Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence enters the story as a new science still close to its beginnings: a way to investigate intelligence by building machines that reproduce some functions of the human mind. For Jan Liseiwicz, it promises more than improved calculation. It could lead from computers to robots and make Rong Jinzhen’s exceptional, dream-shaped understanding of the mind the basis of a major scientific inquiry.

A new research frontier

The subject first takes shape as Liseiwicz’s renewed ambition. In the first winter after the Second World War, he returned from Europe alone, bringing books in an enormous wooden case too large to fit in a car. He explained that he had a new research interest. The scale of the books reflected the scale of the project he intended to begin: artificial intelligence. The world’s first computer had only just been built, and Liseiwicz saw in it an opening that most researchers had not yet recognized. The machine could perform calculations; he wanted to pursue the much larger question of whether a machine might imitate the human mind.

This ambition marked a return to research after a period of dormancy. Liseiwicz’s plans were not simply to extend computing as it then existed. He treated calculation as an initial demonstration that a machine could carry out one kind of mental function, and reasoned that other aspects of intelligence might eventually be approached as well. The proposed field therefore joined a concrete, newly built technology to a question whose full reach remained unknown.

From intelligence to machines

Liseiwicz’s imagined sequence runs from understanding intelligence to creating an artificial person. If the mystery of intelligence could be solved, he reasoned, researchers might build robots: electrically powered, metal beings without flesh or blood. He connected this possibility to other attempts to reproduce or extend the functions of living bodies, including artificial wings. In his account, artificial intelligence was the crucial first step; a robot capable of undertaking human tasks depended on first understanding enough of the intelligence that such a machine was meant to mimic.

That prospect carried practical appeal. Liseiwicz imagined robots taking on work people performed in profoundly inhumane conditions, as well as tasks he regarded as serving perverse human demands. A publicly understood science with such applications, he believed, would have a remarkable future and immediate value. Yet he did not present technological usefulness as an uncomplicated good. His discussion places the promise of new scientific power beside the persistence of war and the possibility that human beings would acquire still more terrible means of killing. The same age that was learning to construct machines was also confronting the prospect of mass destruction; technical capacity could answer human needs without guaranteeing humane ends.

Research, usefulness, and responsibility

In his letter to Young Lillie, Liseiwicz weighs the attraction of pure research against the pressure to produce practical results. He considers an immense, complex mathematical subject a particularly suitable home for Jinzhen’s talents, but fears that a short-sighted, profit-oriented world increasingly undervalues theoretical work. Technical research, by contrast, offers a sequence of results that can encourage further effort. Its danger is that, once a project is complete, its creator may lose control over how it is used. Liseiwicz invokes the reported regret of Oppenheimer over work on the first nuclear bomb to express the problem: a creation with consequences of its own cannot simply be recalled once released.

Artificial intelligence thus stands between two kinds of promise. It offers demanding inquiry into a fundamental mystery and the prospect of machines that could perform useful work; it also raises the question of what happens when a discovery passes beyond its maker’s intentions. Liseiwicz’s confidence in the field does not erase this tension. His case for pursuing it rests on the expectation that its benefits could be immense, even as his warning about technological consequences makes clear that usefulness and control are not the same thing.

Why Jinzhen is central

Liseiwicz’s recommendation is personal as well as scientific. He tells Young Lillie that Jinzhen is indispensable to the project and makes its prospects conditional on Jinzhen’s survival from a grave illness. If Jinzhen dies, Liseiwicz advises abandoning the undertaking; if he lives, Young Lillie might see one of humanity’s great mysteries solved within his lifetime. Liseiwicz presents this not as a claim that Jinzhen has already developed artificial intelligence, but as a judgment that he is uniquely suited to investigate intelligence itself.

The grounds for that judgment reach back to Jinzhen’s earliest conscious life. Liseiwicz understands dreams as an unusually mysterious manifestation of the human spirit and points to Jinzhen’s long experience of them, together with the remarkable skill he developed in interpreting their meaning. Jinzhen had not knowingly trained for research into intelligence, but Liseiwicz sees that experience as an unrecognized preparation for it. Dreams, in this account, are not a finished scientific explanation; they are the domain through which Jinzhen has encountered some of the mind’s most difficult questions.

The concept’s narrative significance

Artificial intelligence gives Liseiwicz a way to unite his belief in Jinzhen’s unusual mind with a scientific future larger than either man. The letter moves from the history of computing, through a conjecture about robots, to an appeal to Young Lillie to preserve the conditions in which Jinzhen might work. Its conditional conclusion matters: the project depends on Jinzhen’s recovery, and Liseiwicz leaves the letter as a record of his hopes if Young Lillie or God should prevent that future from unfolding.

The wider story also sets machine calculation against forms of intelligence that resist easy reduction to calculation. Later, Rong Jinzhen’s cryptographic work is described through exhaustive searching, intuition about a cipher’s openings, and an unexpected discovery: the key to BLACK is zero. These episodes do not show him building artificial intelligence, nor do they establish a direct link between that work and Liseiwicz’s project. They do sharpen the question behind the proposal. A computer can calculate, but the novel’s account of intelligence includes interpretation, patience, intuition, and the capacity to notice what an apparently locked problem conceals. Liseiwicz’s proposal makes the effort to understand that broader human intelligence the field’s defining challenge.