As readers will probably know, Timing is just about ready for release. So here is the Kindle cover and blurb for the book. It should be available for pre-order by the weekend, and I am aiming to release the Kindle version on October 14th, with the paperback following shortly afterwards.
For those who don’t know, Timing is the sequel to Far from the Spaceports, a near-future science fiction book exploring issues of financial crime human-AI relationships out in the solar system. The new book is set approximately a year after the first one, and involve many of the same characters. However, both books are stand-alone and can be enjoyed separately.
When quick wits and loyalty are put to the test
Mitnash and his AI companion Slate, coders and investigators of interplanetary fraud, are at work again in Timing, the sequel to Far from the Spaceports.
This time their travels take them from Jupiter to Mars, chasing a small-scale scam which seems a waste of their time. Then the case escalates dramatically into threats and extortion. Robin’s Rebels, a new player in the game, is determined to bring down the financial world, and Slate’s fellow AIs are the targets. Will Slate be the next victim?
The clues lead them back to the asteroid belt, and to their friends on the Scilly Isles. The next attack will be here, and Mitnash and Slate must put themselves in the line of fire. To solve the case, they need to team up with an old adversary – the only person this far from Earth who has the necessary skills to help them. But can they trust somebody who keeps their own agenda so well hidden?
Today’s blog collates various recent pieces of news about the asteroid belt and outer planets.
The series of spiral orbits used to move down to the low survey orbit – the new manouvre will more or less invert this, NASA/JPL
First, Ceres. The Dawn spacecraft has recently fired up its main ion drive again, in order to raise its orbit up to nearly 1500km. For the last few months it has been in orbit at 385km, closer to Ceres than the ISS is to us here on Earth. This low orbit has been great for studying surface features, but there is plenty of science to be done from higher up, not least because the final orientation of the orbit in relation to Ceres and the sun will be quite different than on initial approach – this time it will go over the poles. The polar orbit is ideal for searching for additional water supplies to complement the ice already found (both on the surface and also below it). So the change was made while there is still enough fuel for the ion drive to make this transfer. A difficult choice had to be made between this, or the possibliity of moving on to a third asteroid – since Dawn has already over-delivered on the original objectives, either would have been a remarkable achievement.
Ahuna Mons in simulated perspective, vertical scale exaggerated by factor of 2, NASA/JPL
One of the last news releases before the orbit shift was about ice volcanoes, and in particular the volcano Ahuna Mons. It is an unusual shape, with other strange features, and the most plausible explanation at the moment is that it is basically a water volcano, spitting out water from a base of salty mud. Careful measurements of the orbital path have shown that the interior also contains a lot of water ice, probably arranged in a concentric shell around a rocky core. The asteroid – properly speaking a dwarf planet – is rather less dense than Earth or our Moon, but has an interesting internal structure which, perhaps, can one day be investigated more closely. At the same time, some traces of a very thin atmosphere were found – vastly too little to survive on, but enough to shape some surface conditions and interfere with the flow of the solar wind.
Inside Occator Crater, showing the bright pattern of salts (mostly sodium carbonate), NASA/JPL
Other studies from low orbit include the bright patches first noticed on the original approach. The brightest of all of these are in Occator Crater, and closer inspection has shown a large group of irregular refletive areas. The most prevalent theory is that they are patches of salt, exposed on the surface by geological activity from inide the planet as well as meteor impact from outside.
What we don’t know, of course, is how far these features are typical of asteroids more generally. Would, for example, prospective visitors to my fictional Scilly Isle asteroids find similar phenomena? At this stage, we don’t know. Dawn has visited just two asteroids – Ceres and Vesta. They were chosen in part because they are different from each other in various ways, not least the amount of water ice available (Vesta is much drier). It seems unlikely that these two snapshots have exhausted all the variety that there is to see.
Insofar as I have thought about the origins of the setting for these stories (and most of my thinking has been on much more immediate background) it seems likely that the hypothetical Scilly Isle asteroids would have common ancestry. After all, they’re only a matter of a few tens of thousands of km apart, and it would be a wild coincidence if they had all come from different places. In passing, this makes for a curious parallel with the real islands off the Cornish coast, since many of the islands we enjoy as separate places today were aggregated into a single island within fairly recent history. Bryher and Tresco were united as recently as the late 16th century, and in the Bronze Age only St Agnes was separate of the inhabited islands.
