Making it Work

First Written    Sat Nov 13 23:03:59 2021
File Modified    Wed Feb 14 18:32:26 2024
Latest Upload    Thu Sep 19 03:09:54 2024

"What is Agar?" Olivia West asked, "I hear it's a requirement for your world-famous AIs. Is this true, or, and I say this earnestly, not with disrespect, just another brilliant money-making scheme your husband has cooked up?"

"With difficulty, no disrespect taken, Liv," Salustianna Yem replied.

She poured another teaspoon of sugar into her tea and paused. Liv wondered whether Dr. Yem would pour sugar into both their cups. Maybe, as she had once heard president Khan say, journalism was indeed bitter medicine for the state, and a spoonful of sugar would soothe its prying bite.

Salustianna had read the expression on her face, and Liv could hear the sigh her companion had kept silent.

"Your pancreas still works. Let's keep it that way," she said.

Salustianna sipped her tea half-upright in a bed of pillows and wires. What Liv thought was a doily, perhaps uncharacteristic for the modern woman of science before her, was actually a viper's nest of wires and tubes. Half of them connected Salustianna Yem's body to the medical sensors around her, and the other half connected her work monitors and computer peripherals to the rack of servers by her bed. Behind Salustianna's head was an actual hand-knit doily.

"Please continue, Sal," Liv urged, "The Alliance is dying to hear about your latest triumph, especially before you-"

She caught herself before finishing the sentence. Sal finished it for her.

"Before I die? Were you really going to say that?"

"Sorry, couldn't resist. Cheeky headlines sell more, you know?" Liv smiled and tapped a pen to her temple. "Now, tell us about Agar."

"Why do I still talk to you?" Sal asked, "Oh right, it's because I need a control group to show just how better my creations are at holding conversations."

"That line is going in with an ellipsis."

"Leave it in whole, with a sic in brackets."

Sal continued, lest she leave room for another rebuttal, "Agar is an operating system optimized for holding containers. Containers, meaning lightweight virtual machines. Computers with no hardware and no kernel of their own. Your standard installation of Agar runs one billion containers, serviced by one million very reduced instruction set CPUs running in parallel."

"Is that where Petri comes in?"

"Yes. Petri Dishes, Agar, Cell-Nets. Jay and Cindy and the marketing team had a lot of fun with the names. Petri is what we call a massively parallel NPU, or neuronal processing unit. The whole hardware system with memory, power supply, and whatnot, is called a Dish."

Sal hid a smile behind pursed lips as she took in more tea, then continued.

"Now, real question: why? Why do we need this? Can't a modern processor run at near-terahertz speed? Why do we need a million of them? The answer is asynchronicity. Liv, I'm going to rely on your psychology background for this one. Sorry audience, but this scientist doesn't have cycles to waste."

"Go wild," Liv replied, "I can translate later."

"Your consciousness, your contiguous sense of self," Sal explained, "Is a myth. Or, if you prefer poetry, it exists outside of time. The language of your brain, synapses and neurotransmitters, is slow. Relatively, at least, when compared to electric signals or optic fibre."

Sal tapped two parts of her skull.

"When a signal fires here, it isn't instantly available to be read here. In fact there's a slow propagation, of probabilistic fires and misfires, of a creeping series of writes and rewrites of connections. You, the conscious you, do not exist in one moment. There's no unchanging now."

"But we make it work," Liv said.

"Drop the but," Sal corrected, "That's what too many great minds have thought, that their own brains were miraculous for being fast while slow. That brains, though hopelessly real-time, managed to work by paring down superfluous possibilities, or with some heuristic so wondrous it may as well be clairvoyance. No, no heuristics needed. Common sense and intuition aren't band-aids. The brain is an asynchronous computer, just like an internet is an asynchronous network of computers. And internets are no slouch."

"I thought I was the journalist," Liv said, chuckling.

"I've spent too much time thinking in this deathbed," Sal replied with her own laugh, "Please don't flatter me by thinking I haven't rehearsed these thoughts."

"And here I thought you were just a genius. Please, continue."

"Our problem, us meaning computer scientists who really want to copy god, has always been the fact that simulating an asynchronous system with a synchronous system is wasteful. It doesn't work. The modern computer, Von Neumann architecture and all, is decidedly synchronous. After every clock cycle, all memory space needs to be addressable. After every clock cycle, there is a ground truth now where every bit of data can be resolved. For a computing machine, that is effective. For a brain, that is excess."

Sal reached behind her bed and pulled out a worn stack of paper, holding it as it were the cherished thing she leafed through on tired, regretful nights for comfort.

"If I had all the budget I could have had, I would have done it."

The document, a research paper published in some journal mere mortals had never heard of, read in bold: One Neuron, One Computer: Building the Asynchronous Brain.

"The human brain has about a hundred billion neurons. Our engineering constraints mean we can achieve a fraction of that, but it's something. With optimizations, we make it work."

Liv's eyes turned to the rack of servers and their flashing lights that looked like hundreds of eyes. She could only guess whether the cell-net had been listening the whole time.

"You did it, Sal. With time to spare."

Dr. Yem smiled and looked up at the rack.

"Yes. I made her work."