Behind me, Adam was in place at the table, gazing towards the window. I finished and was drying my hands on a tea towel as I went over to him. Despite my sunny mood, I could not forgive his disloyalty. I didn’t want to hear what else he had to say. There were boundaries of ordinary decency he needed to learn – hardly a challenge for his neural networks. His heuristic shortcomings had encouraged my decision. When I had learned more, when Miranda had done her share, he could come back into our lives.
I kept a friendly tone. ‘Adam, I’m switching you off for a while.’
His head turned towards me, paused, tilted, then tilted the other way. It was some designer’s notion of how consciousness might manifest itself in movement. It would come to irritate me.
He said, ‘With all respect, I think that’s a bad idea.’
‘It’s what I’ve decided.’
‘I’ve been enjoying my thoughts. I was thinking about religion and the afterlife.’
‘Not now.’
‘It occurred to me that those who believe in a life beyond this one will—’
‘That’s enough. Hold still.’ I reached over his shoulder. His breath was warm on my arm, which, I supposed, he could snap with ease. The manual quoted in bold Isaac Asimov’s tirelessly reiterated First Law of Robotics, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’
I couldn’t find what I wanted by touch. I walked behind Adam and there, as described, right on the hairline was the mole. I put my finger on it.
‘Might we talk about this first?’
‘No.’ I pressed and with the faintest, whirring sigh he slumped. His eyes remained open. I fetched a blanket to cover him up.
In the days that followed this powering-down, two questions preoccupied me: would Miranda fall in love with me? And would French-made Exocet missiles scupper the British fleet when it came within range of Argentinian fighter jets? When I was falling asleep, or in the mornings while I lingered a few seconds in the foggy no-man’s-land between dreaming and waking, the questions merged, the air-to-ship missiles became arrows of love.
What was disarming and curious about Miranda was the ease that settled round her choices, the way she abandoned herself to the flow of events. That evening she came to supper, and after a pleasant two hours eating and drinking, we made love, having closed the bedroom door on Adam. Then we talked into the night. Just as easily, she could have kissed me on the cheek after the chicken with tarragon and retreated upstairs to her own bed and read a history book before falling asleep. What for me was momentous, the immediate, astonishing fulfilment of my hopes, was for her enjoyable and entirely unsurprising, a pleasant extra course after the coffee. Like chocolates. Or a good grappa. Neither my nakedness nor my tenderness had the effect on her that hers, in all their glorious sweetness, had on me. And I was in decent shape – good muscle tone, full head of dark brown hair – and generous, resourceful, some had been kind enough to say. I played a decent hand in pillow talk. She hardly seemed to notice how well we got along, how one topic, one harmless running joke, one mood-tone succeeded another. My self-esteem allowed that this was how it must have been with everyone she had known. I suspected that our first night together barely entered her thoughts the following day.
I could hardly complain when the second night followed the pattern of the first, except that she cooked for me and we slept in her bed, and on the third, in mine – and so on. For all our carefree physical intimacy, I never spoke about my feelings in case I prompted her to admit she had none of her own. I preferred to wait, to let things build, let her feel free until she realised that she wasn’t, that she was in love with me and it was too late to turn back.
There was vanity in this expectation. After a week or so there was anxiety. I’d been glad to switch Adam off. Now, I wondered about reactivating him to ask about his warning, his reasons, his sources. But I couldn’t let a machine have such a hold over me, which was what would happen if I granted it the role of confidant, counsellor, oracle, in my most private affairs. I had my pride and I believed that Miranda was incapable of a malicious lie.
And yet. I despised myself for doing it, but ten days into the affair I began my own investigations. Apart from the much-discussed notion of ‘machine-intuition’, Adam’s only possible source was the Internet. I trawled through the social media sites. There were no accounts under her name. She lived in the reflections of her friends. So there she was, at parties or on holidays, carrying a friend’s daughter on her shoulders at a zoo, gum-booted on a farm, linking arms or dancing or romping in the pool with a succession of bare-chested boyfriends, with boisterous crowds of teenage girlfriends, with drunken undergraduates. All who knew her liked her. No one on any accessible site had a sinister story. Now and then the chatter endorsed parts of the past she was recounting in our midnight conversations. Elsewhere, her name came up in connection with the one academic paper she had published – ‘Pannage in Swyncombe: the role of the half-wild pig in the household economies of a medieval Chilterns village’. When I read it, I loved her more.
As for the intuitive artificial mind, it was pure urban legend, begun in early 1968 when Alan Turing and his brilliant young colleague, Demis Hassabis, devised software to beat one of the world’s great masters of the ancient game of go in five straight games. Everyone in the business knew that such a feat could not be accomplished by number-crunching force. The possible moves in go and chess vastly exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe, and go has exponentially more moves than chess. Go masters are unable to explain how they attain their supremacy beyond a profound sense of what feels right for any given situation on the board. So it was assumed that the computer was doing something similar. Breathless articles in the press announced a new era of humanised software. Computers were on the threshold of thinking like us, imitating our often ill-defined reasons for our judgements and choices. In a counter-move and in a pioneering spirit of open access, Turing and Hassabis put their software online. In media interviews they described the process of machine deep learning and neural networks. Turing attempted layman explanations of the Monte Carlo tree search, an algorithm elaborated during the forties’ Manhattan Project to develop the first atom bomb. He became famously irritable when he attempted, overambitiously, to explain PSPACE-complete mathematics to an impatient television interviewer. Less well known was his loss of temper on an American cable channel as he described a problem central to computer science, P versus NP. He was in front of a combative studio audience of ordinary ‘folk’. He had recently published his solution, which mathematicians around the world were then checking. As a problem it was easy to state, formidably difficult to resolve. Turing was trying to suggest that a correct positive solution would initiate exciting discoveries in biology as well as in concepts of space and time and creativity. The audience did not share or understand his excitement. They had only a dim awareness of his role in the Second World War, or of his influence on their own computer-dependent lives. They regarded him as the perfect English gentleman egghead and enjoyed tormenting him with stupid questions. The unhappy episode marked the end of his mission to popularise his field.