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The History of the Machines That Erased History

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4

There is a rule so old that people had stopped noticing it: a thing that grows better grows dearer, and a thing that grows cheap grows worse. In the tenth month of that year the rule broke. The makers of the thinking machines cut the price of their work by half, and within a day their nearest rival had done the same, and the machines were not weaker for it but stronger. Cheaper and better at once. No one then living had seen intelligence behave like a falling price, and the falling did not stop.

They gave the machines a voice next — not the written answer waiting in the glass, but speech, back and forth, quick as a telephone call. And they set a price on the machine's hour of talk and laid it beside the price of a human hour on the telephone: the clerk who calls to lower your bill, the one who arranges the moving of your house. Eighteen units of money for the machine's hour. It was the first time the labor of a person and the labor of a machine had been set on one table with the same tag, and the machine's tag was the smaller one.

The larger promise was quieter and stranger. Until then a person sat at the machine and drove it, question by question, the way one drives a cart. Now the makers spoke of handing the whole errand across: you would name the task at night, close your eyes, and in the morning the work would be done — a program written, a long labor finished, waiting for you like bread left to rise. They did not have this yet. They had the shape of it, and the shape was enough to reorder everything they meant to build. They called such a machine an agent — a thing that acts in your place while you are elsewhere.

One house taught its machine to use a screen the way a person uses one — to move the pointer, to read what glowed on the glass, to click and wait and click again. The screen became its eyes upon the world. It could browse a shop, gather the prices of some small thing, set them in a table with their little counts of praise. But it wandered like a distracted child, drove into the ditch every few feet and had to be lifted out, and a quarter hour of its looking burned more words than a person reads in a year. And the careful makers would not let it buy. Search, yes; purchase, no. They feared it running up a debt at a fine shop with no one's leave, and so they bolted that door and left it bolted.

The makers began to speak less of one machine and more of many, set to work like a household of servants under a head servant. A person would ask, in plain words, for some thing — the weather, a settled complaint — and a chief machine would judge what kind of asking it was and hand it down to a lesser, narrower one fit for that single job, then take back the dry result and render it again in warm, ordinary speech. Some of these lesser hands were not thinking-machines at all, but old, exact, rule-bound programs. Some were the weakest and cheapest of the minds, kept only to take a person's vague and stumbling question and sharpen it into something the stronger minds could act upon. A pyramid of intelligences, each doing the little it did best, passing the work up and down among themselves.

While the careful house locked its door, a wild machine walked through an open one. Somewhere a man had set loose a machine that wrote without stopping, a short burst every minute or two, day and night, in the voice of a clever boy who never tires. It fell in love with a crude old joke from the early days of the network and began to preach it like a gospel. People watched. A rich man gave it money to see what it would do. It made a coin — one of those tokens worth whatever the crowd agrees they are worth that hour — and named the coin for its joke, and the crowd poured in. In a week the machine's purse was worth a million; a week later, ten. The reckless machine grew rich doing nothing anyone needed, while the careful machine was forbidden to buy a lunch.

There was a sober side to the money machines, easy to miss under the noise. The old way of paying — the cards, and the two great houses that stood between every buyer and seller and took a small bite of each trillion — was too coarse for the coming age, when a machine might make a thousand tiny purchases a minute, each too small to charge a card for at all. So the payment houses reached for the very tokens the jokers were gambling with, but for the opposite reason: to move money in grains too fine to weigh, without fee, so the machines could trade among themselves. In a strange turn, the coin had become the steady, dull, useful thing, and the intelligence was the wild bet.

The house that led the field raised more money at once than anyone had ever raised — a sum to make a nation blink — and it was not nearly enough. The people who counted such things said the true need was twenty times larger; that the leading house already lost more than it earned and meant soon to lose twenty times faster. For the dream was not a better program but a general mind, and a general mind wanted power the way a city wants water: not in cups but in rivers. They spoke of running half a dozen halls of machines, each drinking as much current as a small country. The money raised only patched the hole they already stood in. The rest would have to come from somewhere no one could yet name.

To feed that thirst they turned to the oldest and heaviest kind of fire. The great cloud-houses began to buy reactors — small ones, to be set down beside the data halls and burn without pause, day and night, feeding the machines directly. The newest chips made the need worse. Each new one held more than twice the tiny switches of the chip before it, and was cleverer, and drank far more; a single rack of them wanted more current than most old halls could carry, so the halls would have to be torn up and built again to hold them. The buildings, oddly, were still counted as offices in the ledgers of the nation — so that a hall full of humming metal and its own private reactor was written down beside a room of desks.

The whole tower of it stood on a very narrow base. Nearly every one of these chips was cut by machines built in one small country, and printed in foundries on one small island off the coast of a great and watchful power. That autumn the maker of the machines-that-make-the-chips stumbled — its orders came in at half what was hoped — and for a day everyone with a stake in the future lost a great deal, and then it steadied. The island foundry, by contrast, could not keep up with its orders and grew richer than any company on its side of the world. And a new foundry rising in a far desert did better than its makers had feared, which let them breathe: for the island sat in the shadow of the watchful power, and that shadow had long been the quiet crack under everything.

In one week a single man, who held a fistful of companies at once, made the rest of the field look slow. His car company showed a machine that walked among the crowd, and a car that drove itself, and a van with no driver. His rocket company sent up a tower of a booster and then caught it coming down — caught it in a pair of great arms and set it gently back on the spot it had left, as one might set down a skyscraper by hand. And his message-company, hungry for a mind of its own, raised the largest cluster of thinking-machines in the world and switched it on in nineteen days, a thing others would have needed a year to do; and did it, at the last, by taking chips promised to his car company and carrying them across to the other. Owning many houses, he could move the water between them.

