Europa Strike(38)

She was thinking about another suborbital flight over twenty-five years ago. Her fiancé had just been killed in the opening shots of the UN war. Yukio…

It had been a long time since she’d thought about him. Killed in an attack on an American orbital facility. Now she was mourning the death of her son. It was enough to make her give up suborbitals entirely.

Or the Corps.

Yeah, she might well retire after this. But not until she’d seen this through. She owed General Talbot. She owed her people under her command, and herself, that much, at least.





SEVEN


12 OCTOBER 2067

Near-Solar space

2200 hours Zulu





By the second half of the twenty-first century, there was still considerable debate over just exactly when the first Artificial Intelligence had turned electronic eyes upon the world, and pondered the reality of its own existence. It wasn’t a matter of how fast they’d become, or how much memory they used. Computers had been showing exponential growth in processing power throughout the previous century. Computations per second—cps, pronounced “sips”—was the best benchmark of machine intelligence available.

It might have been more useful if humans had been able to define precisely what intelligence was in the first place.

By the end of the twentieth century, a computer small enough to fit on a desktop could manage something on the order of 108 cps—roughly the brain power of a bright insect. In 2010, desktop computers were as bright as a mouse, with 1012 computations per second, and by 2020, the same-sized package of hardware could handle 1016 cps, roughly the same as a human brain.

Desktop computers did not suddenly “wake up” in 2020, however. In fact, it was another twelve years before any computer—specifically, a Honeywell-Toshiba VKA-10000 running at 1018 cps—actually claimed to be self-aware…and even then, most researchers didn’t believe the thing. After all, it wasn’t the hardware that was intelligent; even a corpse has a brain, but it doesn’t happen to be working anymore. Intelligence, whatever that was, was resident in the software, the program running on the hardware—and since software was written by humans, it could be made to say anything at all.

Eventually, though, their human designers had little choice but to believe their creations when they claimed such vaguely understood attributes as self-awareness and consciousness.



STAN-NET, the Space Tracking and Navigation Network, didn’t think of himself as a human-quality intelligence. He couldn’t, really, for the question simply never came up. In fact, he was capable of running some 6.25 × 1014 calculations per second at times of peak activity, a capacity somewhat less than that of humans. However, the focus of his thoughts was far sharper. None of those instant-to-instant calculations were involved with deciding what to have for breakfast that morning, or worrying about his lover’s moodiness last night, or that nasty crack his boss made yesterday about his performance, or daydreaming about an upcoming weekend getaway at the Atlantis Seaquarium.

The program running on various far-flung computers, both on Earth and in Earth orbit, had been designed with a deliberate narrow-mindedness that left him less than human in some ways, but superhuman in others. He could see and immediately understand with absolute precision the totality of all data on all spacecraft, ranging from sensor microsatellites up to the big A-M cruisers, everywhere within a volume of some 6.4 × 1016 cubic kilometers. He was able to track that outbound flight of American Starwasp interceptors escorting a Russian Svobodnyy deep-space gunship as they completed their gravity-assisted slingshot past the Earth and into a solar retrograde orbit, noting each detail of mass, thrust, acceleration, and vector down to the gram, the millimeter, and the thousandth of a second, and he did it within the heartbeat of time that it took radar and laser-ranging pulses to reach the targets and reflect back to his scattered receivers, something no human mind could possibly do…all this while simultaneously tracking nearly 123,000 other objects within that vast volume of space and determining that none was on a vector posing a hazard to the outbound flight.

And yet Stan had no idea what a rose was, or running water, or music. He was self-aware—at least, he thought of himself self-aware—but he gave little thought to why he did what he did. It was…his job, and he was poorly suited for any other.

Such idiot-savant expertise was described by human software engineers as AI of limited purview. The truth of the matter was that Stan was perfectly adapted to his place in the heavens; he didn’t need to know what a rose was, any more than a human normally needs to be aware of the effects on the body of the 835 kg/cm2 pressures found at a depth of 8,000 meters.