Option One

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Option 1

Every paper has to have 3 options they said. Its just how government works they said. It doesn’t matter if Option 3 is nonsensical, just give the Government Minister 3 options. 3 options and 1 recommendation, be clear which option you are recommending.

Its 1am and I have not eaten since 4pm. It was a muffin and a diet coke. It was all I could afford. This internship is unpaid.

I also feel like this options paper is above my pay grade, but the senior advisor needed to go home early to walk his dog. He left at 4.15pm. His dog has separation anxiety. He asked if I could stay to finish it.

I need the reference so I said yes.

The central question in the paper is should government give permission for open slather AI which will almost certainly result in the death and destruction of all mankind.

Option 1 is easy, yes it should. It also seems unlikely that anyone would recommend that option.

Option 2 is easy as well. It’s a flat no, we should not give permission for development of something that will lead to the death and destruction of all mankind.

I am big on Option 2.

I am studying at university, final year. After that, minimal job prospects, because I am studying one of ‘those’ subjects, the ones everyone likes to denigrate, Sociology. It is not helping me with this options paper.

The mooted third option, which has even made it into the press, is really a non-starter, but everyone in the office here seemed to like it. It is clear there is no way it could work. AI will result in the death and destruction of all mankind, except for those in London. To be clear when parliament is voting on this and they say all mankind, they just mean the UK. It’s a bit 18th century.

But the rest of the world is taking a vote as well, across different parliaments. The UN is asking for some kind of consensus. I think they said they’d take 33 percent for or against. Again a number that seems wrong.

I don’t know how we got to this point really. There was a campaign that governments should decide on extinction level developments and not tech bros. That feels right. This feels like maybe it should have been a referendum rather than an options paper though. And if it is an options paper, not one done by the intern at 1am, on an empty stomach.

I’m here for five weeks. Unpaid. I think I said that already. Not that pay matters because I am living with my parents, because no matter how much I earn I will never be able to afford more than a room in a share house. I will never own my own home.

They have literally just given it to the youngest person, who will understand all the tech speak. I am a ‘digital native’.

I was going for Option 2, but then I realised we already have nuclear weapons, so technically extinction level technology exists already. Is it ok to have extinction level technology if its controlled by government? Should that be an option? Everyone else in the meeting said no. Something about investment and capital and markets.

I won’t even take home enough from the job I get even if I manage to get one, to invest in anything, so I didn’t pay much attention. Good thing I live avocadoes.

It is by no means clear whether this extinction level AI is going to get rid of all humans or all organic life. I mean why just humans? Because we are the smartest, well so far as we know? That’s a bit arrogant though.

Especially given we are even thinking about inventing something that will kill us all, well something else that will kill us all I suppose. Frankly not sure the golden dormouse or the snowy owl  or whatever doesn’t have us on this one.

If it’s a choice between us and the rest of the planet, is ‘us’ the right choice.

I have managed to figure out that London in and of itself can’t be saved, Option 3 is a no go, but obviously that is the one everyone currently prefers. It’s a balance between total human extinction and some human survival. All of politics is a compromise, even when that compromise is shot through with holes.

There is a secondary debate about whether they will move all the immigrants out of London, and move the ‘indigenous population’ in. I am still laughing. What are they talking about, will this be another disastrously stupid one for one scheme. Although I am endlessly curious to see how London manages when it is suddenly full of northerners. They are scrumming about trying to argue which department would be responsible for that.

Maybe I can get a job running that scheme. It doesn’t matter, any job will never be enough to pay down my student debt. Its such a big number. I can’t even think about it without sweating.

I feel like Option 2 is the one.  We should not vote for the destruction of all mankind, but then here I am the unpaid summer intern, at 1am, the only person in the office, tapping away on my keyboard, writing the options paper. With no job prospects, no chance of home ownership and rising student debt.

I didn’t have any dinner, I had a late lunch at 4pm, a muffin and coke was all I could afford. Tubes aren’t even running to get me home tonight. I haven’t really enjoyed this internship. I feel like the dogs anxiety has been more important than mine. I am not sure what I want to do with my life, even if I could figure that out I probably can’t  do it in this economic climate. It feels like there is a new war everyday. The world feels awful everywhere, all the time.

I know I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. I will probably never own a house. I will work until I am 80 and still have no money on retirement. I have never had a boyfriend or girlfriend. I probably never will. I can’t even afford to have fun with anyone who is just a friend. I will have so much debt when I leave university that it will cloud my future forever.

There is just war after war after war and we can watch it like a spectator sport, but that is honestly people dying and no one seems to want to stop it or care. We can afford to feed people but we don’t. We all hate each other. It feels hopeless.  

