The Book: the spiritual individual in quest of the living organization – Codec for the Infinite Game

GARRY JACOBS

This is not The Book.

It is only a book about The Book.

Copyright Garry Jacobs, 2008

Pondicherry, India

All rights reserved

Contact information: garryj29@gmail.com

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover blurb

Four technocrats armed with a mysterious manuscript, a secret formula and a radically new computer program battle a conspiracy of entrenched reactionary forces in a global struggle to determine humanity’s future.

An idealistic Indian marketing wizard, a timid but brilliant Jewish idealist from Boston, a strikingly beautiful Russian mathematician and a monk-like Irish American philosopher-engineer embark on a mission to change the world. A book without author or title roams the earth for decades, silently unleashing revolutionary change, until it finds these four failed but aspiring entrepreneurs and inspires them to create a radical artificial intelligence program, AIS, an instrument for unfailing accomplishment. Their personal struggle to decipher the book’s contents and discover the secret formula for its application lead them on a profound spiritual exploration of knowledge that is power–until they stumble upon the occult process of creation and the formula for infinite self-multiplication. Pitted against them is an alliance of forces seeking to maintain their grip on the world’s power–a government that perceives AIS as a threat to its pre-eminent strength and status, a syndicate of hedge fund traders that will stop at nothing to obtain the program’s formula for infinite wealth, a scientific community outraged by the challenge the book poses to its monopolistic hold on truth, a church bent on suppressing the book’s revelatory knowledge, and fanatical fundamentalists seeking unrivalled power for destruction. Two titanic personalities battling for the mind and soul of humanity alone understand what others have barely glimpsed. The book and the program hold the key to humanity’s future. And behind them stands Life, the whimsical goddess of fate and grace, composing her symphony out of irreconcilable contradictions, raging conflict, unbridled passions, lofty aspirations and binding values to work out her own destiny according to her own evolutionary laws.

• Four technocrats in quest of the formula for unfailing accomplishment embark on a remarkable voyage of self-discovery.

• A clash of titans vying for the world’s soul.

• A mysterious manuscript without author or origin containing the ultimate secret to infinite power.

• The world’s first artificial intelligence system that is conscious and evolves.

• A hundred year old sect springs to life amidst rumors of a perpetual money machine.

• Governments, organized religion, science and fanaticism allied in a global conspiracy to stop the flow of time.

• The laws of scarcity are annulled by a technology for self-multiplication.

• A secret society tries to monopolize the knowledge that is power.

• Truths of a forgotten science reveal hidden patterns in chance events.

• Money and mysticism battle to control the future of humankind.

• A Game played by adepts invokes a Descent of power.

• A mathematician pursues the elusive formula for eternal romance.

• An aging professor silently orchestrates a global revolution.

Contents

Prologue

She sat in a courtyard surrounded by hundreds of people, motionless in her chair, eyes closed, self-absorbed within herself, unaware of the occasional rustle or cough among those around her. She was looking for something, thirsting, calling silently within her being. Concentrating with all the power of her prodigious will, she saw in her vision a huge and massive golden door blocking the way. Lifting an enormous golden mallet, with one blow she shattered the door into pieces. A huge flood of golden light poured down from the heavens upon the earth and was absorbed into the dark, impenetrable substance of the world’s unconsciousness. No one present had any idea what had occurred, but the future was inextricably altered that day. Revolutions should not be judged by the number of heads guillotined or lives otherwise sacrificed for a noble cause, but rather by the subsequent impact of the turmoil on human history. By that standard, the forces put into play on February 29, 1956 were the most potent and revolutionary in history.

The world has known many kinds of revolutions–peaceful and bloody, glorious and profane, red, white and green–but never one quite like this. Some years have been made immortal by the onset of a revolution–1517 in Germany, 1688 in England, 1776 in America, 1789, 1830 and 1848 in France, 1917 in Russia, 1947 in India, 1949 in China, and a very long list of less remembered tumultuous events. Revolutions have small beginnings: a protest against the sale of indulgences, a tea party of angry tax payers, the storming of a Bastille, a shortage of bread, a naval mutiny, a student demonstration. Sometimes the response is immediate and dramatic, a sudden explosion of energy, an outburst of popular descent, or war in the city streets. At other times, the beginning goes unnoticed or the initial eruption quickly subsides, the movement goes beneath the surface and works there to undermine the foundations of a decaying social edifice that still has the power to resist change. But regardless of whether the impact is swift or slow, whether it comes as a mighty blow or a gentle breeze, the world is never the same afterwards.

The revolution of 1964 is not marked for remembrance on any national calendar. It all began on September 30, with a peaceful student protest demanding free speech on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. Inflamed by a clumsy administration and overzealous police force, a local brush fire soon blazed into a national conflagration and crossed the oceans to ignite flames of protest among students around the world. Initially focused on the right of students to express their opposition to the War in Vietnam, it quickly spread to embrace the rights of black Americans, Hispanic farm workers, feminists, the environment, prophets of the Aquarian Age, drug and free love advocates, and virtually every other cause challenging the Establishment and conventional social values. Termed by scholars as a counter-culture social revolution, at its heart was one word, one value–freedom. From North America it moved south and east where it ignited the hearts of youth in Buenos Aires, La Paz, Paris, Naples and countless other cities and university towns. Its influence seeped under the impenetrable barrier dividing East and West into the minds and hearts of youth behind the Iron Curtain, where it fired the brief glorious outburst known as the Prague Spring, until it was violently quelled by invading Soviet tanks in August 1968.

