THE COMING SINGULARITY

 From the R.M. Dolin novel, "An Unsustainable Life - The Book of Darwin."
Read Companion Poem

Chapter 14: 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. Years are nothing more than moments blinded by blurs suspended upside down in an inverted purgatory. From that vantage point, Tien sits in her rental car staring at the house but not at the man she’s traveled across the country to see. Darwin leans against his doorway feeling the panorama of implications as he looks past his former protege to the long dusty dirt driveway expecting some other shoe to drop. Both are acutely aware of the necessity of this moment, but neither is willing to jumpstart the required momentum.

Without gesture or expression Darwin walks 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. He stiffens when Tien enters. While waiting for the water to boil, Darwin gets out a ceramic tea pot, adds loose-leaf green tea, honey, and fresh mint from his garden. He knows Tien’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 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 to collect a whiskey bottle and pours three fingers of bourbon into a glass. He leaves the bottle on the counter certain whatever Tien’s here for is gonna require multiple refills. Darwin’s hard rule about drinking is not before six unless the Cubs are playing. He grants himself that singular dispensation because it’s hard going nine whole innings of exciting Chicago Cubs baseball without 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’s not good.

Grabbing the tray of tea and whiskey Darwin walks 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 craftsman who made the one he has at base camp from that lightning struck tree he harvested three summers ago. He sits down and grabs his bourbon. Tien tentatively lowers 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 stiffening himself with three-fingers bourbon, both waiting for the clarity of clairvoyance 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 and 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 back on the tray, 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 thing, he almost tells Tien. After years of chasing rabbits, squirrels, and packrats, Murphy finally catches a squirrel. He proudly prances around the yard with the squirrel’s tail in his mouth while the squirrel does what it can to scratch and bite Murphy from his upside-down suspension. Eventually, Murphy sets the squirrel down thinking they’ll restart their game, only once free, instead of running away, the pissed off squirrel counterattacks. It takes Murphy a minute to get past the shock of the squirrel’s aggression before he pins him down with his paw. Only now, he doesn’t know what to do. He slowly sniffs the squirrel up and down as if odor will decide his fate. After considerable consternation Murphy lifts his paw and takes a step back to give the squirrel a second chance.

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 to the nearest tree leaving Murphy to wonder why playtime has prematurely ended. Now they’re back, dog and squirrel, once again at their game of cat and mouse. It causes Darwin to take stock of just how perfect life is here on his wilderness mountain. How easily it is for meaning and intention to get lost in translation. How quickly everything’s he’s built over the last ten years is about to be cast into a 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 she came here for.

“Can I assume, this is not a social call?” Darwin asks.

After all this time Tien can still recognize Darwin’s deadpan seriousness from team meetings back in the day when unpleasant topics needed to be discussed. She appreciates her mentor making the first move and knows from having been in such moment many times before that this is his invitation to start. It signals that he’s cleared his mind of all distractions and is ready to listen. She’s learned that for Darwin everything’s a process. When something serious needs to be discussed, he can’t be ambushed or hurried, you have to patiently give him space to set himself up. He needs time to get rid of all competing calculations and deliberations simultaneously racing around his head so he can devote full attention to the matter at hand.

Tien’s been rehearsing her opening line 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 unrehearsed pitch that pops into her head. “It’s quite the fairytale life you’ve got going here.” Tien pauses to give Darwin space to respond. When he doesn’t, she continues. “In many ways this is akin to the life my grandfather pieced together after his unfortunate incident.” She again waits for Darwin to respond but the longer she waits the more uncomfortable she gets. “The thing is, not all fairy tales get to have a happy ending, which brings me too why I’m here.”

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

Tien’s learned that 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 math problem and what she learned was 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 that on your own. I came at considerable risk, to share things and get guidance.”

Between the calm, even cadence of Tien’s voice and the vulnerable way she’s open about personal peril, Darwin gets kicked into mentor mode. “We’ll get to what you’ve done in a moment,” he tells her. “Just know that no matter how bad it is, my hacienda has two bedrooms and you’re welcome as long as you need.” He shifts in his chair to better face, Tien, smiling just a little. “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, does it involve me? You wouldn’t journey all the way to the Northern New Mexico wilderness unless it involves me.”

Tien gets out of her blue-veined Adirondack chair and walks to the edge of the saltillo tile courtyard to allow the sun’s warming rays to fill her face with fortitude, still unable to full face Darwin. “First,” she states. “Thank you for the offer but this is not that kind of crisis.” She turns to face the hacienda but cannot face her mentor. “This is too big to 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 just finishes pouring his bourbon when Tien enters with the tray containing her now empty mug and the tea pot. “Do you have 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 bourbon bottle and pours and addition measure of solace before leaving the kitchen to roam his house for compromising electronics. He reenters just as Tien’s water starts to boil. Repeating his previous ceremony, Darwin loads the ceramic tea pot with mint, loose tea leaves, and honey before adding the boiling water. “Water boils ten degrees cooler here than in California,” he tells her. “You’ll want to let your tea sit longer than usual.” He leans back against the counter facing Tien. “We can take a walk in the woods if you’re worried about privacy. I got an RV in my shop that’s clean. No electronics. No wait, there’s a radio and TV but I never use them, kinda forgot they were even there. Now you got me all paranoid about camping.”

“If you’re certain you’ve turned off all your electronics we’ll be fine.”

“The people you’re involved with, our guys or theirs?”

“Ours.”

“How deep are you in.”

“All the way.”

“Geez Tien,” Darwin scolds. “After what happened to your grandfather, what happened at Berkeley, how could you go there?”

