“But,” he said, on George’s behalf, “what’s this got to do with my missing finger, right?”
George nodded.
“Phantom limb,” the tech said. “It feels like my finger’s there until I look down and remember it’s not. Hence, Schröfinger.”
“Ah,” George said.
“So,” the tech continued, “you know HAL, right?”
Did he? It was only the voice he’d been hearing in his head ever since he first “met” the fictional AI through his uncle’s TV. And damn it—he hadn’t even officially started working there yet, but George could feel it; he’d never want to leave this place. These, simply put, were his people: the geeks, the nerds, the fanboys who’d been promised a HAL and would make one themselves if they had to.
“Daisy” was all George said, but it was answer enough.
“Excellent,” the team leader said. “So the whole thing with HAL going crazy and killing everybody was the result of the limitations of binary computing. He’d been given contradictory instructions about the mission and went a little crazy as a result, because binary systems are hopeless when it comes to contradictions. To a binary system, it’s all bits and bytes—zero or one, yes or no, right?”
George nodded.
“But quantum computers don’t deal in bits; they use qubits, which can be both yes and no at the same time without canceling each other out or leading to a contradiction error. A qubit can be zero and one and the fractional infinity in between.” He paused to back up to his original point. “If HAL had been a quantum computer, he wouldn’t have been tripped up by a little paradoxical coding. That’s because in a quantum system, the answer yes and no doesn’t start the sparks flying. Contradictions are what quantum computers do best.”
The team leader held up his abbreviated digit, blew across the stump, and voilà: the finger was restored. Or had only been folded over in the first place, seeing as it wasn’t the same hand this time.
“Cute,” George said.
The team leader went on to predict that while the coders in digital were making headlines for teaching their AIs to beat world champions in Go, it was his group—the quants, the qubitters—who’d be the ones to crack the nut of general AI.
“That’s because a quantum computer can literally jump to conclusions as opposed to having to brute-force its way through, crunching all possible combinations. It’s like the difference between the inventors Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Edison reached his inventions as a result of trial and error, testing and dismissing alternatives until he found the perfect material for, say, the filament for his incandescent lamp. Tesla, on the other hand, arrived at his inventions in flashes of inspiration while thinking about something else.
“To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, a quantum computer with three hundred qubits of processing power could perform more calculations than the number of atoms in the visible universe. It could do in minutes what would take a digital supercomputer a billion years to accomplish—if it could, ever. With a computer like that you could feed in a person’s genome and it would project their entire life arc. And you could do that for all the people on earth. In minutes. An earth-sized version of The Sims, eight billion simulations bouncing off one another like eight billion billiard balls on a table the size of the planet.”
“And how far away is that?” George asked.
“Well, we have to reach quantum advantage first.”
“And that is?”
“When we finally get enough qubits together to do something that’s impossible for a classical computer.” He paused. “It could happen next week,” he predicted, “or a hundred years from now.”
“That’s a pretty wide spread.”
“Yeah, but once it happens, and it’s scalable, that’s it. Game over for classical computing.”
“Well, on behalf of those of us who’d love a crack at a planet-sized game of The Sims,” George said, shaking the team leader’s discounted hand, “good luck.” Turning to leave, he turned around again, to offer up a pair of crossed fingers, which, on second thought, probably wasn’t cool.
Next up: the fMRI guys V.T. had mentioned, who answered George’s questions even before he knew he wanted to ask them, with the exception of one. He’d noticed a volunteer who looked to be about his age being scanned as the spokestech explained, “We’re trying to locate the part of the brain responsible for suicidal ideation in adolescents.”
Before George had a chance to ask, the tech explained that the subject, who’d actually attempted suicide, would be asked to go back to that dark place.
“But,” George prepared to object.
But the tech was already leaning into the control center’s microphone: “Jake,” he said, “I want you to think back to when you were in the tub, holding the razor blade . . .”
George watched as a portion of the brain he didn’t know the name of (yet) became bathed in a cold blue. Looking at it, he thought of the dark part on an ancient map: terra incognita, the home of monsters.
If you’d asked him before whether he’d like to see what suicidal ideation in a teenager looked like in an fMRI scan, George wouldn’t have known how to answer. Now he did. The demonstration was enlightening in a very dark way, making him think about the mind’s eye, and blind spots. Take this particular case: the boy in the tube was being asked to remember a past time when the future seemed to be in his blind spot. And yet . . .
“Isn’t this dangerous?” George asked. “For the subject, I mean. It seems awfully triggering.”
The lab tech shook his head, then shrugged, then pointed to the disclaimer that had been signed by the subject’s guardian. “Our a’s are c’d,” he said, referencing what George was coming to understand as the unofficial motto of the company that claimed, “Doing good is what we do.”
And after that:
“Back where we started,” George’s escort announced, standing inside the recently vacated office with its window and view and everything. “Welcome to Quire.” The dark suit and glasses turned and prepared to leave, but then stopped. “Door?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Open or closed?”
“Closed would be great,” George said, the better to do his happy dance the second it was.
15
“How was your visit?” Roger asked.
His daughter ignored him, silently stepping out of her boots, unlacing her scarf, shedding her parka. In socked feet, she padded across the cabin’s living room to the bathroom, left the door open, and flushed. Pandora poked her head back out mischievously. “I hope that wasn’t too triggering . . .”
“She told you,” Roger said.
“She told me,” Pandora said, trying to mirror the deadliness of her father’s tone but unable to. She was practically incandescent with glee.
Roger folded his arms and waited while Pandora dissolved into laughter. Finally taking a seat, literally holding her sides, his daughter looked woozy from lack of oxygen. Once the laughter had reduced to a couple of snorts every few seconds, like popcorn slowing down in a microwave, he spoke.