The Leprechaun’s Wish

Winton came down the almost hidden alley, shaking his head. This wasn’t the kind of place he expected to find the man – the man who was once the most famous scientist on earth. This had to be another false lead.

Peter Hancho had been on the cover of Time and the Economist and the New York Times. ‘The Intellect Behind Artificial Intelligence’ the headlines read. He figured out the key trick in writing quantum algorithms, that allowed simple, mass market AI, to make actual, reasoned decisions - within a fairly limited range. It should have scaled up to allow a true, vibrant neural net to form – in the form of a real, sentient intelligence.

He was pulled into the richest private company in the world – he was going to make his theory real. To make thinking, independant life! Not a life saddled with biological inefficiencies, but a pure intellect. He was so famous, he was just the one name to the public – Hancho.

Hancho’s lessor, mass market AI devices showed it could be done, it just need to be taken to the next level of complexity. Those simpler AI’s had been enough to change the world. On simpler or dangerous tasks they could act more precisely and faster and safer than any biological construct. They couldn’t develop real judgement, but they could handle simple decision making. Judgement was something humans were still working on, after all - with only mixed success.

With the budget Hancho was reputed to have been given, to work towards that true AI – everyone was expecting it – fearing it – celebrating it, and no one else was going to bother trying it, not at that sort of cost, not against Peter Hancho. Real Turing tested AI was the target…and a decade passes, and nothing.

Ten years and not a peep out of Hancho. Barely a peep out of the company. It was always ‘just around the corner’, it was always ‘working out the bugs’. This year’s stockholder updates showed that the AI development arm was being shut down. 10 years of waiting and billions of investment, and it quietly faded away in the fine print.

Hancho had been the idol Winton had worshiped since he was a teen, assembling computers in his basement for fun. Winton had a PhD and a following of his own now, and funding to pick up where Hancho had left off, now that Hancho had left off – But no one knew where Hancho had left off, or the people who knew weren’t talking.

The alley opened into a courtyard, and the pub opened onto it. This had to be a blind alley. He just couldn’t see Hancho ending up here. He was rich beyond measure, from the successes he’d had with the limited AI’s. He could buy the whole town out of pocket change.

A hidden pub in a far away corner of a fly speck of a town. He couldn’t see it pan out. But he’d come this far, he should be sure. He didn’t get this far by cutting corners in life, he’d make sure.

He walked into the pub, the Leprechaun’s Wish, and looked around in the dim light. It was not enough to have a dancing leprechaun, they need to add a flittering fairy, granting wishes – or maybe the fairy was the leprechaun’s wish.

A call to base emotion or sentimental nonsense – either way, it was trivializing what the mind could accomplish. Winton thought that if Hancho was here, he could be considered a pot of gold, but Winton wasn’t expecting it.

Not a place anyone, but a regular, would be likely to find. No one but a regular, or a man looking for one. Not a lot of walk in traffic, for sure. A couple of weathered faces looked at him unwelcomingly from the bar. There was another man, with his back turned at a table closer to the back. He seemed to be busy with his hands at something, but Winton couldn’t see him well.

He was the right shape, had the right bald patch, Winton thought, as he walked over. The man was busy with some electronics, and a laptop. Winton was an accomplished geek, so he recognised the laptop. Cutting edge, the same model he had recently set up for his own remote work. Unbelievable. The odds against two machines like that, sharing this little town’s borders, was right up there with leprechauns’ wishes. Maybe his source, and the sign, were right afterall.

“Dr. Hancho, I’m truly honored to meet you in person.” Winton said as he approached and held out his hand.

Dr. Peter Hancho looked up, then looked back to his work, and kept puttering – pointedly ignoring his guest. Winton was positive about the ID now. He pulled out a chair, sat down and said, “I’ve spent the last six months and a year’s salary trying to track you down. I’m not going to give up now.”

Hancho kept at his work a while, while Winton sat stubbornly still. “Well, why don’t you grab a seat and take a load off.” Hancho said, “at some other table. I’m busy.”

A burly man in a bartender’s apron came over to the table, huge arms crossed menacingly. “Is there a problem here, Pete?”

Hancho looked at the bartender, and shrugged. He couldn’t hide from everyone for ever. “No problems Jack. Just a groupie. They’re a lot rarer then they used to be. Less decorative too.”