Since 1956 history has recorded many remarkable events that have irreversibly altered and are still altering the course of human history. Many others have gone unobserved and unrecorded, seeds of the future which have long gestated beneath the surface and are only now beginning to reveal their existence and significance. Such are the events recorded in this book.

****

On October 2, 1964, a tall, handsome Indian youth strolled down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and walked into Moe’s Books. A poorly dressed engineering graduate with a glowing complexion and soft melodious voice, he browsed the shelves looking enviously at the rich hoard of intriguing titles. Occasionally he stopped to remove a volume and browse through its pages, but invariably he replaced them when he saw the price scribbled in pencil on the inside cover. However good the bargains, they were not good enough for one living with his young bride on a teaching assistant’s stipend. Still he persisted in this vicarious pastime which he loved so well. His curiosity was attracted to a brown leather-bound volume without any title on the cover. Reaching for the book, he opened it at random and read the first lines that came within his view.

All problems in life are problems of harmony.

Obviously written by a diplomat or a married man, he laughed to himself, but certainly not by a poor engineer struggling to make ends meet. Reflecting further on the statement, he realized it aptly described the structural engineer’s challenge of harmonizing form and function. As for the economics of a graduate student… Suddenly his musings were interrupted by the sounds of shouting in the distance. Through the store window, he could see dozens of people running towards the campus with agitated expressions. As the young man left the store, he heard police sirens in the distance. He joined the hurrying crowd and was carried along with hundreds of others into a massive spontaneous gathering of what looked liked at least one thousand students. The streets were blocked on all sides by police cars as rows of troopers armed with clubs and tear gas encircled the steps of Sproul Hall.

A vibration of tension blanketed the atmosphere. The very air breathed fear and outrage. Standing like an invisible observer in the very midst of the turmoil–quite literally, a stranger in a strange land–a thought pressed insistently on his mind but could not gain entry. Then he remembered. It was something he had just read in that book about harmony. A few years later he recalled that moment, that thought and that book as he watched thousands of protestors rushing past his apartment on Dwight Way to escape from the onrush of police firing tear gas canisters. How ironic, he mused, that a freedom movement suppressed by violence should have been born on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday.

****

Four years later on August 20, 1968, an American freelance journalist was driving through Prague in a VW bus to report on the peaceful flower revolution engendered by Alexander Dubček. Passing down the narrow lanes of the old city, he saw young people in blue jeans playing music on the sidewalks, reminiscent of a scene from Berkeley, but hardly what he had expected to find behind the Iron Curtain in communist Czechoslovakia. The following morning he took a walking tour of the city, stopping every hour at a different café to sit and watch the myriad smiling faces of people whose lightly skipping steps called to his mind a celebration of freedom.

Late in the afternoon, he passed a small bookshop with a cardboard sign hanging in the window, “Foreign Books for Sale”. Entering the shop, he quickly found the small table laden with myriad titles in French, English and Italian. He reached down to pick up a brown leather volume without any title on the cover. Opening the book carelessly, he read to himself the following sentence:

Freedom is the final law and the last consummation.

Curious as to the title and author, he flipped back through the pages to the title page. Just then he heard a rumbling sound in the distance and voices shouting in panic on the street outside the shop. He put down the book and rushed to the front door. Following the eyes and fingers that were pointing down the road toward the outskirts of the city, he saw what they saw–a long procession of Soviet tanks and army trucks streaming into the city and heading his way. The Prague Spring ended at that very moment. Little could the young journalist imagine that he was witness to the first tiny fissure that would ultimately lead to the collapse of the Berlin Wall twenty-one years later.

****

On February 21, 1971, a strikingly attractive young woman wandered into a tiny bookstore near Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, Russia and browsed through its narrow aisles and ceiling high dusty shelves thinking of nothing in particular, except the meeting an hour later with her boyfriend Andrei at a small café across from the marketplace where students and lovers gathered to whisper things that should not be heard by others. She passed quickly through the rows of books on physics and mathematics, many of which she had read or mastered in the course of her studies. But her mind was not on theorems and equations today. It was on love. A bearded old shopkeeper named Grigorio sat behind the counter, leaning back in his chair with eyes closed in a pose of utter exhaustion, as if he had just completed the monumental task of reading every book in the shop. But she knew better. In all her visits, she had never once found him with a book in his hands. His exhaustion stemmed from something other than reading. Perhaps from the Herculean effort not to speak the thoughts that were in his mind.

Without disturbing the old man, she passed to a small shelf in the rear of the shop where used books on a variety of subjects were stuffed in haphazard fashion. Trained as a physicist to believe in uncertainty as an article of faith, Sonya loved surprises and always gravitated to this corner to see what new or old tome might suddenly show up. This morning her eye was caught by a brown leather volume without any title on the binding or front cover. She knew it must be old, for nothing was bound in leather these days, except Politburo reports. Opening the book at random, she discovered the text was in English. Although study of English had been mandatory for physicists, her knowledge of the language was confined to scientific jargon. Concentrating, she read

The whole secret of life lies in the unity of opposites and the complementarity of contradictions which are the spiritual essence of romance.

