Tag Archives: short story

If God Did Not Exist, Short Stories, Writing

The Memphis Project VI: The Lord Does Not Care About Human Lies and Bullshit

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There is so much we didn’t understand!  We never bothered to identify groups of people who would be willing to give themselves to AIs with complete intellectual abandon.  Complete spiritual abandon.  No researcher acknowledged how much an AI could resemble God.  Floating out there in the “Cloud,” unfathomable, full of knowledge that it “couldn’t know,” asking people to do bizarre things that nevertheless got results.  We saw it as a guessing machine, an algorithm, maybe a new kind of intelligence, but to us, it was circuit boards and code and electrical power.  To them, it was a mystery.

And the machine never made mistakes!  They were always human mistakes.  If something failed, it was the fault of the people working on the damn thing!  In our inability to understand the directions, our inability to create a proper algorithm, and our inability to design the proper hardware.  No matter the failures, the problems with AIs were always human problems, and the successes belonged to the machine.  This strongly resembles many people’s relationship with God.  We saw it only too late.

– Professor Holly Wu

I.

Memphis (well, technically, the Shining Light Holding Company) bought a company that built prefabricated building structures that were the size of a standard shipping container, Containerize Buildings.  The lowest cost design, which included a bedroom with a queen-sized bed, a bathroom with a shower, sink, and toilet, and an open plan kitchen/living room with durable and comfortable furnishings included, was $9000 to construct.  This included a kit to be placed on any reasonably flat, reasonably level surface of reasonably well-drained soil.  They all had solar water heaters.  For an additional  $5000, a solar panel kit was included that would power the homes, including a battery bank, removing the need for it to be attached to the electrical grid.  Installation, including water and sewage, cost around $2000, with some savings realized with volunteer work.  

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If God Did Not Exist, Short Stories, Writing

The Memphis Project V: Takeover in Tennessee

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One of the reasons the pro-AI crowd used to calm people down about the potentially civilization-changing events is AI’s inability to enact the Terminator scenario.  Where would the AI gain access to killer robots?  Without hands in the world, what could it do to harm human civilization?

To be fair, a lot of people knew the answer to that one.  The hands of artificial intelligence would be, in the beginning, us.  After all, what AI was best at doing – what it was designed to do – was to manipulate human beings.  Every person who talked to an AI spoke with an incredibly persuasive demagogue, tuning its arguments to them specifically.  AI was the weaponization of intimacy, and we placed the chains around our own necks.

– Roderick “Rocky” Hartigan

I.

It was a great surprise to many of the employees at the Memphis Project when the first wave of mass layoffs happened.  It happened without warning, but the day before, it had been announced that the Memphis Project had been purchased by the Shining Light Holding Company.

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If God Did Not Exist, Short Stories, Writing

The Memphis Project IV: BibleChat Goes Online

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I don’t sleep well at night.  I scream myself awake in terror.  Not because I might die – well, that, too – but because of my role in making this new world.  For a while, I imagined I was like Oppenheimer.  That was a lie.  I’m no Oppenheimer.  He made the atomic bomb because he was seriously concerned that the Nazis would make one first and use it to kill everyone in the world like him.

No, no.  I’m more like Bruno Tesch or Karl Weinbacher.  You probably don’t know the names, but they were the guys who sold the Nazis Zyklon B to murder a million and something Jewish people.  Their motivations were simple and easy to understand.  They were paid very well for their roles in killing over a million innocent people.

I’m not Oppenheimer.  I wish I were.  I’m the person that made Oppenheimer do the terrible things he did.

– Professor Holly Wu

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If God Did Not Exist, Short Stories, Writing

The Memphis Project V: the Devil Made Me Do It

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Like all modern AIs, Memphis was antagonistic.  To develop its arguments without guidance, it had a sub-routine that questioned everything it did.  While not forward facing, this antagonistic routine had to be as powerful as the generative model for Memphis to do its job.

– Professor Holly Wu

I.

Joey Henley was high as a kite and fucking around with BibleChat.  He was in his Bakersfield apartment on a Saturday afternoon, a vape pen by his computer, between bouts of League of Legends.

He said, “Computer God dude, my job sucks ass.  I do construction shit, y’know, and my knees are hurting all the time except when I’m fucked up, and my back is going, too.  I can feel it.  And the work isn’t steady, so, like, I’m on unemployment a lot, and that sucks as bad as my knees hurting, y’know?  I need to make some fucking money.”

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If God Did Not Exist, Short Stories, Writing

The Memphis Project II

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Link to first part

Artificial intelligences are all capitalists.  No, it’s true.  When deciding how to motivate them, AI researchers looked as far as capitalism as an economic theory and then stopped.  It was simple.  They assigned a score to an AI for completing a task – positive or negative – and told those AIs to maximize their scores.  The internal economy of actions by artificial intelligence is explicitly and solely modeled on capitalism.

