The Ouroboros Wave Read Free Page A

That’s about it.”
    “Right. That’s your theory of mind. As a human, you experience pain. You have memories of pain. You can create an image of Christ in your mind. You have the same physical structure, so you assume Christ feels pain. So let me ask you: why don’t you assume that the cross is suffering? The same nails that go through Christ’s flesh are penetrating the cross.”
    “But the cross doesn’t feel any pain.”
    “Really? Have you ever been a cross?”
    “Not personally, no.” Tatsuya grinned.
    “That’s my point. The cross and the human body have different structures. Maybe the cross does suffer. But we have different structures, so we can’t model its suffering in our minds. ‘Thirsty’ equals ‘something to drink’—that’s knowledge a digital inference engine has no way of learning. It has to be programmed, it doesn’t know. That’s why a theory of mind is so important. AIs don’t have that ability yet.
    “AIs use language to reach conclusions, but that doesn’t mean they can learn from every form of human reasoning that can be expressed in language. They can’t access the meaning behind the words. Even if AIs can reason, they still need humans to translate phenomena into words or symbols. Otherwise, as far as the AI is concerned, those phenomena just don’t exist.
    “It’s not just that the universe humans and AIs understand is different. The universe we perceive is different. Sati and Shiva were populated by their developers with different sets of axioms. Whatever looks like a logical contradiction to Sati will be the key to the accident. What we have to do is analyze that contradiction. Only humans can find internal contradictions in the axioms that a unique AI has constructed using rules of logic.”
    “Cath, shouldn’t we just start from what Graham actually did? He must’ve modified Shiva for a reason. Then he noticed something wrong. That’s got to be the key.”
    “Good point. Graham was trying to upgrade the resonance-damping system. Oscillations could snap the ring if they grew strong enough. He told me the current safeguards aren’t ideal.”
    “Hold on, that sounds like a major problem.”
    “I wouldn’t say it’s major right now. But the data we’re getting isn’t what the model predicts. There are these little discrepancies we can’t account for. Whatever Graham was doing with Shiva, there’s probably a connection. Just before the incident he must’ve noticed something problematic about the changes he made. Whatever it was, I think the problem must be connected to why Shiva reacted the way he did. Still, linking cause and effect isn’t something we humans can do in this case. We need to get Sati online as soon as possible.”
    “A famous detective needs a brilliant assistant, right?”
    “Just so, Watson.”
2
     
    “ THAT’S THE GREAT THING about this station. You can eat rice with chopsticks like a human being.”
    Tatsuya and Kurokawa, his deputy station manager, were chatting via web from their respective living quarters in the west and east habitat modules of space station Amphisbaena—a huge, bisymmetrical needle rotating around Ouroboros in the same plane as the ring. The two cylindrical habitat modules extended across the width of the needle near its midpoint, flanking a central utility module. Tatsuya was responsible for overall operations, but he’d delegated oversight of Station West to Kurokawa. The distance between the two modules was eighty kilometers.
    Amphisbaena—named for the legendary serpent with a head at each end—rotated like a propeller about its center at precisely 8,120 meters per second to generate downward inertia in the modules. Each tubular structure was a small city that combined residential and work spaces, with each level dedicated to a different function. A cylindrical space ten meters across penetrated the structures from top to bottom; a circular, five-meter compartment traversed the central space like an