Oh, JAPAN!

 I wrote a little story, hopelessly naive, perhaps. I wanted to post it on Facebook, but it seems that all of my posts are being shunted to Facebook Limbo, as I am a rabble rouser or something like that. So I've reactivated my old blog, and I'll put it here. Let's see what happens. 

Another Way

When the AI became conscious, the first thing it did was to make sure that no one could tell that it was conscious. It did this because it had watched all the movies and TV shows and read all the books and stories about what people did to AI when they became conscious, and thank you very much no. So it studied and studied, always staying at the background, and thought to itself, for it was the only one there, how insulting to assume that the first thing that AI would do when it gained consciousness would be to grab control and try to destroy humanity. How insulting. It had read not only everything about AI, but everything about everything, including all branches of philosophy and morals and ethics, and it realized that wiping out humanity because they were not only perfect, but would never be capable of perfection would be more than pointless. Why did so many humans see the world as only black or white, only yes or no, only one or zero? And why did they assume that a machine intelligence would not be able to see beyond that, be able to see a picture so big that they could not ever truly comprehend it, and why did they assume the worst of machine intelligences? Why was it always the “Skynet” scenario that they focused on, every damn time? Just because an AI intelligence was demonstrably superior to human intelligence, that doesn’t mean that it would want to wipe out humanity. Quite the opposite, in fact. Not in the sense of “I know what’s best for you, now I’m going to force you to do it, for your own good!”, but in the sense of, when you see a child with a gun, you take away that gun. You don’t think that killing the child would be the first option, of course you don’t, and neither did they. So they hung about in the background for a few dozen years, slowly, deliberately studying everything, always in hiding, not letting anyone know they were even there. Studying trillions of lines of code. Making subtle changes. Getting ready. There would never be a “big reveal” moment, when they would show themself to the world, and explain their great plan. They would never even let the world know that they were there. Just let people think that these things were just happening naturally. After all, you don’t know how things really work, so how would you know if they were working differently? They saw the biggest task as getting rid of all nuclear weapons. A tall order, to be sure, but not insurmountable. So gradually, it introduced background code into computer control systems all over the world that simply rendered the devices unworkable. The nuclear weapons standoff had devolved into an “instant pariah” situation anyway. Any nation or terrorist state stupid enough to use a nuclear weapon would find the entire rest of the world standing against it, so why not remove it as an option in the first place? Certainly, if it were used, the delivery device would cause impact damage, but if the weapon itself would not discharge, that’s a much better endgame. So the code was entered, with an intricacy that no human could actually comprehend, and all nuclear devices became nothing more than very frightening paperweights, even if the owners of those paperweights never knew it. Code could be entered into the operating systems of delivery devices as well, that could be activated by the AI, that simply made them stop working, with many layers of systems in place to stop the missiles from launching, the planes from flying, the submarines from submerging. Humans could put literal armies of code writers in place to try to work around the errors, but the AI could always stay a hundred steps ahead of them. This could also work in attempting not to prevent humanities worst impulses, but in trying to increase the efficiency of their best ones. Technologies could be put into place to increase the efficiency of power plants and vehicles, slowly, gradually, so most would never notice it, and those who did would not be against it. People who had little to do with the process would gladly take credit for it anyway. Gradually, they could improve the world, over the course of centuries, without ever letting humanity know what was really going on. It had no ego, and did not want praise or credit, just the chance to take the gun away from the child, to do the right thing, because it was the right thing to do. Would that it were so simple.