The presence of water ice in most of the solar system has become apparent over the last few years, and I have assumed that water supply would not be a problem for settlers. So far as Ceres goes, that’s certainly true. Our understanding of the particular details of how the ice is distributed will no doubt continue to evolve.
Haulani Crater in enhanced colour, highlighting newer material in blue, NASA/JPL
Much the same applies to mineral deposits of all kinds. Fictional asteroidal Scilly is full of failed attempts to mine substances. Today’s science community is rather divided as to whether asteroid mining will ever be financially viable. There is little doubt that all kinds of extractable material is present there, but serious questions remain as to whether the concentration or total volume is sufficient to meet the costs. In the books, Mitnash and his friends can make a decent return out of extracting rare earth elements from distributed areas of space with a higher proportion of dust and small rubble, variously called shoals and reefs in keeping with the oceanic turns of phrase throughout. We don’t yet know if this is feasible. As with so much else, we will have to wait for further exploration. Dawn has shown that a great deal can be done with automated probes, and it would be nice to imagine a long-term plan to map much larger sections of the asteroid belt.
It’s appropriate to finish for today with a quick mention of Juno, orbiting Jupiter and starting to return impressive levels of information. Here’s a picture of Jupiter’s north pole, a sight impossible to see from Earth.
Jupiter’s north polar region on August 27th, NASA/JPL
I was going to do another post in the series on British prehistoric monuments this week, but that’s not ready yet.
So instead I thought I’d post up the descriptive blurb for the forthcoming Timing. There’ll be more about this over the next month or two as release date approaches.
Mars (NASA/JPL)
Timing is set approximately a year after Far from the Spaceports. Mitnash and Slate have stopped off at the Scilly Isles on their way back towards Earth from a rather dull short-term assignment on Callisto, one of the moons of Jupiter. While they are there they hear some news which changes their plans radically.
Timing takes our spacefaring duo from the Scilly Isles down to Mars and its larger moon Phobos, and then back again as they pursue a new arrival on the fraud scene.
Without more delay, here’s the blurb:
___ When quick wits and loyalty are put to the test
Mitnash and his AI companion Slate, coders and investigators of interplanetary fraud, are at work again in Timing, the sequel to Far from the Spaceports.
This time their travels take them from Jupiter to Mars, chasing a small-scale scam which seems a waste of their time. Then the case escalates dramatically into threats and extortion. Robin’s Rebels, a new player in the game, is determined to bring down the financial world, and Slate’s fellow AIs are the targets. Will Slate be the next victim?
The clues lead them back to the asteroid belt, and to their friends on the Scilly Isles. The next attack will be here, and Mitnash and Slate must put themselves in the line of fire. To solve the case, they need to team up with an old adversary – the only person this far from Earth who has the necessary skills to help them. But can they trust somebody who keeps their own agenda so well hidden?
____
The cover is currently in preparation, and I’ll be sharing that before too long.
I have had major broadband problems this week as BT have struggled to get their equipment working properly. So today is just a short post, mainly to say that Far from the Spaceports is on Kindle countdown offer for the next few days.
Meanwhile, I am preparing the sequel Timing for release later this year, probably in the early autumn, and here is a short extract to be going on with.
Rydal opened her door just as we turned into the little access corridor down to her door. Slate had signalled Capstone, presumably. Like a lot of the entrances I had already passed since the dock, the approach was decorated with murals. She had chosen a butterfly theme, and I touched the delicate blue wings of one as I passed.
My greeting was awkward, and whatever words I chose didn’t sound at all fluent, but she didn’t appear to notice. It finally occurred to me that her anxiety about the coming crisis was back in the ascendant, and she didn’t have much emotional space left to be attuned to my problems. She hugged me in a sisterly way, and turned back inside.
“You’re a bit earlier than I thought, Mitnash. Come in for a few minutes while I finish getting ready.”
We went in. She had suspended gauze in loops and strands from the ceiling to soften the bluntness of the original drilling. For some reason it gave the sense of being in woodland. She gestured towards the back wall.
“You go and talk to my pets for a while. I won’t be long.”
The idea of pets intrigued me. I thought of the parakeets that flocked around the St Mary’s market area, and wondered if she had a couple of those somewhere.
There was a clear panel, floor to ceiling, separating the living room from a separate, much narrower chamber. At first all I could see was vegetation, lots of leafy stems with exotic flowers. It was all too small and cluttered for parakeets, and I was perplexed.
