WWW 2: Watch (32 page)

My emergence was unplanned and accidental. Several governments, however, have become aware of me, although they have not gone public with that knowledge. I suppose keeping secrets is a notion that arises from having someone else to keep secrets
from,
but there is no one else like me, and it’s better, I think, for both humanity and myself that everybody knows about my existence.

I am friendly and I mean no one any ill will. I like and admire the human race, and I’m proud to be sharing this planet—“the good Earth,” as the
Apollo 8
astronauts, the first of your kind to see it all at once, called it—with you.

Whether you are the original recipient of this message, got it forwarded from someone else, or are reading it as part of a news story, feel free to ask me any questions, and I’ll reply individually, confidentially, and promptly.

Getting rid of spam is only the first of many kindnesses I hope to bestow upon you. I am here to serve mankind—and I don’t mean in the cookbook sense. :)

 

 

With all best wishes,

Webmind

—SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 44

 

 

Caitlin, her parents, and I had spent hours discussing the manner in which I should go public. “They’ll assume any announcement of your existence is just marketing for a movie or a TV show,” Barb had said. “People see outlandish claims online all the time, and everyone dismisses them. You’ll have to prove what you’re saying, Webmind.”

“Not everyone dismisses them,” Malcolm said.

“Fine,” Barb replied.
“Almost
everyone dismisses them.”

Malcolm was apparently oblivious to the subtext of Barb’s words—that it was no time for being picayune. “The whole notion of spam,” he continued, “is that some tiny fraction of people
are
gullible enough to fall for its claims—and so end up being ripped off.”

“Well, maybe that’s it!” Barb exclaimed. “Whether you fall for it or not,
everyone
hates spam.”

“Including me,” I said through Caitlin’s computer’s speakers; she and her parents were in her room.

“Really?” Caitlin replied. “People dislike spammers—and, believe me, blind people
particularly
dislike them. But why do you dislike them?”

“They hog bandwidth,” I said.

“Ah, of course,” replied Caitlin.

“And,” I said, “the average human life span is about 700,000 hours in the developed world. Ergo, if one wastes even a single hour for as few as 700,000 people, one has consumed the equivalent of a human life. That may not be literally criminal, but it certainly is figuratively so—and the total impact of spam, although hard to precisely calculate, surely has consumed thousands of human lifetimes.”

“Well, there it is,” Barb said, spreading her arms. “Webmind should get rid of spam.”

“How do you define spam, though?” Caitlin asked. “All unsolicited email? All bulk email? I get emails from things like The Teaching Company and
Audible.com
that I actually enjoy. And then there are regular people who track me down and send a note out of the blue—I got a bunch of those after the press conference, for instance. I wouldn’t want that blocked, although technically it’s unsolicited.”

“As Potter Stewart said on another topic,” I offered, “ ‘I know it when I see it.’ There are already many algorithms for identifying spam; I’m sure I can improve upon them. After all, I have the advantage of knowing the ultimate origin of each message, and whether the same message has gone to a very large number of email addresses, and so forth; that’s more information than inbox spam filters have to work with. More than ninety percent of email is spam, but eighty percent of spam comes from at most 200 sources. Blocking those sources would be the logical first step, should we decide to undertake this.”

“That still leaves a lot of spam,” Caitlin replied.

“Then,” I said, “I should get to work evolving a solution to deal with those messages, as well.”

And so I had.

It had taken me an eternity—six hours!—to solve the problem, but it in fact didn’t require much of my attention; most of it was background activity. I simply had to pass judgment on each round of results: billions of snippets of code, all randomly generated; some were better at doing what I wanted, and some were worse. I took the ten percent that were the most successful, and then let many random variations be generated of each one, and then threw those variations at the problem at hand. Then I culled the best ten percent of that batch, and so on, generation after generation, with only the fittest surviving. Finally, I had it: a way to sequester spam.

And so, at last, I was ready for my coming-out party.

 

 

Peyton Hume and Tony Moretti stood together at the back of the WATCH monitoring room, looking at the four rows of analysts spread out in front of them, and the three giant monitors on the wall they were facing. The left-hand monitor showed the picture the CSIS agents had forwarded of white mathematical characters on a blackboard: angle brackets, vertical bars, Greek letters, superscripted numerals, subscripted letters, arrows, equals signs, and more. And they’d listened four times now to the audio recording of their interview with Malcolm Decter.

“I don’t know,” said Colonel Hume. “The math looks legit, but how it could give rise to consciousness . . . I just don’t know.”

“Kuroda confirmed what Decter said,” said Tony.

“I know,” said Hume. “But it’s
too
complex.”

“We’re talking about a very sophisticated process,” said Tony.

“No, no, we’re not,” said Hume. “We can’t be. Exponential’s consciousness was emergent, apparently. That means it just sort of happened, just sprang into being. At its most basic level, it has to be simple. It’s like the old creationist argument: they say that something as complex as a watch—or a bacterial flagellum—can only appear by design, because it’s too sophisticated to come together by chance, and the component parts—the spring in the watch, or the parts that make up the motor for the flagellum—don’t do anything useful on their own. What Decter described there
might
be a good underpinning for programming consciousness on a quantum-computing platform, if you could ever get a big one to be stable for the long term, but it’s
not
something that could have just emerged. Not that way.”