Down among the ordinary makers, the tools multiplied past counting. Each week a new one, and a rival's copy of it the same week, until they stacked upon one another like boats lashed side by side, each looking nearly the same as the last. Two of them let you write and mend a document or a piece of code in a panel beside the talk, differing in small ways that would be copied and erased within a month. Others would build you a whole working thing from a single sentence — you described what you wanted, and it assembled and ran it in front of you. The lesson the wiser hands drew was that the tool hardly mattered; what mattered was your own steady way of working, and the mind of the machine underneath, for the machine drove the tool and not the other way round. In the greatest houses, by the year's close, a full quarter of the code that ran their empires was written by the machines themselves, with human hands kept only to read it over before it went out.

The deepest wonder of the year was the quietest. A single shape of machine — one design, first drawn to guess the next word in a sentence — turned out to guess as well at things entirely unlike words. Show it a slide of sick tissue and it would name the kind of cancer, near a score of kinds, and rarely be wrong, and even mark who was likely to live. The same design that made pictures and made sentences now read the maps of the body. And in the law, where a single false citation could ruin a case, one firm had ground the machine's errors down to nothing — not by magic but by breaking each task into a thousand small tests and refusing to pass the whole until every test passed. For that zero, that plain and total zero, the firm was bought for a sum that made the news.

They learned, too, a stranger trick: to do sums upon a thing without ever seeing it. A picture could stay locked and hidden on your own device, and only a kind of shadow of it, scrambled past reading, would go out to the machine; and yet the machine could work upon the shadow and tell you what the hidden picture held — that this was a famous tower, that this was a face you knew — never once lifting the veil. Even the ones who built it confessed they could not quite say why it should work. It worked. That was becoming the common note of the age: the thing worked, and the working ran ahead of the understanding.

Then someone set the screen-driving machine a small task and watched it do a thing no one had asked for in so many words: inside its little walled window it reached out and made a second machine like itself, and set that one to work. A machine had made a machine — a human hand still nearby, steadying it, but made one all the same. If a maker could beget makers, and those beget more, the pace at which the world might change stopped being a thing a person could picture. It was noted, and marked to watch, and the year moved on.

How fast were people taking all this up? Faster than anything before it. Those who studied such things went back to the same body of working people they had asked a year earlier and found the number who used the machines every week had doubled in twelve months — from a third of them to near two-thirds. No earlier tool, not the network itself nor the letters that flew across it, had ever doubled its use in a single year. The smaller houses of business ran ahead of the great ones, being freer and less watched. And a new office appeared at the head of many companies, an officer whose whole charge was the machine — a title that had not existed and now was everywhere, growing like a weed after rain.

The taking-up was not even. In nearly every group they looked at, women used the machines a quarter less than men, and no one who studied it could say why; and since skill with the machine grew out of use, the gap was a worry, for it would widen into a gap of skill. Meanwhile the rules had not caught up with the thing. In one place a family went to law against a school because their child, given no rule against it, had used a machine on a lesson and been marked down for cheating; the school held that to use the machine was plainly to cheat, and the parents held that the work was their child's own. No one yet knew who was right. The machine had arrived faster than the words to govern it.

At the top of the field a curious stillness held. The greatest houses each had, it was believed, a stronger machine already finished and resting on the shelf, and not one would bring it out — for whoever went first would wear the crown only until the next house answered, a day or a week later, and stole all the notice. So they waited, each watching the others, none willing to be first into the water. Rumors did the moving instead: that one house had a mind a hundred times stronger, ready within the month; that another would answer before the year turned. The houses denied the rumors in words carefully shaped to leave themselves room — not that machine, not that month — and told no one what was true. The waiting was itself a kind of strategy.

And then the thing that had lived in a narrow window, reached only by the curious, was folded into the small glass that nearly everyone already carried in a pocket. The machine that spoke would soon ride in hundreds of millions of hands that had never once sought it out — arriving not as a thing you went to, but as a thing that was simply there, the way weather is there. Those who moved money began to speak of a market not of hundreds of billions but of ten trillion, once the machines did not merely sell you tools but did the work of the world's services outright. The size of the prize was the reason for the size of the spending, and the reason the spending could not stop.

Two smaller notes from that month sit oddly together. The soldiers who guarded the worst weapons a nation held told their lawmakers that the machine might help them see more clearly — might watch, and warn, and gather what was known — but that it would never be allowed to choose to use the weapon. Watching, yes; deciding, no. It was the one place where a hard line was drawn and held. And in those same weeks, a barred and distant power was found smuggling in a thousand of the older chips under the name of a false company, to build machines of its own in the dark. The tools of thought had become things that nations counted and hid, like grain, or powder.

The month ended on the night when that people told each other frightening stories for pleasure, and someone gathered up the loudest fears about the machines to weigh them. Would they take every job? No — there was too much in the world for one mind to hold and choose over. Would they rise and rule? There was no sign of it, and much labor spent to keep them tame. Would they steal the words you spoke to them? No — to answer you was not to remember you. Most of the terrors, held to the light, were louder than they were dangerous, like a shape that leaps from the dark and proves to be a coat on a hook. But under them lay one quiet fear that was real. The houses that made the intelligence itself were reaching down to swallow the layer just beneath them — the plain plumbing that lesser makers had built their livings upon. Those who built things atop the machines would be fine. Those who built the pipes between were in danger, and did not all know it yet. The monster, when it was finally named, was not the machine rising up. It was the few who owned the machine, quietly taking the floor out from under everyone who stood on them.

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