss your leadership and guidance. You were always the one who saw the ‘what,’ while we were masters of the ‘how.’ We each came to see in our own relative way, how the things you tried to tell us in all those late-night philosophy sessions were coming to fruition. Just so you know, you and I are not the only ones burdened by what we’ve done, there are others. We’ve been dissecting the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of AI technology with remaining remnants of your old Shadow Dancer group and the one thing we agree on is that there is no way of stopping what’s coming.”

“That’s been my assessment.” Darwin adds.

“I won’t get into specifics, but some of us are on the inside of big technology companies developing AI, some of us are working with the defense industry on applications, all of us are worried about the coming singularity.”

“That’s just ScFi bullshit and academic fantasy,” Darwin dismissively says.

“You think that because you’re not on the inside. Have you ever wondered why you don’t read meaningful papers on AI advancements? It’s because they’re not allowed. Sure, there are press releases and occasional demonstrations, but those dog & pony shows are carefully scripted to follow approved narratives. AI is the Manhattan Project of the twenty-first century with all the tapestries of any top-secret development effort.”

“So, you’re saying the “singularity,” is real?”

“Real and coming like a freight train rolling downhill without brakes.”

“Fuck me. . .”

“That pretty much sums it up.”

“I have wondered why development’s been delayed, sometimes I even allow myself to think that if I were back in the game, I could fast track things. I never considered that things were being fast tracked in secret.” Darwin stares at his empty bourbon glass in need of a refill. “This is not good; there are no scenarios where this ends well.”

“Now you understand my urgent imperative.”

“I do, but don’t see how I can possibly help.

“That’s what I’m here to discuss.”

“Even if I could help, even if I were able, I’ve been out of the game too long, technology’s past me by, there’s too much to relearn I would only slow you down.”

“Our cohort’s made up of brilliant code developers, mathematicians and software engineers, but our gifts don’t overlap with yours, you’ve always been the visionary, the guy who sees tomorrow as if it’s today and knows how to navigate the chasm.

“I theory the singularity is the point where computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence, but I don’t believe that’ll ever happen. AI is built on rule-based logic, the classic, if-then-else’ construct. It can never achieve reason or rational thought with that foundation. AI views the world in binary terms, black-and-white, human thought though is based on gray-scale logic where absolutely everything has a context and caveat, which is why no two people think or react the same to a given set of stimuli.

“What if I told you breakthroughs are being made?”

“I’d say it’s not possible.”

“Would you concede that partial success if possible?

“Possibly?

“What percentage of the singularity would a nation have to achieve before it’s too late to save humanity?”

Darwin takes a moment before responding. “Now you’re asking the right question.” He considers the consequences further, “Off the top I’d say more than fifty but less than ninety.”

“Our side’s at sixty-three and no telling where the Chinese are.”

“Fuck me.”

“Yes, you’re starting to get a sense of our starting point.”

“I still believe full singularity is not possible unless someone develops a “God-chip”, but given the rate of computer evolution, even that can’t be far off.

“The dire dichotomy is we can’t stop progress any more than we can halt technology evolution, and yet we must.”

“No,” Darwin bluntly states, his mind already in solution space. “that’s the wrong approach. You’re right we can’t stop technology, that genie’s long been let out of the bottle. We also can’t stop the coming singularity so it’s a waste of effort to even try. What we can do, our only hope for saving humanity, is to create a world of tomorrow that doesn’t need or want AI, and that’s a world God didn’t created humans to inhabit.