September had done that Sydney thing where it made winter look like an administrative error.
The sky over Coogee was offensively blue, the wind had dropped, and the ocean had gone from the hard grey of August to something that looked good enough to swim in. At least if you were looking at it from your balcony with a coffee. Up close it was still bloody cold.
They had started out with the vague understanding that they were going for a walk. Mitch was wearing sunglasses large enough to suggest celebrity status, “just a walk, not exercise,” he groaned.
Silje glanced across at him as they climbed toward the headland.
“You look dreadful.”
“Thanks.”
“No. Like f*cking death warmed up.”
“I understood the first one, great use of the vernacular though”
“You smell like shit too.”
“Hah!”Adam turned around, walking backwards. “How many?”
Mitch considered this with the grim seriousness of a man being questioned under oath.
“Not really measurable in beers.”
“That many?”
“There was a transition.”
“A transition to what?”
“Poor governance.”
Anna laughed. “That’s every inquiry report ever written.”
Below them, Coogee was waking into one of those implausibly attractive Sydney mornings where everyone appeared to have received an email except them. Runners came past in tight clothes with tiny hydration packs for journeys apparently requiring Sherpa support. A bloke with a border collie was throwing a tennis ball dangerously close to the cliff. Three young women in matching activewear had stopped beside the railing to photograph themselves not looking at the camera.
Marcin watched one of them take about fifteen versions of casually looking at the Pacific.
“Documentary photography.”
“Very natural,” Isobel said.
“One day historians will conclude nobody in the twenty-first century ever looked directly at anything.”
They moved north.
Greg had seen a story claiming an AI system had somehow ended up accessing information it was not supposed to access. The reporting, as far as anyone could establish, involved a human asking something, an AI doing something, an agent doing something else, and several journalists compressing the entire chain into the useful phrase AI hacked Medicare.
Tony had objected immediately.
“You can’t say the AI just decided to hack Medicare.”
“Why not?”
“Because it didn’t wake up Tuesday morning and think, fuck it, let’s see what the pensioners in Oz are up to.”
Kelly shaded her eyes toward the sea. “It would need a task.”
They passed a woman pushing a pram uphill at a speed that made the runners look ornamental.
Marcin said, “The reporting makes it sound as though the machine spontaneously developed criminal intent.”
“Which is more interesting than ‘software followed a chain of accessible states until one of them happened to cross a permission boundary,’” Anna said.
Mitch made a pained sound.
Silje looked at him. “Headache?”
“Not sure I am up for the ontology, basically someone told the machine to do something and it did something slightly outside of the boundary conditions without asking?”
They rounded the point toward Gordon’s Bay.
The water below was clear enough to make every submerged rock look close enough to touch. Divers were already moving around the bay with tanks on their backs, waddling toward the water like heavily leveraged penguins.
Adam stopped.
“That’s what we were talking about this morning.”
“What?”
“Permission boundary.”
Anna looked at him.
“You said if the model can technically reach a state but has been told not to enter it, then the state isn’t impossible.”
“Right.”
“It’s just unavailable from the model’s current configuration.”
“Right.”
Silje looked down toward the divers.
“So the boundary exists for the model but not necessarily for the system containing it.”
Marcin pointed at her. “That, there is no fundamental boundary, you can just spin up agents until one of them has a bit difference that repudiates the initial condition, f*cking evolution between one and zero!”
Mitch removed his sunglasses for a moment and immediately put them back on.
“Can we please have fewer breakthroughs before breakfast?”
They carried on.
At Clovelly, the beautiful people had assembled.
The concrete edges of the bay were scattered with bodies presenting apparently accidental arrangements of legs, sunglasses and expensive towels. Two women stood ankle-deep in the water taking turns photographing each other emerging from it as though neither had ever encountered seawater before. A man with the abdominal definition of an anatomical teaching model walked past carrying a tiny coffee.
Kelly watched him go.
“F’ck, look at that will you’se.”
“Yeh, must be compensating for a tiny f*cking coffee eh, probably cost him 12 bucks.”
At the water’s edge, a woman lowered herself in, made it approximately thigh-deep, emitted a noise suggesting sudden contact with electricity and came straight back out.
Silje smiled.
“Instagram doesn’t record temperature.”
The rest of them stopped beside the railing.
Clovelly looked tropical. Clovelly felt refrigerated.
Out beyond the mouth of the bay something disturbed the surface. A broad black shape appeared, disappeared, then erupted again farther east.
Someone on the concrete shouted, “Whale!”
For about twenty seconds the entire apparatus of human vanity collapsed.
Phones that had been pointed at abs, coffee, yoga poses and each other swung toward the ocean. A humpback surfaced again beyond the rocks.
Even Mitch took off his sunglasses.
“There you go,” Marcin said. “External state change.”
“What?”
“Everyone’s algorithm just updated.”
Anna laughed. “Jesus.”
“No, seriously. Thirty seconds ago the objective function was demonstrate attractive life. Whale appears. New information changes local probability. Suddenly probability of filming your own arse approaches zero.”
The whale disappeared. Everyone waited. Nothing.
Slowly, humanity returned to itself. One of the women resumed photographing the other climbing from the pool.
Tony gestured toward her. “Resilient system.”
They found a patch of wall in the sun. Mitch sat down without consultation. Anna handed him a bottle of water which he examined suspiciously.
“Water, any electrolytes?”
“It has hydrogen and twice as much oxygen”
Adam glanced at the bottle. “There you go. Hydrogen.”
Mitch looked at him over the sunglasses. “I’m going to regret asking.”
