“Gea can’t solve the climate problems,” Vander said. “That’s not her job. But by showing us the future reliably she can help us cope with the human consequences.”
We listened to this dutifully for a while. It was even well presented. But it was very familiar stuff. And as Shelley whispered to me, “Why is it that the collapse of the environment always reduces to a set of dreary lists?”
Vander Guthrie seemed more interested in the software engineering that lay behind Gea than the climate modeling itself. As the show went on he leaned forward and began to gossip in whispers. “Shelley tells me your uncle worked through the Age of the Help Desks.”
I glanced at Shelley, surprised.
She wasn’t apologetic. “Your uncle George is an old charmer, Michael. He has a lot of good stories about those days…”
Now that we were on his home ground Vander was engaged, even witty. He seemed to have a genuine interest in the history of his discipline, apparently because he was well aware that with Gea he was working on the hottest ticket in the current generation. His job, though, was only a remote descendant of the software analysis George had once made a living out of.
He described for us new design paradigms based on something called “surface binding.” This meant breaking down Gea’s model of the world into self-contained modules, like worlds in themselves. “So Gea has a model of global rainfall patterns, say,” Vander said, “and another on ocean heating. One affects the other, of course. But to figure out how, Gea has to let her model oceans ‘drive’ the rainfall in a realistic way. It’s not a question of software protocols, you see. It’s as if it were real. The communication between sub-models is not symbolic, it’s experiential. And that offers Gea a much greater richness of consciousness and experience than we have. You see? She is like a community of minds, but minds linked by direct experiential channels.”
I exchanged a cautious glance with Shelley, keeping my face carefully straight. The geek with the blue hair was actually something of a mystic, it seemed. However there was something quite moving in the way he described all this, as if he actually envied the complex entity he devoted his life to serving.
And I started to see the reality of Gea through his verbiage. Her elaborate mental model was as real a representation of the Earth and its cargo of rocks, air, water, and life as could be devised, a model that was improving all the time. In a sense that clunky corporate display had shown the truth in that very first image: the whole, spinning Earth was the center of Gea’s consciousness, and her purpose for being. Meeting her would be like meeting Gaia itself, I imagined.
He went on, “Of course design philosophies are only at the bottom level of the creature we know as Gea. You don’t program Gea, any more than your mother programmed you. My job title is animist. Remember we’re dealing with a mind here, a conscious entity. I didn’t design her; none of us did. I can’t even necessarily measure her output. How do you calibrate playfulness, joy, beauty, sorrow, fear?”
“And you can’t control her?” I asked uneasily.
“This is a climate modeling system,” Shelley said scornfully. “She isn’t a killer robot with laser-beam eyes. What harm can she do?”
I shrugged. “Lie to us? If she’s so smart, how would we even know? And then, when we build the flood barrier in the wrong place, or stimulate algal blooms in the ocean when we should be containing them—”
Vander Guthrie smiled, a bit wearily. He’d heard all this before. “The Frankenstein complex? I wouldn’t worry. Gea is actually sentient, remember. And with sentience comes responsibility. Conscience, if you will. And, believe me, for a creature as aware as Gea, that’s a deep inhibitor indeed…”
The image froze. Vander raised a hand to his ear, as if someone had called him. He grinned at us. “She’s ready to see us.”
To reach the Gea facility itself, Vander led us to a broad, empty plaza, eerily bare of trees or benches. At the center of this circle of concrete was set a building, an unprepossessing box, squat and windowless.
Vander talked nervously as he led us to the central blockhouse. “You can see we wrap our baby up pretty tightly. Ideally she would be dispersed, maybe even buried underground. But the logic of her architecture dictates that’s impossible.” With a superpowerful computer, aiming for the highest processing speeds, you always aimed for small distances to minimize lightspeed delays between components. But that very density made for its own problems — notably the production of an immense amount of heat, which was no doubt why Gea’s physical manifestation was stuck out here aboveground. Vander said, “But we’ve done our best. This block is as robust as most nuclear power plants. You could drive a plane into it and we wouldn’t even notice.”
As we hurried across the empty plaza I was aware of camera drones flitting in the air, and before my eyes smaller motes danced in the bright daylight — more security drones, tiny ones. Even the floor beneath our feet looked smart.
I felt terribly exposed out there. But I could see the logic; this open space, saturated by sensors, was so wide it would have been impossible to smuggle across any kind of harm-making device. Vander also warned us that our minds were being monitored for “inappropriate feelings.” I hoped that awe and dread would not be regarded as too “inappropriate.”
We reached the blockhouse. The wall itself sparkled with embedded processors. Vander palmed a control set in the wall, and a door slid aside out of sight. We hurried inside, with Vander waving us in anxiously; a deafening buzzer sounded the whole time the door was open. As the door soughed shut behind us drones clustered in the air around us, glittering with lenses.
Inside, the blockhouse was brightly lit by strips set in the roof. It looked even smaller inside than from outside, and was crowded with scaffolding where technicians in white coats and hairnets labored at terminals or waved their hands in the air to manipulate VR interfaces. Some of them peered down at us suspiciously.
At the center of the room was an installation of support gear and instrumentation. The heart of it was just a sphere, jet-black, only a couple of meters across. The sphere was embedded in a framework of clumsy-looking engineering, ducts and pipes and huge flaring fins. Most of this gear seemed to be refrigeration plant, laboring to keep that central sphere cool. But wires snaked out, and laser light flickered around it, the visible signs of data chattering into and out of the sphere. Was this Gea?
Vander led us to a corner of the blockhouse. A small room, not much bigger than a toilet cubicle, had been partitioned off; a light shone red above the door. Here we had to wait until Gea was ready for us. Vander seemed tense, as if his god was stirring.
At the core of Gea was a quantum-computing processor, he told us. Inside that jet-black sphere, the intertwined strands of possibility that make up our actuality were picked apart, and each separate strand used, remarkably, as a computing channel. The subtle use in computer processors of strange quantum effects like entanglement and superposition had actually driven forward the basic science of quantum physics. But still, nobody really understood how these machines worked — nobody human anyhow.
“Gea and her kin have already far surpassed us in raw intellect,” Vander said worshipfully. “Take mathematics for instance. There hasn’t been a single basic proof achieved by an unaided human in thirty years. Nowadays the computers do the proofs. Our job is to dig into what they’ve discovered and prize out the implications. We are intuitive, emotional; we still have a guiding role to play. But the computers are the intellects now. We will never again be able to grasp what they are doing.”