Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Read Free Page A

she introduced herself as “Penny,” and she was young enough to be his granddaughter—maybe even a great-granddaughter. She was pretty enough, in the no-makeup, face-scrubbed, farm-girl fashion, with curly red-brown hair, blue eyes, snub nose, and freckles. She showed up at the Friday lunchtime executive meeting wearing blue jeans, a black tee shirt blazoned with the motto “I can explain it to you but I can’t understand it for you”—which Praxis found vaguely disturbing—a military camouflage jacket, and combat boots. The whole outfit was two notches below San Francisco standard for the old casual Friday, plus it was snarky. This was unfortunate because she was giving a major demonstration of the new system’s capabilities that day.
    She was halfway through her introduction and already hip-deep in a technical language filled with search strategies, heuristic learning types, minimax decision making, constraint propagation, and core resources when Praxis put up a hand to interrupt the flow. “Excuse me,” he said. “Could you start over, for the slow children in the room?”
    Antigone, sitting immediately to his right, caught his eye and grinned.
    Callie, across the table, leaned back in her chair and looked troubled.
    “Yes, sir,” Winston replied. “What is it you need to know?”
    “Tell me, in simple terms, what this thing does that we didn’t do before.”
    “Well …” The young woman frowned. “It pays attention. It’s basically an artificial intelligence, although we don’t use that word anymore. It will help coordinate your business and govern your recordkeeping functions like accounting, finance, personnel, and project scheduling—the backroom stuff.”
    “Does it replace the operating system, accounting package, and whatnot?”
    “Oh, no! It’s an overlay to the system. It doesn’t replace anything. It augments and monitors. Think of it like having a real-time operator who watches everything and asks the right questions.”
    “Does it talk?” Praxis asked. “Don’t artificial intelligences speak English?”
    “It’s merely an analytical engine,” Winston said. “But, but if you want, I suppose we could put in a synthesizer and teach it English. We’d need a separate port for that, too.”
    “Then could it attend our board meetings and make its own reports?” The possibility of having a robot system large enough, smart enough, complex enough to run a whole company intrigued him—even though he had been stung by one when he worked for the plumbing company. “Does it have a name? Do we call it ‘Hal’?”
    “Well, sir, it has an IQ about equal to a dog’s,” she replied. “A really smart dog, a working dog, like a border collie—and with the same kind of fixed focus and attention span. But it won’t converse like a human being. And it doesn’t play chess or do psych evaluations.”
    “Then we’ll call it ‘Spot,’ ” he said. “Or ‘Rover.’ ”
    Penny Winston looked over at his daughter Callie for help.
    “It’s just a machine, Dad,” she said. “It simply follows rules, or algorithms, that refer to an extensive database of prior examples—something like a person drawing on vast experience. But it doesn’t actually think—although it can learn and add to that base of experience.”
    “Do you trust it?” he asked her seriously.
    “More than some people I can name,” she said.
    “Until it does something terribly wrong, I suppose.”
    * * *
    Antigone Wells had come to treasure the weekly trysts with John. It was usually on a Saturday morning, but sometimes Sunday, when the two of them went out for lunch together as a couple—just them, without Callie, her daughter, other family members, or PE&C associates, and no business talk allowed. This particular morning they had gone to Café de Young, attached to the art museum in Golden Gate Park, and after the meal they walked it off by touring the galleries. They were holding hands like a pair of