Page 23 of The Proving Ground

“I don’t want them to know we know about her. Not yet. Which reminds me, there’s no Wi-Fi in the cage. How’d you search for her on TheUncannyValley?”

“On my phone. I stepped out to do it. I thought that would be okay.”

I thought about that for a moment. McEvoy’s finding Naomi Kitchens alleviated my suspicions about him, so it was unlikely that the Masons or Tidalwaiv knew about my decision to allow him to jointhe team. My main concern now was hiding from them that we had discovered the identity of the ethicist they were trying to hide from us.

“When you say you stepped out to search on your phone, how far did you step out?” I asked.

“Uh, I actually did it in the courtroom while we were waiting for the judge to come in,” McEvoy said. “Why, what are you worried about?”

“That they might have a sniffer here.”

“A sniffer? Really? That seems kind of extreme.”

“Believe me, Tidalwaiv will go to extremes to win this case. Any idea where Naomi Kitchens is now?”

“Yes, I found her. She’s up in Palo Alto teaching at Stanford, and one of her classes is called Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

I nodded. Things were coming together.

“Then that’s where we’ll go to talk to her,” I said.

“Really?” McEvoy asked. “When?”

“Right now.”

“Don’t you want to call her first?”

“No. They might be watching her like they watched Patel. Besides, we call her and it might scare her away. She’s got to know about this lawsuit, but she hasn’t come forward. Why? Another NDA? I think it’s something else. She’s scared.”

10

“RIGHT NOW” TURNEDout to be the next morning. McEvoy and I took a JSX flight from Burbank up to Oakland, picked up a Go rental car, and made our way across the lower bay to Palo Alto and Stanford University. On the plane, McEvoy had searched online for Professor Kitchens’s office and schedule. He found both and learned that she gave only one lecture on Tuesdays. The class was called History of Machine Learning.

“Perfect,” I’d said.

The lecture was scheduled from eleven till noon in the Hewlett Teaching Center. We got lost twice while trying to find it in the school’s Science and Engineering Quad and finally arrived shortly before noon. It was held in a midsize lecture hall that was about half full. A hundred or so students were scattered throughout the six tiers of seats. The two entrances were on the top level. We stepped in quietly and took two open seats near the door. Kitchens stood at a lectern below. There was a large flat-screen monitor on the wall behind her that showed a black-and-white photo of a man who looked familiar,but I couldn’t readily place him. On a blackboard next to the screen, Kitchens had written her name and university email address in chalk. That was when I realized that it was the first class of a new semester.

“Deep Blue defeated Kasparov with what move?” Kitchens asked. “Anyone?”

No one raised a hand. I now recognized the man on the screen as Garry Kasparov, the chess champion who famously lost a match to an IBM computer almost three decades ago.

“The knight sacrifice,” Kitchens said. “It was in that moment that many believe machines became smarter than humans. And I will leave it there until next week. Please begin reading Kurzweil’s book and we will add that to the discussion next Tuesday as well. Have fun.”

The students started leaving. I watched one kid shove a book into a backpack. I caught a glimpse of the title,The Singularity Is Nearer,and assumed that was the book Kitchens had assigned the class.

I saw Kitchens gather up her lecture notes and move to a desk. She looked like she was in her mid- to late thirties and she had dark skin and hair in tight rows of braids. She wore faded blue jeans with a red, untucked, and equally faded blouse.

“I don’t want to overwhelm her with two of us,” I said. “Let me go down alone first.”

“You sure you don’t want me to go with you?” McEvoy said.

“No, it should be just me. Hang back until I signal. Or I don’t.”

“Will do.”

I went down the steps toward the stage, passing the final few students going up to the exits. When I got to the front, Kitchens was sliding her notes and the laptop she had used for her PowerPoint presentation into her backpack. Though she was looking down and zipping the pack closed, she spoke before I could.

“I saw you two up there and knew you weren’t students,” she said.