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

Darwin’s reflex 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. His dear friend, colleague, and former protege came here for help not judgment. “Each of us carries our burdens differently,” he states. “I don’t condemn you for anything you may have done. You’re a good soul and whatever it is you did, I know you were trying to do good.”

“Thank you,” Tien whispers. She’s steadied by Darwin’s reassurance. He was always good about that. “Part of why I came all this way was to hear you say that.”

Darwin takes a pull of bourbon before diving in. “You 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 must hear now what he couldn’t bear to face after Berkeley. “You threw in towel and walked away. Good for you I suppose but someone had to pick up the pieces. Clean up the mess.” After a pause to let that Titanic sink, she continues in a calm monotone way. “What did you think would happen?” There it is, just the way Darwin taught her. No sugar coating. No beating around the bush. Just straight to the point.

“The truth I had to reconcile after Berkeley,” Darwin states. “Is I can’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 atone for what I’d done.”

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

Darwin starts to react. He’s deeply offended and his impulse is to lash out and defend himself. He doesn’t though, because he accepts the truth in Tien’s accusation and because reacting is not going to advance the conversation, they’re still just warming up to. Since the incident with Gwen on Thanksgiving, Darwin’s more mindful about following impulses. “If you really believe that,” he says. “Why would you think I’d help you now?”

Tien looks at Darwin with the desperation of someone carrying the full weight of not only her debt to humanity, but also her ancestors. “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 it’s why you’re here, 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. 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 broke like I’m some sort of savant, I’m not. I’m the catalyst behind the silent sickness causing humanity’s undiagnosed cancer.”

Tien sips her tea with cautious content. She learned during her years collaborating with Darwin that once he’s engaged in debate, the battle’s half over. He’s no longer at ‘no,’ he’s developing a process of bringing the problem across the finish line. “Lie to yourself all you want,” she 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. You just needed time and space to sort things out, the right kind of catalysts. You’re an engineer, a builder. I’m asking you to help build something so big it makes amends for all our sins. I know you stay current and it’s more than ironic you live out here in remote isolation while intellectually, you never left Silicon Valley or lost your desire to redefine tomorrow.”

Feeling as anxiousness as the caged 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 requisite moment alone before joining him 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.”

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

“Before getting to that,” Tien states. “I have a confession.” She turns to face her mentor. This is the pivotal moment, one requiring crystal clarity. It’s the reason her journey to his wilderness 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. 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 it’s clear what they’re capable of with the kind of capability you enabled. The only way to keep the Chinese 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 is a lot less steady than it was a minute ago. Since Tien’s rental car rumbled up his dusty dirt road the unknown something he’s been bracing for has been a mystery shrouded in expectation, but now, the full impact of what she’s done hits him like the undiminished 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 is to repeat the fuck-up by fucking up!” Darwin shouts. Tien looks down unable to absorb his wrath. “I hope you were least compensated with thirty shiny pieces of silver. We can put it in the trophy case next to mine.”

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

“Fuck me.” Darwin whispers.

“You tell me!” Tien counters. She stares 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 this 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 is always 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 we 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. History is as history does Darwin and the end is always the same. What makes you think you’re so special universal laws should bend a knee?”

“Because 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 lists go on. Millions upon 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 will follow. You’ve betrayed everything we ever stood for.”

“What I did!” Tien calmly counters. “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. That’s far more than anything you’ve come close to in your quarantined captivity.”

“Oh yeah!” Darwin pushes back. “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. “But I’m not mad you. All you did was correctly call me out and while my mirror has two faces, the one you force me to see is not the one my filters follow.”

“Be mad!” Tien pleads. “You should be. You need to be. Be mad at me. Mad at the world. Hell, if it helps, be 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? The Chinese have the ability to build an infinite army and 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 and partly faces her mentor. “What’s done is done and there’s undoing 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. We need to keep the 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. He may not know the words being spoken but is mindful enough to sense the magnitude of the moment.

“You follow trends,” Tien starts. She looks up at Darwin. “You’ve always had the gift of seeing 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. “Fuck me.”

“The old team never stopped meeting. At first, we met to decompress from Berkeley, then to chart are independent futures. We reconvened once we understood where technologies, like the ones we developed, are leading the world. One theme persistently dominated our evolution; how much we miss your leadership and guidance. You were always the one who saw the ‘what,’ while the rest of us mastered 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 and we’ve formed a small but important cohort. We’ve lately been dissecting the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of AI with 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 dismisses.

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

“You’re saying the ‘singularity,’ is real?”

“Not yet but coming like a freight train rolling downhill without brakes.”

“Fuck me. . .”

“That pretty much sums it up.”

Darwin takes his time absorbing this new information. “I have wondered why AI development seems delayed. Sometimes I even allow myself to believe if I were back in the game, I could fast track things. I never considered that things are being fast tracked in secret.” Darwin stares at his empty bourbon glass suddenly in need of a refill. “This is not good. There are no scenarios where any of this end well.”

“Now you understand my 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.

“AI singularity is just theory, the mythical point where computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence. I don’t believe that’ll ever happen. For one thing, 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-&-white, human thought is based on a graded logic where everything has a context and caveats. It’s 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. “Now you’re asking the right question.” He considers the consequences. “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.”

“You’re beginning 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, that’s probably not too far off.” Darwin looks across the valley to the mystical Jemez Mountains. “I’ve been thinking about a God-chip. If it could be immaculately conceived, it’s the only thing that could save humanity.

“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 resources 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. The challenge, however, is that’s not the world God created for humans to inhabit.