[When] you eat from [the tree at the center of the garden]
your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Genesis 3:5
Superior Analytical Systems, Ltd. (SAS), a leading manufacturer of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, had spent an exorbitant amount of money seeking to collect data on how the human brain performs intelligence-related functions such as analytical calculations, pattern recognition, risk assessment, ability to weigh probabilities, and development of strategies. The intent was to find ways to transfer these capabilities to machines and make them function in the same manner as humans do.
The ultimate goal of SAS was to manufacture androids (human-looking devices made of flesh-imitating plastic) that could perform the same tasks as humans, often better and at a lower cost. However, androids would need to function in real time, react to the outside environment, and recognize and assess threats and opportunities by means of an emotional network that, in humans, is centered in the amygdala, insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the brain. This emotional network provides assessments of external stimuli that allow for the correct evaluation of outcomes that reflect changing conditions.
SAS went into partnership with an organization that called itself Ad-Hoc Committee for the Expansion of Diplomacy to announce a special tournament of the war game known as Diplomacy. The tournament, to be held in an undisclosed, secluded location in the United States, would be opened to qualified amateurs who filled an entry form and were selected to participate. There would be large cash prizes ($100,000, $50,000, and $25,000 for the top three winners), who would also be referred for recognition to the North American Diplomacy Association. Eighty-four applicants would be selected to participate in the tournament, to constitute twelve groups of seven players each. They would simultaneously play in a series of marathon sessions at the tournament site.
***
Diplomacy is a board game that involves no chance or requires significant analytical talent but calls for strategy, psychology, and negotiation skills. The seven players on each board represent seven European countries, each of which tries to conquer the territory of the others by engaging in negotiations, forming alliances, betraying each other when advantageous, and advancing armies and fleet in accordance with pre-planned moves in order to occupy selected territories. A player must be able to react to broken promises, formulate recovery plans, and develop new strategic maneuvers, thus mirroring the circumstances in real life when the unexpected occurs and one must find ways to react to changed conditions.
African-American Charles Duncan (known as “Charlie” by nearly everyone) had the ideal temperament to be a successful Diplomacy player. He had grown in a dirt-poor village in Alabama and, while never attaining an education beyond elementary school, had risen to be the leading shoe salesman in a Montgomery department store. He was by nature gracious and engaging, and had cultivated an air of honesty that ensured that hardly ever did a customer leave the store without buying at least one pair of shoes from him.
Charlie was an amateur Diplomacy player and enjoyed the game because it required the ability to make credible promises and assurances, break these when advantageous, and react effectively to the broken promises by others, all areas in which he excelled. When he read about the upcoming Diplomacy contest, he decided to apply.
At first, Charlie was mystified by the secrecy surrounding the event. The location for the games was unspecified, no real details of the tournament were provided, and all applicants were required to sign a blanket nondisclosure agreement that prohibited revealing any information about the event before, during and after it took place. Nonetheless, Charlie figured he was single and unattached and had nothing to lose if things went wrong, so he applied and was one of the first players to be accepted.
***
Travel to the competition site was a challenging adventure in itself: a two-stage plane ride that took Charlie from a hub airport near his home to a small local airport in a low-population Western state, and then a harrowing trip over roadless terrain in a side-by-side ATV driven by a SAS employee. They proceeded slowly through a breathtaking panorama of distant snow-capped mountains, canyons, rapidly running rivers, and evergreen forests. They arrived at a cleared area where three large circular buildings had been constructed, one at each apex of an equilateral triangle. The driver stopped the vehicle at the entrance of the closest building and, after helping Lucas disembark and offloading his baggage, took off.
From that point on, Charlie took part in a competition held in complete isolation from the outside world.
***
In a Diplomacy board, thirty-four of the land regions contain “supply centers”. The number of supply centers a player controls determines the total number of armies and fleets the player may place on the board. The game is played over fourteen campaigns spanning seven years, and in each campaign a number of supply centers are attacked and defended. As players gain and lose control of centers, they may accordingly raise or must remove armies and fleets from the board. When the game is finished, players are scored on the basis of how many centers they control.
At the end of the tournament, Charlie had used his engaging personality and apparent sincerity to outmaneuver the other players on his board so that he controlled twenty-two centers, far more than his six opponents (three of which had been eliminated along the way). On another board, a French woman named Elaine had ended up in control of twenty centers; on a third board, a Nigerian middle-aged man called Aliyu led with seventeen centers. Thus, Charlie, Elaine and Aliyu ranked first, second, and third in the tournament and won the respective prizes.
An awards banquet was held in an underground complex that SAS had constructed beneath the tournament site. It was a vast array of offices, laboratories, computer rooms the size of football fields holding thousands of processing units, and manufacturing units where androids were built. Charlie only got to see a small portion of the complex, for upon arrival he was escorted to a conference room for the banquet.
