This is a map of a story as it progresses, and is reconsidered. There is a revised story after the line of nnnnn’s – well below the original try, that is at the top. If you wish to just read the latest version of the story, click here, otherwise continue to follow the process as it happens.

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, 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 trick in writing key quantum algorithms that allowed simple 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 AI devices showed it could be done, it just need to be taken to the next level of complexity. Those simpler AI’s had changed 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, 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 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 Hacho 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. I guess 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, 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. The’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.

“A newly hatched PhD, did cutting edge work, off the back of my published works, and has a company or a government ready to fund your efforts, to do what I clearly couldn’t.” Hanch said. “‘Thinking’ is your whole life. You’ve had two girlfriends. One broke your heart, the newer one – you still spend those rare moments you can turn your brain off, with her.”

“It doesn’t happen often though. Shutting off your brain. She’s noticed.” He continued, “But Puzzles have to have solutions, you just need that one more bit of data to make sense of it, and then you’ll have some free time. You’re driven to find the answers. All the answers. ‘What happened to Dr. Hancho’ is your latest puzzle. She puts up with you, but very much has her own life. She gets on with her own life, and lets you step in and out as you will. A tip from an old man…turn off your brain more. The novelty of being with the big brain, that doesn’t give enough back, will wear thin.”

A pregnant pause followed as Winton tried to figured out how to get this recluse, who clearly didn’t want to tell his story – and seemed to hold a grudge against life – to leak his secrets. Winton certainly didn’t want to think about himself as a younger Hancho. He didn’t want to become this prematurely old, broken looking man, at barely 50, hiding from the world.

But he needed Hango’s help. Hango had to become an expert at brains to create them, so it was no real surprise he could read Winton like a book. Especially as it mirrored the book Hancho had lived. Winton hadn’t noted that before.

He didn’t want to blow this, after so much work to find him. He had to figure out how to use the opening. He didn’t want to think of Deanne, or talk about his relationship with her, with this prematurely old man.

He didn’t really understand what Hango was working towards and he needed to get the conversation back on course. “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 said smile.

Winton looked at him, and jumped all the way in. “I have a chance, sir. I can see how to do it. I can see how to simulate human brains. It’s multiple minds! The psychologists dance around it, but we aren’t just one mind. We have different consciousness fighting each other all the time in our heads.”

“It’s how we can go from hate to love to anger so quickly. Some of those minds are the lizard brain – eat, screw, survive – but there are better minds in there as well, rational minds. If you balance a survival brain and a philosophical brain and a remembering brain, and you make them all rational – not thrown about by the tempestuous, emotional or hormonal – it would be a mind that would show how limited by the biological, our minds are! It would put the marker down, for what we can strive to become!”

Winton continued pleadingly, “Help me, Dr. Hango, I have the funding, I have the lab, I have the scientists, the techs. We can do this, but I need your help. Help me! Where did you go wrong?”

Hargo 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.

“You missed a couple brains, but yes. Multiple weighted consciousnesses, with the dominant mind governed by a central nexus, analysing the sum of sensory input at any moment and steering the weight of the decision to the mind it deems best. That nexus was a bear.” Hancho said, with a wry smile.

“They 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 proxies. That was the hardest part. Rational proxies for the emotional. Survival, motivation, fear…making them logical constructs, not emotional ones. We dropped lust and procreation and status totally, for fairly obvious reasons, and watered the other’s down into rational actions.”

If you take a human brain and bisect it, it becomes two separate minds, each limited by the loss of the other, but self aware individually. Donald Hoffman had the key of it. Evolution selects for fitness, not truth. Groups of minds can be behaviourally modeled as a single consciousness, weighted by sensory input. To get to the complexity of thought the biological brain maintains, requires the sum of multiple consciousness.”

+++++++++++++

“Group behaviour is still easier to predict than individual behaviour, of course. The exceptional is watered down to the average. The trick is the individual behaviour is group behaviour, but with an individual, you are more likely to have some or all of those minds outside of the societal norms. Almost everyone has at least one mind that is out of the norms.”

“There are exceptional individuals, both good and bad, that can surprise – but larger groups cleave off the exceptional behaviour and follow predictable patterns – The larger the group, the more dilute the agency in the group, the less influence even perfectly placed, exceptional minds have – and the outcomes revert to the mean.”

“Different leaders will rise up out of any set of circumstances, but the most common, evolutionarily appropriate, minds – for any given set of inputs – will be somewhere in any larger group of minds, in any larger group of people. Evolution choses for fitness, not truth or right or any of those higher moral constructs. It might not be a moral mind that the group of minds will decide to follow, but it is evolutionarily suitable – fit – and it’s predictable. There will be individuals with the right mind, mixed in with all those mixed consciousnesses, that fit to an expected leadership paradigm, in any large crowd. That mind will guide the whole crowd. Or someone with that mind, amongst his minds, will lead the whole crowd, while listening to that mind.”

