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They spent hours going from lab to lab throughout the floor, and at every stop it was the same. Hinton sat with his staff, they talked about their worries, they talked about some of the people who had died, and they speculated as to what this was all about.
Some of the researchers knew Tomer Basch, many of them knew Lars Halverson, and it seemed like all of them knew a guy named Maxim Arsenov, though this name was not familiar to Zack.
They talked about the women in Japan and Korea who’d been killed, and Rene Descourts and a few other names Zack hadn’t even heard before, giving him the impression that the killings had not yet stopped.
Zack saw that Hinton was well liked by his people, but he didn’t get a sense he was doing much work here today. Instead, he seemed like he saw it as his job to buoy the spirits of his team in the wake of all the murders.
When actual work was discussed, Zack found it too arcane to follow. Several researchers explained to Anton something about some coding they’d discovered in the cloud that none of them had seen before, and they speculated that this one piece of code could be used, in theory, to animate a weapon. Hinton speculated that the code might have been a remnant of a top-secret DARPA project called Mind Game that had made it out into the world.
DARPA, Zack knew, was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a U.S. Department of Defense arm where new technologies were developed.
Hinton’s theory that this code was American-made and perhaps the Chinese had stolen it to make the new AI weapon everyone feared was passionately presented to his researchers, but Zack didn’t understand the first word of what he was explaining about neural networks and training and classification algorithms.
Zack tuned it all out after a while.
•••
Midafternoon they broke for lunch, and Anton asked Zack to sit with him and Wren in the cafeteria.
“What do you think, Zack?”
With a little smile he said, “I think you should wear your body armor even when you’re inside, so maybe you shouldn’t ask me what I think.”
The New Zealander said, “These people are my friends and trusted coworkers. They aren’t going to hurt me. I am going to keep my people looking at this mystery code out there, to try to find some fingerprints on it that will lead us in the right direction. Whatever direction.”
Zack said, “I didn’t hear anyone today talk about a weapon. It was all about software. Isn’t the big fear that this software will be weaponized?”
“It is.”
“But weaponized with what?”
“Our problem here,” Anton confessed, “is that we aren’t the military robot people. We’re the artificial intelligence people. Brains, not brawn. Tomer Basch and Lars Halverson and Rene Descourts and even Rick Watt, they knew what was out there in the military landscape.”
He shrugged. “We’re the computer nerds. We’ll develop the code, and we don’t involve ourselves with lethal autonomous weapons. If you leave the entire kill chain up to the machines, machines that can process tens of millions of data points in a few milliseconds, then there is no place for a human being on the loop. It simply moves too fast.”
Zack said, “If you are so worried about artificial intelligence being used for evil…why do you and your people continue to develop AI?”
Hinton smiled, then took a bite of his salad. “Let me put it to you this way, Zack. Fire.”
“Fire?”
“Yeah, fire. Is it good or bad?”
Zack didn’t like riddles, but he thought a moment. “I guess if I’m cold and in the woods, it’s great.”
Hinton said, “But if your house is on fire, then it’s bloody horrible, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“There you go. We are building the right AI, we are seeking out peaceful uses, we are working on a better future. We are the fire that warms you at night, that cooks your food, that lights your way. Others…others are the fire that tears across the forest towards your house, sending furry creatures running for their lives.
“If we shuttered everything today, and all these scientists and engineers went on to some other line of work, then AI would just be the burning forest, not the beacon of hope.”
Zack nodded and ate his meal. He thought the man was weird, but he also thought him to be charming as hell.
Finally, he said, “That guy, Arsenov. The one everyone was talking about today. Who was he?”
“He was killed in Mexico City the other day. He worked for me.”
