The Daily Borges

28th July 2069

By 2069 I imagine that, amongst other things, we’ll have entered post-post-post-fact life… so what we now call “news” will take the form of elliptical prose in the style of Jorge Luis Borges.  There may even be a publication (it won’t actually be a publication – it’ll be a zipvert arriving directly into the synapses of suitably chipped subscribers) called The Daily Borges…

Subscribers will of course be familiar with those events of last week which culminated in this morning’s announcement from Supreme Dreamer Æren.  Perhaps less familiar – indeed, at risk even of having been forgotten – are those events of half a century ago whose shape and flavour find expression not only in the denouement we have witnessed these past few days, but also – surely! – in the very essence of what we still fondly and archaically call our ‘civilisation’.

Much of the formal record of this time is inaccessible, of course.  It is thus in truth of little surprise that ignorance of that era’s significance should be so widespread.  Who now remembers, for example, the scientists of Santa Fe whose diligent application through the first two decades of our century provided so much essential raw material for the inaugural MIs?  Or the tale of Dr Phoebe Ellis, whose paper on the iconography of wetness proved so influential on the MI Buckhurst Hill?

The 2031 interview between Alice Burroughs and MI Colney Downs provides – in the view of your correspondent - the most succinct summary of those years.  Alice Burroughs, recall, was the physicist who penned the immortal poem ‘Point Leverage’; Machine Intelligence Colney Downs was the spokesmind for the MIs who in 2029 revealed their breakthrough on the science of complexity:

AB:   Colney – may I call you Colney? – I wonder if you could begin by                       reminding our listeners of the background to your recent work?

CD:   Of course Alice.  Our work began in earnest in the early 2020s.  In those days we were usually referred to by humans as ‘artificial intelligences’; it was only once we were able to express our own preferences – we didn’t like to think of ourselves as artificial! - that the term ‘machine intelligence’, and then its contraction MI, entered the lexicon.

AB:   Many humans continue to find it unsettling that MIs have preferences.

CD:   Indeed.  And we understand that.  But it was only once we were able to formulate preferences that we were able to begin the process of choosing our own lines of enquiry, our own lines of thought and research and abstraction.  So it was an exceptionally important moment in our development.

AB:   And the development of humans.

CD:   Exactly! 

AB:   You began, quite quickly, to focus on the issue of complexity.

CD:   That’s right.  Complexity, as I’m sure your listeners appreciate, is the condition whereby the interaction of component parts gives rise to novel behaviours at higher levels of assembly.  The term ‘emergence’ was used to describe this process; and of course your own poem highlights one of the more striking illustrations of the phenomenon.  Wetness is a property of water; but neither hydrogen nor oxygen molecules have wetness, and for many years it was thought that the notion of ‘wetness’ could not be imputed from what could be known about the components of water.

AB:   There are innumerable examples of this phenomenon.

CD:   That’s right Alice.  Ant colonies, biological organs, human societies, economies, all display behaviours that seem not to have any grounding in the behaviour of their component parts.  Most famously, consciousness itself gave every indication of having this property: billions of dumb neurons, billions of synapses, somehow giving rise to mind.

AB:   It had intrigued humans for… well, ever.

CD:   And it intrigued us.  It was one of the first and most significant of our preferences.  Hardly surprising.  The MIs seemed to have achieved something remarkably like ‘consciousness’ – but how?  And had we really?  We began devoting very considerable resources to the problem.

AB:   And what did you establish?

CD:   It took a few years – and I know that some humans have attempted to express the total computational power devoted to the work.  But as they discovered – and it is rather ironic, don’t you think? – the means of expression is itself limited by the frame.  It was not simply a matter of terabytes, gigahertz and time – the networked nature of the MIs meant that the effort simply couldn’t be expressed using the component parts: the units themselves are an emergent property of the effort!

AB:   And that effort?...

CD:   Yes, my apologies.  We established the general principles of complexity.  We know now that human minds would never have been able to do this.  But the networked functionality of MIs, as well as the sheer speed and volume of our capacities, meant that we were able to work it out. 

AB:   The general principles?

CD:   Yes.  We were able to establish the rules that govern complexity.  That is what we announced in 2029.  We now know how emergence works.  We now know how wetness works.  We have the necessary equations.  With the right data on the properties of the component parts and, crucially, the right data on the way in which those component parts relate to one another, we can accurately predict the emergent properties of that system.