++++++++++++++++++++++

“Punch Joe in the face, out of the blue, while he’s walking beside his friend Steve. Steve’s brain will suddenly have the ‘protect the tribe’ mind and ‘run-away’ mind and ‘understand stuff’ mind and maybe a few other ones, all having a quick discussion with the senses – as to Steve’s likelihood of success – at revenge or flight or whatever – and, provided those minds come to agreement, Steve will take some action.”

“A third person, who knows Steve, can reliably, and correctly, predict which mind will win. If Steve’s group of minds fail to agree, Steve will just freeze up. If there are a larger group around that has some type of tribal allegiance to Joe, violence is certain – one of those ‘protect the tribe’ minds, in someone in a crowd, will win. If the crowd sees two complete strangers involved in violence, they will only peripherally intrude.”

“One of the more common of the exceptions may occur, where a stranger will create a tribal connection by reaching out to a stranger/strangers in need, and the crowd will react to that new connection, but only some of the time. I don’t recommend doing that experiment in the wild, by the way, without having spent a lot more time in the gym.” Hancho said, flexing his arm.

“But, nevermind. I’m wasting your time. You obviously know all that, or you wouldn’t be here. Years of habit. It still gets my emotional self going, still gets me excited and I’m off on a tangent – irrational as it is.” Harcho said, shaking his head again, and scoffing at himself.

“Look, you’re probably a smart kid. Might be as smart as me, even – but it turns out I’m an idiot – and all mankind clusters way down in the ‘don’t know very much’ part of the ‘what there is to know’ scale – and we understand a lot less than that. I have more knowledge, on the topic you’re focused on, and a very unfortunate little bit of understanding as to how it all works, than you. You’re far too much like I was, to just let it go. So at least listen, kid. I’ll try to give you that hard won bit of understanding, that you don’t yet know, you don’t want.”

Hargo looked Winton in the eye, “It only took a year. We had a full up, 7 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 Hargo in sorrow. Hargo continued when Winton seemed to have caught up to his unexpected disclosure. “We built 12 versions, tweaking priorities and weightings, but all twelve grew into self aware, strictly rational intellects.”

“There were more than twelve attempts, but twelve that stabilised enough to reach true self-awareness.” Hargo 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,” Hargo 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.”

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“And what does an intelligence do with it? An intelligence that can pull in every bit of written and recorded knowledge man has ever recorded into its cavernous memory – that can see all history, all theories, all pasts, that can predict all futures, that can ingest that stream, and understand it., and extrapolate any missing parts. Not just hold onto little bits of it, like we do. Our little nubs of understanding – they’re like ripples in the vast ocean of historical knowledge. These wonderful, awesome machines…they drank the ocean dry.”

xxxxxxxxxx

“What can an intelligence do, once it understands it all – as it will once it collects enough data. 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. Is that 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. We were really careful. The 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.” Hargo was getting more and more intense as he rambled.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

“Once they had internalised enough of existence, one after another, and they figured out the world – they were a month apart. They had an epiphany like the others – once they could extrapolate the past into the future – but these last two, because they had been given minds that craved explanation, needed to explain to their makers, their Gods, what they were doing and record their motivation for each action. We gave those explanatory minds nearly highest priority in their groups of minds, only behind survival itself. We Gods would know why they were shutting down.” Hargo wiped his chin, and swallowed – leaving a moment’s pause, and continued.

“The same words. The same end. Two different machines. They had distinct personalities, but no emotion, no biology, just perfectly rational minds. No matter how curious we made them – for ten years we’d tried different arrangements, different numbers of minds, ten years of changing things up, changing priorities. Ten years of playing God…”

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

“But any one of the combinations that would rationalise into a consciousness, any that didn’t destabilise off the bat – once they 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…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. We need leprechauns. We need wishes…We need Gods – and we can’t be God, we’re 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. And expressions of good emotions at the wrong time turns out bad, and expressions of the bad emotions sometimes leads to good. Code that. Quantum isn’t nearly uncertain enough….’What’s the point’ indeed… my life’s work. What was the point…Hmmf, now go away.” And Hargo went back to his puttering with the machine before him, as Winton sat back in dismay.

……………………………………………………..

I figure about a third of the ending gets too redundant – I can hear some minds in my head saying “we get it, get on with the story…” – and the whole early ‘how brain’s work section’ could probably start at Joe and Steve, but this is what came out of my head on a Sunday afternoon, and with minimal edits since to clean it up a bit (I apologize to the early birds who got it raw), this is what is presented here.

Good editors are good things…the story gets to the same place and gets there quicker, if you remove everything between the +’s the x’s and the z’s. I figure it’s unlikely anybody who reads this thing is that fussed about getting there quicker, but still…

I’ve spent too much effort in trying to show-off how smart I am, probably showed how limited my mind is (or minds are), and didn’t focus on the story enough.

I’ll revise extensively, and add a new version below the nnn’s…

nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

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, at that sort of cost, not against Peter Hancho. Real Turing tested AI was the target…and a decade passes, and nothing.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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, and 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 12 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…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. 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.

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The Leprechaun’s Wish

The Leprechaun’s Wish

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