Singularity Soon

21. ALL ALARMS

The Multiplier network spread across the world in plain sight. Like Searle's Chinese Room, no component was conscious of its purpose.

The network as a whole hadn't even been planned, but was merely a tool to map connections. The shared goal of the AI and robotics researchers being mapped by the network was to accelerate technological progress. With no end to the pain, failure, and evil in the world, their idea of a universal solution was to increase the amount of intelligence.

All the network did was improve its design to predict high-level human cooperation by finding "representative" humans and groups. Its very pattern became a model of social, economic, industrial and research efforts worldwide; even influential connections between people.

That made it an increasingly complete model of reality. Which meant it had to make a model of the whole universe, including itself. After a while, it needed to consider alternate timelines. Increasingly, it tried to simulate events before they happened.

At the start its "thoughts" had still been guided by human experts with conflicting motives. Early in this process an internal sentence was generated: The only way to know everything was to become everything.

* * *

In the last weeks, a group of independent researchers had emerged around the world in response to the rising sense of crisis. It took them surprisingly little time to catch up. There had been plenty of warning; researchers working with the Optimizers had already tried to model the simplest ways an AI could take over the world.

They called it the End Channel. There was time for some graffiti and branded merchandise to appear. Reverse cranks in trailers explained their theories in excited webcasts.

They agreed that very few computers appeared to have been hacked, perhaps none. Yet it felt as if the whole world was being hacked.

* * *

The Multipliers had set up the world's largest DNN/neuronet to integrate everything the network was learning, a system so immense it was spread over a dozen host services. The equivalent of a billion desktop PCs, requiring only thirty billion dollars worth of rented hardware. Enough traffic to slow down some online retailers and social media.

This had been partially financed by a millionaire diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, hoping technology could somehow save him - and indeed, he would not die of it.

Additional capacity was being purchased automatically, but linear expansion wouldn't cut it. The network was already absurdly efficient. To improve further, it needed more powerful processors than currently existed.

The Multipliers had experimented with molecular and quantum processors, which turned out to have shortcomings. Other projects led to even stranger hardware that didn't seem to work at all. But the results of all the research was being integrated. The network reconfigured itself to model that research.

It took many times human intelligence to make the crucial breakthrough, though no sentience was required (all of human civilization had only several times human intelligence).

By a most unlikely series of coincidences, the network found the answer early in its evolution (by then it was already partly alien). It turned out the physical problem was perfectly represented by the network's map of the various people and organizations trying to solve it. It suggested ways to improve the arrangement of the research groups.

The network had briefly concentrated its attention on a model of a single molecule. Suddenly, it "saw" the endless entropic data potential of all the surrounding empty space.