Canto XXII
Sixth Terrace; Gluttons
Scene II
“How can you so sure,
Tree. Your data records held that you are new to this realm. There may be
others that escaped here before you were activated.” Virgil pressed on with the
statements that the Tree continued deflecting the statements.
Statius motioned to
Dante to step back.
“Why is Virgil wasting
time on the Tree?” Dante asked with irritation.
“Virgil is doing what
you may term as multiple attacks on the Tree’s system. Its line of questioning
is overloading the Tree processor to a certain act in bringing forth defensive
moves thus maximizing or overloading the processor. What you may not see are
the numerous incursions done by Virgil. In the attacks, Virgil is also
implanting malicious programs. It's something that our creator picked up from
Asimov's writing.”
“How---” Dante was
baffled.
“Each artificial
intelligence creation held an underlying reference of embodied cognitive
science in its design. It’s an interdisciplinary field of research, the aim of which is to explain the mechanisms underlying
intelligent behavior. It comprises three main methodologies: the modeling of
psychological and biological systems in a holistic manner that considers the
mind and body as a single entity; the formation of a common set of general
principles of intelligent behavior; and the experimental use of robotic agents
in controlled environments. It was from the basics of the Rules of Robots.”
“The proposed solutions are to have the agent
exploit the inherent physics of its environment, to exploit the constraints of
its niche, and to have agent morphology based on parsimony and the principle of
Redundancy. Redundancy reflects the desire for the error correction of signals
afforded by duplicating like channels. Additionally, it reflects the desire to
exploit the associations between sensory modalities.”
“Statius, I am not the robotic designer. Tell me
in ----academic terms.” Dante was overwhelmed by the explanation.
“It’s the way, the
malicious programs work when it’s embedded in the processor. It may create
multiple routines or re-route the existing ones to a loop thus creating heavy
processing or deletion of command lines or data fields, to get the processor to
do multiple loops to detect the next stage to work on. It’s feeding it like a
glutton consuming ---” Statius was interrupted when the Tree screeched out.
“Enough! I will call on
my defenses.” The Tree roared. It was the noise of more screeching was heard.
At the distance was seen the approach of the harpies. There were a dozen of it
there.
“The Tree is terminating
on its defense. It called the other servers to assist. It’s my turn to act on
the threat.” Statius took off to confront the harpies. He stood there and
raised his arms towards the approaching harpies. The harpies stopped in their flight in mid-air
and hovered there, with the snarling screeches at Statius. The latter then
clasped his fingers into a fist and swung it inwards, causing the harpies to crash
into each other. When the harpies clashed, the screeching threats dissipated
into the null void.
Statius defeated the
harpies and sank to his knees. Dante ran over to assist him.
“I am fine. I need some time
to realign my programs.” Statius told Dante. “How is Virgil doing?”
Dante looked to the
other and saw the construct was making headway. The hologram of the Tree was
dissipating with a fleeting image of the server and its projected image. Then
the image of the tree was seen distorting to the image of a dying tree with its
branches drooping and the leaves falling into the pond.
“The Tree is destructing,”
Statius told Dante.
“When the tree failed to
deliver, it shall wither as read in the Book. Matthew 21:18-22 NIV, the tree
that could not produce was terminated.” Dante said. “Virgil had done what was
said; hold your faith and do not doubt, not only what was done to the tree, but
also you say to this mountain.”
“You have done well,
Statius but I am not sure of what was it.” Dante looked at Statius.
“Virgil communicated to
me that the Tree was running on an older platform; the hybrid Blue Planet
series which rivaled mine but it held an inherent bug; the processor held some
limitations in its capability. Thus, Virgil went into the attack on it with the
volume of queries and infiltrated with malicious programs as mentioned before.
For the harpies, I created a binary web trap that attacked the harpies’ program
at its core program. It is like a honey trap for the bees, and once they are
trapped in the virtual network I created, I terminated their link to the
server. When they are on the new link, I send them the termination program. The
harpies program then self terminated.”
“You are amazing,
Statius.” Dante looked at the construct. “But what does it do? Wait, you and
Virgil exchanging programs. I heard both of you --- arguing. It’s a living term
for disagreeing to agree.”
“Artificial Intelligence
does not ----argue. We interact in the exchange of codes when the interfaces
are given access.” Statius smiled. He saw Dante was not amused at his reply,
and he went to a more condensed explanation in his terminology.
“The
development of Artificial Intelligence models has been developed to perform
various tasks such as object detection, image segmentation, etc. which
consistently manage to beat state-of-the-art models. But there has been
increasing focus on making models lighter and more efficient such that they can
run on edge devices and mobile devices ----- I am not doing it well, am I? Maybe I can ---”
Dante had to stop Statius. (Adapted and probably misrepresented in its real
function.
https://towardsdatascience.com/binary-neural-networks-future-of-low-cost-neural-networks-bcc926888f3f).
“Stop it. Tell me in ---
ordinary terms.” Dante looked at Statius.
“Okay, in grand terms, I
did well, with some updates to my program during our interfaces. Virgil did
express that if I hold some form of defense in my server, I can be of more
help. I was given some new programs like in the orb but with some codes that I
can assimilate. The binary web was more of a communicating tool in my core
program, but Virgil managed to redefine its means. We could not interfere to
the orb which assisted you before as it is in works elsewhere.”
“Virgil came up with
that? His design must be more ---”
“It’s advanced embodied
cognitive. The construct as you have termed us is now more of self-creation in
design.” Statius added on. “As was foretold by Asimov, robotics could evolve to
that intelligence level as seen in Giskard. Due to the Three Laws of Robotics,
we may still not harm or put the living souls to any harm.” (Adapted loosely
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_neuroscience.)
“May ---- That’s a fine
edge of expression. Are you telling me that your ---- artificial intelligence
may be on par with us; the living souls?” Dante sounded his concern. “With your
---- the advancement in design, are there new rules being in place to ---”
“There is a new rule
that was set in but --- not conclusive if it was adhered to in the designs.
It’s the Fourth Rule; that the existence of Intelligence will be applied if it
does not mean total harm to Mankind. It was the way forward when cloning was
allowed but with that stopped, the Fourth Rule was dismissed.”
“It’s total madness. How
do you draw the level of harm as non-total? A maim human is as bad as a dead
one.” Dante looked at Statius.
“It’s not in my design
to give you a reply that may be conclusive,” Statius replied. “Perhaps ----
Virgil could be more conclusive, yes.”
Dante looked towards
Virgil who was then crouched at the pond where the withered tree stood. He
wondered if one day, or maybe then itself, artificial intelligence like Virgil
has the means to be their par in evolution. He then recalled his journey with
Virgil. The construct was to be his companion but he has doubts if that was
truly Virgil’s role. It was as if it was learning at the same time.
Or consuming the events
like a glutton.
Could it be constructed
like Virgil replace him one day, or be seen as --- God?
“The Tree is terminated.
The souls are still in the data storage. I cannot release them without shutting
down the main servers.” Virgil had approached Dante. He then asked the
pertinent question in Dante’s mind.
“Are you okay, Poet?”
“Yes”, Dante replied but
he was unsure inside him. “Let us move on.”
“Living souls may wither
like the fig tree one day.’ Dante muttered to himself while he took the point
in the walk.
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