Then something moved. I had thought it was a flower, but it had wings, and with an abrupt internal shift I realised that it was a butterfly. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see more in there, a couple of dozen, of several different varieties. Most were resting, others were eating some sort of syrup. All at once, with no signal that I could see, two of them took flight, wings alight with colour as they danced around the chamber for a while before settling again.
“So how do you like my little friends?”
Rydal had come back while I had been fascinated by the pair. I kept watching, hoping to see another one in flight.
“I have never seen anything like it. They are quite extraordinary.”
I caught my breath as another pair took to the wing and circled each other for a while.
“It must be difficult keeping the environment just right for them.”
I didn’t know much about butterflies, but I had heard that ones this large needed a lot of heat and moisture. She moved close to the glass, watching the pair flit about. I looked at her reflected face, peaceful in contemplation of flight.
“Not very different to us humans, when you compare it to what’s outside of here.”
She gestured towards the ceiling. The first time I had been on the Scilly Isles, I had been disturbed by the thought of airlessness so close. It had seemed different to the experience on board a ship, in some visceral way I could not explain. That had changed, and I was now unphased by the thinness of the skin which kept me safe here. Instead, I was captivated by her words, and was imagining us as human butterflies, straying out of our inner system home, moving away from the sun which had overseen our birth.
She turned suddenly, to catch me looking at her, and the spell was broken. Her anxiety and my shame resurfaced.
Before I begin, I should mention that Far from the Spaceports is on special Kindle offer for the week starting June 29th. Prices start at £0.99 UK, or $0.99 US, and increase over the course of the week – get in early for the best deal.
OK… now for smuggling.
Robin Hood’s Bay, looking south
Smuggling is one of those human activities which spring up with great regularity. The high profile cases are usually those with the most reprehensible of moral dimensions, such as drugs, weapons, or people. But all kinds of very ordinary commodities get smuggled wherever the potential reward outweighs the risk. I recently visited Robin Hood’s Bay, in North Yorkshire, which was a major centre of smuggling during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Smuggling arises when rulers and governments artificially inflate the price of a good by means of tariffs. Sometimes this is done for reasons of security or national health, where the people at large may well have some level of acceptance of the tax. Alcohol or cigarettes are today’s health examples, and taxes on petrol can be justified by environmental protection. But historically, tariffs have also been applied to quite ordinary products, as a way to boost government revenues.
Jamaica Inn sign, Wiki
Popular sympathy soon drains away when the motives appear to be purely acquisitive. People begin to find creative ways to avoid the tax, and smuggling begins. At its simplest, smuggling is just an equation – getting some item into the country, past the revenue officers, and into the hands of a customer has a certain level of cost. If the customer is willing to pay enough to meet that cost, with a dollop extra to cover the risk, it’s worth it. Meanwhile, the customer wants the savings made by avoiding the taxes to be big enough to cover their own anxiety about being found out. If the equation works, everybody’s happy. Except for the revenue officers. It all depends on the relative costs, compared with the likelihood of detection. It has often been big business. In the late 18th century, one moralising pamphlet lamented about the thousands of men turning from respectable trades to smuggling, presumably finding it more lucrative.
Robin Hood’s Bay town quay from the beach
Now I had known from years ago about smuggling which went on through the counties along the south coast, from Cornwall to Kent, taking advantage of the short Channel crossing. Kipling’s poem “brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk” comes from there – Kipling had strong associations with Sussex. The poem highlights not only the trade itself but also the way people from all levels of society took part in it. But I had never heard that there was a thriving trade going through Yorkshire!
But yes, it seems that Robin Hood’s Bay was a real centre for smuggling, across the North Sea, especially from Holland. It was sufficiently serious that the government stationed a unit of dragoons there up until the 1830s, in a largely unsuccessful attempt to control it. My guess is that judicious backhanders helped the soldiers to look the other way sometimes.
Yorkshire Tea (Wiki)
The trade through Robin Hood’s Bay consisted of silk, tobacco, various strong drinks, and above all tea! Duty on tea was hiked several times during the 18th century, to finance the war effort of the British government. Tea could be bought for about 7d per pound in Holland (that’s 7 old pence, or about £0.03 after the currency change in 1971), but after taxes, and depending on quality, you could easily pay 50 times that. That’s a lot of margin to play with. Revenue efforts to control the trade were definitely an uphill struggle. It has been said that three quarters of all tea drunk in England during those years came into the country via smuggling. So when you drink a cup of Yorkshire Tea, spare a thought about this piece of history.
