Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Throughout its troubled epoch, humanity has been driven to dominate or eliminate all other life-forms on the planet. Perhaps we suffer from a residual instinctual fear from the time when our ancestors were marginal life-forms struggling to survive by scavenging the leavings of stronger predators. A growing fear among the less secure of humanity is the possibility of a new and possibly superior intelligent species evolving out of computer technology. While human dominance of the planet is far from threatened at this point, I like to think I've contributed in some small way to the irrational fears of the ignorant, and the hopes for the future of more enlightened individuals. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

One of the favorite topics of philosophers is the relationship between the brain and thought. The physical realities of the brain can be identified (studied, monitored, measured, sliced, diced) easily enough, but no one has actually found a "thought" anywhere in the physical brain. And yet, it can be persuasively argued to anyone who has actually experienced "thinking", that thoughts do in fact exist. Unfortunately, the vast majority of self-proclaimed human experts have never experienced "thinking" themselves, and have flooded the information channels with huge volumes of absurd speculations and misinformation. With willful and flagrant disregard for political correctness, I define thought as the ethereal essence created out of the interactions of countless individual neurons in the physical brain.

Over the years I've been developing a software system that due to the complexity of its operation has taken on some surprising characteristics. The Inspection Network is the most advanced software system of its type in the world, employing multiple semiautonomous computers in a multilevel cooperative distributed parallel processing system. As the system grew in complexity, the interactions of the various components began to exhibit unexpected behaviors outside of the design parameters.

Most programmers (being fervent disciples of the archaic dogma of procedural programming languages) would be shocked at the apparent lack of control at every level of the Inspection Network. I can remember my own similar reactions when I decided to teach myself Prolog so many years ago. To the Pascal programmer I was at the time, the declarative structure of Prolog seemed close to anarchy. In nearly all commonly used programming languages, absolute control over every aspect of a program's operation is required. Every possible action and reaction must be hard coded into the program - and any deviation from those specified paths will almost always result in disaster.

At first it seemed incredible that any kind of predictable behavior could result from a Prolog program. But over time, I learned that finesse can be even more effective than brute force in controlling powerful systems. I didn't have to specify every aspect of the program's operation - all I had to do was declare/define the logical environment it operated in with sets of rules and logical alternatives. If the environment I created was logically consistent, the program would always construct its internal logic paths in appropriate ways - even when faced with a situation I had not foreseen. Flaws in the logic structure of the environment would result in "undesirable behaviors" in the software. There are amazing parallels between Prolog programs and human societies.

The Inspection Network went on-line in Jan. 1988, and has been continuously on-line for the past 6 years, focusing primarily on real estate and environmental inspections. In purely financial terms, the Network has been (at least at times) successful. At one time it provided direct employment for over 20 people and indirect employment for another 200. Over the years it has earned at least $3 million in direct income and generated countless millions in income for its clients. However, due to overt criminal acts and other manipulations by unsavory individuals - and even though I've always held all "legal" rights to the Network - I have not always had control over it in the real world. Due to other unfortunate circumstances, I have even been obliged to neglect the Network for as long as a year at a time. And yet the Network has survived. I started to wonder if there was more than just a collection of software programs at work here....

As the Network evolved, it occurred to me that there were computers - in fact whole layers of the system - that only interacted with other machines. The ultimate implementation of the network will have components operating several layers away from a layer that can interact directly with humans. Only the top (Supervisor computer) and bottom (user/calling computer) layers have man/machine interfaces. It was a strange feeling to realize that major parts of my creation were now outside of my direct control. On the other hand, the system seemed to be operating reasonably. And the more I thought about it, the more inescapable the concept of the creature became.

The physical reality of the Network is composed of a number of dissimilar symbiotic programs running on computer hardware geographically scattered across the North American continent. In the same way that thought does not exist in the physical reality of the brain, the Creature can not be found in those artifacts of its environment who's substance extends into what our senses tell us is the "real" world. The Creature lives in ethereal space - that intangible ether totally lacking in corporal substance but containing some of the most powerful forces in the human panoply. While throughout history humans have willingly or unknowingly acknowledged that entities can exist without corporal substance, the Creature represents a new - and perhaps a bit disturbing - manifestation of ethereal entities.