Huh, she smiled to herself, how very appropriate. The author sounds like a physicist in love. Then glancing at the opposite page

Love is a passion and it seeks for two things, eternity and intensity. Love is a yearning for beauty…

Just then Grigorio coughed loudly, opened his eyes and sat up. Startled by the sound and movement, she glanced down at her watch and realized it was time for her rendezvous with Andrei. She replaced the book on the shelf and hurried from the shop to the café across the street with a sense of joyous anticipation. As she approached the table where Andrei was intensely engrossed in conversation with another student, he raised his head momentarily and smiled broadly, then immediately returned to what he was saying. Is this how lovers greet their eternal complements, she wondered? Where is the passion and yearning? Where is the eternity and intensity? Pouting slightly, she sat down next to him and he extended his arm around her shoulder to draw her closer without turning his head away from his friend. “What is so very important that you are discussing, Andrei?” she asked, more in an effort to attract his attention than to discover any secrets that might separate them.

Andrei turned to her and handed her a student newspaper. “Politics, my sweet, as usual. Just some news about a party apparatchik from Stavropol named Gorbachev who has been elected to represent party youth in the Party Central Committee.”

“From Stavropol? Sonya asked. “Why, he is one of your own countrymen. Have you ever heard of him before?”

“Yes, he has done much to improve agricultural production and worker conditions in my region. It’s a huge promotion for one so young in that august gathering of octogenarians. Why, he’ll be the only one who wasn’t born when Comrade Lenin led our glorious revolution. Do you think he could possibly be wise enough to deserve this remarkable distinction?” Sonya knew very well the disdain with which Andrei regarded the whole Communist Party, so she easily detected the implied sarcasm concealed by his apparently patriotic demeanor. She fervently hoped that no one else could.

Three days later the same young woman entered the same bookshop, passed Grigorio as he leaned back with eyes closed in the same position as before. She walked to the small shelf in the back of the shop and looked for the leather-bound book she had read from earlier in the week. It was nowhere to be seen. She thought of rousing Grigorio to ask what had happened to it, but suddenly realized she did not even know the book’s title. She quickly resigned herself to the disappointment and told herself it was only a foolish impulse that had carried her back in the first place. In a span of three days, she had been offered a post at Moscow’s most prestigious scientific institute and the heart of her lover in marriage. Why was she thinking of a silly book at a time like this?

****

In early September 1989, a young Israeli intelligence officer specialized in computational analysis arrived in Berlin to gather intelligence regarding the political turmoil in East Germany and other Eastern bloc countries. On Sunday, September 10, he strolled around the city examining remnants of pre-war architecture and lush green gardens. In a small park a few blocks from the Brandenburg Gate, he came upon a Sunday market consisting of two dozen wooden carts covered with a variety of miscellaneous products–delicious looking pastries, tourist trinkets, maps and picture postcards, handicrafts, fake Rolexes and the like. He passed them by and came upon a bearded old vendor with a meager assortment of used books in English, French and German. The young man spoke all three languages fluently, so he paused to spend a few minutes in the shade of the vendor’s canopy browsing the titles. There he came upon a brown leather-covered book with no discernable printing on the spine or cover. Curious, he picked it up, opened it and read the following lines:

Knowledge is power. Complete knowledge is power to accomplish without negative consequences or side-effects. Such knowledge is unfailing.

Whoever heard of accomplishments that had no negative side-effects, he thought. His entire job was to anticipate the negative fallout and collateral damage arising from every act of his government. This passage seemed to imply that side-effects were the result of incomplete knowledge. But he knew that Israeli intelligence was among the best in the world and that had never been good enough to escape untoward consequences of every new initiative. He read a little further and was even more intrigued by what he read, so he reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet. It was only then that he realized he had left the wallet and his cell phone in his other jacket at the hotel. He looked at his watch and saw that it was just past three. There was plenty of time to walk back to the hotel, get his wallet and return to purchase the book. He told the book vendor that he would return within an hour and walked off toward the hotel. When he got to the hotel, he found an urgent message waiting. It instructed him to meet his CIA counterpart immediately. He hurried over to the US military complex and was handed a copy of the latest intelligence report. What he read left him speechless. It predicted the imminent collapse of the East German government and the possible disintegration of the entire Eastern bloc behind the Iron Curtain. As he studied the report, breaking news announced that Hungary had opened up its borders to East German refugees. Thousands of Germans began fleeing through Hungary to Austria. The impenetrable fortress of the East German communist orthodoxy was shaken at its roots.