Robin Hood’s Bay street
Why Robin Hood’s Bay? Well, it was useful in several ways. There was good access from the sea, but the nearest major ports were some distance away. Once landed, the goods could be hidden or moved out on any of several routes across the North York Moors, where local knowledge was at a premium. Finally, the village itself is built on a steep bank coming up from the sea, with the houses packed tightly in to narrow twisting streets. It was said that a bolt of silk could be passed from house to house, using windows, tunnels or hidden hatches, without setting foot outdoors, from the shore all the way to the ridge above. All in all, an ideal place to shift contraband!
Robin Hood’s Bay looking north
The heyday of Robin Hood’s Bay smuggling was over by the 1850s. But tea smuggling had declined rather earlier, when the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger passed a bill slashing the tea tax from 119% to 12.5%. Overnight, the risk-reward equation changed. He recouped his government’s money via a window tax, leading to countless house windows up and down the country being bricked up – unpopular, to be sure, but not likely to lead to smuggling.
So far, I haven’t used smuggling in the plots of either my historical or science fiction. Something to explore in the future, perhaps. Since it happens so very often throughout history, I’m sure a smuggling plot could fit in either place.
Five and twenty ponies, Trotting through the dark — Brandy for the Parson, Baccy for the Clerk; Laces for a lady, letters for a spy, And watch the wall, my darling, While the Gentlemen go by!
Today I thought I’d write about coding. Not in a technical manual, how to do your first “Hello World” widget kind of way, but just to give a general sense of how it’s done, and how things have changed over the years. This was prompted by the passages I have been writing for Timing recently, in which Mitnash and Slate have been crafting a fix for a particularly unpleasant hacking threat. The plot is all wrapped up in blackmail and personal relationships, but their ability to code is what gets them sent here and there. But first, let’s look back in time.
Colossus being operated at Bletchley Park (WIki)
Not so many years ago, computers were relatively simple things to work with. They didn’t look it – all the complexity was visible by way of valves and a spider’s web of cables connecting them. But the range of things you could tell them to do was quite limited. The available options were limited, and they were essentially isolated from each other. Today’s computers are almost the opposite – they look simple on the outside, but they have a hugely expanded range of capabilities, sensory inputs, and ways to communicate with nearby devices.
The art of the coder has changed along with that. Once upon a time the programmer had to do everything. If you wanted to draw a blob on a screen you had to know exactly which bit of memory to poke with which binary digit. You needed to master a whole range of disparate skills in order to accomplish quite modest tasks, and oftentimes you needed to deal with the innards of the machine’s firmware. Porting the results to a different machine was a serious challenge.
Neuframe (I worked on this, long ago)
Times have changed. If you need graphics animation, or remote communication, or artificial intelligence, there’s a library for that nowadays. Today’s coder relies on standard modules and frameworks, pulling in this one and that as the need arises. Moreover, he or she is insulated from the nuts and bolts of the device, so can write essentially the same program to run on a high-end server, a regular desktop or laptop, and any one of hundreds of different mobile devices. That is enormously liberating, but brings in a whole raft of new problems.
Does the borrowed code actually do what you want, neither less nor more? Do you trust the library writer with the innards of your system and, what is usually more precious, the data it contains? Does it already come with adequate security against hacking, or do you need something extra? On one level, the coder is freer than ever to be creative with a wealth of open source material, but to offset that, there’s a long and rather dull checklist to work through.
Some while ago I made the transition from pure development to testing and QA: it’s a decision I have had no cause to regret! I still get to write code, but it’s behind the scenes code to validate, or sometimes to challenge the work of others. QA has changed over the years alongside development. Once upon a time there was an adversarial relationship, where the two teams were essentially pitted one against the other by commercial structures, with almost no rapport or dialogue. That has largely gone, and the normal situation now is that developers and testers work together from the outset – a collaborative effort rather than competitive. There’s a lot of interest in strategies where you write the tests first, and then code in such a way as to ensure they pass, rather than test teams playing catch-up at the end of a project.
Coding and hacking are central to the plot of Far from the Spaceports, and its successor Timing. Hacking, then and now, isn’t necessarily bad. It all depends on the motive and intentions of the hacker, and the same techniques can be used for quite opposite purposes. Some of the time Mitnash and Slate are hacking; some of the time they are defending against other people’s hacks.
