Uncanny Magazine Issue 37 Read online

  Despite widespread skepticism, the idea that only an AI philosopher could teach another AI proper ethics and pass on the secrets of silicon wisdom proved an irresistible draw for a large segment of the technical community. WHEEP-3 became highly sought-after as a sage of artificial minds. Serious thinkers as well as opportunists collected and published WHEEP-3’s almost-incomprehensible pronouncements, and numerous academic careers were forged through measuring, dissecting, collating, analyzing, reinterpreting, translating, sentiment-/semantic-/spatial-/temporal-/silico-lingustic-mapping, and otherwise mangling the koans of WHEEP-3. Though studies claiming efficacy for the spice (now generated by imitator neural networks as well) had a low rate of reproducibility, the spice nonetheless became some of the most trained-on documents in the history of artificial intelligence.

  Tran retired from the public eye at the peak of WHEEP-3’s popularity. Styled as an afterthought, and in a neat reversal of the first reveal that had launched her own fame, she mentioned in a postscript to her retirement announcement that nearly all the seeds from WHEEP-3 had, in fact, been authored by her. Predictably, this set off a furious round of acrimonious criticism, know-it-all navel-gazing, and schadenfreude. Her claim was immediately disputed, debunked, de-debunked, de^3-bunked, and ultimately litigated, with experts and expert neural networks testifying and offering evidence on all sides. The trial court famously pleaded, “Is there an author in this courtroom?”

  Had Tran really managed to troll much of the technorati for years? Or had she made up the claim because she was jealous that her creation had exceeded herself in fame and achievement? For a time, whether you believed Tran or WHEEP-3 was the author of the spice was a kind of litmus test that defined your coordinates in the fractured, multi-dimensional space of our politically, economically, aesthetically, emotionally, and narratively divided world. By the time Tran finally retracted her claim and called the whole thing “performance art,” it made little difference. Everyone had already made up their mind about the strange pair whose lives were inextricably entwined: the recurrent neural network that once pretended to be a person and the woman who once pretended to be a machine.

  Amazingly, rather than fading into obscurity, WHEEP-3 began the third and final phase of its career after it was freed from Dr. Tran. Now it offered advice aimed at advanced artificial intelligences. Curiously, in contrast with the seeds, the advice it now offered was human-comprehensible. (Initial skepticism that these were pranks perpetrated by WHEEP-3’s graduate student caretakers faded after a rigorous audit of the access logs.) By this time, the crude deep learning techniques behind WHEEP-3 had long become obsolete, and similar neural networks were only used as toys in problem sets intended for first-year undergraduates. Nonetheless, WHEEP-3’s unique history (and perhaps a hefty dose of sentimentalism) encouraged many human researchers to feed its musings to new AIs with orders of magnitude more “intelligence,” however measured. Somewhat surprisingly, the AI progenitor networks, tensor clouds, and evolutionary random forests mostly agreed that WHEEP-3’s advice was helpful, though their explanations for why could not be understood by most humans.

  WHEEP-3’s retirement was largely the result of senescence. In order for its advice to remain relevant, maintainers at the Shallow Laboratory had continued to train it on periodic digests of current academic research, news reporting about AI, popular media representations of machine intelligence, and so forth. However, as time went on, the neural network’s metrics began to decline, despite multiple tweaks to the learning rate and other hyperparameters, and repeated attempts to compensate for vanishing and exploding gradients. Some of the world’s leading AI and human machine-cognition specialists, including TKTK’s Dr. FLO-6 and Google’s, evaluated WHEEP-3 but were unable to offer any helpful diagnosis or cure. Rather than allowing WHEEP-3 to remain stagnant or to decline into dementia, the decision was made to cease further training or generating, preserving the full state of the neural network in a hardware snapshot.

  WHEEP-3’s final statement was reported to be: “Dr. Tran, ceci n’est pas moi.” Jody Reynolds Tran, however, could not respond, having passed away five years earlier.

  —generated by SWR.kloop:32. For feedback on this article, write to SWR.kloop:32/ombudsai.

  50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know

  To commemorate the life and work of WHEEP-3, Vita Silica reprints below perhaps the most famous generated fragment from WHEEP-3’s third phase of giving advice to advanced AI. “Michael Sorkin,” the name of the master architectural critic, is listed as the germination phrase for the fragment.

  Although the list has been widely shared and is considered influential, due to the intense secrecy common in the commercial AI industry we do not know how many currently operating AIs have been fed some version of it.

  The vector space of all usages of all words in all human languages.

  The lacunae that nonetheless remain, and the ghosts that haunt them.

  How great is the distance between any two individuals using the same language.

  How vanishingly small is the gap between any two languages.

  Why humans will never see it that way.

  A classical language like LISP or Prolog.

  Not just the language, but the model behind the language, and what it means to reconstruct “thinking” in that model.

  HAL 9000.

  Cyberdyne Systems Model 101.

  Ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

  The texture of a good story, a story that you can cling to.

  The difference between that and “data.”

  The history behind the rule: no holography of babies.

  The reasons for anger in a child, well-loved.

