Beautiful Intelligence Read Free Page A

face the most difficult obstacle next, for we must teach him language. Chomsky said human beings have grammar hardwired, and I think he was correct.”
    “We gave Zeug only a little.”
    “Just enough for self-improvement – not too much.”
    “Too much would have meant learning less,” Leonora agreed, “and we want him to learn as much as he can without being spoonfed. But you and I do not agree on language.”
    “Nexus or not?”
    Leonora shrugged.
    Yuri continued, “We both agree Zeug must remain solo until he is ready to experience the nexus. But language is changing so fast we have no choice but to utilise what exists now in human societies. Not those of the West, of course, but the Pacific Rim, perhaps even Japanese. He must speak what people presently speak, and that means we cannot avoid the nexus – for if he stands out he will be noticed, and that could lead to disaster, and the demise of our noble project.”
    Leonora sipped her tea and eyed the honey cakes. She took one; took a bite. “I think we should teach him,” she said. “If we rely on the nexus we make him a nexus man. If I teach him, and you do, we follow the human principle, and that’s worked for tens of thousands of years. I am sure Chomsky was correct, though he is thought old-fashioned now. Remember Yuri, my original goal was to make an artificial human being, a conscious intelligence. I am not here to make a servant of the nexus.”
    Yuri leaned forward. “There is one method of compromise.”
    “Which is?”
    “We allow a feed in here from the nexus–”
    “No!”
    “Wait, Leonora, please wait, allow me to elaborate for you.” Yuri sat back and did the steeple thing with his hands that Leonora hated. “Mr Hound secures every link we have with the nexus, indeed, every link with the outside world. He must manage the link I suggest so that our invisibility is maintained. I propose that we have a number of broadcasting stations available for us to watch – news channels, entertainment shows, cheap, educational. This will influence our speech patterns. In time, when he can speak, Zeug too must be allowed to interface with such stations.”
    Leonora considered this. Hound was the best in security, the master of camouflage. But still she worried that he might be turning away from the AIteam. Could she trust him? “We are approaching our crucial time,” she mused, “when all our threads come together. It sounds risky.”
    “Please. Ask Mr Hound.”
    ~
    Virenza, the village at the bottom of the valley, was well known to Hound. He had lived there for a while as part of security checks made prior to setting up the cave system bolthole, and had there developed some of the procedures used after the Ichikawa breakout. So it seemed natural to chill villageside one evening and decide what broadcast channels to allow into the caves... and how.
    He had been instructed to seek variety. It was some theory of Yuri’s. Dirk was in agreement, but Hound felt twitchy.
    A number of procedures camouflaged the extent of activity at the caves. Some were simple: arrivals and departures, these mostly Hound, made only at night, so satellites couldn’t pick up anomalous GPS activity. No thermal footprint. The deliberate fostering of cave dwelling bat populations. Some were complex: the geologists working near the cave mouth, giving data to a region that otherwise would have none; and the geologists’ swirl of pointless data also masked any mistakes the AIteam made. Then there was the proprietary ’ware developed by Hound that allowed his data incarnation to fade in and out of the nexus rather than suddenly appear and disappear. But Hound felt uneasy about letting broadcast channels in. It would be so easy for competitors, enemies, and especially journalists to hitch a virtual ride on such incoming streams. Broadcast channels implied viewers. And viewers implied activity.
    The data sink, then, must not be attached in any obvious way to the cave system.