Before the confrontation with the nine-dan Japanese go master, the Turing–Hassabis computer played thousands of matches against itself continuously for a year. It learned from experience, and it was the scientists’ claim – reasonable enough – to have come a step closer to approximating human general intelligence that gave rise to the legend of machine intuition. Nothing they said could bring the untethered story back to earth.
Commentators who suggested that the computer’s victory would make the game extinct were wrong. After his fifth defeat, the elderly go master, helped by an assistant, stood slowly, bowed towards the laptop and congratulated it in a trembling voice. He said, ‘The mounted horse did not kill athletics. We run for joy.’ He was right. The game, with its simple rules and boundless complexity, became even more popular. As with the post-war defeat of a chess grandmaster, the triumph of the machine could not diminish the game. Winning, it was said, was less important than pleasure in the intricacies of the contest. But the idea that there was now software that could eerily, accurately ‘read’ a situation, or a face, a gesture or the emotional timbre of a remark was never dislodged and partly explained the interest when the Adams and Eves came on the market.
Fifteen years is a long time in computer science. The processing power and sophistication of my Adam was far greater than the go computer. The technology advanced and Turing moved on. He spent concentrated time looking at decision-making and wrote a celebrated book: we are disposed to make patterns, narratives, when we should be thinking probabilistically if we want to make good choices. Artificial intelligence could improve on what we had, on what we were. Turing devised the algorithms. All his innovative work was available to others. Adam must have benefited.
Turing’s institute drove forward AI and computational biology. He said he wasn’t interested in becoming richer than he already was. Hundreds of prominent scientists followed his example on open-source publication which would lead, in 1987, to the collapse of the journals Nature and Science. He was much criticised for that. Others said that his work had created tens of thousands of jobs around the world in diverse fields – computer graphics, medical scanning devices, particle accelerators, protein folding, smart electricity distribution, defence, space exploration. No one could guess the end of such a list.
By living openly from 1969 with his lover, Tom Reah, the theoretical physicist who would win the Nobel Prize in 1989, Turing helped give weight to a gathering social revolution. When the AIDS epidemic broke out he raised a huge sum to set up a virology institute in Dundee and was co-founder of a hospice. After the first effective treatments appeared, he campaigned for short licences and low prices, especially in Africa. He continued to collaborate with Hassabis, who had run his own group since 1972. Turing gradually lost patience with public engagements, so he said, and preferred to concentrate on his work in ‘my shrinking years’. Behind him were his long residency in San Francisco, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a banquet in his honour with President Carter, lunch with Mrs Thatcher at Chequers to discuss science funding, dinner with the President of Brazil to persuade him to protect the Amazon. For a long while, he was the face of the computer revolution, and the voice of the new genetics, almost as famous as Stephen Hawking. Now he was a near-recluse. His only journeys were between his house in Camden Town and his Institute in King’s Cross, two doors down from the Hassabis Centre.
Reah wrote a long poem about his and Turing’s life together, published in the TLS and then in book form. The poet and critic Ian Hamilton said in a review, ‘Here is a physicist who can imagine as well as scan. Now bring me the poet who can explain quantum gravity.’ When Adam appeared in my life, I believed that only a poet, not a machine, could tell me if Miranda would ever love me, or lie to me.
There must have been Turing algorithms buried in the software of the Exocet series 8 missiles that a French company, MBDA, had sold to the Argentine government. This fearsome weapon, once fired from a jet in the general direction of a ship, could recognise its profile and decide mid-flight whether it was hostile or friendly. If the latter, it aborted its mission and plunged harmlessly into the sea. If it missed its target and overshot, it was able to double back and make two more attempts. It closed on its prey at 5,000 miles an hour. Its opt-out capacity was probably based on face-recognition software that Turing developed in the mid-sixties. He had been looking for ways to help people with prosopagnosia, a condition in which sufferers are unable to recognise familiar faces. Government immigration control, defence companies and security firms raided the work for their own purposes.
Since France was a NATO partner, strong representations were made to the Elysée Palace by our government that MBDA should be prevented from selling more Exocets or from providing technical assistance. A consignment bound for Peru, Argentina’s ally, was blocked. But other countries, including Iran, were willing to sell. There was also a black market. British agents, posing as arms dealers, bought up the supply.
But the spirit of the free market was irrepressible. The Argentinian military desperately needed help with the Exocet software, which had not been fully installed by the time the conflict began. Two Israeli experts, acting on their own, presumably on the offer of huge financial reward, flew to Argentina. It was never discovered who cut their throats in a Buenos Aires hotel. Many assumed it was British intelligence agents. If so, they were too late. On the day the young Israelis bled to death in their beds, four British ships were sunk, the next day another three went down, and on the third, another. In all, an aircraft carrier, destroyers, frigates and a troop carrier were sunk. The loss of life was in the low thousands. Sailors, troops, cooks, doctors and nurses, journalists. After days of confusion, with all military efforts concentrated on rescuing survivors, the rump of the Task Force turned back and the Falkland Islands became Las Malvinas. The fascist junta that ruled Argentina was jubilant, its popularity soared, its murder, torture and disappearances of its citizens were forgotten or forgiven. Its hold on power was consolidated.
I watched it all, horrified – and guilty. Having thrilled to the sight of the warships filing down the English Channel, despite my opposition to the venture, I was implicated, along with nearly everyone else. Mrs Thatcher came out of 10 Downing Street to make a statement. First she couldn’t speak, then she was tearful, but refused to be helped back inside. Finally, she recovered and, in an untypically small voice, made the famous ‘I take it on my shoulders’ speech. She assumed full responsibility. She would never outlive the shame. She offered her resignation. But the shock to the nation of so many deaths was profound and there was no appetite for heads to roll. If she had to go, so did her entire cabinet, and most of the country. A leader in the Telegraph put it thus: ‘The failure belongs to us all. This is not the occasion for scapegoats.’ A very British process began, reminiscent of the Dunkirk disaster, by which a terrible defeat was transformed into a mournful victory. National unity was all. Six weeks later, 1.5 million people were in Portsmouth to greet the returning ships with their cargoes of corpses, their burned and traumatised passengers. The rest of us watched it on television in horror.
I repeat this well-known history for the benefit of younger readers who won’t be aware of its emotional impact, and because it formed a melancholy background to our three-cornered household. The rent was due and I was concerned by a loss of income. There was no mass purchase of hand-held Union Jacks, champagne consumption was down, and the general economy was in trouble, though pubs and hamburgers went on as before. Miranda was lost to her father’s illness and to the Corn Laws and the historical viciousness of vested interests, their indifference to suffering. Meanwhile, Adam remained under the blanket. Miranda’s delay in starting work on him was in part due to technophobia, if that’s the word for disliking being online and ticking boxes with a mouse. I nagged, and finally she agreed to make a start. A week after the remains of the Task Force returned to port, I set up the laptop on the kitchen table and brought up Adam’s site. It wasn’t necessary to wake him for her to begin. She picked up the cordless mouse, turned it over and stared at its underside with distaste. I made her coffee and went into the bedroom to work.