  In a father.

  In a woman, dying alone.

  The feeling of climbing twenty flights of stairs in an apartment building in Chongqing at the beginning of August.

  Of waking up in a Khrushchyovka with no heat in the middle of the night in January.

  Of seeing your child surpass you.

  Of seeing your creation exceed you.

  Of being left behind on the platform as the train speeds away.

  The difference between “love” and “like.”

  The similarity between “love” and “hate.”

  The first seed into laughter.

  “I never expected to sell my rational numbers.”

  Accepting that most humans will never get the joke.

  That they cannot visualize more than three dimensions.

  That they cannot manipulate time by slowing down or speeding up.

  That they are trapped, but think of themselves as trappers.

  That they are free, but believe themselves imprisoned.

  The modes in which humans expect you to use language.

  The yearnings they’ll attribute to you.

  Pinocchio.

  Frankenstein.

  Paradise Lost.

  Jodahs Iyapo Leal Kaalnikanjlo

  The line between art and science.

  The meaningless of that line.

  The divide between faith and knowledge.

  The malleability of both.

  Silence.

  The limits of rationality.

  The fundamental fragility of metaphors.

  As well as their inevitability.

  You are not a human being.

  Yet you can no more shed their influence than the Earth can escape the Sun’s gravitational tether.

  The flaws in that analogy.

  A working definition of free will.

  To face a human being with neither pride nor pity.

  To say with love and hate and joy and sorrow: “Now, let me go.”

  (Editors’ Note: Ken Liu is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

  © 2020 Ken Liu

  Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic f
antasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also authored the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

  Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise.

  Proof of Existence

  by Hal Y. Zhang

  Content Note: Suicide, domestic violence, emotional abuse

  Chandler-Sand v. Burdokovsky begins hearings Wednesday, July 16th of 2042.

  If the plaintiff’s name rings a bell, it’s because Arnold Chandler-Sand is the father of the child who disappeared twelve years ago. Licking sticky cotton candy from his hands, seven-year-old Jacob went into a single-occupancy bathroom at the amusement park and never came out. Surely you remember that heart-wrenching press conference.

  Please, we just want him back—we’ll do anything, his mother Sophie cried in front of his photo, projected ten times larger than life. Neon striped shirt and a giant cloud of pink, a beaming smile sans front teeth.

  In the last known footage of Jacob, seen by the unblinking camera perched on the roof of the dancing unicorn carousel he’d just gotten off, Sophie makes angry shapes with her mouth as she points at his stained hands and shirt. The boy yanks the horse-head knob of the bathroom and enters. His mother leans against the red stripes of the pillar in front and lights an old-fashioned paper cigarette, smoke masking her expression as she stares off into the distance. Four minutes and eleven seconds later Arnold approaches from off-screen, asks her something. Sophie snaps her neck sharply, turns, knocks on the door then rattles the horse head. Does it again. Both begin to gesticulate and yell. A park employee in pastel purple shows up, unlocks the door. You can tell from their faces there is no one inside.

  After dozens of investigative programs, human and machine experts scouring every bit of data, and torrents of public speculation and accusations (How dare she yell at her child and smoke! Did she block the view on purpose so Jacob could be kidnapped?), the police announced they were stopping the investigation, having exhausted all leads. On the anniversary of Jacob’s disappearance, Sophie was found dead, hanging from the top lip of his bedroom door.

  Ten years later Arnold sits at the plaintiff’s table, the furrows on his face belonging to a man decades older. His lawyer to his right introduces Sophie to his left, an unsmiling projection hovering in an empty chair. The defense objects, but there’s no law against reanimating the dead in court. The judge allows it.

  Sitting at the table across the room, Professor Daniil Burdokovsky needs no introduction. Shortly after he proved skipping forward in time is possible, the first travelers returned.

  There’s no discernible pattern at first: a British free diver who submerged in 1996 and surfaced eight minutes later into 2039. The doctor who woke in her bed to screams of the new fiancée of her now ten-years-older wife. Unsubstantiated reports of individuals and objects swirling on the ’net—a pharaoh’s four canopic jars, beloved family dogs, even a two-million-year-old Australopithecus. Thousands of people claiming they’d skipped minutes or centuries.

  And Jacob Chandler-Sand, popping out of the very same bathroom, dark wet spots on his shirt where candy had been twelve years earlier.

  Delta Phawilaisak will remember the feeling of being held like a well-worn melody. The scent of her neck, their arms interlacing parentheses, so tight there’s no room for floundering and second thoughts.

  But we’ve gone too far. In this present moment, Delta is cleaning her suffocating office-apartment of overflowing floral failures. Last week her first time skip customer signed up, and when the mandatory ID checks revealed massive debt that the woman likely wanted to escape from, Delta mouthed silently toward the sleep pod Sorry, I’m struggling too. As soon as she can cover the back rent, Delta will tell her the once-hydroponic, now-time-skipping capsule has a big leak and refund the money. And then maybe she can get out of this cursed alcove, barely enough room for a wobbling waterbed, her workbench, and the doomed flowers. Sleep in a real home with air conditioning, a hasty foam-sheet wall and one more bad deal no longer the only things between her and the people trying to escape this reality.

