Crystal Nights — Greg Egan

Publication historyInterzone #215, April 2008. Free podcast at Transmissions From Beyond. [Site no longer active] Oceanic (collection, Orion) Crystal Nights and Other Stories (collection, Subterranean Press) [Out of print.] The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three, edited by Jonathan Strahan; Night Shade Books, San Francisco, 2009. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois; St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2009. Hayakawa’s SF Magazine, January 2010. (Japanese translation) The Planck Dive and Other Stories (collection, Hayakawa) Translated by Makoto Yamagishi. (Japanese translation) “Krystalové noci” in XB-1, December 2011. Translated by Petr Kotrle. (Czech translation) Digital Rapture, edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel; Tachyon, San Francisco, 2012. Oceanic (collection, Greg Egan) “Noches de cristal” in Terra Nova Volume 2, edited by Mariano Villarreal and Luis Pestarini; Fantascy / Random House Mondadori, Barcelona, 2013. Translated by Carlos Pavón. (Spanish translation) “Nuits cristallines” in Bifrost #79, July 2015. Translated by Erwann Perchoc, Quarante-Deux and Olivier Girard. (French translation) Science Fiction World, May 2017. (Chinese translation) The Best of Greg Egan (collection, Subterranean Press) The Best of Greg Egan (collection, Chengdu) (Chinese translation) Oceanic (collection, Dook) (Chinese translation) 1 “More caviar?” Daniel Cliff gestured at the serving dish and the cover irised from opaque to transparent. “It’s fresh, I promise you. My chef had it flown in from Iran this morning.” “No thank you.” Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips then laid it on her plate with a gesture of finality.

The dining room overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she was growing impatient with his small talk. Daniel said, “I’d like to show you something.” He led her into the adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the wall screen showed a Linux command line interface. “Take a seat,” he suggested. Julie complied. “If this is some kind of audition, you might have warned me,” she said. “Not at all,” Daniel replied. “I’m not going to ask you to jump through any hoops. I’d just like you to tell me what you think of this machine’s performance.” She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She ran some standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them off with one finger. There were a lot more than she’d been expecting, but she wasn’t seeing double. “That’s extraordinary,” she said. “Is this whole building packed with networked processors, with only the penthouse for humans?” Daniel said, “You tell me. Is it a cluster?” “Hmm.” So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it wasn’t really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelise; however smart the compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried out strictly in sequence. The FLOPS rating was unchanged. Julie said, “All right, it’s a single processor. Now you’ve got my attention. Where is it?” “Turn the keyboard over.” There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square and five millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined it, but it bore no manufacturer’s logo or other identifying marks. “This connects to the processor?” she asked. “No. It is the processor.” “You’re joking.” She tugged it free of the dock, and the wall screen went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screwdriver and take the thing apart, probably.

He said, “If you break it, you own it, so I hope you’ve got a few hundred spare.” “A few hundred grand? Hardly.” “A few hundred million.” Her face flushed. “Of course. If it was a few hundred grand, everyone would have one.” She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought slid it a little further from the edge. “As I said, you’ve got my attention.” Daniel smiled. “I’m sorry about the theatrics.” “No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?” “A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No electronics to slow it down; every last component is optical. The architecture was nanofabricated with a method that I’d prefer not to describe in detail.” “Fair enough.” She thought for a while. “I take it you don’t expect me to buy one. My research budget for the next thousand years would barely cover it.” “In your present position. But you’re not joined to the university at the hip.” “So this is a job interview?” Daniel nodded. Julie couldn’t help herself; she picked up the crystal and examined it again, as if there might yet be some feature that a human eye could discern. “Can you give me a job description?” “Midwife.” She laughed. “To what?” “History,” Daniel said. Her smile faded slowly. “I believe you’re the best AI researcher of your generation,” he said. “I want you to work for me.” He reached over and took the crystal from her. “With this as your platform, imagine what you could do.” Julie said, “What exactly would you want me to do?” “For the last fifteen years,” Daniel said, “you’ve stated that the ultimate goal of your research is to create conscious, human-level, artificial intelligence.” “That’s right.” “Then we want the same thing. What I want is for you to succeed.” She ran a hand over her face; whatever else she was thinking, there was no denying that she was tempted. “It’s gratifying that you have so much confidence in my abilities,” she said. “But we need to be clear about some things. This prototype is amazing, and if you ever get the production costs down I’m sure it will have some extraordinary applications.

It would eat up climate forecasting, lattice QCD, astrophysical modelling, proteomics ...” “Of course.” Actually, Daniel had no intention of marketing the device. He’d bought out the inventor of the fabrication process with his own private funds; there were no other shareholders or directors to dictate his use of the technology. “But AI,” Julie said, “is different. We’re in a maze, not a highway; there’s nowhere that speed alone can take us. However many exaflops I have to play with, they won’t spontaneously combust into consciousness. I’m not being held back by the university’s computers; I have access to SHARCNET anytime I need it. I’m being held back by my own lack of insight into the problems I’m addressing.” Daniel said, “A maze is not a dead end. When I was twelve, I wrote a program for solving mazes.” “And I’m sure it worked well,” Julie replied, “for small, two-dimensional ones. But you know how those kind of algorithms scale. Put your old program on this crystal, and I could still design a maze in half a day that would bring it to its knees.” “Of course,” Daniel conceded. “Which is precisely why I’m interested in hiring you. You know a great deal more about the maze of AI than I do; any strategy you developed would be vastly superior to a blind search.” “I’m not saying that I’m merely groping in the dark,” she said. “If it was that bleak, I’d be working on a different problem entirely. But I don’t see what difference this processor would make.” “What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked. “Evolution.” “Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.” Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?” “Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking. “With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.” “On the contrary,” Daniel assured her. “I’ve been planning this for twenty years.” “Evolution,” she said, “is about failure and death.

Do you have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo sapiens? How much suffering was involved?” “Part of your job would be to minimise the suffering.” “Minimise it?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as if this proposal was even worse than blithely assuming that the process would raise no ethical concerns. “What right do we have to inflict it at all?” Daniel said, “You’re grateful to exist, aren’t you? Notwithstanding the tribulations of your ancestors.” “I’m grateful to exist,” she agreed, “but in the human case the suffering wasn’t deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been a just creator, I don’t doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he sure as hell would not have used evolution.” “Just, and omnipotent,” Daniel suggested. “Sadly, that second trait’s even rarer than the first.” “I don’t think it’s going to take omnipotence to create something in our own image,” she said. “Just a little more patience and self-knowledge.” “This won’t be like natural selection,” Daniel insisted. “Not that blind, not that cruel, not that wasteful. You’d be free to intervene as much as you wished, to take whatever palliative measures you felt appropriate.” “Palliative measures?” Julie met his gaze, and he saw her expression flicker from disbelief to something darker. She stood up and glanced at her wristphone. “I don’t have any signal here. Would you mind calling me a taxi?” Daniel said, “Please, hear me out. Give me ten more minutes, then the helicopter will take you to the airport.” “I’d prefer to make my own way home.” She gave Daniel a look that made it clear that this was not negotiable. He called her a taxi, and they walked to the elevator. “I know you find this morally challenging,” he said, “and I respect that. I wouldn’t dream of hiring someone who thought these were trivial issues. But if I don’t do this, someone else will. Someone with far worse intentions than mine.” “Really?” Her tone was openly sarcastic now. “So how, exactly, does the mere existence of your project stop this hypothetical bin Laden of AI from carrying out his own?”