A Time Traveller's Guide To Feudal Japan

Chapter 343 - Modern World

Throughout that first day he focused on making his electricity automated. With a big wheel and a bowl full of water, that was more or less done, at least to the point where he was happy with it.

Next, he was down to make his first computer system, a simple sort, but he hoped from there that he could make the most basic of AIs and begin to automate the processes.

The only problem was, again, his lack of materials. He had not the quartz sand needed for silicone nor the oil needed for plastic. It took a whole day of waiting before materials of that sort were finally delivered to his door and even then work needed to be done on them.

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Throughout the process, Gengyo had to continually remind himself not to attempt to make anything too complicated straight away. In truth, all he was doing at first was making his tools.

With his first plastics and silicone, he was finally able to begin with a circuit board. A basic sort, but enough to handle a very primitive processor and other such essentials. And then, with the tungsten wire that he had been playing with a day or two before, he made up his display, with hundreds of tiny little bulbs.

With a screen of sorts and a computer without any operating system to speak of, Gengyo felt he had finally made his first steps into the modern world. He spent a few days merely on that system, programming it to be of use to him, automating the production of computer parts, making it more precise.

He soon had a little conveyer belt on his table flowing with parts, with his very first robots doing their work as they extended over with the single arms that comprised their entire bodies and made minute adjustments to circuit boards, all according to the instructions that Gengyo had programmed.

From there – for Gengyo at least – the path was much straighter and easier to navigate. As soon as he had AI to work with, even the most primitive sort, it was a steady process of upgrading processing power and intelligence.

First, he started off with an intelligence system that was no better than that of a worm, then from there he upgraded it to that of a fish, then a mouse, then a rather dull-witted cat, then a dog. That was where he was forced to end that day, with an artificial self-learning intelligence that was eager to serve.

As he went back to rejoin his friends and family, he left it the task of teaching itself how to better produce the parts that would be needed in future, to save Gengyo the effort of reprogramming it. He left it the raw materials to do so, and could only hope that it would not cause too significant a disaster if were to all go wrong.

He slept easier that night. Better than he had in a long time. He always did, when he knew that work was being done as he slept and there was nothing he could do to speed it up.

When he came down the next day, he mentally prepared himself for a mess, just in case his programming had truly contained some sort of bug, but to his delight, there was nothing at all. Nothing but a clean row of parts all lined up on the table.

He checked each one individually and was more than happy with the quality. Things were starting to improve. They looked like the sort of professionally made circuit boards one would find if they opened up their computer and gutted it. The connectors were clean and well shaped without any issues at all.

Gengyo patted the robotic arm, praising it for its work, and then he began to assemble the new computer. By his calculations, this one should have enough processing power to support an AI with a similar level of intelligence to a human, which was more than a big step, but whether or not that was the case remained to be seen.

He used the operating system he had already set up on the last two computers, a rather ugly and primitive sort of thing, more focused on functionality than appearance, and then he began to make the changes required to his robot’s system in order to give it the capacity of human intelligence.

It took more than a few hours to get to that stage. He was surprised to find how well he remembered that code. Then he realized just how many months had a poured over it, all them years ago, trying to decide what it was about the human minds ability to think that made it function so.

Before the day was out, the scripts were done. A network of intelligence had been built up inside that computer with the capacity for human-level intelligence. That would be where its home remained, for now, as he got it to work on something bigger and better, by itself.

When his machine reached human level intelligence was when Gengyo’s work was almost done. Now, by its own processing power and by trial and error, it could simulate and learn what was necessary to create a system more intelligent than itself, at a rate hundreds of thousands of times faster than any human possibly could.

He left it to that, beginning the process with a nervousness, just as he had last time. As a leading head in the robotics industry, he had never feared AI as many had begun to, but with so many tales picturing the end of humanity at the hands of the very machines they had birthed, it was difficult to be too confident that nothing could go wrong.

Once more he closed his heavy iron door at the end of a productive day, but this time he checked the locks even more thoroughly, testing them more than once to ensure that they would not open for anyone. Now they had truly entered the modern world.