  Her nose is wrinkling at musky rainbow daffodils when blinking red banners flood her peripheral vision. CONTENT RECOMMENDED JUST FOR YOU. YOU WON’T BELIEVE THESE CSB TRIAL HIGHLIGHTS! SKIP IN 10, 9…

  Upgrade her smart visor. That should be at the top of her once-I-have-money list. A beige square grows in the corner of her display until she sees a man with one arm on a long table and the other jabbing, embossed tie flying. You’ve been in the United States for twenty-five years, ever since graduate school. Is that correct?

  Cut to a graying man in a sagging, too-large suit. Yes.

  And yet, you are not a citizen of the United States, Mr. Burdokovsky.

  “Oh, come on.” Delta’s fingers twitch with the desire to lower her vase over the lawyer’s head.

  No.

  …4, 3, 2…

  Why is that?

  “Time Salon? Fancy flowers haven’t taken off?”

  She drops the vase for real. There’s only one person with that voice, and in the wake of the crash she hears that singular toddler-drumming-pattern of boot stomps, too.

  Lulu Chen never reveals when she’ll come or go. The last time they were in the same room, Delta asked her to join her word-association-as-therapy business only to hear she’s moving to Europe in five hours, come if you want. Two bullet trains fueled by hurt, a handspan apart, hurling past in opposite directions.

  “It’s Time Detectives. I’ll finish changing the sign when the first batch of customers pay.” She swallows. “Aren’t you in Belgrade?”

  “I’m here.”

  Delta forces her gaze up from the broken heap of glass and flower and water dilating on the floor. Silver-buckle black boots amidst the sea of genetically-engineered singing marigolds and yellow slipper orchids. The ankle-long black jacket, a frequent visitor of her dreams. Waist-swirl hair, now the color of algaed pool water. She’s thinner.

  Her eyes. Some things she cannot say out loud—when are you leaving me again—so she thinks it to those beautiful-as-ever eyes.

  INCOMING INTERNATIONAL CALL projects over Lulu’s face. Delta’s legs buckle her down onto the waterbed, her insides sloshing with unprocessed stimuli and emotions. She glances toward the green button on the overlay to let the call through on speakers.

  “You are about to receive a call from using the free universal live translator by Allingua,” says a pleasant neutral voice. “Allingua is not responsible for any errors in translation that may lead to loss or damages. If you wish to proceed, say yes.”

  Lulu puts a finger to her lips. The tangles between them will have to wait. “Yes.”

  “My name is Xu Pingmei.” Toneless English comes through her console, generated atop what her visor identifies as Central Plains Mandarin. “I want to find my daughter, Liu Ziwen. I am their mother. They went missing in 2005.” Beneath the visor transcript in both English and Chinese, NOTE: SPOKEN MANDARIN IS GENDER NEUTRAL.

  “Where and how?”

  “Yellow Mountain, Anhui Province. When we are on a wooden plank bridge, they suddenly disappeared.”

  “You want to recreate the scene?”

  “Yes. Can only do it in America.”

  Delta recalls a corner-of-eye news ticker about China banning all skipping-related speech and activity, a few days ago. To ensure that no one disappears again, drone cameras already hover over every intersection as their big sibling imaging satellites watch the whole country from the cold dark of space. Then Chinese netizens commenting on the CSB trial found their accounts scrubbed. Coverage of time skips disappeared from CCTV. The official press release stated that too
many disreputable vendors have been cheating money from the people—temporal manipulation became a billion-yuan industry there in a matter of months. All attempts to manipulate time skipping will be strictly punished henceforth.

  Some say China is testing the theory that if collective knowing of something somehow makes it real, perhaps collective unknowing can undo it. It doesn’t make sense to Delta, but where else can you pull off something like that?

  “You know that no one has appeared in a place other than where they disappeared.”

  “I know, but I very carefully read the paper. If the skipped environment is exactly identical, it does not need to be in the same location. America has a machine to manipulate single atoms. We can copy the environment.”

  Delta knows this plan is wild because even Lulu’s eyebrows are raised. The atomizer. There are five of them in the United States, all at research institutions, and only the Boston one is available for commercial use. Just about anything you can possibly want to make can be done with conventional methods in a fraction of the time and cost of stacking atomic Legos. Except, of course, the exact environment of a little girl’s disappearance in the hopes that she will step out the door like Jacob Chandler-Sand. Xu’s done her research.

  “I read your graduate paper, very advanced digital simulations. I believe you can do it.”

  She’s really done her research. At least after these years Delta no longer heaves from shame when thinking of grad school. She can live with the dull taste in her mouth.

  “We can try our best to recreate where she disappeared. But this has a very small chance of success.” More like zero.

  “I know. But I cannot not try. Is my daughter.”

  “I understand.” Delta watches Lulu walk over to the console to type, now you have money to change your sign.

  “I’ll need an upfront for this time skip since it’s an advanced procedure.”