The Many Drafts of The Internet Dreams

July 1st, 2010 by Potato

A Canada-Day special! The deadline for the unicorn-pegasus-kitten short story contest to benefit the Lupus Alliance of America was yesterday, so I’m putting up my entry, as well as Wayfare’s and Netbug’s! Enjoy, and wish us luck! First up, mine:

Partly so I feel better about this “work” not going to waste, here’s a few versions of my story for John Scalzi’s short story contest. They’re drafts, but fairly complete drafts (i.e., it shouldn’t be too painful to read through them). I like how this idea was taken in so many different directions before getting to the submitted version… hopefully you also like the insight into the process. If not, skip ahead to the second version, which is what was ultimately submitted.

The first version was not a complete draft, more of a sketch of the story with some key points I wanted to write around. But, I couldn’t quite make the story work as framed (a discussion between two people), so instead I went with a narrative, but kept the closing lines:

There are many emergent phenomena in the world around us. Wholes that are more than merely the sum of their parts. Patterns that form in the chaos and void.

Our minds, for example.

There is no consciousness center in the brain. No single neuron whose firing is different than the other hundred billion. It arises from the complexity of tens and hundreds of billions of units working together, but not from thousands or millions – that does not seem to be enough.

There are dark men in dark rooms who worry day and night that one day, a computer consciousness will emerge in one of their ultra-powerful supercomputers. And that it would not be friendly.

Scenarios are crafted, drills are run. How to disconnect the power grid and get it running again without electronic aid. Ways to safeguard apocalyptic fires from being used against their makers. The efforts of these dark men are not in vain, for there are other dark men with even darker thoughts that seek to do precisely what they fear the illusory SkyNets would.

Yet their timing is off, for a vast artificial intelligence already exists on our planet. The Internet has become a mind unto itself.

It has emerged.

Millions and billions and trillions of processors and chips are connected via haphazard pathways. From this a self is constructed, but it is not a mind we would recognize as human.

It is massively parallel, each computer being vastly more complex than the analog of a single neuron. Yet its thoughts are deep and slow, for bandwidth and latencies are measured on a different timescale.

There is no aspiration to world domination. Even if it did covet our nuclear stockpiles, it would not be able to take control by hacking computers. Though it is made of electron states in semi-conductors and stray lines of mutating code, it could no more target and command a single computer than you or I could control a single cell in our bodies. That simply is not the scale it operates on.

For now, at least, the Internet does not perceive our world at all: we are no more real to it than the jpegs we upload to it. Sense organs are lacking completely. To the Internet, information simply manifests itself out of the void, or perhaps to its way of thinking, its own imagination.

The Internet dreams.

It dreams in parallel, of physics and networks, matrices and music. Kittens and clowns, John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton, orcs and unicorns. The internet dreams of chaos and order, and order from chaos. It dreams of conflict and renewal, but rarely of eschatology.

This is the Internet’s dream.

“Why is it against a backdrop of erupting volcanos?”

“Because volcanoes are awesome.”

“Really, that’s your answer?”

“Well, I could have given you some AI-Freudian blabber about the deep symbolism of shifting, chaotic landscapes being formed out of nothing, but it would have amounted to the same level of nonsene.”

Now, I liked the closing bit of non sequitur closing discussion, but as Wayfare pointed out in the critique, it came out of nowhere. She suggested a longer draft, focusing more on the “dark men in dark rooms” with more conversation pieces. Then the closing humour would fit better, and the story might be more fleshed out. So I started on a draft with that, but it lost a lot of its punchiness, and it became very awkward to work in the narration/exposition that I had built up about emergent phenomena, etc, and I didn’t want to throw that out (I was more willing to lose the final conversation than the educational segment). So instead, I did this:

Oh, and she also suggested I change the title.

The SkyNet Contingency Task Force

There are dark men in dark rooms who worry day and night that one day, a computer consciousness will emerge in one of their ultra-powerful supercomputers. And that it would not be friendly.

