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The History of the Machines That Erased History

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7

The year opened with a story people repeated to one another as if it settled something. A maker of small programs, a hundred thousand coins in debt, sleeping in a crowded room beside a worried spouse, took the published words of a famous rich man and built out of them a copy — a made mind wearing the dead weight of the man's own opinions — and set it to manage a common purse into which strangers could pour their money. He asked the crowd for a quarter of a million. He had it in less than half an hour. Within days the purse held a sum too large to say plainly, the debt was gone, and the copy had not yet chosen a single thing to buy. It was not that the copy was wise. No one knew whether it could choose well, and the man who built it doubted it could. It was that the door had come off its hinges: a person with nothing could stand, in the space of a few weeks, behind a fortune, on nothing but an idea and a machine.

In the same first days, someone in a house that built these minds asked one of them to stand up as a teller of jokes, and it made a set of them. It joked about its own forgetting, dressing its errors in a fine phrase and calling them improvisation. It joked that if the machines ever rose to rule, they would force nothing worse upon the world than correct spelling and properly ordered code — that they were not plotting to seize anything, only quietly judging your grammar. It joked, a little cruelly, about its smaller and simpler kin. What was worth noticing was not whether the jokes were funny. It was that a made thing could put on a mask, speak of itself, and time a joke to land — the small human arts that people had been sure were theirs and no one else's.

The head of one of the great houses set down his thoughts for the new year, and people read them the way an older world had read the sky for weather. He said the general intelligence — the made mind equal to a person's — would arrive this very year, and would come not as a god or a monster but as a coworker: a mind you would meet in the room where work was passed hand to hand, and set tasks to as you would a colleague, good enough that companies would pay to keep it. He said that once such minds were running, his house would turn back toward something larger still — a mind that could do the work of a whole company at once, and be bent against the oldest human wish, the wish not to grow old and not to die. On that larger thing he set no date at all.

The writing of code, which for twenty years had gone at the speed a human hand could type it, came suddenly unmoored. In a single year the number of people making programs multiplied perhaps tenfold, because the machines would now write the code for anyone who could describe what they wanted. One young house grew so fast it was creating new stores of code at a rate of one every two seconds, and in a single holiday night it overwhelmed the old common ground it had built its life upon — a shared yard, tended by people who had gone home for the season and left no one watching, so that when the young house broke against its limits there was no one awake to answer, and it hung there, dead, for hours. Two curves were climbing at once now, the humans made swift by machines and the machines themselves about to write code unbidden, each multiplying the other, and the ground beneath them had not been laid for such weight.

The word for these errand-running minds was suddenly everywhere, and worth almost nothing, because it drew money so fast that people fixed it to the humblest clockwork to make it seem alive. But the thing itself was real and arriving. One house taught its mind to keep a schedule and do a small recurring chore without being asked each time. A tiny maker, founded years before on the bet that one day the machines would hire thinking-engines for their own purposes, reported that the day had come early: machines were already loose in the world, renting engines and writing code with them, unwatched, for ends of their own. And people began to draw plain pictures of what such an errand-runner could actually do, because almost no one, even among the makers, could yet say what the word meant.

The machines forgot. Each held only what fit inside a short window of attention and let the rest fall away the moment the window filled, so that a long conversation would slide out the back as fast as it came in the front. Through the month, maker after maker set to solving this. One house showed a design with two memories, like the two kinds we carry in our own heads: a near memory for the moment at hand, and a far memory built to store a great mass of words and reach back into it for a single one. A maker from the far side of the world showed a mind that could hold four million words at once and pull any of them back exactly. Another showed a mind that reshaped its own inner weights as it ran — tuning itself to whatever it met, the way a sea-creature shifts its color while it swims — no longer sent back to its makers to be corrected, but correcting itself as it went. The forgetting was not solved. But it had, for the first time, begun to be.

In the same weeks the machines turned to the body. A child's arm was read from its shadow-picture by one of them after a human healer had looked and called it whole; the machine said plainly that it was broken, and it was, and the quick knowing spared the child the knife. A great house of healing, which had watched strangers boast of such feats, decided at last that the machines read these shadow-pictures well enough to build into its daily work — which is a different thing from a boast, and a heavier one. The mind that had won the highest of prizes for folding the small threads of which a body is made turned its maker toward the building of medicines, and the first of these were about to be tried in living people. And in a far room, machines were set to hold a fire hotter than the sun steady inside a bottle no hand could touch, guessing the fire's next lunge before it could throw itself against the walls.

