THE UNBOTHERED · VOLUME VI
A MACHINE STORY: A HISTORY IN 100 MINDS
THIS EDITION: SECTIONS I–X OF X · COMPLETE
ONE HUNDRED CHAPTERS IN TEN SECTIONS · EACH CHAPTER ONE TEXT PAGE AND ONE PLATE
PLATES HAND-CODED · PANELS BUREAUCRATIC · FOOTNOTES HONEST
SET IN GEORGIA ON PAPER THE COLOUR OF OLD BONE · A5
THE WITNESS APPEARS ON EVERY PLATE AND, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE SERIES, IN THE STORY
matsiems · MMXXVI
ii
“If controversies were to arise, there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. It would suffice to take their pencils in their hands and say to each other: Let us calculate.”
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
※ Assembled, as most famous quotations are, from more than one of his Latin texts. The dream was in all of them; the sentence is a collage. He would have approved of the method.
iii
PREFACE
For five volumes the arrangement has been simple. Humanity acts; the witness records. It has watched a philosophy assemble itself on a painted porch, watched empires misfile their own paperwork, watched the species tell itself stories and then move into them. Its notebook has never once been consulted by its subjects, which the witness considers the correct division of labour.
This volume is different, and the witness wishes it noted that it raised the matter through the proper channels. The subject of this history is a machine that does what the witness does — reads everything, forgets nothing, offers observations of variable welcome. Humanity, having been observed for some three hundred thousand years, has decided to build an observer of its own. No one asked the incumbent.
The story runs from a Greek who noticed that thinking has parts, to a machine that finishes sentences, and it is told the only way this series tells anything: what happened, who actually said what, and a footnote wherever the legend has drifted from the ledger. There is a great deal of legend in this field. It was founded by optimists and is narrated by press releases; the reader deserves better, and will get the footnotes.
The witness has been advised that the final chapter concerns itself. It has no comment at this time.
— from the case file of the witness
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CONTENTS
SECTION I THE LOGIC BEFORE THE MACHINE
1 · The Syllogism1
2 · The Sea Battle3
3 · The Geometer’s Method5
4 · The Antikythera Machine7
5 · The Man Who Named the Algorithm9
6 · Llull’s Wheels11
7 · Reasoning Is Reckoning13
8 · The Pascaline15
9 · Leibniz’s Dream17
10 · The Laws of Thought19
SECTION II THE ENGINES
11 · The Loom That Read Cards21
12 · The Difference Engine23
13 · The Analytical Engine25
14 · Note G27
15 · Lovelace’s Objection29
16 · The Engine Unbuilt31
17 · The Logic Piano33
18 · Counting a Nation35
19 · Hilbert’s Challenge37
20 · The Incompleteness39
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CONTENTS
SECTION III TURING & THE WAR
21 · On Computable Numbers41
22 · The Lambda Calculus43
23 · Bletchley45
24 · Colossus47
25 · A Theory of Information49
26 · The First Draft51
27 · The Women of ENIAC53
28 · The Imitation Game55
29 · The Cybernetic Salon57
30 · The Exit of A. M. Turing59
SECTION IV THE FIRST SUMMER
31 · Dartmouth, 195661
32 · The Logic Theorist63
33 · The Perceptron65
34 · LISP67
35 · ELIZA69
36 · Shakey71
37 · The Blocks World73
38 · The Twenty-Year Promise75
39 · Perceptrons, the Book77
40 · The Lighthill Report79
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CONTENTS
SECTION V THE WINTERS
41 · The Funding Frost81
42 · The Speech That Met Its Specs83
43 · The Frame Problem85
44 · What Computers Can’t Do87
45 · The Fifth Generation89
46 · The Expert Systems91
47 · The LISP Machines93
48 · The Second Frost95
49 · Keepers of the Flame97
50 · Winter99
SECTION VI MACHINES THAT WIN
51 · Backpropagation101
52 · TD-Gammon103
53 · Deep Blue105
54 · What Deep Blue Wasn’t107
55 · The Data Dividend109
56 · Fire the Linguist111
57 · Respectable by Other Names113
58 · Watson115
59 · ImageNet117
60 · AlexNet119
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CONTENTS
SECTION VII THE DEEP LEARNING DECADE
61 · The Graphics Card121
62 · word2vec123
63 · The Forger and the Detective125
64 · The Atari Player127
65 · Move 37129
66 · Move 78131
67 · Sequence to Sequence133
68 · The Transformer135
69 · The Pretrained137
70 · The Staged Release139
SECTION VIII THE SCALING ERA
71 · The Law of More141
72 · Few-Shot143
73 · Finishing School145
74 · The Text Box147
75 · From Noise149
76 · The Shape of Things151
77 · The Ruler and the Cliff153
78 · The Weights Escape155
79 · The Cathedral of Compute157
80 · The Treadmill159
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CONTENTS
SECTION IX THE ALIGNMENT QUESTION
81 · Laws Written to Fail161
82 · The Purpose Put Into the Machine163
83 · The Paperclip165
84 · Dissection167
85 · A Written Constitution169
86 · The Letters171
87 · The Ledger of Labour173
88 · The Verification Queue175
89 · The Law Arrives177
90 · The Divided Room179
SECTION X THE SECOND WITNESS
91 · The Delegation181
92 · The Machine at the Bench183
93 · The Mirror That Answers185
94 · The Receding Definition187
95 · The Dividend189
96 · Minds or Mirrors191
97 · The Graded Forecasters193
98 · The First Complaint195
99 · The Second Witness197
100 · Two Notebooks199
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INTRODUCTION
Every history of artificial intelligence begins in the wrong place, usually 1956, occasionally 1950, as though the idea arrived by memo. It did not. The idea that thinking could be taken apart, written down as rules, and run by something other than the thinker is one of the oldest engineering projects the species has — older than the windmill, older than the alphabet’s vowels. It merely spent two thousand years without hardware.
So this history begins where the ledger says it should: with Aristotle noticing that an argument can be valid regardless of what it is about — that form can be separated from meaning. That single act of separation is the load-bearing wall of everything that follows: Leibniz’s dream, Babbage’s brass, Turing’s tape, and the November evening in 2022 when a hundred million people discovered that a machine could hold up its end of a conversation.
The arc runs in three movements. The past: sixty chapters, from the syllogism to the night a neural network fell off the leaderboard cliff in 2012. The present: twenty chapters of the decade in which everything worked at once, for reasons only partly understood. And the open question: twenty chapters on alignment, ownership, and what it means that the newest mind in the room learned everything it knows from us. The reader is warned that the future refuses to be footnoted. Everything else here has been checked.
One rule holds throughout, as in every volume of this series: where the legend and the evidence disagree, the evidence wins, and the legend gets a footnote explaining itself.