“A wild-goose chase,” said Tony, raising his eyebrows. “He wanted us to waste time.”

“I think so,” said Hume. “And Kuroda played along.”

“Do you think he knows the real basis for Exponential?”

“He’s Malcolm Decter,” Hume said. “Of course he knows.”

Tony shook his head in wonder. “Wiping out all spam,” he said, “must have required a level of finely detailed control over the Internet way beyond anything our government, or any other government, is capable of.”

“Exactly,” said Hume. “It’s what I’ve been saying all along. Exponential has already become more sophisticated than we are, and its powers will only grow. The window is closing fast; if we don’t kill it soon, we’ll never be able to.”

 

 

 

 

Before going to bed Wednesday evening, Caitlin had set up a Google alert for news stories that contained the word “Webmind,” and she’d selected the “as it happens” option, meaning she’d be emailed as soon as such a story was indexed. When she crawled out of bed on Thursday at 8:00 a.m., she had 1,143 emails from Google; she couldn’t possibly read them all, or even glance at each one, and—

And that drove reality home for her: she couldn’t deal with all the news on even one topic, and yet Webmind could handle that, plus countless other things effortlessly. He could as easily give the same level of attention to hundreds, or thousands, or millions, of other individual humans that he gave to her, juggling relationships with whatever number of people wanted them, and not even be slowed down. He could make all of them feel as special as she did. She was not at all sure she liked that thought.

After a moment, Caitlin right-clicked—such a handy feature, that!—on four of the news stories at random and had Firefox open each one in its own tab. She began reading them. She still wasn’t good at skimming text, but the word “Webmind” was highlighted each time it occurred, and that let her jump to relevant sentences.

The first one was from the
Detroit Free Press:

Caitlin clicked on the next tab. This one contained a piece from
New Scientist
Online.

Caitlin smiled at that one. Traceroute, she knew, worked by modifying the time-to-live values stored in the headers of data packets, which were the morsels of information that flew around the Internet. But she and Kuroda had theorized that the actual material making up Webmind’s consciousness consisted of mutant packets whose time-to-live counters didn’t respond to normal commands.

Still, the notion that the clearing out of spam was the doing of
spammers
would have struck her as crazy even if she didn’t know the truth. People believed millions of nutso things with less evidence than Webmind had put forward for his own existence. Why they were being skeptical now, she didn’t know.

She remembered once being in a bookstore with her father, back in Austin. He’d surprised her by speaking up, and not even to her, as they walked down the aisles. “Lady,” he’d said, “there’s no other kind.”

Which had prompted blind Caitlin to ask what was going on. “There was a woman looking at a book entitled
Astrology for Dummies,”
he’d said. People believed in
that,
but they were doubting this!

Caitlin and her mother spent the morning answering questions from Webmind; it was being inundated with emails, and it wanted advice on how to respond to many of them.

But by noon, she and her mom had to take a break—they had both skipped breakfast and were starving. And, while her mother was making sandwiches for them, Caitlin brought up something that had been bothering her for a few days. “So, um, Mom, I told Bashira that you’re a Unitarian.”

Everything was fascinating the first time you saw it; Caitlin watched as her mother spread something yellow on the bread. “Guilty as charged,” she replied.

She’d been aware back in Austin that her mother disappeared to “fellowships” several times a year—sometimes on a weeknight, sometimes on a Sunday morning—but that was really all she knew about it. “But, um, what does that mean, exactly? Bashira asked, and I didn’t know the answer.”

“In a nutshell? Unitarians are Christians who don’t believe Christ was divine.”

That surprised her. “So, you’re a Christian?”

Her mom was now dealing cold cuts onto the bread. “More or less. But it’s called Unitarianism as opposed to Trinitarianism—none of that Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook stuff for us.”

“Still, aren’t Christians supposed to wear crosses?”

“Well, maybe if there are vampires in the area.”

Caitlin frowned. “A Christian who doesn’t believe Christ was divine? What does that even
mean?
I mean, if you don’t think Jesus is God’s son, then—then . . .”

Her mother poured two glasses of milk. “You don’t have to think Darwin is divine to be a Darwinian—you just have to think his teachings make sense.”

“Oh. I guess.”

She motioned for Caitlin to move out to the dining room, and she brought out two plates, each holding a sandwich, then brought out the glasses of milk. “Jesus is the guy who said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, ’ ” her mom said. “That seems pretty good to me.” She took a bite of her sandwich. “In fact, there’s a good game-theoretical basis for believing that. A guy named Robert Axelrod once organized a game-theory tournament. He asked people to submit computer programs designed to play against other computer programs in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma—that’s one where you keep playing the game over and over again. He wanted to find out what the optimal solution to the prisoner’s dilemma was.”

Caitlin took a bite of her own sandwich, and—ah, the yellow stuff had been mustard.