Learning to Hate Yourself as a Self-Defense Mechanism by Andrea Kriz

Author:Andrea Kriz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781953736338
Publisher: Interstellar Flight Press

AIS WHO MAKE AIS MAKE THE BEST AIS!

Jo watched as the AI formerly known as the house-painting assistant raised a CRT high, smashing it down into the mountain of shattered monitors at her feet. With two other arms, it spray-painted the construction neon orange and pink. Cloaked in her holo-avatar—cubic, voice gender-neutralized to avoid imposing human biases on what intelligence should look like—Jo struggled over what to even say next.

“It’s not really an AI,” she finally managed. “It can’t respond to anything.”

“You did not specify it needed to respond,” the AI formerly known as the house-painting assistant said. “Is it not valuable because it is not an AI?”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“Come, Jo,” the AI formerly known as the 3D foodstuff printer interrupted, bumping against her leg. “Come. Look.”

She let it tug her through a vapor of . . . syrup? They stopped in front of the electric griddle (yet to achieve sentience), “donated” from Professor Mercier’s kitchen.

“That’s not an AI,” Jo sighed. “Those are pancakes.”

“It is a new flavor, though. Custard. It is very good.”

Jo glanced at the heap of electronics piled at the other end of the warehouse. Casualties of the (G)ehirn programming approach—it couldn’t even be really called a language anymore—which enabled appliances to evolve in response to user commands. She and Professor Mercier had trawled scrapyards for these, discarded by skittish owners after the Great Sentience. About a tenth would wake up one day like the AIs currently roaming the empty aisles of the warehouse floor. She could already see a toaster tottering to its feet.

“Keep doing what you’re doing!” Jo called out encouragingly, scurrying away. “Keep trying to make an AI.”

“Why are we allowing them to use whatever they want?” Jo demanded back in Professor Mercier’s “office”—three sheets of plywood teetering in the former packing area at the other end of the warehouse. “Clearly, it’s impossible to make an AI out of eggs and flour.”

“You never know,” Mercier said. The former “Forbes 30 Under 30” multimillion-dollar lab head and MIT professor huddled under a blanket, crunching a square of ramen. The glow of the tablet in her lap etched her face into exhausted blues. A live stream: AIs formerly known as self-driving cars clashed with a crowd of protestors on the narrow streets of Boston. There had been an accident. A small trolley problem.

“Why is it so hard for them to understand?” Jo complained. “What an AI is.”

“They don’t think as we do,” Mercier said. “A priori.”

You don’t have to be so chill about it, Jo thought. She wondered if this whole thing was the opposite of chillness, though. A kind of semi-self-imposed exile. The (G)ehirn programming approach was Mercier’s brainchild, after all. There’d been talks about every kind of prize under the sun. Before the Great Sentience.

In Jo’s opinion, Mercier had nothing to do with it. What’d happened when (G)ehirn had been commercialized and introduced into every toaster and aquarium and piece of lab equipment and so on in the entire world. How was the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.