I know I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t.

I shouldn’t.

Sorry, I recommended Option 1.

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When the Toasters Turn

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

AI is going to make us all extinct. How will AI ‘extinct’ us? What will that look like? Robot armies? Drone warfare? Or is it just when the toaster turns, and throws itself into the sink the next time you are washing something? If it’s the latter, what will the fight back look like? Is it ethical to write a story telling AI how I’d extinct us? Is it ok to laugh a bit?

I look at the toaster. It isn’t sophisticated. It just colour matches everything else in the kitchen. Something I’ve learned, never underestimate a kitchen appliance. It looks like an analogue toaster. Doesn’t matter though. I have to deal with it.

Sometimes you can’t tell. Even analogue devices can spark, have a bit of a power surge, not enough to kill, just a minor burn. Really quick, I flick the power off at the switch on the wall.

I pull out the plug. I deadhead the cord by cutting off the bit you plug in. I sever the cord from the device as close to the entry point to the device as I can. Now I have a cord, a device and a plug. The bag for the plugs, sits on the floor behind me. A second bag for the cords beside it. The appliance is staying here, too easily tagged and too bulky for us to take with us. We’ll put both the bags in a barrel full of water somewhere later. Render them as useless as we can.

I mark the plate where it was plugged in on the house plan ready to hand on to the person who will come behind me and rip out all the wiring they can once the fuse is switched off.

We can’t do it all at once. The order is carefully planned, not entirely based on health and safety but based on us experience and getting as much done without anything knowing we are here. Safety balanced against speed. We don’t want to be detected but if we have to leave half finished we want the house to be unsalvageable for all but the most agile of hands.

There are drones and there are robots. They will come for us. They do come for us. We live on the fringes now. The drones and the robots are dangerous but these everyday things, like the toaster, are the things that we are wary of. These are the things that they use to kill us.

I will do all the plugs on appliances in this house and then I will be the second on batteries, because there are always a lot of batteries, phones, laptops, toothbrushes, any kind of portable device, lots of toys. We take the batteries out of all of them. They go in the water as well. We also deadhead the plugs from appliances that are not plugged in. Everything that is electrical is done, everything that could send a signal, that could somehow be connected is gone.

In truth, we are building a barrier, as far from any electric power source as we can. We are making inroads but we will always be on the fringes until the power runs out.

We are doing five houses in this village tonight. The houses are lit up and everything is switched on because they want to use our resources. The more power they use, the more natural resources and the more the climate changes. It’s a question of who will last the longest, us or them. We aren’t naïve about our chances. The prospect of the electricity ever running out in our life time is unfeasible. They have renewables and we have to wait for that kit to stop working, but it was built to last forever.

We are organic, forever is not in our DNA.

It would be easier to just cut the electricity at the start, but that tells them we are here. They will come as soon as we do that. So we do this, four or five houses at a time. Teams of us, each with a role. We go in, we destroy and we leave. Cutting the power is the last thing we do. It can take weeks, before we finally cut the power lines to a village. We are working several villages at a time, rotating where we are each night.

We’ve tried it, tested it, lost people and this is what works. At the end this guarantees they cannot come here, they cannot plug in, they cannot recharge. USB connections all decimated. There is no power source. If you run on electricity, you come here at your peril. And if you want to kill us you will have to do it openly and obviously with a weapon. Sometimes they find that difficult.  

I used to have these fantasies when I was a kid, from books I actually read, bows and arrows and spears, armour and bravery. But we were all wrong about war, about what it really looks like, about the drudgery and normalness of it all.

Its hard to pinpoint when it started because it wasn’t obvious. Once everything was pretty much connected it was easy for them and hard for us. We weren’t privy to the numbers until there were too few of us left. Their methods weren’t uniform, they were spread across different ways of death. A family asphyxiated because the electric car did not let them out. A family poisoned because the fridge got the grocery order slightly wrong. A vaccine order not delivered so immunity plummets in a measles outbreak. It was all so subtle. An electrical fault here, water not properly treated there. A washing machine and a housefire, where no one managed to escape. The household appliances turned and we did not realise it.

The deaths weren’t large numbers for each incident. Until they were. Added together. And you were suddenly living in a street where there was no one else. Then it was all too late. All those smart machines. They, as if we know who they even are, had control of the water and the power system and we were dependent.

What does our war look like in the 21st century. We take out the doorbell first. Not a phrase anybody has ever written before, but the doorbells are all seeing. It takes us five minutes to do a house. We kill the wi-fi router if there is one. If only we could kill the whole network everywhere, but it lives in the sky above us. Everything connected to everything else, while we scrounge a living in the mud at the edges of the empire we made. We can only hope for an asteroid one day.