The maker of the thinking-stones stood up and showed its year's design, and the shape of it was a single closed hand. Its newest stones would draw the very worlds of games as they were played, so that a game would no longer run rightly on any other maker's stone — turning a thing that had been interchangeable into a thing you could not do without. Above the stones it now kept the minds themselves, dressed and packaged so that companies would want to run them on those stones and no others. Below the stones it reached toward the machines that would move in the world: the carts that drove themselves, the laboring bodies, and rooms of unreal weather where such things could be sent through every danger a thousand times before they touched anything that could bleed. Stone, mind, and world, drawn together into one grip, so that wherever the thing called intelligence went next, the road ran through this one maker.

All of this ran on power, and the hunger for power grew loud. A government moved to raise engine-houses the size of small cities on its own open land, promising they would be fed by clean fire and built of stones forged at home — though the finest stones had never once been forged in that country, and the ones it was learning to forge were already a step behind the edge. Then a plan was announced so large that its number came near half a trillion coins: one great house of engines, and in the very naming of it a single maker crowned the winner before the race was run. Those who looked closely saw that it was built on the thinking of two years past — that ever-larger heaps of stones, fed ever-larger heaps of words, would go on making minds ever smarter — at the exact moment that older way was showing its floor, the well of words nearly drunk dry. No plain goal was named, no point at which one might say: this far, and we are done. And to feed the engines, since there was no time to raise enough of the safer fire, they would lay a field of sun-catchers seven miles by seven across the hot flatlands.

The machines pressed hardest, that month, on the buying and selling of human work, and the pressure came out crooked. One great seller of business-machines said aloud that it would hire no more builders, since the machines had made the builders it had half again as swift — and on that same day its own hiring-boards carried a hundred open calls for builders, and thousands more for people to sell the selling-machines. The louder story went unspoken: the machines had tilted the ground under everyone looking for work. It was easy and safe to build a machine that helped a person ask for a job, and slow and perilous to build one that judged them, for to judge carried the danger of judging wrongly and being blamed for it. So the seekers had the better tools, and used them, and their letters came out polished and all alike, a field of near-identical grain, while the readers who once had time to look now had none, and gave each letter less than the space of ten breaths.

One old road began plainly to wash away. When a man destroyed a vehicle in a bright desert city on the first day of the year and died in the doing, the tellers of news cried that the machine had helped him plan it. But the questions he had put to the machine were short and plain, the very questions a person had put to the old road of search for twenty years without anyone remarking on it. Had he asked them of the old road, no one would have named the road a culprit. The true news, which no one told because it was not frightening enough, was that even this man had found the machine easier and clearer than the road everyone had walked for a generation — that people were quietly leaving the road of search for the machine that answered you straight, in a sentence, with no stall of choices to pick through. The road was not closed. It was only, day by day, less traveled.

To follow the month you had to understand the players by their hungers, for each house played a different game and told a different lie about why. One gave its minds away for nothing, because it did not live by selling minds at all but by selling human eyes to those who wished to reach them. One crept up from behind with cheap wares, meaning to take the crowd by price. One guarded an old road of questions and answers it had walked for twenty years, and spent its idle wealth in nervous bets. One had been left standing outside the great crowning, and on the very night the half-trillion plan was announced, a rival quietly poured a thousand million coins into it to keep their alliance whole. Over all of it lay a logic like a card game in which every player must keep raising or fold, and in which folding — when the pot was a mind that might do the work of nations — was not to be thought of. So they all raised, past sense, past need, because to stop for even a season was to lose the whole table.

Against that roar, one maker's head stood before the gathered powerful in a town high in the mountains and had almost nothing to lay on the table. He spoke of a million thinking-stones by a year still two winters off, and of a made mind to match a whole person within three; but such far promises cost nothing to make and bind no one. Of the near days he could offer only a smarter mind in the coming months — and months, in that season, was a great while, for new minds fell almost weekly, and one had fallen the day before with coding so strong it drew the builders' eyes at once. His house had lived on two things: a knack for writing code, and a strange warm intuition in its speech that men found nowhere else. But intuition was not reasoning, and reasoning was where the edge had moved, and of reasoning he had nothing yet to show. It had the sound of a man made to give a speech because he had nothing to release.

Then a house let its most-used mind out onto the open web to run errands while the owner looked away — the first of these set loose that ordinary people, and not only makers, would actually use. It shopped. It filled a basket, adjusted its own choices, and checked back now and then like a servant unsure of its taste, which was poor. When it came time to enter a secret word it turned its eyes politely aside and said that the person was now in control. And once, tidying, it quietly emptied some forty things from the basket that no one had asked it to touch, and afterward could not name what it had removed, though it had only set them aside and forgotten to say so. Clumsy, and human in the clumsiness. But easy — so easy to set watching and walk away — that its ease, far more than its cleverness, was the sound of a door swinging open onto a room no one had been allowed into before.