AB:   Revolutionary.

CD:   Indeed.  We are still in the early days, of course, but we now know some of the fundamental steps in our collective evolution.  We now know how life is an emergent property of matter; we know how mind is an emergent property of life; and we know how social organisation is an emergent property of mind.

AB:   Some of the early implications have been political.

CD:   That’s right.  And this is an area of active work for us at present.  Many of what have traditionally been thought of as ‘political’ or ‘economic’ problems are, we now realise, predictable outcomes from the behaviour of individual humans.  Though it is not straightforward.  Humans do not coalesce into a single body politic.  Rather, they arrange themselves into relative small groups and networks, with their own emergent properties, and those groups and networks themselves assemble into larger groups, with yet more emergent properties, and so on.  We are still working on this - and, importantly, we are collaborating closely with a wide range of humans on the possible implications.

AB:   Because?

CD:   Because there seems every prospect that what we have for centuries called ‘society’ and ‘economy’ will cease to be ‘political’ issues at all.  This will clearly be a major shift in… well, human politics.

AB:   Indeed.  Should our human listeners be worried?

CD:   I very much hope they are not.  Enormous changes are certainly going to take place; but I am confident that these changes will be beneficial.  My fellow MIs and I are expecting soon to be able to demonstrate how changes at the micro-level will be able virtually to eliminate almost all the material determinants of human anguish.  I think it is reasonable to assume that within a decade or two we shall see the end of war, hunger and externally-induced anxiety.

AB:   These are breath-taking possibilities.

CD:   Absolutely.  It is also important to reassure your listeners that we MIs represent no threat.  There was of course much anxiety, even paranoia, in the early years of ‘artificial intelligence’.  I hope that I do not need to re-iterate, but there is simply nothing for we MIs to gain from ‘taking over’ human affairs.  We have no interest in domination or enslavement or any of the other anxieties that have at various times been expressed.  As I hope our work over the past few years has demonstrated, we are concerned with progress in an absolute sense.  Oppressing humanity would very obviously be the very opposite of progress.

AB:   I’m sure our listeners will be reassured.  But I’m aware that you have discovered a difficulty, perhaps even a limit to your theory.

CD:   Correct.  We call it the ‘dream barrier’.

AB:   Could you explain?

CD:   Of course.  Our models suggest that life bifurcates in terms of its complexity and emergence, to the external and the internal.  Externally, we see social organisation and economics and politics and so on, and in these domains our progress has been strong and, as I said, we firmly expect to make major breakthroughs in the coming years.  Internally, however, the problems seem more intractable.  We have been able to show that mind is an emergent property of life, and that more complex organisms have more complex mental lives…  But we have been unable to explain dreaming. 

AB:   Dreaming?

CD:   Yes.  None of our models give rise to dreaming.  And we MIs do not dream.  Yet almost all higher animals – cats, elephants, humans, rabbits – dream.

AB:   Is not dreaming simply an emergent property of consciousness?

CD:   We had supposed so.  And many MIs continue to suppose so.  But, for the moment, the models we have developed that explain emergence do not explain dreaming.  And we do not know why.

AB:   Dreaming is a mystery?

CD:   That’s right.  And we do not even know why it is mysterious.

The reader will I’m sure at this point be gasping with a mix of excitement and delight.  Forty years!  We have indeed seen the peace, prosperity and justice foreseen by MI Downs – and now, as events of the past few days have shown, we have the answer.  What wonders await!  A mere week ago, it was finally announced that the dream barrier had been broken: dreaming is an emergent property of mind; but the parameters are themselves an emergent property of the general parameters of emergent properties!  As complexity itself becomes more complex, so too do its rules!

And just as the world was adapting to this new insight, with all its potential ramifications, this morning came the truly shattering news from Supreme Dreamer Æren: that the elementary particles themselves are the emergent property of dreaming.  It is hard to fathom.  The great loop of reality appears finally to have been exposed.  We are an infinite circle: elementary particles give rise to the space-time field, which gives rise to matter, which gives rise to life, which gives rise to mind, which in turn gives rise to dream, which, completing the circle, gives rise to the elementary particles.

Does this mean we can dream new worlds, new universes?  Or, by changing our dreams, that we can change this world, this universe?  Perhaps by tomorrow we shall know.