Nasim plugged her headphones into their jack, cutting off the speakers. ‘The recital’s over,’ she said. ‘I have work to do.’
At lunchtime, Nasim joined the others gathered around a wide-screen monitor in the conference room, watching Redland give his testimony to the Select Committee. The session had taken place a few hours before, and the video had been posted on the web.
Redland stuck to the usual big targets: schizophrenia, autism, depression and Alzheimer’s. The Human Connectome Project, he declared, would shed light on them all. This was almost certainly true in the long run, and it was a relatively easy goal to sell to the public, but Nasim still had her doubts about the wisdom of the strategy. It didn’t take much reflection for people to start wondering if there weren’t better, cheaper, faster ways to address those conditions. Mapping every corner of the brain would be a triumph of human self-understanding – with payoffs, eventually, that left the genome in the shade – but if you were going to spend billions of dollars and decades of hard work on that goal, selling it as a cure for some Affliction of the Month would only risk making the whole project seem like a bloated white elephant as soon as a drug came along to make that role redundant.
As Shen closed the playback window for the recording, he noticed a small image showing the site’s live feed. ‘Hey, they’re talking to Zachary Churchland!’ He put the feed into full-screen mode.
Churchland was an octogenarian oil billionaire who had raised the possibility of funding his own brain-mapping project, in competition with any government effort. The press had started calling him ‘the Craig Venter of the HCP’, but unlike Venter, he had no biotech skills himself. The neuroscientists advocating the HCP treated him with kid gloves, as they would any potential sugar daddy, but his professed motives could not have been further from their own statements about Alzheimer’s and apple pie.
‘Congressman, the ultimate goal of my project would be universal immortality,’ Churchland declared. His voice reminded Nasim of William S. Burroughs, a writer whose words had been sampled on one of her favourite dance tracks; she’d never sought out his books, suspecting they’d be rather strait-laced and stuffy, but he had such nice diction that she’d come to think of him as the epitome of twentieth-century gentility. ‘If there are public health benefits along the way, then that’s well and good, but all of public health becomes a minor sub-problem when viewed in the light of the digital migration.’
Congressman Fitzwaller, chairman of the Select Committee, pondered this reply in silence for a moment. He could hardly have been ignorant of Churchland’s views unless he’d had his head in a paper bag for the last six months, but now that the man was there in front of him, in the flesh, giving testimony before this august body, he seemed not quite able to believe what he was hearing.
‘Mr Churchland, the scientists who have come before this committee have all been quite clear: the Human Connectome will not be a personal map of any one human’s brain. It will not describe any individual’s memories, or personality, or goals. Do you dispute that expert testimony, sir?’
Churchland made a sound that could either have been a sigh, or a sign of emphysema. ‘No, Congressman, I do not. I accept that a generic map is a necessary intermediate step on the road towards the mapping of individuals. Having reached that point, a great deal of work will remain to be done in order to achieve personalisation. But to pretend that we will reach that point and then halt is simply absurd. We will continue. That is our nature.’
Fitzwaller said, ‘What timescale do you anticipate for that development? For what you call “personalisation”?’
‘I am not an expert,’ Churchland replied, ‘but the people I have consulted on the matter suggest that it might be possible within twenty or thirty years.’
‘So this is not a development from which you would hope to benefit yourself, sir?’
‘On the contrary, Congressman,’ Churchland replied crisply, ‘I am unlikely to see out the year, but upon my death my body will be frozen. If I do set up a trust to support this research, the deeds of that trust will expressly state that its goals include my own digital resurrection.’
Fitzwaller looked down and shuffled through his papers with something of the air of a doctor reluctant to deliver bad news. Nasim could sympathise with his discomfort. She suspected that uploading would become feasible at some point in the future – perhaps by the end of the century – but to watch a dying man clutching at straws like this was just painful.
Fitzwaller said, ‘Mr Churchland, do you really have that much faith in this technology? We are all grateful for the achievements and ingenuity of the medical profession, but surely there are limits to what mere humans can do.’
Churchland reached off-camera and retrieved an oxygen mask, which he held over his mouth and nose for three deep breaths before replying. ‘Indeed, Congressman. And I would not wish to mislead this committee into thinking that I have definitely resolved to fund a project of the kind we are discussing. In fact, over the last month or so I have received some very persuasive representations from a group who believe that it might be at best inefficient and at worst highly dangerous to proceed in this fashion.’
‘Can you elaborate, sir?’
‘I have been invited to fund an enterprise known as the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project,’ Churchland explained. ‘Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers of self-analysis that it will design and construct its own successor, which will be armed with superior versions of all the skills the original possessed. The successor will then produce a still more proficient third version, and so on, leading to a cascade of exponentially increasing abilities. Once this process is set in motion, within weeks – perhaps within hours – a being of truly God-like powers will emerge.’
Nasim resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. However surreal the spectacle unfolding on the screen, there was, in retrospect, something inevitable about it. The uploading advocates who’d sold Churchland on an imminent digital resurrection hadn’t lost their critical faculties entirely, but their penchant for finessing away any ‘mere technical problems’ that might stretch out the timetable was, nonetheless, intellectually corrosive, to the point where the next step probably didn’t seem like such a great leap any more: hand-waving all practicalities out of existence, transforming the cyber-eschatologists’ rickety scaffolding of untested assumptions into a cast-iron stairway to heaven.
Fitzwaller cleared his throat. ‘Mr Churchland, it’s not entirely clear to me how that matter is pertinent to the business of this committee.’
Churchland said, ‘Rather than trust humans to perfect the brain-mapping technology that we’ve been discussing, I am leaning towards putting my fate in the hands of an artificial God, for whom such problems will be trivial. The Benign Superintelligence will rule the planet with wisdom and compassion, eliminating war, disease, unhappiness, and of course, death. I am told that it will probably disassemble most of the material in our solar system in order to construct a vast computer that will exploit all the energy of the sun. Perhaps it will spare the Earth, or perhaps the Earth will be reconstructed, more perfectly, within that computerised domain.’
The camera caught Fitzwaller in the transition from bewilderment to revulsion. ‘ “Rule the planet”? Am I to understand that you’re contemplating funding a body that advocates overthrowing the lawful government of the United States?’
Churchland required more oxygen before replying, ‘Keep your shirt on, Congressman. There’s no point fighting it, and the alternative would be far worse. Imagine if one of our country’s enemies did this first. Imagine the kind of despotic superintelligence that Al Qaeda would create.’