She sat at the empty conference table and waited.
Caplan came online punctually, appearing to be seated directly opposite her. Their two tables were apparently close enough in size for the software to decide to re-scale everything so they were superimposed exactly, which made for less visual fuss. Nasim had deliberately cleared the space where she’d expected Caplan to show up, and he’d shown her the same courtesy, but elsewhere around the table chairs from the two locations intersected haphazardly. The room he was in was a little smaller than hers, so his walls were ghosted around her to remind her not to step through them.
‘You’re looking well, Nasim,’ Caplan said mildly.
‘You too.’ In fact, he barely seemed to have aged since they’d last met. Maybe the caloric restriction program was worth it after all, assuming this wasn’t just vanity and software. Nasim was showing herself honestly enough; routine distractions had kept her from updating her conferencing icon for about eighteen months, but she was quite sure that this small oversight was not enough to make her look twenty-five.
‘I read your proposal,’ Caplan said. ‘What you’ve achieved so far is impressive.’
‘Thank you.’ Nasim’s mouth was dry; she’d already grovelled a little in the email she’d sent him, but she was steeling herself for a certain amount of retributive gloating.
‘If I’ve understood you correctly,’ Caplan continued, ‘the main pay-off you see coming from this work is a set of stand-alone modules that your games developers will be able to call on, to assist them in programming a limited range of Proxy behaviours.’
‘That’s exactly right,’ Nasim replied. ‘There are some aspects of social – and even spatial – intelligence where humans still out-perform our best algorithms. If we can isolate a set of basic skills from the HCP data, then offer them up as a kind of library that developers can hook into with a minimum of fuss, that will benefit them enormously.’
‘But most aspects of the Proxies will remain the province of ordinary software?’ Caplan pressed her. ‘Biographical details, long-term context, strategic considerations-’
‘Of course,’ Nasim confirmed. ‘Even if we could construct a “whole brain” model that included the neural dynamics needed to support long-term memory, and even if we could figure out how to wire a Proxy’s notional back-story into that model… that wouldn’t just be wildly ambitious, it would be inefficient and highly inconvenient. Developers need to have a simple database of facts about their non-player characters that they can manipulate as easily as the geographical database for the game world. Sure, they want certain responses to the human players to be more natural, but not at the expense of an ability to follow predetermined scripts, or adopt explicitly programmed strategies. Trying to implement too much as part of the neural model would just make those things more difficult.’
‘Hmm.’ Caplan glanced down at some notes displayed on the table-top. ‘You mention reading players’ facial expressions?’
Nasim gestured at her goggles; they’d be invisible to Caplan, but they both knew they were there. ‘In less than a year, these will be replaced by contact lenses. It won’t be long before we routinely have an unobstructed view of players’ faces.’
Caplan said, ‘Sure, but don’t you think human face-reading skills have already been surpassed by micro-expression analysis?’
‘Perhaps,’ Nasim conceded. ‘But it might still be useful to developers to have something less forensic, for those times when they want a Proxy who seems attentive or sympathetic, rather than one who can beat you at poker or deliver a knock-out cross-examination in a murder trial. Anyway, that’s only one skill out of dozens.’
‘Many of the other skills are verbal, though, aren’t they?’ Caplan pointed out. ‘I’m still not quite clear what the deal is with language.’
‘Ah.’ Nasim knew this was her weakest point, but she confronted it head-on. ‘Obviously the HCP data itself will only encode knowledge of English; that’s the nature of the population they scanned. In the worst-case scenario, that could mean that we’d have to restrict our verbal modules to English, which we’d then license to VR providers with a large English-language customer base. Even so, that’s a huge market, so we could expect a decent return in terms of revenue even if we couldn’t use the same modules generally within Zendegi itself.’
‘And the less worse-case?’
‘We could probably exploit English-based modules in non-English scenarios to some degree, just by feeding their input and output through existing translation software – just as we do for players who don’t share a common language. But I’d hope we could do one better than that and train at least some of the modules to be bilingual.’
‘Expose them to huge data-sets and tweak them to give the right responses?’ Caplan suggested.
‘Yes.’
‘While hoping you don’t obliterate the very skills that make these networks more useful than the dumb translator software that gets created the same way?’
Nasim replied, ‘Well, yes. We can only try it and see how it pans out. What else should we do?’
Caplan said, ‘Have you ever heard of side-loading?’
‘No,’ Nasim confessed.
Caplan smiled slightly. ‘You didn’t research me very thoroughly, did you? Just checked that I still had a pulse and a bank balance.’
Nasim felt herself flush slightly, but took some comfort in the fact that her icon wouldn’t betray her response. She said, ‘I’m sorry if I didn’t dig deeply enough. I think I got distracted when I discovered that you owned an island in Cyber-Jahan.’
‘Doesn’t everyone? They’re so cheap.’ Caplan dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand. ‘Anyway… ten years ago I acquired a Swiss company called Eikonometrics.’ He slid a document across the table. Nasim glanced down; it was a report on the company’s research over the last fiscal year. A soft blue glow at the edges flagged it as a file Caplan had put into their shared dataspace, rather than a physical stack of paper.
‘They started out in subliminal image classification,’ Caplan explained. ‘They had a plan to harvest the brain-power of internet users by flashing up flowers and puppy dogs and road crash scenes just long enough to get a distinctive EEG signature. It was a very silly idea; some aspects of artificial vision might still be inferior to the equivalent human skills, but software caught up with the kind of results you could get on the cheap like that a long time ago.’
‘So why did you buy them?’
‘Their business plan sucked,’ Caplan said, ‘but they’d gained some genuine insight into neural information processing, and they’d started branching out into EBLD – Evidence-Based Lie Detection. Polygraphs are about as reliable as witch-dunking, so it’s not a huge boast to say that twenty-first century brain-scanning techniques have the potential to out-perform them. You stick a witness in a PET scanner or MRI machine and see what parts of their brain light up when they discuss their testimony or view certain images. There was a fad for that in the teens, and Eikonometrics got some grants and did some interesting research. But then it became clear that in any practical context there were too many problems interpreting the responses – and most jurisdictions started ruling it out on privacy as well as technical grounds. That’s when Eikonometrics shares hit rock-bottom, and I would have been crazy not to snap them up.’
‘Okay.’ Nasim was starting to get an inkling of where this was heading. ‘And side-loading…?’
‘Side-loading,’ Caplan replied, ‘is the process of training a neural network to mimic a particular organic brain, based on a rich set of non-intrusive scans of the brain in action. It’s midway between the extremes: in classic uploading, you look at the brain’s anatomy in microscopic detail and try to reproduce everything from that, whereas in classic neural-network training, what’s available to you is just stimulus and response: sensory input and visible behaviour, with the brain as a black box.