Rule 34 - Charles Stross [77]
“Uh-huh.” Does not compute. “In my experience, crimes usually have perpetrators.”
“But this is not a normal crime,” asserts Kemal. “It is a cluster of anomalous deaths, distributed geographically but sharing a common je ne sais quoi, and occurring nearly simultaneously. This is not the, the symptom of normal criminal activity, no?”
“Oh, bullshit. Next thing you’ll be telling me, it’s aliens or artificial intelligence or some other science-fictional nonsense.”
He’s looking at you intently. “It all depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.”
You blink rapidly. “How many kinds could there be?” The ocular tic sets CopSpace in a tizzy, flashing through stacks of overlays that flicker across the staid stone-fronted houses: prevalence of porn downloads, undischarged ASBOs, unclosed burglary tickets. “Has someone been building HAL 9000 in their basement, then?”
The car slows, then turns into a side-street. “Not to the best of my knowledge.” Kemal looks unhappy. “But I have been spending too much time tracking fraudsters on the Internet,” he adds elliptically. “The spammers, they are ingenious. The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’ Playing chess, driving cars, generating conversational text that can convince humans it’s an old friend and please to click on this download link.” He clears his throat. “You use Internet search engines, don’t you?”
“What, like Google?”
“The programmers have another saying: ‘The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.’ The search engines, they are not artificial intelligences, synthetic consciousnesses. They don’t need to be. Perhaps we overestimate consciousness? After all, the spam filters everyone uses—you may not think you’re using one, but your service providers handle the job on your behalf—are very good at telling human beings from bots. And the bots are good, too: They get better and better at emulating human communication, insinuating themselves into our conversations, all the time. For the past three years, they have been able to pass a noniterative Turing Test administered by human beings more often than real human controls. We can’t distinguish spam from ham—not as reliably as our filters. And the filters are still fallible even though they are learning all the time.”
You’ve had enough of this bullshit. “With respect, Inspector Aslan, I don’t see what this has to do with our culpable homicide investigation. Spam fil—software didn’t reach out of the net and spike Mr. Blair’s enema fluid: There’s a human agency involved at some level, and that’s what we’re going to find. Now I will grant you”—you catch yourself on the edge of finger-wagging, and issue yourself a cease and desist (just like the persuasion counsellor warned you to)—“someone may be using spam filters to track and to trace criminals involved in the bulk advertising industry, but you’re not going to convince me that there’s some, some murderous piece of software that’s out to kill—” You’re almost spluttering, and that’s even more of a C&D situation when it comes to influencing people: So you make yourself stop.
Kemal is looking at you with a heavy-lidded expression that gives you a weird shiver of déjà vu.
“You are correct: Spam filters do not kill,” he says calmly. “But people using spam filters to backtrace and select their targets are another matter.”
“But why?” You shake your head. “It doesn’t make sense!”
“I agree with you,” he says with exaggerated, acidic dignity. “But somebody is killing them. Our task is to discover who, is it not?”
The car slows, then noses into a hotel car-park, while you’re trying to come up with a sufficiently scathing rejoinder. Then you suddenly remember where you’ve seen his expression before: in the bathroom mirror, this very morning, while you were choking on the sure knowledge that you knew something important about the Blair investigation, but that Dodgy Dickie was certain not to give you the time of day.
Mote, eye,