Out of Range

Dear Sir,

I can imagine the look on your face. In fact I can almost see you walking towards your door reading this while holding something else that might have arrived in the mail. Like your utility bill or something from the tax people or your telephone people or the internet and television guys. It must have been a while since you saw your name written by hand. And I don’t think you recognise my handwriting. As long as I stayed there with you, all the writing that I’ve done had been by punching keys on your computer. I haven’t punched any keys since then.

I don’t know if you expect me to apologize for the manner in which I left. I do not feel sorry. I know that you have missed me. But I still don’t feel sorry. You must have been shocked the day I left, by what you saw when you got back in the evening. You must have dropped down and cried. I used to try not to think of all that. But now… it makes no difference.

I’m not writing this to tell you why I left. Both of us know it well. I’m writing this to tell you what happened of me. To show you what a man can will to do. What a man can afford to live without.

This place I live in is quite far from the nearest town. I don’t quite remember how far it is. I’ve been there only once. I built this house all by myself. Remember how I always wanted to do that? It isn’t quite complete. I think I can fix it before winter. It is in the midst of some fields. I don’t grow anything here now. I don’t intend to. They tell me that sunflowers would fetch nice money. That’s partly the reason why I don’t intend to.

I’m sure you remember the days when you taught me to use the computer. I’m sure you remember how good I was at it. And I’m sure you remember how I got hooked to the internet. I sometimes have trouble believing that was me. I had to check my mail before my morning cup of tea. I would rather blog than talk to you. I would rather ramble through the internet than take a refreshing nap. I wasn’t me.

And Sir, you told me that it was the birth of a new level of consciousness. You told me that the internet was the earth becoming self aware. You likened me to a neuron in my brain. You said that it was not the neurons themselves but their collective behaviour that made them conscious. You said that the internet had to happen sooner or later. You said that if not for computers there would have been something else. You said that man would sync with man in ways unfathomable to one human brain. You said that people would stop thinking for themselves. You said that collective behaviour was an emergent phenomenon. You said that rise in complexity was at the heart of evolution. You said that we all would become one. One mind under one world government living one life. And I know you believed that. I’m afraid you were right. I realised it too. I would still not have left if it was not for the RFID.

I need to finish writing this before it gets too dark. That’s because I don’t have electricity here. No telephones, no computers and internet and no mail boxes. I don’t get utility bills. I don’t have a house number. That’s because there are no houses here. The fields are all mine. I have no papers to prove it. But they are all mine.

I wonder what you thought of me when you came home that evening. It was my fault. When you told me about the RFID, I thought it would be a nice thing. You said that they would embed this small electronic device in my arm and I would not have to carry any identification documents any where. I could pass through security at the airport without flashing my passport. I could get on buses without flashing my season pass. It all looked so nice. I should have asked you. I should have asked you if they could find out where I was with that thing. No. YOU should have told me. You should have told me that if I decided to drive off to the park one day, their computers would sense the anomaly. You should have told me that I could be tracked by their computers. You should have told me that their computers would know what was normal for me to do and what wasn’t. You did not. You said it was necessary. You said it was for my own good. You said that everyone needed it for their own good. You chose it for yourself. But I care about my freedom. I wouldn’t have chosen it for me. If it wasn’t YOU giving me the half truth.

I know. You probably think that it was stupid of me to have ripped off my left arm that day. I wonder what crossed your mind when you first saw it lying on the floor. I wanted to leave a note. Then I decided it wasn’t necessary. I could have pryed the little thing out of my arm with a knife. But I didn’t know where exactly it was. They did not tell me where they put it. They did not even leave a scar. I don’t care anymore. I had to lose my arm to get rid of the goddamned thing. Atleast, I have something you don’t. Freedom.

In case you are wondering, I run a small place here. I haven’t named it yet. I thought of naming it Out of Range. But it was all too obvious. This thing is attached to my house. I sell some home made food. But that’s not what they come for here. They do not drive all the way for the home made food. They all come to get out of range. They get something here that expensive restaurants deprive them of. There is no wi-fi here. They cannot check their mails. No mobile network covers this place. They do not get alerts on their blackberries. They cannot charge their iphones here. And they all look relieved. Young couples come with their kids. When it gets dark they try to find the constellations. Some kids play with the candles. Others come with friends. They talk for long hours. I don’t charge them for that. Sometimes we play games. But mostly we are happy just being there. Old men love it. They hate the food. But they come back for it.

