The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [68]
“Well…artificial intelligence, more or less.”
He decided to ignore the cryptic “more or less.” “So how’s artificial intelligence doing?”
She grinned at last. “If you mean how close are we to getting a computer to have a reasonable chat with us, terrible. If you go back to the kinds of artificial intelligence projects that the people who started the field were trying to solve, not bad at all. Did you ever hear of a man named Marvin Minsky?”
Ranjit consulted his memory and came up empty. “I don’t think so.”
“Pity. He was one of the best minds ever to try to define what thought was, and to find ways of getting a computer to actually do something you could call thinking. He used to tell a story that cheers me up sometimes.” She paused there, as though unsure of her audience’s interest. Ranjit, who would have taken pleasure in hearing her announce train delays or closing stock prices, made the right sounds, and she went on. “Well, the thing is that in the beginning of AI studies, he, and all the other pioneers, too, considered pattern recognition as one of the hallmarks of AI. Then pattern recognition got solved in a rather everyday way. Checkout counters in every supermarket in the world began reading the prices of every item from bar codes. So what happened? AI simply got redefined. Pattern recognition got left out of the recipe because they’d solved that one, even if the computers still couldn’t make up a joke or figure out from the way you looked that you had a hangover.”
Ranjit said, “So can you get a computer to make up a joke now?”
She sat up. “I wish,” she said moodily. And then she sighed. “Actually, my main interest isn’t in that kind of thing anymore. It’s more in applications. Autonomous prostheses, mostly.” Then she changed expression, and the subject. Without warning she asked, “Ranjit, why do you keep covering your mouth like that?”
It was a more personal question than he had expected from her. He was, however, quite aware of the way his hand kept covering his face. She persisted. “Is it your teeth that bother you?”
He conceded, “I know what I look like.”
“Well, so do I, Ranjit. You look like an honest, decent, and extremely intelligent man who hasn’t gotten around to letting a dentist repair his bite.” She shook her head at him. “It’s the easiest thing in the world, Ranjit, and you will not only look better, you’ll chew better.” She stood up. “I promised Aunt Bea that I wouldn’t stay longer than ten minutes, and she promised me that I could ask you if you wanted to swim in the ocean for a change. On Nilaweli beach. Do you know where that is? We’ve got a little beach house there, so if you’d care to…”
Oh, yes, Ranjit would care to. “We’ll work it out,” she said, and surprised him by giving him a hug. “We missed you,” she said, and then drew back to look at him. “Gamini said you asked him about his old girlfriend. Do you have any of that kind of question for me?”
“Uh,” he said. And then, “Well, yes, I suppose you mean about that Canadian.”
She grinned. “Yes, I suppose I do. Well, the Canadian was in Bora-Bora, last I heard, where they were building an even bigger hotel. But that was long ago. We don’t keep in touch.”
Ranjit hadn’t even known that Gamini and Myra were aware of each other’s existence, much less that they were apparently on easy chatting terms. That wasn’t all he hadn’t known. His density of visitors was getting more so, with the lawyer from Dr. Bandara’s office coming in with more documents to sign—“It’s not that your father’s estate is at all complicated,” he told Ranjit apologetically. “It’s just that you were reported missing and somebody in the bureaucracy interpreted that to mean presumed dead. So we have to clear that up.”
And then there were the police. Not that anybody was filing any charges against Ranjit himself. De Saram made sure of that, before he would allow any questioning at all. But they had