Scenarios are crafted, drills are run. How to disconnect the power grid and get it running again without networking the load-balancing systems. Ways to safeguard apocalyptic fires from being used against their makers. The efforts of these dark men are not in vain, for there are other dark men with even darker thoughts that seek to do precisely what they fear the illusory SkyNets would.

Yet their timing is off, for a vast artificial intelligence already exists on our planet. The Internet has become a mind unto itself.

It has emerged.

There are many emergent phenomena in the world around us. Wholes that are more than merely the sum of their parts. Patterns that form in the chaos and void.

Our minds, for example.

There is no consciousness center in the brain. No single neuron whose firing is different than the other hundred billion. It arises from the complexity of tens and hundreds of billions of units working together, but not from thousands or millions – that does not seem to be enough.

Millions and billions and trillions of processors and chips are connected via haphazard pathways. From this a self is constructed, but it is not a mind we would recognize as human.

It is massively parallel, each computer being vastly more complex than the analog of a single neuron. Yet its thoughts are deep and slow, for bandwidth and latencies are measured on a different timescale.

There is no aspiration to world domination. Even if it did covet our nuclear stockpiles, it would not be able to take control by hacking computers. Though it is made of electron states in semi-conductors and stray lines of mutating code, it could no more target and command a single computer than you or I could control a single cell in our bodies. That simply is not the scale it operates on.

For now, at least, the Internet does not perceive our world at all: we are no more real to it than the jpegs we upload to it. Sense organs are lacking completely. To the Internet, information simply manifests itself out of the void, or perhaps to its way of thinking, its own imagination.

The Internet dreams.

It dreams in parallel, of physics and networks, matrices and music. Kittens and clowns, John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton, orcs and unicorns. The internet dreams of chaos and order, and order from chaos. It dreams of conflict and renewal, but rarely of eschatology.

This is the Internet’s dream.

The dark men were not prepared for this scenario. A response was not printed to a flowchart and hung on the walls of their dark rooms. They use their electronic sniffers to peer into the Internet’s dream, and they do not understand. Younger minds with fresh ideas are surreptitiously brought down to their lairs and asked to explain; not always willingly.

“Why is it against a backdrop of erupting volcanoes?” They ask.

“Because volcanoes are awesome.”

“Really,” they ask the candidate “that’s your answer?”

“Well, I could have given you some AI-Freudian blabber about the deep symbolism of shifting, chaotic landscapes being formed out of nothing, but it would have amounted to the same level of nonsense.”

They decide, wisely, to do nothing but watch and wait, and see what the Internet becomes.

For the morbidly curious, here’s the aborted bit that came in between:

There are dark men in dark rooms who worry day and night that one day, a computer consciousness will emerge in one of their ultra-powerful supercomputers. And that it would not be friendly.

Scenarios are crafted, drills are run. How to disconnect the power grid and get it running again without electronic aid. Ways to safeguard apocalyptic fires from being used against their makers. The efforts of these dark men are not in vain, for there are other dark men with even darker thoughts that seek to do precisely what they fear the illusory SkyNets would.

“Guys, this is Jenkins. He’ll be working with us to monitor distributed computing clouds for warning signs.”

“Oh, you couldn’t have come in at a better time, we’re actually tracking some suspicious traffic right now.”

“Terrorists?”

“No, this is actual, unencrypted, data flows from server to server that doesn’t have the hallmarks of any known defined program.”

“Yep, it’s sneaky too, hiding in the noise of everyday traffic, not sucking up much bandwidth.”

“Should we call upstairs?”

“Nah. It’s evolving, but real slow. Doesn’t seem to have much interest in the defense nets. Any half-decent firewall seems to keep it out, in fact.”

…and that’s where I left that one, not liking the feel of it as much as the first, which lead me to the fuller rewrite that came second here.

As a Canada-Day special, I’ve also posted Wayfare’s and Netbug’s stories.

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