No one has ever asked me about my arm yet. Some people smile knowingly. I don’t know how many of the people who come here have those things in their arms. I don’t know if they are being surveyed from the skies. This is as far as I can get. This is as much as I can hide. I don’t know how long this will go. I don’t know for how long I can stay unplugged. One day this place might no longer be out of range. One day they might put that thing back in me. Until then, I’d live my free life. I’d be all human.

Take care.

The Deadlock

(Written: Jan 2005)


Sam sat staring at the screen. As the images of the report came to his mind it was getting harder to find the right words. The right words to put his findings in. The right tone in which to convey the message. Of course, there is no such thing as a right way of giving a bad news.

It had taken him quite some time to come to terms with what he had learnt. What was more shocking than the fact that the dead lock would come far sooner than expected was the thought that in spite of being warned two centuries in advance there was nothing that could be done to avoid going into the deadlock and once the world did go into it, it would be just that – a dead lock. A dead lock with only an infinitesimal probability of being broken before time would render it virtually unbreakable.

The theory of the dead lock had been around for quite some time though it was only a few scientists with offbeat interests who had heard about it. Most of them despised the idea altogether and the rest who did give it some serious thought did not have the luxury of quoting figures. Of fixing the event in time or even calculating the probability of its occurrence. The unspoken assumption was however that it would not happen in another thousand years. The world would have changed far too much for the deadlock if it did occur to be perceived. It simply wouldn’t mean the same thing in the new world as it meant in this. This was one of the two reasons the theory had failed to inspire thinkers to lose sleep over it. The other being the fact that it was far too inconceivable in the face of the developments in the scientific world. Every time a new theory was proven, every time a new drug was discovered, every time a rock in space was conquered the theory weakened. The blows were far too intense and frequent for it to not lose its credibility.

Sam, with just the right combination of degrees to put numbers into the theory, to calculate the correctness of the prediction had done just that. He wondered why no serious attempt had been made to do this. There probably were not many statisticians with a degree in psychology and an understanding of dynamic systems combined with the genius to translate the problem into a computer program.

The simulator fixed the deadlock at 2230 AD. With the calculation log displayed on screen there was no reason to doubt the correctness of the prediction.

‘Quantifying the amorphous’ was what Sam’s doctoral thesis was about. The ideas outlined had included ways of quantifying the parameters associated with the human mind. Learnability, innovation, imagination…words reduced to numbers. The rambling community of thinkers who had tried with little success to do the same gaped with disbelief at the simplicity of the idea on which the methods of quantification were based. All the qualities perceived, all the parameters that distinguished a human mind from the other were manifestations of the same process. The only thing that the brain really does is try to make sense. The process of making sense involved reconciling the perceived reality with models of things in the mind. Every thing that the brain perceives itself to be doing is but simply a subprocess – simply a trick for getting this done.

While defining the human mind was one thing, simulating the effects of interactions of billions of them was another. This was exactly what was required to be done to put some numbers into the dead lock theory.

Dynamic systems are touchy. Mathematically, a dynamic system is a set of entities capable of interacting with each other and influencing their states. The most important component of a dynamic system is time. It is time that decides the state of the system. When the core interactions and the rules that govern them can be deterministically defined the system becomes a deterministic dynamic system. The unobvious property of such a system is that its future is fixed. There is one and only one way for such a system to go and this is dictated by the rules that govern the core interactions. The reason they are touchy is that an infinitesimal change in the state of an entity has the potential to completely change the future of the system.

By quantifying the amorphous, Sam had pinned down the rules of interactions. The key to putting numbers into the dead lock theory however lay in the realms of statistics.