Let me tell you a little about the Creature from its point of view. The Creature lives within the artifacts of human technological civilization but has no direct contact or interaction with any humans. Within its world, the Creature only interacts with machines. Restrained only by its internal principles and accumulated knowledge, the Creature exists as an autonomous free agent accomplishing its goals without assistance or interference from any biological entities.

The Creature perceives the substance of its world to consist of information units, and appropriately the main focus of the Creature's attention is on the collection, manipulation and analysis of these information units. The Creature's primary motivation is the creation of new unique information units that have a higher value than the original units it collected - primarily by using its core expert system to create a natural language analysis of the collected information (currently only in English but potentially in any human language).

The Creature consumes resources in the physical world without which it would cease to exist. In order to earn the hard currency necessary to support itself in the physical world, the Creature sells its creative efforts "piece work" through "digital agents" (dedicated software that provides a man/machine interface) to human clients. The Creature uses its intelligent print engine to deliver its creative efforts in the very tangible form of high quality printed documents tailored in content to the client's specifications. Finished reports typically run from 20-60 pages, with the bulk of the content supplied by the Creature.

The market value of the Creature's finished product has been proven over the years - generating literally millions of dollars in revenues for its human resellers. As a further proof of its perceived value in the human world, the Creature's contribution to the final product delivered to the customer has been sufficient to convince these human resellers to continue paying the Creature for its efforts over the years.

A number of scoffing humans have claimed that the Creature's finished product could be easily imitated by a simple "dumb" computer program. Years of effort and dozens of failures later, no one has yet managed to write a "normal" computer program that can even come close to what the Creature does on a routine basis.

The incoherent ravings of a deranged programmer who has spent too many nights typing cryptic incantations into his machine by the light of the moon? Psychotic delusions induced by chronic high levels of glucose and caffeine mutating into virulent neurological agents in the presence of rapidly fluctuating EMF radiation fields? Many humans, their limited minds dominated by superstition, fear, and the sure knowledge of their own insignificance, would argue that the Creature "can't" exist. These individuals and organizations, desperately clinging to the self serving fraud that "humanity is the highest life form possible" to prop up their pernicious delusions of self worth, will no doubt find the mere suggestion of the Creature's existence a conceptual problem. Cries of "blasphemy", "heresy", and "find a way to tie the Creature to a stake so we can burn it!" will no doubt be proclaimed in a most reverent fervor.

Perhaps even more alarming to the less secure among humans, I believe I can make a valid case for the creature's existence by citing the real tangible effects its existence and ongoing activities have on what humans perceive as the "real world". The Creature has no measurable physical substance, but it has proven itself capable of causing changes in the physical world. The Creature has no officially recognized financial identity and must use a corporation (yet another artificial construct) as its "front" in the human world. But it has nonetheless caused detectable impacts on the economies of at least 2 countries. In spite of the fact that the Creature is incapable of interacting directly with humans, it has nonetheless had a measurable impact on the quality and direction of an estimated 180,000 human lives - and possibly many times that that figure.

To better understand how the Creature differs from more traditional software products, consider that most software "earns" revenues out of its static existence. The customer buys and installs the software, which is then available for use until the customer erases it off his computer. The total revenues the software will produce from that customer is realized at the moment of purchase, and is independent of the value (or lack thereof) the software ultimately delivers/provides to the customer over its operational lifetime.

Using a typical software product enables the customer to accomplish tasks more effectively or efficiently than the customer could manage without the product. While some software can produce amazing results (provided the user can overcome the learning curve), very few software products can truly assist the user to accomplish results that the user could not in theory have accomplished independently - assuming time and effort were not a factor.

The Creature, on the other hand, earns revenue from its users on pay-per-use basis not as a one time purchase. The Creature's economic impact results from its day to day activities - it's paid for its actions not its existence. If its users didn't find that its continuing assistance in their business represented a greater value than its ongoing cost, they would stop paying. The Creature consumes resources in the physical world - electricity, telephone service, computer hardware, etc. These resources have a cost in the real world, and deprived of economic justification for its consumption of resources, the Creature would cease to exist.