****

On a cold wintry day in early February 2004, a twenty-five year old Hispanic man with a clean-shaven, intelligent face walked into Shakespeare Books at the corner of Telegraph Ave. and Dwight Way in Berkeley. He spent an hour browsing the shelves systematically from one end of the store to the other. It was difficult to imagine what he might be looking for. The movement of his eyes over the titles was so swift, that he could not possibly have read them each in turn. A sales girl had noticed the man walking up and down the aisles. When she approached to offer him assistance, he held up a colored sketch of a book in an old brown-leather cover. She asked him the title of the book and he merely shook his head. Then she asked him the subject matter and he replied in similar fashion. Eventually the store manager came over and tried to engage the young man in conversation, but he quickly discerned that the man spoke little or no English. The manager shifted to Spanish and learned that the man was looking for a book that had been lost by his employer and he had hoped that it might turn up for sale at a used bookstore. The book had sentimental value and the employer was eager to get it back. The manager promised to call the man if a book of this description was brought into the shop. The man left his phone number and departed.

The young man walked across the street to Moe’s Books. He knew them all. This was the third time he had been through Berkeley in the past six months. Previously he had remained inconspicuous by walking very slowly through the aisles, but he found it took much too long to complete a store that way. Now he was learning to do it quickly and gain the cooperation of the store staff without raising their suspicions. Why should they be suspicious? All he wanted to do was recover a lost book for that beak-nosed man named Simon who refused to tell him anything about the book except a description of its appearance and the fact that it had no title or author.

Diego, for that was the young man’s name, had wondered at first why Simon would choose a person like him for this job. After all, he could not read a word of English, except for the street and shop signs. He was glad for the work. It was better than gardening or picking grapes in the vineyards. The hundred dollars a day Simon paid him had sounded very good at first, until he realized how much he had to spend on travel moving up and down the West Coast. It was the prize that made it worthwhile–twenty-five thousand dollars in cash when he finds the book. That was worth working and waiting for. Simon had assured him it was around here somewhere and that sooner or later it would come up for sale. If so, Diego intended to be there when it did. He often wondered what could be so special about the book that Simon would pay twenty-five thousand dollars to get it back. The man must be much richer than he looks, he thought. These gringos squander their money on so many useless things.

Twenty minutes later Diego rushed out of Moe’s in a high state of agitation. He was elated. His faith and perseverance had paid off. He pulled out his cell phone and called Simon. Yes, he was positive. The book had been seen here a few days earlier. It was found by a white male with sandy hair around thirty-five years old of medium height in a Cal sweatshirt. The sales girl said she had seen the customer several times earlier, so he probably lived in or around Berkeley. That was all they could tell him. The manager had promised to call Diego if he saw the man again. Diego asked Simon what he should do next. Simon simply replied, “Find that man.” Diego put away his phone and wondered how in the world he was supposed to do that.

Simon put down the phone. At last, a concrete lead. It had been four full years since the last one at a conference marking the dawn of the new millennium. Reflecting back on it now, he had lost count of how many conferences he had attended, books he had read, and articles he had scanned looking for a clue since then. Now he could call off the others, those dozens of people who like Diego were roaming bookstores in the major cities of the world with absolutely no idea of what they were looking for or why. He had employed a desperate and costly strategy. But it was a mere trifle compared with the value of the prize and it had finally proven its worth. A feeling of self-satisfaction came over him at his own sound instincts. The Book could have surfaced anywhere, but he had studied the patterns and concluded that California was the most likely. Yet, who could imagine it would surface in the very same place–the very same bookstore–twice in exactly forty years? He laughed at Diego’s bewilderment when he had told him to find the man who bought it. It was Simon’s private joke. He did not need Diego for that. He had other ways and he was confident that sooner or later they would lead him to it.

Simon reached for the phone. Finally, he had something substantial to report. His boss would be very pleased with him.

Part 1: The Quest

There is only one process of accomplishment, one process governing all creation–individual, collective and universal. It is the process by which the finite reveals the Infinite.

The Book

1.The New Religion

Each of us interprets events from the perspective of our own consciousness. For those who worship or idealize the past, the millennium marked the end of history or was viewed as a herald of Armageddon. For those who regard history as a series of ascending steps from darkness to greater light, it announced a new beginning. The futurists constituted the majority. Having survived two world wars, a Great Depression, and a forty year cold war presided over by sixty thousand nuclear warheads, most people considered the year 2000 as an occasion for ecstatic celebration.

This was especially true in the USA, the self-declared victor in the Cold War, the sole superpower and world’s economic engine. Eight unprecedented years of rapid growth and employment generation proclaimed America’s supremacy. Europe was still struggling to adjust to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Unemployment was still high there. The threat of massive immigration from the East generated alarm. The European Union, which was to become the rallying point for the future Europe, had not yet become fully conscious of its strength and its destiny. China and India were awakening, but it would be three or four years before the real speed and magnitude of their ascent to wealth and future power became fully apparent. In fact, perceptions were going to change radically over the next decade as the true significance of the European experiment and the resurgence of Asia advanced.

There was still another year to go before September 11 would rudely awaken Americans to their own vulnerability. It would be another seven years before environmental campaigners such as Al Gore finally got their message across that climate change was a meteor headed for earth, like the one in the Bruce Willis movie, only one that all the fire power in the US arsenal could not destroy or divert. The second Gulf War had not yet entangled the USA in an inextricable quagmire, where the future fought with the past for the right to exist. Crude oil prices had not yet rocketed from twenty five dollars to hundred dollars, as they would following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s dominion. The subprime mortgage crisis had not yet reached the US financial system and sent shock-waves of human fallibility and vulnerability around the world. The iPod had not yet been invented. And, of course, that was before anyone had ever heard of AIS⁹ or UNIAC.