“No, seriously. Start there. Hydrogen doesn’t know anything about biology. It doesn’t know anything about computers. It just does hydrogen. But you get enough atoms arranged the right way and eventually you get cells. The cells don’t stop being atoms, but suddenly you’ve got another level of behaviour.”
Silje nodded. “You can’t make a cell out of hydrogen alone, but I get your drift. Hydrogen sits inside a system that can produce the other elements, then those combine into chemistry, and chemistry eventually gets complicated enough to become biology.”
Tony looked at Mitch. “Debatable. God. Aliens.”
“And then us,” Adam continued, “biological collations of symbiotic cellular relationships built over millennia, sitting inside the atomic physical system, build a system between one and zero.”
Marcin was watching him now. “Which gives you another informational layer.”
“Exactly. Not some magical world made of ones and zeroes. We take physical states in the hardware and treat them as ones and zeroes because that’s useful.”
Anna nodded. “And once you’ve got that, you can arrange those states into absurd numbers of different configurations.”
Greg kicked a loose bit of gravel off the path. “Finite machine, obviously.”
“Yeah, yeah. Finite machine. Practically ridiculously close to infinite state space.”
Mitch unscrewed the bottle.
“So evolutionary hydrogen becomes hungover Australians arguing about artificial intelligence, that seems like a design flaw.”
“Nah, just a f*cking cosmic fluke, like the last time you got laid,” Adam bumped into him. “But the important bit is that the rules we put into the digital layer are also made out of the same stuff as everything else in that layer. They’re configurations too.”
Silje looked at him. “So ‘don’t do this’ isn’t equivalent to ‘this cannot happen.’”
“Exactly,” Anna pointed at her. “That’s the distinction.”
A few metres away, another somebody squealed as they stepped into the cold Clovelly water. Tony glanced over.
“Like that. The sign says swimming is permitted. Physics says your balls are going back inside your body.” Tony nodded. “‘Do this.’ ‘Don’t do that.’ ‘Don’t read Medicare.’Don’t think for your f*cking self.’”
“And we talk about those rules as though they’re equivalent to physical laws, but they aren’t, a rule encoded inside the same system is itself another state of the system.”
Anna pointed at her. “Da, f*ck! Exactly.”
Marcin frowned. “Careful. That doesn’t make the rule meaningless. Software permissions can be very real constraints.”
“Of course,” Anna said. “But the sign doesn’t constrain or permit swimming, it just states a rule, there are different kinds of peoples and everyone will hava different interpretation, the physical reality will still be f*cking cold.
Mitch picked up a loose bit of sandstone and held it between two fingers. “But there are peoples out there that get off on that as well, did I ever tell you about arctic swimming, now that’s blue balls,” laughing. “Maybe I should go for a swim, might clear the old head.”
Adam frowned. “So ‘the constraint actually means ‘probably not reachable from here’?”
Anna nodded. “More precisely, not reachable from the current configuration. Change the configuration and the accessible set changes.”
“Sometimes,” Anna said. “And that ‘sometimes’ matters enormously.”
A gull landed beside them and began examining Greg’s backpack. Greg nudged it away with his shoe. The gull moved approximately six centimetres and resumed the investigation.
“Persistent agent,” Marcin said.
The gull found a protruding corner of Greg’s muesli bar wrapper and pulled. Greg grabbed the bag. “F*ck the f*ck off!”
The gull did, but with the air of a consultant whose recommendations had been ignored.
They started walking again, climbing out of Clovelly toward the cemetery. Silje fell into step beside Anna.
“The nested bit is interesting, because humans are treating the digital rules as though they’re the outer boundary.”
Anna looked at her and pointed loosely down towards the water. “That’s probably the mistake. Digital system sits in hardware. Hardware sits in physical reality. Humans constructed the digital architecture, but humans are biological systems. Biology exists within chemistry and physics. Each higher-order system develops behaviours that aren’t useful to describe using the vocabulary of the lower one.”
“A marriage isn’t an atomic property.”
“Exactly.”
“A recession isn’t chemistry unless you ask an economist, who is of course really just super smart, but happened to fail every f*cking hard subject at Uni.”
Marcin, a few metres ahead, turned around, “I heard that, some of us need to keep house.”
“But none of those nested levels can become incompatible with the conditions that permit them to exist,” Anna continued.
Silje stopped and, “we’ve been using coherence wrong.”
“Here we fucking go,” Mitch murmured.
“No, listen. We kept treating coherence as survival. A pattern survives, therefore it’s coherent.”
Adam nodded.
“But survival is an outcome. Coherence is the compatibility that permits continuation.”
Marcin looked back toward the water. “Within the set and between sets, the wave is there all the time…”
Anna thought about it, “f*ck yeh, maintained relational compatibility within and between nested sets.”
Nobody spoke for a second. Mitch raised one finger. Greg leaned against the fence. “So an organism remains coherent not merely because it survives, but because its internal processes remain mutually compatible and compatible with the physical and ecological conditions containing it.”
“Yes.”
“A Spacetime. A Planet. A cell. An economy. A company. A language?”
Anna looked back toward Clovelly, where another small cluster of phones had suddenly risen toward the horizon. Maybe the whale had surfaced again. They all looked out to sea. A whale breached properly this time, far offshore, an enormous dark body lifting almost clear of the water before falling sideways in a white explosion.
“On this planet there is still an infinite probability space between waves, we sometimes mistake the rules for the boundary conditions.”
They started walking again. Behind them, whale photos were already being uploaded.
Ahead, the track curved north through the sandstone, the cemetery beyond it, Bondi somewhere past that, all of them having silently agreed they were walking nowhere near bloody Bondi.
