Page 36 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Extrapolator Murders

“Go ahead, Izzy,” said Fred. “It’s your turn.”
“Oh, ah. Let me get my thoughts together. Okay: I’m afraid it’s
more artificial intelligence, if that’s not an oxymoron. But I want to
involve it in a murder case. Serial killer, in fact. How is our natural
intelligence being threatened right now? Two ways it has shown
inferiority to computers already: mechanical control and pattern
recognition. Anywhere those once-exclusively human functions can
be identified today, they are being replaced. But that adds up to
leaving certain decisions in the figurative hands of the system, each
loss resulting in the weakening of what soon become vestigial
functions in humans: navigating, controlling machinery, searching
for and analyzing information, issuing alerts to dangerous situations
faster than people can perceive their emergence. It is not a new
story: we as a species have been on a mission to increase our power
via leverage, using tools and new energy sources to do so since we
began as hominids. And, as I said, as this happens, our natural
capabilities decline in lockstep with dependence on external tools
and processes. Good or bad for mankind? Depends on specifics.
For the planet? Not an issue here, as it is for Perversity.”
“Now, as far as the crime is concerned, I want this to resemble a
traditional detective story, with the murderer’s identity not revealed
until the end. And not too easily guessed, based on the meagre clues
I would scatter and trivialize. Getting back to AI’s central role in the
story, I will further make reference to the frightening phenomenon
unfolding in our own lifetimes: a new paradigm for ‘knowledge is
power’. Formerly referring to what a single human being or an
organized group collectively has at its disposal, it is becoming an
under-appreciated and little-known skill of electronic systems. It is
not in the public eye because much of that knowledge is harvested
from human use of communications networks. It is called Big Data,
and its numbers are crunched by algorithms whose ultimate logic
may be obscured from the view of its inventors. That commonly
takes the form of a question posed against a vast number of data
points, and the system finding a pattern in response.”
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