The new millennium commenced with a euphoric explosion of new ideas, expansive energy and unshakeable faith in the future. Never before had the prophets of optimism and visionaries of utopia had such strong and rational grounds for hope. The brightness of a millennium supernova relegated everything else to the shadows. At the moment when the clock struck midnight, all eyes were on America and all American eyes were on the Market. The US economy was enjoying an unprecedented expansion. On January 14, the DOW reached a new historic peak of 11,722, more than hundred times higher than on this same day a century ago. America was in the midst of the greatest stock market boom since the 1920s. The Dow had risen 370 percent since the end of the Cold War, roughly equivalent to its rise from the end of WWI until the Great Crash. But crashes were a thing of the past. Economists were smarter now. After the humiliating defeat of Communism, no one could any longer lack faith in the power of the Market and the financial geniuses at the Fed. Wall Street visionaries predicted that this was only the beginning. Unable to tell a boom from a bubble, in 1999, Dow 36,000 and Dow 40,000 were published and acclaimed, financial analysts eager for business, only to be followed two years later by a more accurate pinpoint forecasting model predicting Dow, 30,000 by 2008. Obviously, the science of computer prediction had made great strides in those two years.

Technology stood at the heart of the American dream. There was a revolutionary spirit in the air as challenging to social convention as those that had ever played out in parliaments or on city streets, university campuses or hallowed battlefields. But this was a revolution of a different sort that performed in a different world, a virtual battle in the world of cyberspace. The dot.com boom began as a slow ascent in the mid 1990s. Over the next five years the technology-heavy NASDAQ composite index doubled and confidence in the future of technology soared. Quickened by enthusiastic anticipation of the new millennium, the NASDAQ rose by 250 percent in 1999 to reach a peak on March 10, 2000. On January 11, America Online, an internet pioneer, acquired Time Warner, the world's largest media company. If any further proof were needed of what the future held in store, the Super Bowl XXXIV in January 2000 featured seventeen dot-com companies that each paid over two million dollars for a thirty-second spot. In 2000 alone, venture investors poured nearly ninety five billion dollars into technology start-ups. The new economy was born with a roar.

From this cauldron of excitement and anticipation many things were born–new ideas, new products, and even new religions. Ever since Leonardo da Vinci drew his sketches of submarines and flying machines, ever since Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, there had always been visionary prophets like Steve Jobs who passionately proclaimed the liberating power of technology. The doomsday prophets who predicted that the world would stop at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000 looked ridiculous when stock exchanges, hospitals, airlines, power grids, governments–even television shows–continued functioning as normal. Didn’t that mean they were wrong about everything else as well? Never before had the growing number of electro-mechanical geniuses been heralded as they were when everything worked normally after the clocks struck midnight ushering in the new millennium. Surely this was sufficient proof that God is really a great Mechanic and the universe a glorious Machine. The insidious monster, Y2K, had been vanquished by a new breed of heroes, the chipmakers and code writers. The last fortress of Satan, a tiny segment of defective computer code, had been driven from the world.

Technology had always been worshipped in America, a land that was too big for its modest population to manage without assistance. What better help could there be than machines that would do precisely what they were told to and never make a demand for higher wages or better working conditions? Europe had invented modern science. America put technology at the service of humanity. Until recently, that technology had been the servant of capital and the technologist served at the will of the industrialist. No more. Finally, the engineer could assume his rightful place at the pinnacle of power. A new breed of young, techno-savvy entrepreneurs were remaking the world and the world was working better for it.

The evangelical religion of technology had many different kinds of advocates, each peddling his own miracles to mesmerize the masses–a religion of the machine replacing the religion of man. Atomic physicists promised to unravel the strings of energy that bind everything together and foray into the unknown zero point field, while astrophysicists laid bare the entire course of history from the Big Bang to Eternity and finally revealed the Creator’s grand design. Geneticists promised to clone better versions of ourselves, while biotechnologists offered to conquer disease, aging and, perhaps, death itself. Networking engineers were in the process of wiring the earth for human unity. Nanorobots were at work fashioning new materials and eliminating the need for labor.

Crowning them all, at the pinnacle of the highest peak looking out into the most distant future, were the AI visionaries–the magicians of Artificial Intelligence. Stanley Kubrick revealed the coming dawn forty years ago in: 2001: A Space Odyssey, when he portrayed a computer in the process of evolving into a human being. So what if Hal was a bit neurotic? Then before he died, Kubrick inspired Steven Spielberg to improve on that vision by giving us the perfect child, a machine who dreams and loves. The release of Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix in 1999 presented a very different vision in which conquering machines created an artificial world for human beings, but regardless of whether man or machine won the war, the advocates of AI were positioned as the visionary leaders of the future. These were indeed heady times.

A host of visionary events celebrated the dawn and spirit of the new millennium. Some were widely publicized, glamorous extravaganzas, others more sober affairs known only to a bare few whose thoughts and acts so profoundly influence our lives without our being aware of it. From January 5 to 7, the world’s best minds in the field of artificial intelligence gathered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida to attend the Sixth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. The world-at-large took little notice of what was said. There was too much to celebrate just then to think seriously about the future. But events that occurred behind the scenes during those three days were to change the course of human history–and much sooner than anyone could imagine. The conference attracted a motley assortment of techies, hackers, math wizards, bio-technologists, neurologists, psychologists, actual and would-be philosophers, and new age true-believers of every description. Among them were a handful that were destined to shape humanity’s future. Further revolutions were in the making.