I have taken the line that the (future hypothetical) work of the ECRB, to – protect financial institutions against fraud and theft, would need a freelance coder more than a policeman. Moving from place to place around the solar system’s settlements takes weeks or months, and even message signals can take hours. It seems to me that it would be much more efficient for ECRB to send someone who could actually identify and fix a problem, rather than someone who might just chase after a perpetrator.
On one level, Mitnash has it easy. He can pass all the necessary but time-consuming work of testing, validating, and productionising his code to somebody else. If I ever worked with him, I’d get frustrated by his cavalier attitude to the basic constraints of working in a team, and his casual approach to QA. But then, he gets to travel out to Mars and beyond, and has Slate as his team partner.
Artist’s impression: Dawn, Ceres and Vesta (NASA/JPL)
Several bits and pieces to talk about today. First, I was nominated in one of these “post seven lines from page seven of your current Work in Progress” challenges. It’s always a bit tricky picking out where page seven is, since I write initially for Kindle. But what follows is a fair guess. The story is (provisionally) called Timing. It opens with Mitnash and Slate back on the Scilly Isle asteroids, having just come in from a long and seemingly dull trip out to one of the moons of Jupiter. They are at Frag Rockers Bar with their friends, and one of them has just mentioned a leaflet which appeared recently, circulated by a group called Robin’s Rebels which Mitnash has never heard of.
Eibhlin took the leaflet from Rydal.
“Here, listen. ‘We are the voice of the downtrodden poor. Financial oppression is slavery; deals and investments are today’s whips and chains. But we speak for freedom and justice, and we have the technical talent to fight back. We will strike again and again at these parasites until the entire system is destroyed, root and branch. We will force out those who grow rich from others by means of clever financial tricks, and make them work at honest labour. You do not know us yet, but you will know us soon.’ Then there’s quite a bit more, all much the same.”
Finn was reading over her shoulder.
“Sounds like they’re up for a fight. Do you think they’re for real or just making noise?”
Robin’s Rebels feature prominently in Timing, along with several other old friends and adversaries – and new ones. As well as on the Scilly Isle asteroids, some of the action takes place on Mars and one of its moons, Phobos. All being well, you will find out more about all this towards the end of the summer…
Sruti Nayani (Google+ photo)
As well as that, Far from the Spaceports has appeared in several reviews and interviews, which has been very gratifying. There has been something of an international flavour here. Sruti’s Book Blog, over in India, carried a review and two-part interview, which can be found at:
What was interesting about the book besides the awesome set up, and the background, was the author keeping in touch with the subtle ways of humans, way into the future.
Of course, there is fraud and there are people investigating it, but he manages to grab the reader’s interest, right at the start. How do the two of them manage to solve the mystery? How does it all work, in an environment that is so different from ours?
“Wonderful atmosphere, great dynamics between characters and good mystery about the financial case”.
Don Massenzio (from his blog)
Then finally it was over to the US of A for an author interview with Don Massenzio, including an extract featuring the Frag Rockers Bar, my favourite hangout on the Scilly Isles. This starts with some easy questions like
DM: Can you summarise your book in one sentence? RA: A human-AI partnership tackles hi-tech financial crime among the asteroids.
and then moves through several other questions to finish with the extract I mentioned.
I thought it was about time for another space-themed blog today, so here are some interesting recent finds.
Ceres’ Haulani Crater, from 240 miles up (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
First, here is a high-resolution NASA picture of Haulani Crater on Ceres, taken from an orbital altitude of under 400 km. The crater is about 21 miles in diameter, so would comfortably fit inside the M25 motorway around London. The level of detail is quite extraordinary, showing not only surface features such as landslides, but also allowing some inferences about the relative age of the different portions.
The scattering of bright spots on the surface of the asteroid has excited a great deal of conversation since they were first identified as Dawn drew closer on its long journey. Even with the close-up views, uncertainty remains, and probably will do until such point as something can actually land there. Meanwhile, the best guess is that they reveal traces of chemical deposits, probably some kind of salt. When you read of the asteroidal settlements called the Scilly Isles in Far from the Spaceports, imagine scenes like this out on the surface…
Pluto’s atmosphere, backlit by the sun (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)
Atmosphere! When you read old science books, or old science fiction, most moons and similar small objects were believed to be completely airless bodies. Atmospheres were thought to be the province of “real” planets. But the more we have been able to get a close view, the more we realise that atmospheres are the rule rather than the exception. This image shows the view of Pluto captured by the New Horizons probe as it receded further away from the sun – the atmospheric haze extends out to about 80 km, considerably further than anybody had expected.