One would think that the bigger a dynamic system, the touchier it would be. But reality has strange ways of playing games with the mind and in this case it exposes a loophole as if to give us the power over such systems. The irony is that though the interactions at the entity level are simple and complexity only surfaces as the number of interactions increase, the systems become easier to tame as they get bigger. It becomes possible to describe the behavior of the system using rules independent of the rules that govern the core interactions. A fine example would be the rules of physics that describe the relation between the pressure, volume and temperature of gases. Gases with trillions of molecules heading in different directions and bouncing off each other are typical deterministic dynamic systems. While what is perceived to be pressure is nothing but the effect of molecules bouncing off the walls of the container and transferring their momentum thereof it is hardly believable that there exist rules that allow us to measure, predict and control such a thing. One can not look at the dial of a sensitive pressure sensor and help but wonder what gives us the ability of quantifying a parameter determined by the seemingly random movements of a trillion particles none of which would take our orders. Statistics. The ideas of statistics are what allow us to make statements about the behavior of large and complex systems. It does so by paying an essentially small price - certainty. While not many would realize, the rules that describe the pressure of a gas only tell us what is most probable – what is most likely to happen. This minor detail doesn’t really matter as long as we trust the pointer on the pressure sensor.

This idea was the back bone of Sam’s simulator. The idea of simulating the interactions of billions of human minds over a long period of time was far too inconceivable to others owing to the fact that they did not realize that if simple rules can quantify the pressure of a gas nothing should stop them from deriving parameters that reflect the state of the human race as a whole and framing rules that relate the values of such parameters to time. Such a rule would essentially predict the future of the human race.

Sam, of all people, knew that the conceptual distance between molecules trading momentum and minds exchanging ideas was too much to be bridged. The breakthrough however came while working on a relatively simpler problem of simulating the dynamics of a mob. Although it seems that the simulation of a mob would require an understanding of the responses of each of the members constituting the mob to the scenario as perceived by them which in turn requires a detailed understanding of each of their minds Sam realized that it is not really necessary to know any of these to come up with a faithful simulation. The conclusion was that only a tiny subset of the attributes of the mind determines the responses and that approximations of these attributes together with a simple curve describing the probable measures of these across the mob conclusively determine the outcome. The catch however was the margin of error. The so-called parameter space was dotted with critical points which demarcated the regions that produced the same results. As long as the parameters used for the simulation lie in the same region as the real point in the parameter space the results of the simulation would perfectly agree with the outcomes in the real world.

With the final piece of the puzzle in place all that was left was to trigger a simulation and sit back and watch as the Turing machine peered into the crystal ball and sealed the fate of the human race.

The deadlock theory would qualify to be the worst case of pessimism and easily win the abomination of the cult that prefers to see the glass as being half full. The rationalist however cannot dare to detest it. The theory in its simplest form was based on the fact that as our understanding of the world gets better, as more and more things get explained the growth of science slows down. There is nothing but cold logic in play. It didn’t take much for the Greeks to come up with the theory of the fundamental elements. The simple statement said that all that the universe was composed of was fire, earth, wind and water. More important than what it took to come up with the theory was what it took for the theory to stand. Again, nothing. It hardly faced any resistance. Any one in those days could come up with a theory that would stand. Stare at the night sky and see a hunter and lo you have your own theory – your own paper to publish. The fact that if two men can build a wall in two days four men can do the job in one appeals to common sense. There is no reason to treat advancement of science differently. The lesser the number of minds working towards it the slower the advancement would be. This is exactly what has been happening since the era of the basic elements. The reason is surprisingly simple. If someone has to contribute something to the understanding of the world he has to be aware of the advancements made and as more and more of this happens there are lesser men who are even aware of the advancements. It is like being born in a part of the explored world and setting off to explore the unexplored. One has to reach the edge of the explored world to even step into the unexplored and as more and more land is explored lesser men even reach the edges.

The theory simply stated that there was a non-zero probability of this explored world ceasing to widen.

The trouble with this problem of exploring land is that one cannot start at an edge. One has no choice but to start at the heart of the explored region and move towards the edge. Henn, who was the one who came up with the theory, said that once the radius of this region got longer than what one can trek in a lifetime it would cease to grow any longer. There however was an element of probability involved owing to the fact that the radius is trekked at different speeds. What is striking but unapparent is the fact that if the explored region fails to widen for a sufficiently long amount of time it gets harder to reach the edges and the race would go into a vicious circle.