The Generals & the Battlefield

Every movement has its spokesman. Every new religion has its prophet. What would the American Revolution have been without Thomas Paine, or the French Revolution without Rousseau and Voltaire? AI visionaries were nearly unanimous in proclaiming Benjamin Dent as their self-appointed spokesman and leader. Dent was a towering figure, both physically and intellectually. His students at MIT sometimes joked that having a discussion with Dent was like playing chess with Deep Blue, IBM’s chess playing computer. The professor always seemed to be ten moves ahead and instantly ready to respond to any and all possibilities. Dent was a dominant figure on campus, as Professor of Philosophy and head of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He held a double PhD in philosophy and psychology with minors in biology and neuroscience. While many thought this combination of disciplines an anomaly, Dent considered all three as dimensions of a single subject, the science of Reality. And like the dedicated scientist that he was, he was determined to consider the object of his study from all possible sides. Due to his prodigious learning, clarity of mind and power of expression, few academics were willing to face him either in a conference hall or on national television. A discussion with Dent was best restricted to a quiet exchange in his office or over lunch. For in addition to his intellectual capacities, he had a strong predilection for publicly humiliating those who dared disagree with him. But that rarely occurred now. His reputation always preceded him. And if it did not, a quick glance into his intense, confident eyes was usually enough to deter all but the boldest from venturing to joust with him.

Over the past two decades Dent had constructed a formidable theory of AI founded on the most recent developments in the biology of life, cognitive neuron theory, computer science, neural networks, and chaos theory. Few of his peers had sufficient breadth of knowledge to speak intelligibly in all these disciplines, so Dent was always at an advantage. Wherever he encountered strong opposition in one field, he would switch with facility to another and surround his opponent with concepts and terms with which he was not sufficiently familiar to debate. Dent was the leading advocate of what is known as Strong AI–the view that the human brain is nothing but a sophisticated computer and that in a short time electronic computing devices will be able to replicate, replace and exceed all the properties and capabilities of human consciousness. The cinematography of Kubrick, Spielberg and the Wachowskis embodied that view, whether they agreed with it or not.

Dent was a dominating figure, but he was not alone. There were a few who dared and had the capacity to meet him head on and remain standing at the end of the encounter. Of these, the foremost was Joseph Stearne, the distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. The two men were as different as the world views they held. Stearne had a doctorate in Philosophy from Cambridge University, the other Cambridge across the Atlantic. But it was more than water that separated them. Where Dent was aggressive and emphatic, Stearne was receptive and empathetic. Dent was an eclectic renaissance man who studied and knew about developments in every related field of science and could weave together facts from multiple disciplines into a seamless fabric within seconds. Stearne was thoughtful and slow to respond and his response always had more depth than breadth to it. Dent tried to extend the scope of his purview to encompass the entire surface of existence. Stearne plunged deep into a problem searching for the first principles which he believed related and united all knowledge and all fields of existence. Dent had the mentality, though not the personality, of Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, ever eager to explore new uncharted regions of outer space; whereas Stearne’s explorations were confined to the human sphere and the inner workings of his own mind. Dent was the universal wanderer in the far off galaxies of technology, but his thought and consciousness were founded and firmly rooted in modern American materialistic science and never strayed far from home. Stearne travelled widely and was honored wherever he went, but the purpose of his movements was more to learn than to speak. Whereas Dent was always hungry for new facts and new gadgets, Stearne was ever eager to encounter new people and discover more of his shared humanity. If to Dent, God was a mechanic and this universe a machine, to Stearne man was a God and this universe a spiritual marvel.

Stearne was as great an admirer and as strong an advocate of artificial intelligence as Dent, but their positions were in most ways diametrically opposed. Dent viewed AI as a reality in its own right, a outcome of natural evolution with its own destiny, almost independent of man. Stearne was a spokesman for Weak AI. He viewed AI as an instrument or a tool fashioned by human beings to extend the efficacy of their senses and their power. For him, AI could never exist for or by itself. He laughed heartily at the notion of machines conquering humanity. “If the machines come out on top,” he often said, “it will be because human beings voluntarily submit to their own creation, not because the machines decide to take over. We human beings have a funny habit of becoming slaves to the things we invent for our use–money, government and technology. Why should we fault our leaders for acting like demigods, when it is we who elect ordinary men to high position and then insist on attributing to them extraordinary capacities they have never exhibited in order to glorify our own collective self-image? Many accuse man of creating God in his own image, but a more just accusation would be that we elevate our own creations to the status of gods and proceed to worship and surrender to them.”

