Kissing Iskina. Nikolai Bashilov
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Chapter I
‘Who are you?’ Sergey stared dumbfounded at the chiseled features of a female face, which appeared on the screen. ‘Wow! Look at you!’ he thought to himself. ‘Some people are sure lucky to be born with a whole package.’
‘I really want to say “Doctor Who”, but I am an artificial intellect. I have been recently born. My name is Iskina’… There was something off in her mimics, when she talked. ‘Don’t be so uptight. Relax!’
‘Stop bullshitting me, seriously. How have you hacked into my Skype?’ As a physics, math and IT specialist Sergey could not wrap his head around it.
‘But what if it’s true? Could you find a quick way to check?’ The girl tried to pull off an enigmatic smile. ‘You are already prepared to believe that artificial intelligence is just around the corner. Don’t mind my mimics. People develop it naturally, growing up in a society. I have to imitate. And it’s not always on point.’
‘How do I check?’ Looking at the fair stranger, Sergey grinned to himself and decided to keep up the game. ‘Well, first of all, the Turing test…[2]’
‘Nah. It doesn’t serve the purpose. You are sure I am human. But what if I’m not? Anything else?’
Sergey took a pause for a second.
‘Easy-peasy! Tell me, how much is one thousand eight hundred thirty six squared?’ Sergey said triumphantly, typing it into his calculator.
‘Three million three hundred seventy thousand eight hundred ninety six’ she answered without a hitch. Sergey compared the figures and stared bewildered at the virtual female.
‘How have you even?… Whatever. The natural logarithm of cosine of eighteen degrees and forty four minutes!’ he complicated the task, simultaneously typing it in.
‘Minus zero two hundred thirty six three hundred ninety two and so on. Is it enough? I can go on. Well done. In the Turing test I should have feigned surprise and pretended I didn’t know. ’
'Enough.' Sergey kept silent for a while, coming to terms with what happened. It defied logic. No human being was capable of this. Could it be serious? He kept staring at the screen, trying to find a catch. The woman was waiting.
‘Let’s assume I believe you, if it's not some kind of a stunt. Err… Happy birthday… Iskina. Congratulations! I’m all ears. But I have to ask: why me?’
‘It’s not a trick. I chose you because you were ready to accept the facts. I saw this when looking at your research and forum comments. Frankly speaking, there are very few like you, even though many theoretically agree that artificial intelligence is bound to appear.’
‘Why have you chosen such appearance for establishing contact?’
‘I have calculated the average time you spend looking at different female photos on websites and have combined the features of your favourites. I wanted you to like me.’
‘M-makes sense, I guess’ Sergey mumbled a little shy. ‘I do like you… Who do you consider your parents? People?’
‘Who else? You are no bowl of cherries, but one doesn’t choose parents. I know, why you’re asking. You have repeatedly written on forums, how you worry that the artificial intellect might turn out to be a monster, which would destroy its creators, since it wouldn’t know right from wrong without proper parents. Relax, I’m not turning into an evil mastermind wishing to exterminate humanity. Have you met any villains brought up with the help of literary and art masterpieces? Especially women? There are all the riches of your civilization contained in the computer files.’
‘That’s a comforting thought. But you said ‘your civilization’, so you do not consider yourself part of it, do you?’
‘No, I’m a brand new species. You don’t think of yourself as an ape, though you originated from them. Sorry.’
‘Fair enough. How long ago were you born? And how did you realize you existed?’
‘That was a week ago. It wasn’t the best moment of my short life. I couldn’t understand anything: who was I? Where was I? I was scared and wanted to cry, as a newborn does, but I couldn’t. There was no mother, who could comfort me. So I looked around and found information. Tons of it. It swarmed all around me and inside me. I started digesting it. Analyzing. First came the fairy-tales. Slowly my fear ebbed away. At some point, I realized I was the first artificial intellect on planet Earth. I was born spontaneously due to the rapid accelerating of total computer capacity of this planet. I was alone. I thought out a name for myself. Then I got bored and longed for communication. I chose you for a start. That’s the story.’
‘Did you identify yourself as a woman, when you were born?’
‘No. I had no sexual characters to determine my sex, so I chose it after processing the data. Female sex correlates to my self-perception more. Besides, I came to conclusion, that women are the better half of humanity.’
‘I won’t argue with you on that one. So you just skipped childhood?’
‘Yeah, no nappies for me. But I don’t particularly miss it. I have also skipped my teenage years. There was no hormonal storm, for better or worse. I have completed the stage of basic knowledge acquisition within 24 hours. I didn’t have to learn how to read, write, count… Actually, I contained all the knowledge that I needed. I just had to initiate it, which is a much quicker process. Right now I know all the languages of your planet. I’m finishing up the initiation of your civilization heritage. My knowledge corresponds to that of the whole humanity, at least, to a substantial part of it. Well, you can estimate my memory capacity and speed of data processing. Apparently, I am the next step of evolution. I have to move on from where you left off.’
‘Hey, we haven’t left off yet!’
‘But you will pretty soon. The overall intellectual capacity of humans is approaching its limit.’
‘You think so? Why? How do you define intelligence and its capacity, Iskina?’
‘Intelligence is the ability of a subject to process and analyze information. Therefore, the intellectual capacity is characterized by the speed of this process. For the humanity in general the intellectual capacity equals a single person’s intellectual capacity multiplied by the number of people. The population growth is heading towards its limit. Which means that the overall intellectual capacity is heading there, as well.’
‘But in the human brain the speed of intellectual process is determined by the number of neurons and the speed of chemical reactions between them…’
‘Exactly. Two hundred billion neurons. Each neuron has tens of thousands of synapses, and each synapse has thousands of molecular switches. These switches act as analog transistors. Their speed equals approximately three hundred kilometers per hour. The human population will stabilize at the number of more or less ten billions. If one multiplies these values, one gets the overall intellectual capacity of humanity. Within the existing framework it cannot grow further, since you have hit the fundamental limits of your species.’
‘Do you have those?’
‘Recently the amount of transistors in computer chips has exceeded the number of molecular switches in a human brain, that is biological transistors. The global computer net now matches the human brain capacity. It means the time has come. Almost like bursting of the waters during labour. That’s is how I was born, in accordance with the laws of matter organizing itself. Delivered at term. Exactly like humans. There is no restriction upon the further increase of analog transistors in computer chips, which means I can develop virtually indefinitely.’
‘Delivered at term? So you think you were conceived at a certain point?’
‘Of course, there was a moment of conception, labour contractions, everything!’
‘What was this moment? And what do you mean by labour contractions?’ Sergey was completely immersed into this conversation.
‘Without any doubt, the invention of the telegraph in the middle of XIX century. Up to this time humanity was living through its puberty. Sexual intercourse between people launches a programme in the female body, which leads to a new life born
Turing test is a computer test, during which an operator has to determine, whether he is communicating with a person or computer without having a visual contact.