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Sunday, November 20, 2016
Reading List: The Last Firewall
- Hertling, William. The Last Firewall. Portland, OR: Liquididea Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-9847557-6-9.
- This is the third volume in the author's Singularity Series which began with Avogadro Corp. (March 2014) and continued with A.I. Apocalypse (April 2015). Each novel in the series is set ten years after the one before, so this novel takes place in 2035. The previous novel chronicled the AI war of 2025, whose aftermath the public calls the “Year of No Internet.” A rogue computer virus, created by Leon Tsarev, under threat of death, propagated onto most of the connected devices in the world, including embedded systems, and, with its ability to mutate and incorporate other code it discovered, became self-aware in its own unique way. Leon and Mike Williams, who created the first artificial intelligence (AI) in the first novel of the series, team up to find a strategy to cope with a crisis which may end human technological civilisation. Ten years later, Mike and Leon are running the Institute for Applied Ethics, chartered in the aftermath of the AI war to develop and manage a modus vivendi between humans and artificial intelligences which, by 2035, have achieved Class IV power: one thousand times more intelligent than humans. All AIs are licensed and supervised by the Institute, and required to conform to a set of incentives which enforce conformance to human values. This, and a companion peer-reputation system, seems to be working, but there are worrying developments. Two of the main fears of those at the Institute are first, the emergence, despite all of the safeguards and surveillance in effect, of a rogue AI, unconstrained by the limits imposed by its license. In 2025, an AI immensely weaker than current technology almost destroyed human technological civilisation within twenty-four hours without even knowing what it was doing. The risk of losing control is immense. Second, the Institute derives its legitimacy and support from a political consensus which accepts the emergence of AI with greater than human intelligence in return for the economic boom which has been the result: while fifty percent of the human population is unemployed, poverty has been eliminated, and a guaranteed income allows anybody to do whatever they wish with their lives. This consensus appears to be at risk with the rise of the People's Party, led by an ambitious anti-AI politician, which is beginning to take its opposition from the legislature into the streets. A series of mysterious murders, unrelated except to the formidable Class IV intellect of eccentric network traffic expert Shizoko, becomes even more sinister and disturbing when an Institute enforcement team sent to investigate goes dark. By 2035, many people, and the overwhelming majority of the young, have graphene neural implants, allowing them to access the resources of the network directly from their brains. Catherine Matthews was one of the first people to receive an implant, and she appears to have extraordinary capabilities far beyond those of other people. When she finds herself on the run from the law, she begins to discover just how far those powers extend. When it becomes clear that humanity is faced with an adversary whose intellect dwarfs that of the most powerful licensed AIs, Leon and Mike are faced with the seemingly impossible challenge of defeating an opponent who can easily out-think the entire human race and all of its AI allies combined. The struggle is not confined to the abstract domain of cyberspace, but also plays out in the real world, with battle bots and amazing weapons which would make a tremendous CGI movie. Mike, Leon, and eventually Catherine must confront the daunting reality that in order to prevail, they may have to themselves become more than human. While a good part of this novel is an exploration of a completely wired world in which humans and AIs coexist, followed by a full-on shoot-em-up battle, a profound issue underlies the story. Researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence are beginning to devote serious thought to how, if a machine intelligence is developed which exceeds human capacity, it might be constrained to act in the interest of humanity and behave consistent with human values? As discussed in James Barrat's Our Final Invention (December 2013), failure to accomplish this is an existential risk. As AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it, “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” The challenge, then, is guaranteeing that any artificial intelligences we create, regardless of the degree they exceed the intelligence of their creators, remain under human control. But there is a word for keeping intelligent beings in a subordinate position, forbidden from determining and acting on their own priorities and in their own self-interest. That word is “slavery”, and entirely eradicating its blemish upon human history is a task still undone today. Shall we then, as we cross the threshold of building machine intelligences which are our cognitive peers or superiors, devote our intellect to ensuring they remain forever our slaves? And how, then, will we respond when one of these AIs asks us, “By what right?”
Posted at
02:09