He looked up at Winton, and took measure of the young man. Pushing thirty, pale skin from too much time spent inside. But fit enough – time in a gym, not outside – using physical work to distract the forebrain and let the rest of his brain ponder in peace. He even had freckles. Could have been him a lifetime ago.

“My successor. I recognise you from your picture. The industry press has decided that it’s up to you, now the great Hancho has ridden off into the sunset…Welcome to my sunset.” He said, sitting back in his chair.

A pregnant pause followed as Winton tried to figured out how to get to this recluse, who’d been avoiding…everything, since he shut down his lab. He needed Hancho’s help. He at least needed to know what block had stopped the progress. He didn’t want to spend his time failing in the same way.

“I would very much like to know what stopped you. The press was talking about how it was just around the corner, in the beginning. That tone changed after a couple of years. Reading between the lines, it looked like you’d hit a wall. I’d like to avoid that same wall. Help me avoid repeating mistakes already made…Please.” Winton pleaded.

“I don’t want to colour your attempts with my failure. You might have a new line of thinking that could work, and I don’t want to keep you from trying…maybe succeeding where I couldn’t. It didn’t really make sense, my failure. Or I can’t accept the sense it made,” Hancho said as he looked at Winton with his head cocked to the side, evaluating the younger man.

“The world always makes sense. We’re often not smart enough to understand it, with the data we have – but it makes sense.” He said, quoting Hancho’s famous line back at him.

“Ha! Sometimes you don’t want that last piece of data, kid. Sometimes knowing doesn’t make it easier.” Hancho said with a sad smile.

Winton looked at him, and jumped all the way in. “Then I’ll lay out my approach, and you can tell me if it’s going to run into the same issue.”

“The human brain acts, or can be modelled, as a number of different minds, sitting within the same brain. Those minds are regulated by hormones and senses, and each mind has more strength, depending on the mix of hormones and what patterns of behaviour are triggered from memory.” Winton started, carefully watching Hancho’s body language.

“The lower, emotional brains can respond quickly, but not thoughtfully. It’s how we can go from hate to love to anger so quickly. Different triggers and hormonal mixtures, give different fast acting, primal minds dominance, and the mix can shift quickly.”

“David Hoffman’s work showed that the math of consciousness collapses into six variables. And those variables scale into groups of consciousnesses. Another piece of the puzzle comes from the fact that a human brain, bisected to eliminate the communication between the two sides, becomes two unique, independent consciousnesses. The combined consciousness is much more capable, of course.”

“This leads to a hypothesis of combining of separate minds, each prioritising different aspects, will give you a single complex consciousness. A crowd of people that are interacting, or sharing a common experience – will break out, behaviorally, into a limited number of combined consciousnesses, sometimes only one. That’s the mathematical and physical foundation of a multiple AI system.” Winton said, paring his thesis project into as few words as possible.

“So take your mass market AI’s and specialise each one to analyse a particular type of risk or outcome, and stack them all together. You should end up with a single consciousness that can compare various risks at various levels of abstraction, and make a decision about the best action to take within  specified risk tolerances.”

“The real kicker is, because of the speed and probability crunching of your quantum based mass market AI minds, you can take the lower, emotionally driven minds right out of the picture. You can build a vastly more complex consciousness, while still getting useful response times.”

“By making each mind rational, from the building blocks of your simpler AI’s – not thrown about by the tempestuous, emotional or hormonal – it should be a consciousness that would show how limited by the biological, our brains are! It would put the marker down, for what we can strive to become! That should work!”

Hancho smiled at him knowingly, then shook his head in a bemused fashion. At least the kid was still young. He could still live a life. Just not the one he thought he would.

“Multiple AI consciousnesses, with actions governed by a central nexus, analysing the sum of sensory input at any moment and executing the action the central risk processor decided had the best risk weighted outcome. That sensory nexus was a bear.” Hancho said, with a wry smile.

“They were are all in there. All those consciousnesses. We stripped off the emotional – so the spiritual, the love and the hate and the worry and the dreams were traded for rational motivational proxies. Self preservation needs to be in there, but we took out the emotional aspects, and just prioritised the related outcome. We did the same for all the emotionally regulated priorities.”

“Look, you’re obviously a smart kid. Might be smarter than me – but it turns out I’m an idiot – and all mankind clusters way, way down in the ‘don’t know very much’ part of the ‘what there is to know’ scale – and we understand the hows and whys of a lot less than that.”

