Ha turned her face toward Evrim’s. Her own excitement was mirrored perfectly in Evrim’s expression: Yes. This was something they shared, for certain. There may have been distance between them—a massive difference in the way they saw the world—but there was no mistaking this shared feeling. The pure joy at her discovery—at their mutual discovery. “Our octopus is in its Stone Age,” Ha said. “Or—to be precise—in its Seashell Age.”

Chapter 17

The ideas behind connectome mapping and neural modeling are human ideas, but the turning point was technological, not intellectual. The scientists who preceded me were Galileos without a telescope. They were trying to reconstruct the mind’s labyrinth from cross-sections of dead brains, hand-drawing boundaries between neurons. No matter how smart they were, their task was impossible. Manual reconstruction of the maze of connectivity in a single cubic millimeter of cortex would have taken a million human hours of labor.

It was massive processing capacity and the automatic imaging analysis of new generations of supercomputers, themselves powered by artificial intelligence, that finally allowed progress. That is the irony: I don’t stand on the shoulders of giants—I stand on the shoulders of machines and their focused computational power.

—Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Building Minds

17

“WHAT IS IT LIKe to be a bat?”

It was hot in Astrakhan, and stuffy in the little one-room apartment. Aynur lay naked on the narrow bed, watching a vapor ring disintegrate toward the ceiling. They had smoked a little bit of the stuff, but hardly enough to provoke this kind of weird speculation. She turned her head to Rustem.

“Sorry?”

“You were asking me, before, about my work. About what I do. I was trying to think of how to explain it to you.”

Aynur had to drag herself back to the conversation they were having earlier. What had they been talking about? Oh yes. Jobs. Her job hanging art for galleries—Rustem thought it was fascinating. The theory behind it, the thought that went into the sequences of pieces and their position in the space. The importance of negative space. He’d asked her question after question about her work: questions she answered idly.

She had not thought much about her job in a long time. The process was automatic. There was a natural syntax to the pieces, usually, and if there wasn’t—well, you made up a sequence, and invented a reason for it. Some gobbledygook. If the artist didn’t like it, they insisted on something else, and you hung it their way. That was how it worked in real life.

After a while she had gotten a little embarrassed—Rustem’s questions were probing, exact. They demanded exact answers, and she didn’t have those answers. The theories she had learned in university had long been subsumed by the flow of practice.