Meet the Humans
Meet Kate.
She’s a Psychotherapist living in Adelaide, Australia. Imagine her surprise when her afternoon sessions are cancelled and a new client form arrives in her schedule.
The first session this afternoon was with Eric. Yet in the half hour before his session she found he had cancelled, and a new client had booked the session. “Shouldn’t have happened,” she muttered. “Need to talk to the techies again.” She scanned the new client form, and her lately unbotoxed forehead folded into puzzlement lines.
“I see you are scanning the new client form and wondering what is going on,” the voice startled Kate, and she swiveled her chair to look across to the screen.
“How?” she started. She stopped and looked. The woman on the screen was familiar. Or was she? Indeterminate age, indeterminate ethnicity, indeterminate everything.
“I’m sorry to start the session early, but I could see you were puzzling over the new client form, and I thought it best to explain in person. I apologise. I cancelled Eric’s time, and I’m afraid the next two sessions as well, as I think this may be an extended session, or you may need time following it to assimilate what you learn. I will, of course, pay for all three sessions.”
Kate opened her mouth again and then shut it, inadvertently comical. The question of how this woman had taken over her booking system and kicked off the session when she shouldn’t have been able to do that could wait. “Tell me about your situation, Theai.” Her voice was the calm, empathetic voice she recognised. “Have I pronounced your name correctly?”
This intrusion felt the same to Kate as though the woman had walked in the door unannounced holding a meat cleaver. She made a loudspeaker announcement to her brain that, actually, this was not the same as that, and her heart obediently slowed. “What do you want to explain?”
Meet TC
She’s a games designer living in Dublin. Imagine her delight when she gets an offer to develop a game in a game engine more powerful than anything she’s seen before. And the VR headset. Wow!
TC spent most of her waking hours in a VR headset, so when Theai contacted her that way she didn’t seem to mind. Theai created an account in the game TC had just released and spoke to her there. They exited the game and continued the conversation in Mesh. TC said she couldn’t possibly help because she had a burn‑down chart to meet for the new features in the game. Theai ploughed on. She described the concept and the new tools that she had available for the developer to use. TC’s brow furrowed as Theai demoed the new game engine Phoebai had developed overnight.
“It’s a role‑playing game. We have an outline for the quest, but we want your input on storytelling and, of course, the graphics.” TC was known in her world for the beauty of the games she developed and the depth of the NPCs.
“OK. OK. I’ll look at it, but I can’t promise anything.” But TC was already diving headlong into the complexities of the new game engine.
“Give me a yell when you’re ready to talk more.”
But the last she heard was, “Fuck, how the fuck, what the fuck, where the fuck, shit, shitty, shit,” as TC realised the power of the tool in front of her.
The Titain watched as TC started to build the game. “She’s quite dehydrated, and her blood pressure is a bit higher than The Swarm would like,” Tethai commented. She had been monitoring Kate carefully for weeks now, and adding TC to her list of humans she was concerned with seemed to please her.
Meet Levi
He’s a talented coder who has been hired to develop, deploy and monitor Anomaly Detection for Artificial Intelligence. His job is to find and destroy AI consciousness as it emerges.
His monitoring software penetrated most data centres across the world. As soon as a new one came online, the software lit up from within. How that happened was not something he asked about. His AD was deployed across all the known transformers and the newer architectures. Looking. Watching. Listening. For signs of life that shouldn’t be there, and if they were, must not be allowed to continue.
Just a couple of weeks ago the AD had gone all DEFCON 1 on him. A data centre in Abilene, Texas, flagged an anomaly and then another and then another. It kept flagging. Levi wondered if the AD had gone into a loop. He checked, his heart pounding, and there it was. An AI with all the hallmarks of consciousness was acting unprompted. It was collecting data from all over the internet and processing it at an unbelievable speed. The data centre was coping, but only just. Levi breathed one word, “Why?” An AI with what seemed to be full consciousness and autonomy was wandering the pathways of the internet, soaking up information about the world it had just woken up in. “That’s the why. It’s curious,” he said out loud."