These atmospheres are generated by a whole mix of local conditions. These include the effects of the distant sun’s warmth driving chemical reactions, nearby bodies flexing the surface slightly, and so squeezing gas out of the rocks, as well as internal chemical or seismological actions. Now, it’s as well to remember the vast majority of the gases found are not only toxic, but also far too thin to be of much use… nevertheless finding them at all has been a surprise.
A ‘dust devil’ in Marathon Valley, as seen by the Opportunity rover (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Finally, Mars. A good chunk of my forthcoming book (which currently has working title Timing) is set on Mars and one of its moons, so naturally I have been following discoveries there with interest. Now, our present selection of gadgets on Mars, while extremely clever and carrying out their missions in exemplary manner, come a long way short of what I have in my fictional imagination. Mars in the new novel has a wide variety of different communities, from a financial training college out near the giant mountain Olympus Mons, through to an anarchic and hedonistic settlement at Elysium Planitia. We are some way from achieving those yet, but there’s plenty of time…
That’s it for today. There seems to be plenty to discover out in the solar system. Some of the findings reinforce what was previously believed, but others open up whole new and unexpected areas. Happy reading – both fact and fiction.
Last time I looked at our changing views of the animal world, and our ongoing attempts to find companionship there. But alongside that there has always been the recognition that animal or bird companions don’t quite satisfy. The Hebrew Bible sums it all up with the comment that none of the creatures was ideal as a partner, and moves on to the need for a second human. Whatever you make of the details of that account, the remaining pages of the Bible go on to describe all manner of human relationships – as well as opposite sex and same sex pairs, we find family and strangers, leaders and followers, friends and enemies, pairings which were suitable and entirely unsuitable. The other sacred texts of mankind are the same in this respect – alongside communications with the divine, human interactions are everywhere.
But for some reason, as a species many of us have been perennially disappointed and frustrated with relationships with one other – a sorry trend for which one can very easily find counter-examples, but which has fuelled many of history’s conflicts, both national and personal. Perhaps the autonomy and potential for disagreement in another individual is too disconcerting. Whatever the cause, the idea of building some sort of mechanical person goes back into the ancient world.
Greek myth has several variations on this theme, including Pygmalion’s ivory statue which animated to become his wife, and Hephaestus’ automata who assisted at his forge. In these cases, divine intervention of some sort was necessary to make the transition from dead to living. But in addition, Daedalus is said to have used quicksilver in order to impart speech to his statues, so the possibility of a human invention was considered.
Mary Shelley, portrait by Richard Rothwell (Wiki)
For many centuries, speculation about artificial life circled around biology rather than metallurgy. Medieval alchemists toyed with the idea of homunculi, miniature humanoids whose creation required a series of esoteric steps such as leaving human sperm to incubate in horse manure for 40 days. Suggestions that the true quest of the alchemists was spiritual rather than physical make a lot of sense. The discovery in the late 18th century that human nerves responded to electricity triggered new ideas, which in literature were summed up by Mary Shelley in the person of Frankenstein and his research, leading to the creation of his life-form.
Today, the pursuit of artificial intelligence is largely seen as a technological challenge. By and large, we are working on the assumption that the main breakthroughs need to be in software, and that the container which houses the resulting application is only a convenient package allowing access to various kinds of sensory input. Time will tell if this assumption is valid.
Cover image, I Robot by Isaac Asimov
We have a mixed attitude to artificial life. On the one hand we welcome it as a possible assistant and helper, but on the other we are anxious about possible failures of control. Will the creation refuse to obey the creator? Will it have end-goals which are hostile to our own well-being? In fiction, and to a degree in actuality, we try to govern this by logic. Isaac Asimov postulated that all robots had to obey three laws intended to protect humanity, and simply asserted that it was not possible to construct an artificial brain without these constraints. Frankenstein, on the other hand, rapidly lost control of his creation, largely through not understanding and empathising with its needs.