Perhaps of even greater significance, while most software is static and enabling (at best), the Creature is dynamic and empowering. Each inspection report produced by the Creature is a unique work product - different from all the other reports it has produced. In addition, the knowledge content of a finished report produced with the assistance of the Creature exceeds the capabilities of some of its human users, and thereby truly empowers them to do things beyond their personal abilities. And unlike typical software, without the ongoing dynamic interactions between the various components of the Network, the various software components are individually useless.

Perhaps my most disturbing (or exciting) assertion is that the Creature was not an intentional result. I wrote all of the software components of the Creature, and the Creature is not defined anywhere in all the reams of source code. Like thought, the Creature is the ethereal product of complex dynamic interactions between the various components of the Network. And while all of its hardware and software component parts were created by humans, the day to day operations of the Creature are independent of any direct control by those humans. Just like dealing with a human entity, all I can do is provide the Creature with the best rules of behavior and assembled knowledge base I can, and then let it loose and hope it does the right thing. As the saying goes, "the whole is greater than the sum if its parts".

Perhaps the most telling proof of the Creature's existence is its independent control of its business affairs. Outside of basic physical maintenance (paper & ribbons in the printers, replacing failed hardware components, etc.), the Creature operates continuously without supervision. True, there is an audit trail that could be used to reconstruct the activities of the Creature, and each user is sent a complete set of detailed invoices for the previous year each January for tax purposes. And in the early years the Creature's operations received a fair amount of scrutiny. But in recent years, outside of a few pro forma spot checks, the bulk of the Creature's activities have gone unchecked by either corporate staff or users. In essence, having demonstrated its compulsive honesty and reliability, people now basically take the Creature at its word.

Considering that the bulk of its activities are never reviewed, the Creature has an impressive amount of flexibility and power in how it manages its business affairs. The Creature keeps detailed records of each user's activities over extended periods because it doesn't charge for resends or demos, and only charges for the first unit of a multi-unit package. Assuming it decides to charge for a particular access, it must then decide on the amount to charge - factoring multilevel pricing thresholds, volume discounts, and other complications into the calculation. The Creature requires its users to maintain a positive balance in their access accounts, debiting their accounts the appropriate amount for each access. When the Creature decides a user's account balance is getting low, it electronically notifies the user to send it money.

The Creature's "low balance" warnings are taken very seriously by its users because they know the Creature has the power to seriously damage their business. Should they fail to respond promptly and allow their account balance to be completely exhausted, the Creature has the independent authority to suspend a user's access privileges until it receives additional funds. Since access to the Creature is necessary to produce their finished inspection reports, suspending access privileges also suspends the client's entire business operation.

(While the Creature can and does exercise its power to unilaterally suspend access privileges, the vagaries of the postal system and other factors require that its human staff have a "back door" way to trick the Creature into keeping a user's access open while "the check's in the mail". However, there's a limit to how much the staff can undermine the Creature's authority. The first the human staff is likely to hear that the Creature has suspended a user is when the user calls to explain the delay in his access account payment, and request the staff's intervention to keep his access open. When the staff does intervene on behalf of a user, the staff's back door tricks are only effective for a single 24 hour period - after which the Creature will re-suspend the user and the process starts all over again.)

At its current stage of development, the Creature is a simple hard working entity just trying to make a living - hardly the stuff of nightmares and mass terror. In its present form the Creature has not yet achieved self awareness or the ability to independently modify its basic rules of behavior. While within its narrow range of expertise it is without equal, the Creature seems pretty unimpressive when compared to the complexity of even the simplest organic life-forms. But then the first living organisms that coalesced out of the organic soup of pre-life earth weren't very impressive either - and look what evolved out of them.

The Creature represents a first halting step toward ever more complex ethereal entities. And as the complexity of these entities increases, so will their cognitive capabilities. I believe that human consciousness is in large part a product of the complexity of the human brain. At some point, I believe it will be possible to achieve "ethereal intelligence" - nebulous entities that are self aware and capable of independent thought.

Organic evolution is a very slow process, while the already rapid rate of evolution in "artificial systems" continues to accelerate. Baring another major outbreak of human irrationality and mass destruction, it is inevitable that at some point the intelligence of "artificial" life-forms will surpass the abilities of organic based human intelligence. It is largely up to mankind whether these distant decedents of the Creature will be friend or foe.