2312

Wahram said to the entire group, “The question of programming lies at the heart of today’s meeting. There’s clear evidence to suggest that some qubes are actively self-programming, in particular the ones involved with assembling these humanoids with qubes for brains. We don’t know that any humans asked them to do that, and we don’t know why they’re doing it. So-the first questions concern what they are, and who’s making them. We know that they can’t communicate internally with each other because of the decoherence issues. They’re not some kind of entangled group mind, in other words. But they can communicate just like we do, by talking with each other, using all the ways we ourselves communicate. But in their case, when they employ quantum encryption, it’s not possible to break their codes. Robin here”-who was the person on the other side of Wahram, and who nodded at Swan-“has been coordinating the recording of their conversations over radio and the cloud, and even in some direct vocal communications. While we can’t crack their codes, we can see that they’re talking.”

Swan said, “But go back a bit-how could they self-program? I’ve heard that recursive self-programming does nothing but speed up operations they already know.”

“Well, but if they were instructed to try to make something, for instance, then it might lead to some odd results. Pushing at ways to make something work could have initiated other ideas in them. It might be much like the way they play a game of chess. They’re given a task, which is to win, and they’re told to figure out ways to do it, and then, in their usual testing of all possible options, they might have had certain unexpected successes at modeling effective courses of action to get what they want. That wouldn’t be exactly a higher-order process, but it still might do the job, and lead to new algorithms. And that could then feed back into trying more things. At some point in trying to self-program for more effectiveness, they might have stumbled into consciousness, or something like it. Or the process might just have resulted in some strange new behaviors, even destructive behaviors. This, anyway, is the theory we’ve been pursuing.”

“Do the original qube programmers think this kind of process could go very far? I mean, wouldn’t the qubes still be stuck in algorithms?”

“As it turns out, the programmers who first built quantum computers used differing structures, and they ended up creating several different internal operating architectures. So really there are different kinds of qubes, each kind with different forms of cognition-different protocols, algorithms, neural networks. They have brain imitations of various sorts-aspects of what you might call self-awareness, and many other features of consciousness. They’re not simply one design, and in terms of their mentation, they may have started speciating.”

Inspector Genette took over: “We’re seeing clear signs of self-programming in the qubes. Where that may have led is hard to say. But we’re worried, because they don’t have the brain architecture and chemistry that makes us think the way we do. We think very emotionally. Our emotions are crucial to decision making, long-term thinking, memory creation-our overall sense of meaning. Without these abilities we wouldn’t be human. We wouldn’t be able to function as individuals in groups. And yet the qubes don’t have emotions, but are instead thinking by way of different architectures, protocols, physical methods. Thus they have mentalities that are not at all human, even if they are in some sense conscious. And we can’t even be sure that they resemble each other in the ways they’ve emerged into this new state. We don’t know if they think in math or in logic terms, or in a language like English or Chinese. Or if different qubes aren’t different in that way too.”

Swan nodded as she thought it over. If the silly girls had been qubes-the lawn bowler also-that was rather amazing, just in terms of morphology. As to mentation, none of this particularly surprised her. “I talk to Pauline about these issues all the time,” she told them. “But what’s clear to me from those conversations is how crippled the qubes are by these mental absences you speak of. Maybe it is the lack of emotions. There’s so much they can’t do.”

“So it has seemed,” Wahram said after a silence. “But now it looks like they may be generating goals for themselves. Maybe there are some pseudo-emotions there; we don’t know. Probably they still aren’t very wise-more like crickets than dogs. But, you know-we don’t know how our own minds work, in terms of creating the higher levels of consciousness. Since we can’t get inside the qubes to see what’s happening in them, we’re even less sure of them than we are of us. So… it’s a problem.”

“Have you taken some of them apart to see?”