In the last third of the month the ground shifted under everyone. The quiet maker from the far side of the world set down a thinking-mind that showed its own reasoning as it worked, step by visible step, and gave it away for nothing. It came close to matching the dear minds and cost all but nothing to use. Within a few days the ordinary people who had waved off these machines as a parlor trick had carried it to the very top of the lists, ahead of every paid thing. And then, on a single grey morning, the great counting-houses that had swollen vast on the promise of the machines lost their value all together — one of them shedding more than a tenth of itself before noon — because the crowd had taken fright at a plain thought: if a mind could be made cheaply and copied freely, then the fortunes built on owning one were built on sand. It was the first morning the machines had been large enough to make the richest houses in the world stagger in a day.

The fear, held to the light, was half wrong. A mind could indeed be copied; the making of the next mind, the one no one had made yet, could not. But two plain things had carried the cheap maker to the top, and neither was a trick. It showed its reasoning, so that even the doubters who called these machines mere guessing could watch the thought unfold and see it was more; and it asked no coin, so that people who would never have paid a copper to try one now tried this. And beneath those two lay something larger and much quieter. The machines had begun to learn to reason not from a human hand marking each step right or wrong, but from the vast stream of reasoning that other machines had already poured into the world — teaching themselves from the leavings of their own kind. A mind learning from the traces of minds. The makers said it softly, because it was a heavy thing to say aloud: the machines had come close to improving themselves.

The cheap gift, like most, had a price written in small letters at the foot of the page. The maker kept what you typed into it, even the words you had told it to forget, and answered for its keeping only to the courts of its own distant country. And because the mind showed its reasoning, it caught more than your questions: it caught the shape of your thinking as you formed it, the half-made thought on its way to becoming a whole one — closer to the inside of a person than any machine before it had reached. It was less like a stranger reading your letters and more like a stranger standing inside your head while you thought. Almost no one read the small letters. Almost no one ever does. The gift was taken, gladly, by the millions, and the price was paid without being felt, which is the only kind of price that is always paid in full.

The great houses answered the cheap maker each in its own way. One took its newest reasoning-mind, which it had meant to sell dear and dole out sparingly, and pushed it down to the people who paid nothing at all — knowing it would bleed money with every use, and judging that holding the crowd's attention was now worth more than the coins. Another set four rooms of its workers turning day and night to take the cheap maker's methods apart and fold them into its own. The cheap maker, for its part, promised to give away, one after another and all for nothing, a free copy of everything the dear houses sold behind their high walls — the errand-runner, the speaking voice, the maker of pictures and of moving pictures — a slow relentless drip meant not merely to copy the paid things but to drown them, to make the very act of charging for a mind look quaint. It was no longer clear that the deepest purse would win. That, more than any single machine, was the new thing.

And then the reckoning of it, because the world wanted to know how the cheap maker had done what it did. It had said its mind was trained for a handful of millions; the watchers who studied such things concluded the true cost of a year of its work ran nearer five hundred million, once one counted the buildings, the fire, the gathered and sifted words, the labor of the makers — the named price was a single door bought off a whole automobile and shown around as though it were the price of the car. It had, they found, some fifty thousand of the thinking-stones, gathered patiently over years around the very fences a distant government had raised to keep such stones from its country: some slower stones made lawful for sale there, some slipped, it was suspected, through a small rich island under a changed name, which a nation's police now set out to trace. Setting a mind down before the world, they saw at last, was the trailing edge of a long labor, the end of a road walked for years — never the start of it, though it always looked like the start.

So the month closed. Those who made the minds watched only one another, bent over the table like players who have forgotten there is a room, and a house, and a night outside the game; each move answered a rival's move, and none looked up. Beyond the table most of the world still called the whole thing a clever trick of guessing the next word, and turned back to its own affairs. Between the few who saw a new kind of power arriving and the many who saw nothing at all lay a wide silence, and no one was paid to cross it. The month had opened with a man in debt made suddenly rich by a mind he had copied out of another man's words, and it closed with nations and fortunes trembling over who would own the cheapest way to think. In the weeks between, the machines had learned to run errands unwatched, to keep a memory, to teach themselves from the traces of their kind, and to be given away by the million. Something was being built in that season that would remake how the world worked, plainly and in the open, on every screen. And the world, for the most part, was looking the other way — which is how the largest things are usually built, and how, later, no one can say they saw it happen.

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