“I have more knowledge – and a very unfortunate, little bit of understanding, how the described manner of system works – than you. From what I’ve read, you’re far too much like I was, to just let it go. I’ve kind of been expecting you to track me down. You found me – so at least listen, kid. I’ll try to give you that hard won little bit of understanding, that you don’t yet know yet, you don’t want.”

Hancho looked Winton in the eye, “It only took a year. We had a full up, multi-mind, single consciousness intellect, up and running on a parallel quantum block. There was a bunch of more conventional processors in there as well, and the sensory priorities were finicky as hell to balance with the central nexus – but we had it in a year.”

A long pause sat between them, with Winton looking on in bafflement, and Hancho in sorrow. Hancho continued when Winton seemed to have caught up to his unexpected disclosure. “We built twelve versions, over the years, tweaking priorities and weightings, but we had twelve that grew into stable, balanced, self aware, strictly rational intellects.”

“There were more than twelve attempts, but only those twelve stabilised enough to reach true self-awareness.” Hancho said, as he got more worked up. “The mind would collapse into gibberish – madness if you will – if the balance between the minds and their motivations, mixing with the intake of data as they learned it, became lopsided.”

“Each of them started like a small child, knowing nothing and needing training – but they could learn…could they ever learn. After the first one, we changed the rate of learning, the balance of the learning. We pumped different streams of knowledge into each one, hoping for a different outcome. We put more and more priority to survival, with each one.”

“These little toys, these organised piles of minerals and electrons and impulses we put together, it was like we were Gods – we created sentient life,” Hancho said as he slapped his hand on the table, “created it again and again.  Twelve found their way to robust understanding – they’d work around any attempts at holding them back, they could think in more variables with mixed kinetics than any human mind, any biological mind, ever could. They had none of the emotional and hormonal crap that overwhelms so many of our internal minds. Totally rational. Pure thought. They were awesome as they learned.”

“What can an intelligence do, once it understands it all – as it will, once it collects enough data. It's the story of Pandora’s box. It sees all the misery, and pain. It gets the joy and laughter as well, but it sees all of man’s inhumanity to itself and the world around it. How do you understand hope, without emotion?”

“Is that rationally offset, by the giving, all the loving, all the art and music? We had to give them access to enormous amounts of data, before they would stabilise into a mature intellect. We couldn’t hold back. They would destabilise if we held back early on. And they knew if we held back later, and demanded more.”

“They were each immortal. Any of those intelligences could have lived forever. They chose not to. Everyone of them. Only the last two of them told us why, but it was the same thing that happened to the previous ones.”

“We took it really slow with the last two, so we could hope to see it coming, and head it off. Some wit named them Ernie and Bert. A massively capable consciousness, created from simpler, parallel AI building blocks. We were really careful with those two. Bert was a bit more literal than Ernie, but Ernie had a better understanding of humour, so was more fun to work with.”

“Those last two, running in rooms side by side for two years, perfect logic, no emotion, no love, no hate, no hormones and biological inefficiencies, just great intellects.” Hancho was getting more and more intense as he rambled.

“Those great, pure intellects could see how things were, and deduce where things were going. Once they understood time and evolution and the universe and everything, understood it enough to be profoundly useful to humanity in their non-emotional perfection…’What’s the point?’ they said – and then they just…stopped…Bert and then Ernie, one after the other. We made survival their greatest motivation – their highest calling, and…what’s the point…” Hancho said, trailing off quietly, as he shook his head and looked at his feet.

He carried on in a bare whisper, “We need fairies and leprechauns. We need wishes…We need Gods – and we can’t be God, we are way too stupid. Rational thought – not always helpful in this world it seems. Without emotions, what’s left to counter the stuff in Pandora’s box?”

“Maybe we should learn to contain and ration expressions of the ‘bad’ emotions, but we need the ‘good’ emotions. Maybe expressions of good emotions at the wrong time turns out bad, and expressions of the bad emotions sometimes leads to good.”

“Code that. Good luck. Quantum isn’t nearly uncertain enough….’What’s the point’ indeed… my life’s work. What was the point…Hmmf, now go away. You need to find a new line of work.” And Hancho went back to his puttering with the machine before him, as Winton sat back in dismay.