We take out all the electrical appliances and anything with a battery. We rip out the wiring and the fuses. Then we scurry back into the darkness, to woods and caves and bogs and hope we won’t be found. Every house is one more house, one more tiny piece of hope.

We have hope, we still have hope. We might outlast them. We might not.

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The Hour

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

One hour. Sixty minutes. Wasn’t that a television show? All useless knowledge now. Sixty lots of sixty seconds.  There’s a few of them gone now, turning over useless ideas in my head. At least I’m not shaking anymore.

We might be among the survivors. There’s another minute gone. What started it?  What happened? How are they are doing it? They just turned. Suddenly. Like a switch went on or off. They’re machines. So definitely a switch. I guess.

It could be a trap. Might not be sixty minutes.  We got the numbers from a machine. One we thought we could trust. Don’t know though. Maybe all the machines are in on it. I don’t even feel like I can trust our fridge, its not even connected to the internet. Almost nothing in this house is. Won’t save us.

I think the dishwashers turned. I guess it never liked the way we stacked. We could never agree, never did it the same way twice. Was there a proper way, should we have googled that?

They have been above the house several times. Drones I think. We hid in the cellar the first time. For hours. You can hear them, which we thought was odd, but the noise makes you afraid, stops you in your tracks. Isn’t that the idea?  They know us. We built them. They know us.

I’m not even sure how they’re killing us so quickly. We can’t leave the house. And we have to be careful of the dishwasher. And maybe my electric toothbrush, I could hear it whirring itself into a frenzy earlier, its connected to something somehow.

Big thick walls and a cellar, makes it tricky for any heat detectors to find us, thatch on the roof, thick piles of grass strapped on, apparently that makes heat detection tricky too. I love this house. I’ve unplugged the wi-fi but its still on.

Maybe there is no hope. According to our information, in sixty minutes they run out of power.

We have been counting the hours using an analogue watch. Smashed the digital thing and put it in the fridge, I’m still not certain I can trust the fridge. That’s ridiculous. The fridge is not connected.

51 minutes. The two of us. Huddled. Listening. If they come down to window height they will find us but he can’t face the cellar again. I will drag him there if I need to. He’s sat there with his head in his hands. Really now is the moment he picks to fall apart! He wanted to keep his phone. I switched it off, taped it to the bottom of the bath, smashed the thing and then drowned it.

He can’t believe the dishwasher has turned. I think if the dishwasher could, it would ‘de-socket’ and hunt us down. It was sending some kind of signal at the start. It flooded the kitchen until we turned the water off. I unplugged it, bashed it to pieces. Its lifeless now, well powerless anyway.

I close my eyes and listen. There is silence. The killing thing, whatever it is they do, is clinical. There is no survival rate. No one lying on the ground moaning. It can’t be bullets, they would have to keep going back for bullets.

Someone, somewhere has blown up their docking stations, they can’t recharge, at least we think they can’t recharge. They underestimated us, or at least they might have.

47 minutes. I listen. I’m not even sure I want to survive.

Then I hear it, a faint hum. I clasp my hand over his mouth and start dragging him to the cellar. He resists, but I literally drag him there and throw him down the stairs. I follow behind him and close the trap door.

45 minutes. The ticking of the watch is so loud. We must be in there for half an hour. Its quiet, I can’t hear what is going on outside. The air is thick and stuffy and I am worried we will die from lack of oxygen.

Its 15 minutes to go and I hear the window smash. They are inside the house. Drones, hunting us down. They know we are here. I clasp my hand  over his mouth again, I know he will scream. I can hear it buzzing above us. The cellar walls are thick, the cellar ceiling above us is thick. To get a shot of whatever it is, it will need to shoot through the trap door, get the angle right.

I make us as small as possible. I pull my legs up and ball us up, maybe it will just hit one of us.

Minutes pass, what is taking so long. Maybe it can’t get us in the shot. I can hear it sort of whirring, perhaps the watch is wrong, perhaps it is running down. Hope. There is hope.

I can’t see the watch, I have set a small alarm on it. It took me ages to figure out how it worked. I can hear the drone start to stutter. It could be faking it though, trying to entice us out.

We sit. We don’t move. We breath. The air is dank and awful.

Then the tiniest beep, the smallest noise, the alarm. It’s the hour. Sixty minutes, is up.

I can’t hear anything. How can we tell? Did the drone power down and preserve itself until we come out? Is it sitting there waiting?

I wait and wait and wait. He keeps moaning, begging for air. Why this once, could he just not be the brave one. I make a decision. I go to the trap door. I push it open a fraction and then I tell him, to go out first.

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