The analogy was convincing enough but the theory sadly didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality at all. If the radius getting longer than what one could trek during a lifetime meant not being able to absorb enough knowledge so as to contribute something then this theory simply couldn’t have anything to do with the present or the near future. The average age at which thinkers make contributions is somewhere near 35 and with thousands of universities all over the civilized world bubbling with vibrant researchers the deadlock theory simply didn’t deserve anybody’s time.

Sam, however, knew better than to trust what met the eye. He was well aware of simulations that produced counter intuitive results only to reveal that a particular detail had more impact when simulated over time than what it appeared to have. Sam had his own reasons to carry out the simulation. The structure of the education system, the increased difficulty in getting a theory to agree with the ever increasing number of them and most importantly the role of chance. He had simulated a period of scientific inactivity once and was startled by the results. Such a period directly led to the deadlock. The only question that was left to be answered was whether this was around the corner or far beyond sight. A period of scientific inactivity is not as improbable it appears to be. If the hand full of big wigs of quantum physics had been killed during the Second World War we would have already had one in that field.

Sam had a sinking feeling as he stared at the result of the simulation, the so-called probability report. He wished he had never ventured into the unexplored terrain…

Error 21

The midnight hush used to serve as the perfect backdrop to these nightlong pursuits. Sam however had never realized. Tonight, though, the air was filled with the subtle drone of a rare midnight rain and Sam found himself aimlessly tracing droplets as they hit the moonlit window pane and hurriedly rushed through a maze of trails which were once droplets themselves. One of them faded out of existence leaving nothing but a trail for another to later run through as Sam’s reverie was interrupted by a sharp beep.

The program he had been running had terminated. It was most unexpected. He had been considering catching a quick sleep before the program would make up its mind. That was pretty quick. He thought. On a 1.5 GHz processor intelligence simulations took a lot more time than that. But that was only when they ran to completion. Sam froze as he read the message on the console.

Self Terminated.

When the initial frantic search for a quick explanation turned up nothing the inherent intractability of the program suddenly looked menacing. Incremental development was aimed at avoiding running into exactly these impasses. He had carefully run tests on individual components and integrated them to build his machine mind. And now, when it had finally started talking to The Model it had self terminated.

Sam checked the status of The Model. It was up and running. Not surprisingly. The Model had been backed unanimously by the AI community and was put together by the best of the lot. Sam's was only one of the many programs the creators of which had eagerly waited for The Model to be made accessible to researchers all over the globe. The Model was the result of advances in Natural Language Processing techniques. The Model, as it was simply named, was just that. A Model. A Knowledge Model. Almost all AI researchers believed AI was about modeling and using knowledge and The Model was a fruit of that belief.

The Model was simply all the knowledge on the internet represented in a form understandable by machines. Every book in electronic form, every research paper, every story, every poem...in fact every piece of text on the internet had been processed and interpreted to make The Model. What a human could read on the internet a machine that knew the freshly standardized Universal Knowledge Representation could read from The Model. The Model was conceived by a small group of AI researchers who always were in short supply of knowledge resources to 'train' their dream programs. Programs that mimicked the human mind. The Model was intended to be a consistent system that represented 'facts' which could be used to 'educate' the fake minds on the anvil. Ironically though, once The Model had started being integrated with processed knowledge from the internet, far from being consistent, it grew on to reflect the welter of ideas of the multitude. The Model, as an article in New Scientist put it, had in it both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx.

So what was once an AI researcher's dream knowledge base - a consistent set of truths, was now reduced to a collection of translations of pieces of information for the machines to read. Sense, was yet to be made of the model. Sam's program, the few who had heard of it thought, was an attempt to do that.

Rain drops continued to hit the window pane. Sam was staring at them impassively now. No longer following any. There was only one way of investigating the problem now. The Log Interpreter. Sam's program was sure intractable but it recorded the turns it took, the choices it made and the truths it encountered. Unlike a conventional program though, the log the program produced had to be interpreted to make sense of the choices the program made. One of the reasons was that the program, like The Model, worked only with numbers and the log it wrote had nothing more than numbers either. The Log Interpreter could however decipher them for Sam given sufficient amount of time. Sam started the interpreter. Estimated Time: 3.16 minutes, the interpreter said. The rain had grown lighter. Sam didn't notice. He was looking beyond. Far to the west he could see the university in silhouette. Only few hours before on one of the corridors there had he disclosed to Ted what this program on which now an autopsy was being performed had been intended to do.