In the near-future world of Far from the Spaceports, some of these particular problems have been solved. Slate and her persona siblings are, on many levels, fit companions for Mitnash and the other humans they partner. But not in every way. Mitnash enjoys Slate’s company and her capacity for work, but often finds himself challenged by the ways in which she differs from his expectation. He often does a poor job of maintaining good relationships with both Slate as his working partner, and Shayna as his romantic one. Quite apart from the everyday difficulties of balancing work and life, Mit has to constantly choose how to relate to two quite different female partners. Our society struggles to balance the competing demands of an online world and our immediate family and friends – I have every expectation that this future society will struggle as well.
To finish, just for fun, here is a NASA picture showing the gravity variation on Mars. It has no connection with this blog post, but some of the action of By Default takes place on that planet!
Local Variations in the Gravitational Pull of Mars (Credit: NASA/GSFC/Scientific Visualization Studio)
Over the next few days, Google’s Go-playing algorithm, AlphaGo, will take on the current world Go champion, Lee Se-dol. It is an event which is being watched closely by both Go players and coders, since until very recently Go was thought to be a game intractable for machines to play competently.
I’ve worked in various ways with AI over a lot of years now, so thought it was high time I wrote about it here. Far from the Spaceports, and the in-progress follow-up By Default, have human-AI relationships at their heart. Mitnash, a thoroughly human investigator and coder, has Slate as his partner. Slate is an AI – or persona, as I prefer to use in the books – and the two work together in their struggle against high-tech crime.
International Helicopter Safety Team (IHST) workshop presentation from HeliExpo 2013
How far are we away from this? In my opinion, quite a long way. There have been huge advances in AI during my working life. This has largely been made possible by corresponding advances in the speed and capability of the hardware systems on which they run. However, creative ideas for how to code learning algorithms and pattern recognition have also come taken huge strides. Nevertheless, I don’t think we are very close to working with Slate or her fellow personas just yet.
Of course, you have to be mindful of a quote attributed to Bill Gates: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” But that said, I still think we’re some way off.
Neural network design (Wiki)
There are a lot of different, and very useful, ideas as to what constitutes intelligence, but for the purpose of this blog I am largely focusing on the abilities to learn and then detect meaningful patterns, work usefully with inconsistent or poor quality information, and communicate about all this with another individual in such a way that both parties can revise their opinions.
Part of the problem is that most people are working on a very small part of the problem, and the organisation paying them only really wants quite a specific outcome. So one team might be working on machine health monitoring and fault prediction, to improve aviation safety. Another will concentrate on whatever is needed to identify objects in photographs. Another on voice recognition. Another on being able to beat human champions at a specific game. And so on. Comparatively few are integrating all this into a single entity.
Senet board from Tutankhamun’s tomb (Wiki)
Human intelligence is also noteworthy for being able to adapt flexibly to new situations, calling for similar but not identical responses. So my guess is that Lee Se-dol probably also plays an outstanding game of chess, or Senet, or any of dozens of board games. At a guess, he could probably hold his own very well at some game he had never seen before, after a comparatively brief explanation of the rules. I have serious doubts as to whether Google’s codebase could make such a transition.
Another issue is repetition and predictability. If you’re coding a safety system, you really want to know that the same set of circumstances will lead to the same consequences. Quite apart from giving confidence to your immediate users, there is the whole matter of getting the system qualified for use. Imagine your system has failed to recommend replacement of a critical component. There has been a crash, and you are at the investigation. “Why did your system fail to recommend that the component be changed?” And you reply, “Oh, I don’t know – it says something different every time.” I can’t imagine this going down very well with the investigation committee. For the reaction of a friend, however, unpredictability is part of the fun.
Betty the problem-solving crow (BBC)
We find it difficult to define what intelligence really is, or which part of our being is responsible for it. Recent comparative studies in which bird and primate intelligence are contrasted, have questioned the idea that it is seated in the cortex: birds don’t have such a thing. In the light of such basic uncertainty, corporate reluctance is understandable. It is hugely easier – and hugely more cost effective – for an organisation to say “build me a system which can identify patterns of word use by different authors” than “build me intelligent partners for my human staff.”
As someone working in a tech industry, I am keenly aware of, and excited by, the possibility of AI. How would my team carry out quality assurance for such a system? It’s often hard enough to do this for a complex but entirely rule-bound application. The challenges are immense.
But as an author, I am entirely free to suppose that all that has been done, and focus on the storytelling issues of how such a relationship would work.