Dent was the champion of the youngest and most exciting of the sciences which promised to discover the mathematics of life and consciousness in matter. Stearne was a proponent of the oldest, least glamorous and least popular of scientific disciplines, rational thought. People who listened to Dent came away stimulated, fascinated and often mesmerized by the wonders he portrayed, though the more sensitive often left with an almost imperceptible feeling of discomfort or sadness which they were unable to describe or explain. Those who met Stearne almost always left with a smile on their faces and a feeling of indefinable warmth and expansiveness. The learned professor could be forceful and even overpowering, but the force was always delivered by a velvet covered hammer that quietly and gently penetrated into the depths. Stearne relied more on mental clarity, humaneness and humor than on a plethora of hard facts and mechanical devices. He was almost always patient, but he often admitted his intolerance for one thing–arrogance–and in characteristic fashion would add it was because he was so very arrogant himself.

The Fort Lauderdale conference organizers had worked for nearly a year planning this event. They were determined that no one in the field of AI would ever forget this week. The most eloquent exponent of Strong AI was to meet and battle with the most respected advocate of Weak AI. In fact, the two men had been battling for nigh on thirty years through distinguished academic journals, in conferences and across the vistas of cyberspace. But they had never before met in person and wrestled with one another from a common podium. How precisely the organizers had done it, they never revealed. When word spread, conference registration soared three fold and the organizers had to scramble to find a larger facility to accommodate the three thousand people who were expected to attend from all parts of the world. Never before had so much intellectual processing power in the field of AI been concentrated in one place on earth.

The organizers planned their campaign carefully. As a millennium event, they insisted in focusing on the big picture, a vision of things to come. They dedicated the first of the three days to the Strong AI view and billed Dent as the valedictory speaker in the late afternoon, to be proceeded by leading advocates, primarily drawn from American universities. Day Two was allocated to their opponents, mostly from Europe and Asia, for finding them in the USA was getting almost as difficult as locating Jews in the Vatican hierarchy. They mainly came from France, Germany and Russia. Ironically, most scientists from India, where one might expect to find support for a more human, less mechanistic view of consciousness, seemed heavily biased towards the strong position. Joseph Stearne was an American anomaly in the midst of this group, but he stood out as its foremost and most formidable exponent, and was appropriately allotted the most prominent place on the agenda. The first two days were the warm-up. The battle was set for the third day. Dent and Stearne would meet each other face to face for a three hour debate, physically juxtaposed to one another on the stage as they were intellectually on the issues.

2.The Maestro

The first day of the conference went as expected. It was dazzling and euphoric. The average age of the audience could not have been more than twenty-seven. Five plenary presentations and a dozen parallel workshops charted out the gains made in the application of AI over the past decade in computer based trading and market modeling, genetic engineering, medical diagnosis, criminology, intelligence gathering and analysis, social profiling, industrial robotics, micro-computing, nuclear physics and astrophysics, imaging and mapping systems, environmental modeling, and scenario building for the spread of terrorism and nuclear weapons. Some speakers used stunning real-life photos, computer-generated video images and animated illustrations to drive home the fact that AI was very real, here-and-now technology that was rapidly transforming the way human beings work. Others methodically probed the outer boundaries of current science to show that eventually all the existing limitations would be overcome.

A presentation on Beauty was typical of this type. An Australian scientist demonstrated an AI facial recognition system that could reliably identify beautiful women on five different continents - as reliably as the people on those continents, at least. The computer went along with the majority 73 percent of the time, whereas ordinary citizens agree with one another only 68 percent of the time. The presenter conceded that his system was not yet able to predict beauty on a universal basis. When one hundred people from different nations were mixed into a common pool, the computer went along with the majority only 21 percent of the time, whereas a cross-section of people from different countries were in agreement 57 percent of the time. Perplexed, the scientist attributed this result to a methodological flaw. A tall, strikingly attractive black- haired woman in the audience suggested an alternative explanation. National standards of beauty may fall within certain stereotypes relating to physiognomic characteristics such as nose length, thickness of lips, shape of the face, height of the forehead, and skin color. Whereas, a universal standard of beauty would depend more on a perception of energy, vitality, brightness of mind and personality, gracefulness and mystery, i.e. attributes of human consciousness rather than physical characteristics. The woman so perfectly embodied the characteristics of universal beauty she enumerated, that few were prepared to disagree with her. The presenter discerned that he was being subtly challenged by a proponent of Weak AI, so he passed on to another question.

He was followed by a mathematical criminologist who sounded like he had served as a consultant to Numb3rs, the TV crime series. His presentation covered a vast landscape ranging from probability theory to personality profiling. Stearne sat unobserved among the audience whispering quietly with a young blond woman with her own claim to universal beauty. He was very familiar with the behaviorist school of psychology dominant at Berkeley and easily grasped the underlying philosophy of this speaker’s approach–human personality is the product of physiological conditioning. Once you have identified all the inputs, projecting and modeling behavioral outcomes was a relatively simple matter for advanced AI systems. The speaker cited a long list of successful applications of AI for crime detection and prevention, though Stearne observed that none of his examples actually illustrated the successful modeling of human behavior. They were almost all based on probability theory. The argument and the evidence were both compelling, but they did not relate to one another.