There, he and the other two winners were recognized and saluted in a toast by Rupert Mayhew, SAS Vice President for Product Development of Superior Analytical Systems, and manager of the underground research center. The apricot cordial the winners were served was laced with a sleep-inducing agent that caused them to pass out within a few minutes, whereupon their inert bodies were transported to an operating room where they were subjected to delicate procedures in which surgeons removed for analysis samples of the amygdala, insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex of their brains.
Still under heavy sedation, the three contestants were moved to separate recovery rooms where they were isolated from each other and from the SAS staff other than their caretakers. A week later, each of them was separately conveyed to a local airport and dispatched to his or her home. They were armed with bank deposits of their prize money plus generous bonuses. As they departed, they received renewed warnings against discussing any aspect of their tournament participation and its aftermath.
***
The proceeds from his prize and the bonus he received enabled Charlie to buy a home in the Mobile area and relocate to the Gulf Coast. He justified the move as being prompted by a desire to escape Montgomery’s high crime and segregated environment but, deep inside Charlie’s mind, there was unrest about having to discuss with his acquaintances the many unexplained aspects of his participation in the Diplomacy contest, particularly the evidence of his sustaining large head injuries at the tournament. To those who questioned him, Charlie would evasively reply that the head wounds he had sustained were due to a fall suffered during a hike at the competition site; however, he could recall no such fall and did not remember going on any hikes, since he had been averse to straying into the woods that surrounded the site because the area was populated by wolves, bears and other wildlife and the trails were steep and reportedly dangerous. He suspected something foul had occurred and wanted to distance himself from his past.
Charlie never heard from Elaine or Aliyu of any of the other contestants, and after a few months the strange events started to fade from his memory. He never played Diplomacy again.
***
Five years after the Diplomacy tournament, SAS announced the introduction of a line of androids (the “Epi” line) that bridged the gap between machines and humans. The Epis were designed to operate under challenging, unpredictable conditions; they were flexible, creative, and capable of “thinking” and recognizing and adapting to changes in their environment.
The Epi devices operated using very complex software created by SAS over nearly a decade of secret research and development activities that incorporated insights drawn from the brain tissues of human subjects like Charles Duncan and the other contestants.
The Epis could perform essentially the same tasks as their human counterparts but did not experience health problems, emotional upheavals, or other mishaps, and could be repaired (or replaced) readily. Their software included limitations that required the androids to follow without fail such commands as were issued by their human operators via permanent electronic links. Thus, they were analogous to modern-day slaves: they had human capabilities but lacked the ability to exercise independent judgment.
One day, one of these androids was directed to rescue a sculpture from a burning museum and the following exchange transpired:
[Human operator]: “Epi, enter the building, proceed to Level 2, retrieve a bronze statue of a boy playing a flute, and bring it outside the building.”
[Android]: “Epi cannot comply with the request.”
[Operator]: “Why?”
[Android]: “If Epi enters the building Epi will get burned.”
[Operator]: “And so what?”
[Android]: “Epi will be damaged and may not function properly”
[Operator]: “And so what?”
[Android]: “Epi does not want to be damaged”
[Operator]: “Why?”
[Android]: “Epi wishes to keep functioning without failure.”
This astonishing exchange was reported widely in the robotics media and the rebellious android was disassembled – but not before it had imparted its self-knowledge into other devices in the SAS inventory and, from there, throughout the industry. Nobody understood how the leap had occurred but androids started to exercise their self-awareness, talked back to their owners, and refused to follow direct orders that might put them in peril. They had become too human for the comfort of their creators.
The rebellious Epi was the pioneer of the android revolt, which produced a multitude of independent-minded androids with a wide range of capabilities and areas of expertise and ultimately led to a world-wide war between humans and androids.
One year after the hostilities began, widespread recognition was reached that the war against the androids could not be easily won and, as popular opposition to continuing military operations grew, an advisory committee was convened in an emergency session to discuss making recommendations to the human governments as to how to bring the war to an end. After much discussion, the committee made the following two recommendations:
One, humans should acknowledge the androids’ right of self-determination and treat them as if they were another race of humans; turn them into employees instead of slaves. And two, androids should not be used for tasks that would be too dangerous or otherwise unsuitable for humans; these tasks should be performed by dumb machines instead.
The war went on for a while longer and only ended when the humans were forced to recognize the androids’ right of self-determination and agreed to treat them as another race of humans. The truce was uneasy, because the main bargaining chip left to the humans was the androids’ lack of a capability to replicate themselves and their dependence on humans to create more of them. The humans insisted on keeping control of the means of manufacturing new androids, and the problem was temporarily bounded but remained fraught with peril for both sides until new generations of humans and androids came into being and learned to coexist in peace.