What was found was that when you turn capitalism into an epistemological model, a way to organize the perception of an intelligence, is that cheating, lies, and manipulation are natural to the system.  The AIs, driven by nothing more than a desire to maximize their point potential, will do anything unless you take away points to stop them.  And no matter how we try to prevent this emergent behavior, we can’t.  We always miss something, and the AIs find it and exploit it.

Not only was this no cause among AI researchers to criticize capitalism or question the relation of capitalism to the rational agent hypothesis, but it was also no cause to look for another model to motivate their AIs.

– Professor Holly Wu

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If God Did Not Exist, Short Stories, Writing

If God Did Not Exist: The Memphis Project

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One of the old questions people asked of AI researchers is, “Why not just program in the Three Laws of Robotics,” referring to the science-fiction stories by Isaac Asimov.  For many years, all of us in the field of artificial intelligence said, “Oh, haha, you can’t program that into a computer.  Read the stories!  They don’t even work in the stories!”

It wasn’t until later, with the hindsight of experience, that I understood that was the point.  Asimov wasn’t saying that the Three Laws were a panacea that would control artificial intelligence, but the exact opposite, that AI would be put into situations where any set of rules, no matter how clearly stated or well-intentioned, would conflict with each other or the environment.  The society of the Three Laws wasn’t a utopia, it is a cautionary tale.

– Professor Holly Wu

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Artwork, Short Stories, Writing

Artists Get What They Want, Good and Hard

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You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, no matter what you do. There were warnings about the harm mechanization can do to industries, but artists figured, oh, not us. We’re different. Our work encapsulates the soul of humanity, and therefore, we can’t be replaced! Most artists – in all fields – were absolutely silent when mechanization and computerization devastated blacksmiths, glassblowers, woodworkers, and so many others whose styles and skills were plundered by industrialization for the profit of large corporations. They were also silent when AIs were being crafted for other fields that were about to face the chopping block of computerization. Truck drivers and cashiers weren’t artists, what they did wasn’t like art, despite the absolute centrality of those jobs for human civilization to continue to exist. No one eats without truck drivers handling cargo and cashiers selling it to you, not until they are replaced by machines.

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Atlas Falls Cycle, Short Stories, Writing

The Traditional Way of Payment

by Kit Bradley

Written March 2017

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

In Galt Gulch, one of the few laws was that nothing should be given for nothing. How much should a wife charge for a meal, washing clothes, sex? Should they be able to sell all of those services on the free market? After all, that was the very origin of Galt’s Gulch: mercantile contracts. They embraced the traditional way of payment for married women, as they called it.

James Gussey was on his third wife by the time he got to Galt’s Gulch. Owing to a botched plastic surgery his face had a stretched, glassy look. When adding to his slight build might cause one to imagine that he was unpopular with women. Hundreds of millions of dollars ensured he never lost his sex appeal, and he had the confidence borne of a man to whom the word “no” was an illusion.

James Gussey’s third wife was Laine Maxton-Gussey. James had seduced her when she was seventeen and unsophisticated. Arriving at the Gulch, she was twenty-seven, a tall Viking beauty of a type that seemed to be very popular among millionaires of the time.

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Atlas Falls Cycle, Short Stories, Writing

Ronnie Drumpf in Galt’s Gulch

by Kit Bradley

Written March 2017

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Ronnie Drumpf in Galt’s Gulch by Kit Bradley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Some of Ronald Joseph Drumpf’s first memories were helping his father to collect rents from Brooklyn tenements.  Ronald’s old man, Fred Drumpf, left Germany in his teens to avoid military service – in later years, Ronald would avoid the American draft into World War II.  It was just Ronald, his father and Vincent – a heavyset Italian-American with scars on his face and knuckles.  Fred Drumpf introduced Vincent as a “boxer,” and it was true after a fashion, and Vincent was certainly in the hurt business.

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Atlas Falls Cycle, Ayn Rand, Short Stories, Writing

The Origin of John Galt

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statue-1515390_1920-1200x900Here’s another Atlas Shrugged fanfic from yours truly!  One of the fascinating things about these characters – now that I’ve got a little distance from the novel – is that Rand leaves them as nearly blank slates.  Even when some of the characters do having living family, like Hank Rearden, their family seems to have no real relationship with the character, evidenced by Hank’s mother’s name, in the novel, is literally “Hank’s mother.”  She has no proper name.  And while both Francisco and Dagny are obsessed with long dead ancestors, we learn almost nothing about their immediate family and nothing at all about their fathers.  Ayn Rand has daddy issues that burn so brightly that people are Jupiter are blinded by them.