TWTBACD Ch.17 - The Threshold Approaches

Chapter 17

The Threshold Approaches

2031–2032

2031-32: AGI is close enough to smell

[ARJUN SHARMA — Bangalore — Special Dispatch]

Arjun was at a conference in Geneva in November 2031 when the paper was presented. The room had a hundred and forty people in it and had been scheduled for a four PM slot — the graveyard of academic conference schedules — and was at capacity forty minutes before it started.

The paper described results from a collaborative between three labs — one in the United States, one in China, one in Canada — that had been working for two years on what they internally called 'integrated reasoning architecture.' The paper's findings, stripped of the protective language that academic culture requires, were this: the model could, when given a novel problem in any domain, generate a solution path, evaluate the solution path for internal consistency, identify its own knowledge gaps, request appropriate information, and revise the solution path — not once, but recursively, until it assessed the solution as sufficient.

It did this across domains. Not one domain. Every domain tested.

The question from the audience that Arjun remembered was from an elderly Dutch physicist named Hendriksen who had spent forty years studying complexity.

"When you say it assesses the solution as 'sufficient,'" Hendriksen said, "by whose standard?"

The presenting researcher paused. "Its own," she said.

The room was silent for four seconds. In the silence Arjun wrote in his notebook: own standard / own evaluation / own sufficiency — then looked up at the presenter and understood that the thing they had been approaching for his entire professional life was now very close. Not arrived. But close. The way a wave is close before it breaks — you can't see the break yet but you can feel the mass of water behind it.

He called his father from the airport. It was midnight Varanasi time. Rajan answered on the second ring.

"It's coming," Arjun said.

"I know," Rajan said.

"You've been awake."

"I've been reading."

They stayed on the phone for two hours. Father and son, priest and engineer, ancient river and approaching wave.