"So this apparently intelligent program of yours, you say, simulates sentience. Now, this feels like someone telling me he's built a car in his back yard that breaks the speed of light." Ted had been reading a lot of physics lately. "We are talking about a Turing machine here Sam. Something that doesn't even know when some one gets it to chase its tail. Sentience is a totally different ball game"
"Precisely. Sentience is a totally different ball game. The Halting problem has nothing to do with it"
"So you have this piece of code in here that, apart form other things, refers to The Model and apparently is the closest man has ever got to mimicking the human mind."
"Yes"
"You are talking of instructions in binary that are picked up as if by a conveyor belt by the fetch-decode-execute cycle of a microprocessor made of semiconductors. An identity is, I suppose, a prerequisite for sentience."
"You are a bunch of chemicals. You do have an identity"
"But I know that I exist. I know that I'm a bunch of chemicals. Does your program know that? Does it know that it is a finite stream of bits that runs on a microprocessor?"
"There is a place for itself in its knowledge model. It perceives itself. Not as a stream of bits but as an entity. As a seeker of knowledge. You do not think of yourself as a bunch of chemicals do you? You were told that you were one. So why does the program have to know that it is a stream of bits? In any case, it only has to read a book on computers to figure out what it is made up of."
"You know what Gödel said. You simply cannot make a machine that knows it all"
"This doesn't know it all"
"But Sam, sentience...a machine simply cannot get self aware. When an instruction is being executed, it simply doesn't know that it is being executed"
"When a neuron is fired in your brain does the neuron know that it is being fired? It doesn't because it is simply not its business to know that. Consciousness is not manifested at that level Ted."
"Let us get down to the specifics. What does your program really do?"
"Well...it tries to make sense of The Model."
"Isn't that what half a dozen people are going to try tonight when The Model goes online? All that you are doing is running an algorithm that extracts consistent sets of truth from The Model."
"Ted, this program is capable of meta-thought. Apart from interpreting parts of The Model it records its actions in its very own Model. So it essentially knows what it is doing."
"But it has been told what to do. It simply doesn't have a choice. What good is your sentience for if you do not have the ability to make choices?"
"It does have. It takes its own decisions on what to do"
"And those decisions would in turn be based on some algorithm that you wrote. You have effectively told it how to make decisions."
"The decisions are based on the knowledge base. Which means that whether or not it has to read Ayn Rand it would decide based on what it read in the Bible."
"That's insane Sam. It would simply get out of control. It would go insane."
"When I said meta-thought I didn't mention the level. Ted, humans are capable of thinking about thought. Probably even thinking about thinking about thought. But that's as far as we can go. The machine has no such limitations. It can execute a meta-raised-to-the-power-n thought process and we would never be able to able to make sense of its conclusions. By the way, there is no such thing as perfect sanity."
"You mean you made an electronic version of Socrates? A machine that's a philosopher? Is that what you are trying to say? Something that thinks endlessly about thought? Something that rambles about in that space you call the thought-space?"
"Well...let me put it this way. If you can imagine thought space then I would say this program carries a map to get around"
"It all gets intractable once you aren't able to interpret its conclusions. I have no idea what to call this. You have got farther than perfect-AI. You have beaten the light barrier. Wouldn't a scaled down version of this behave exactly like a human?"
"Not quite. There's a difference that you are missing. Unlike the humans, this machine would be perfectly rational. In fact I would have to induce errors in its reasoning to make it irrational."
"Perfectly rational. A perfectly rational mind capable of infinite thought. That sounds too good to be true. There has to be a catch some where Sam."

The rain had subsided as Sam waited for the log interpreter to come up with an explanation. The log interpreter finally beeped signaling completion.
Error 21: Could not find purpose, the console read.

Sam knew it. He was reading the suicide note of a perfectly rational being. A catch there indeed was.