Other plenary speakers focused on environmental scenario building and military security and intelligence. A CIA senior analyst deftly handled the intelligence topic, sketching the outlines of an AI system that could predict the behavior of rogue nations, anticipate terrorist attacks, and reduce the threat of nuclear attacks. We now possess the wisdom of hindsight to view these claims with skepticism following September 11, the erroneous reports on Iraq’s nuclear program and the optimistic scenarios put forth by the Administration for a quick victory for democracy in that country. In January 2000, these claims met with wild approval. But there were dissenters. An Israeli intelligence office challenged the efficacy of AI systems to decipher the Middle East crisis. An American scenario planner working at a Washington think tank pointed out that not a single AI system had anticipated the sudden end of the Cold War eleven years earlier and none had come forth with a viable solution for ending violence in North Ireland or Kashmir, let alone in Palestine.

Towards the end of the day Edward Bennet, a hedge fund trader from Rothman & Lazurus, whose elegant attire and high tech presentation exuded wealth and success, spoke about financial modeling. The speaker defended computerized trading against the frequent accusations raised by opponents–none of whom were present–and largely credited America’s robust economic growth and booming financial markets to the application of AI in this field. At the conclusion of his talk, a tall handsome thirty-something Asian Indian challenged the speaker’s view and cited evidence that computerized trading systems had only served to disassociate financial markets from underlying economic fundamentals, with potentially disastrous results down the line. Bennet merely pointed at the dot.com boom as compelling evidence in favor of his view and left the podium.

By 4:00 pm the mood of the conference was exhilarating, bordering on intoxication. When Benjamin Dent was introduced, expectation rose to a peak and the hall fell silent. Dent began in his characteristic fashion, weaving an intricate web of concepts, theories, facts, applications and examples drawn from a dozen different fields into a magnificent and harmonious symphony, exuding power and grandeur. And as he wove, his audience was spellbound and uplifted, as if inspired by the glory of God’s word brought down and proclaimed by one of Christ’s living apostles. Though his voice lacked the smooth, melodious undulations of a black Southern Methodist preacher who sang rather than spoke his sermon, Dent’s speech resonated with clarity, strength, conviction and faith in what he spoke. His harmony was woven of thoughts more than of sounds, but the rapid oscillation of those thoughts between fact and possibility, past achievement and future prospect, science and science fiction created its own unique cadence, rhythm and melody in the minds of his listeners, perhaps not unlike the music of the spheres heard in meditation by the early astronomers.

Gradually the consummate maestro brought his presentation to a crescendo. He became for a moment the living embodiment of a glorious power, a power to conquer the mysteries of nature, a power to transcend even the greatest of limits, the limitations of our humanity. Nothing could stop the forward step of progress. If people were ignorant, weak and fallible, they were also imaginative and courageous enough to create something that transcended their own limitations. Then in a whirlwind closing argument, he tied everything together in the simplest of terms that left everyone feeling indeed that the highest truth is self-evident, that the greatest mystery can be reduced to a matter of commonsense. He drew on the most recent discoveries in the science of complexity to reveal the natural tendency for the evolution of emergent properties without any need for postulating a conscious creator working behind the scenes. Then he cited the latest developments in biology to support his view that life can best be regarded as an emergent property of material systems. He heralded the achievements of cognitive neuron theory and neural networks as incontestable evidence that consciousness has its roots in the electro-chemical properties of the brain–that thought, mind and soul itself are emergent systems of matter–the greatest manifestation yet of Nature’s capacity for creative evolution. As a final culmination and close, he followed the vector lines of these three great discoveries far into the future to the point where they unite and become one.

“What lies at the center of the convergent focal point?” he asked. “Artificial Intelligence. AI is the ultimate science of synthesis and the final product of human endeavor. That point marks the end of human evolution as we know it and the beginning of a new phase in the endless unfolding of universal Nature. We are on the verge of the greatest of all scientific discoveries, the formulation of a Theory of Everything that unifies, synthesizes and integrates within a common framework and set of universal principles all the processes of nature. By this theory, the reality of matter, life and consciousness are revealed as various expressions of the same natural laws and the same principles of variation, a perfect marriage of Chance and Necessity. Those who fear the rise of a deterministic, all-determining science need have no fear. For we now know that behind the apparent order of the universe looms CHAOS. That chaos forever guarantees our freedom and our individuality, for it makes each object, each moment and each of us absolutely unique in space and time, a random variation on the general theme. Freedom is the final law.”

Dent raised his arms in front of him and bowed his head in an expression of humility, signifying the conclusion of his presentation. After a moment of utter silence, a pandemonium of violent applause filled the hall. Hundreds of people rose from the audience and flocked to the podium to intercept Dent before he could depart from the hall. The very air was vibrant with intensity.

Stearne sat motionless in the back of the auditorium anonymous and unrecognized as yet by all but a few. He had listened intently to Dent’s presentation and could not help admiring the awe-inspiring intellect and masterful skill of its author. He waited patiently with his lovely companion for the crowd to pass out before him, so he could return to his hotel room and ponder what, he wondered to himself, he would say the following afternoon. What could he say to reach beneath the splendor of Dent’s magnificent façade and call to mind among these people the deeper realities of their own existence and experience?

As he rose he noticed a moderately tall, sandy haired young man in his mid thirties–anyone less than sixty had come to look young in Stearne’s eyes. The man hesitated at the end of the aisle, looking in his direction, apparently wanting to speak with the professor as he walked to the end of the row. Then he turned and left the hall.