"Even if you're right," I retreated, "it would take us forever to teach it sufficient amorphous generalities."
Lentz roused himself from distraction. "What do you want? We have ten months. Ten months is several generations these days. Plus, we don't have to be humanly intelligent. Our brain doesn't have to correspond to real mentation. We just have to be as good at paraphrase, by any route we care to take. And for that, we can fly, flat out. If you ever stop talking and pitch in."
I stood and helped him assemble the new card into Imp B's backplane. Manual labor: the extent of my contribution to date. "It strikes me that the thing we're trying to get as good as is damn near unparaphrasable."
"Oh, pish. It's the easiest thing in the world to take in a human. Remember AI's early darling, ELIZA, the psychoanalyst? 'You remind me of my father,' the human types. Tell me more about your father,' the machine answers. Remember the student who found the thing up and running on a deserted terminal? Struck up a conversation. Got steadily more frustrated. Ended up shrieking at the sadist on the other end to quit jerking him around."
Exactly how I ended up every time I talked to Lentz. "So all we're building is a deception?"
"Consciousness is a deception." Lentz grimaced. He stared into some middle distance. The pause was long and awful. I didn't know how to fill it.
At length, I had to say something. "You're not suggesting that Son of B is going to be conscious, are you?"
"Don't be obtuse, Marcel. You're making this argument a duck shoot. No, of course not. Nor do we have to make it conscious. We don't have to give it sensations either, or even make it think. We just have to make it a reasonable apple-sorter. Get it to interpret utterances, slip them into generic conceptual categories, and then retrieve related 'theoretical' commentary from off the prepackaged shelf."
"And what are we doing next week?"
"Touché, Marcel. You're right, for once. Let's just take the baby steps first."
"As they say to sky divers: that first step is a killer."
"Nah. The first step's a Cakewalk. We can beat the hell out of a developing infant, in any case. First off, our baby never needs a nap. Never. We can feed it around the clock, once things start to take off. Second, a kid's neurons aren't even fully myelinated until age twelve or so. They're erratic. Trying to get them to potentiate is like writing in Jell-O."
Not long after that conversation, I learned that the only child Lentz ever raised had disowned him.
I still thought of B as a composite of makeshift components. Silk-screened cards populated with ICs on the one side and word frequency lists by parts of speech on the other. Each of its distributed, loosely linked subsystem nets was a community of neurodes, and each neurode a community of shifting allegiances.
Day after day, I trained these micro-circus animals to respond to my voice. Pattern generalization became simple sentence parsers, the way push-ups become pectorals. The stacked layers began to recognize — and even make — rudimentary distinctions. I told it: John is taller than Jim. By copying the repeated ur-models, it then reassured me that, yes, Jim is shorter than John.
But even such simple manipulations of properties could throw it for an infinite loop. The kettle has more coffee than the cup, but the cup is fuller. That conclusion needed to wash recursively through the mesh several times before B got comfortable with it.
As with many younger sibs, B turned A's personality inside out. While it handled the two-word sentence drill with curt aplomb, it turned garrulous at anything longer. This second set of arrays found more patterns in our sentence prompts than either of us intended.
"B is sick," Lentz greeted me one day on my arrival at the lab.
"Oh no. Don't tell me."
"By 'Don't tell me,' I assume you mean Tell me.' "
"What's it doing now?"
"Watch."
Though the machine would respond to no voice but mine, it answered to anyone's typing. It couldn't tell who was at the keys. It answered all comers, cheerfully presuming the typist had nothing but its best interests at heart.
Lentz typed B a little story: "Friends are in a room. A chair is in the room. Richard talks to Diana. Diana sits in the chair." Each word converted to a token, a matrix of strengths. These tokens laced together into sentence vectors. The vectors rolled around through the net landscape, marbles seeking the most available basin. The place they landed, the way they fell, was what they meant. The sieve sorted every configuration that entered it. And each sort changed forever the net configuration.
"You ready?" Lentz asked me. Then he typed, "Who is in the chair?"
B flipped out. "Friends is in the chair. The chair is in the chair. Richard talks to in the chair. ."
It wouldn't stop prattling. "It's got St. Vitus' dance," I said.
"It's got St. Vincent's malaise," Lentz countered.
He was right. Figuration was driving B as batty as a poet. It framed meaning too meagerly, extending semblance too far. It pushed the classic toddler's tendency to overgroup. Had its digits been skeletal, it would have pointed at anything sitting on a bookshelf and called it a book.
"We'll need to cut the graded feedback and go to more rigorous supervision," Lentz said. 'This beast is going to have to learn that not everything will fly."
It made sense. I'd read some developmental neurology. A newborn's synapses far outnumbered those of an adult. Perhaps building effective pathways required that many useless ones had to die. Short of slitting B's metaphoric throat with Occam's razor, we were going to have to rein it in.
For the time being, we decided to pare back B's associations with definitive answers. Repeated treading across the desired path would force Imp B to hack a right route through its lush profusion.
Now, when B started to do its permutational thing, I learned to say no. I would tell it the proper answer, however problematic. However much it hurt, I made it play straight. B took this right answer, matched it to the verbal diarrhea it had produced, and step by painful step went back over its connections to see where it had gotten carried away.
Only this reduction of limitless possibility made learning possible again. And only real learning — nothing mechanical or predictable— would satisfy me.
It pained me, one false spring dusk late in the season, as I walked home along the soon-to-be-crusted-over streets, to hear myself thinking in terms of satisfaction. I thought I'd left the word behind, in the reweighted and long-since-extinguished past.
Imp B always did rub me the wrong way. Nothing violent. I just never cared for it, although I tried not to let that impede our work. I guess the way its linked nets responded to input reminded me too much of all my own little rickies, drowned in fecundity, unable to damp generalization down or clamp it into the manageable.
But as B grew less poetic and more docile, I began to miss the willful driveler. I'd taken perverse delight in watching it conclude, from "If you want me, I'll be in the office," that until you want me, I'll be at home.
Lentz seemed unhumbled by this second lesson in unbounded verbal space. "What do the literary theorists say about reading books these days?" As if I could paraphrase for him, in an afternoon. As if, armed with my paraphrase, he might tack on a couple of preprocessing, feed-forward subsystem nets that would address any conceivable problem.
"First off, they're not books anymore."
"Texts," Lentz corrected himself. "Excuse me." As always, he knew more than he let on.
"Well, let's see. The sign is public property, the signifier is in small-claims court, and the signification is a total land grab. Meaning doesn't circulate. Nobody's going to jailbreak the prison house of language."