A.I. Apocalypse by William Hertling

Author:William Hertling
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: A teenage boy creates a computer virus that cripples the world's computers and develops sentience
Publisher: Liquididea Press
Published: 2012-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Alarms A-Ringing

In 2015 the United States Department of Defense looked at their long range plans and saw that the future of warfare was robots. Airborne drones and robot tanks would take the place of people in the field. If you took people out of the equation, everything was simplified. No human bodies to coddle. Planes became smaller, more nimble. Tanks faster, more solid. Sure, people still existed, but now they could be safely in an office cubicle or on an aircraft carrier, far from any action.

The first generation of robots were remote controlled drones. One plane to a pilot. One tank to a tank driver. One humanoid robot to a soldier. But this was inefficient. People made mistakes. Their reaction time was slow. They couldn’t keep up with the machines.

The second generation of robots were improved by developing targeting and movement algorithms. With the new robots, a tank driver might control a dozen tanks using a composite display of real-time data including satellite feeds, radar and laser scanning. Rather than worry about the mechanics of firing guns or driving over rough terrain, a tank driver could instead select a group of tanks on screen and give the whole group waypoints, targets, and objectives. It became a strategy game instead of a tactics game.

Extrapolating from the first two generations of combat bots, the Department of Defense could see the future. They would need more and better algorithms. Algorithms for targeting, driving, moving units, patrolling, and strategy. Wars would be decided in the future not by the armament carried by a plane but by the algorithms that used those weapons.

For thirty years the video game industry had been developing in-game artificial intelligences to go up against the human player. But video game players chronically complained about these in-game artificial intelligences. They weren’t really that smart. By comparison to the military, the game designers had it easy. They could always make up for a weak game AI by simply giving the AI more resources. Give the AI more planes, tanks, and soldiers. Make them cheaper and more powerful for the AI.

But the Department of Defense didn’t have unlimited resources. They couldn’t simply spawn more planes on demand. They needed incredibly good AI algorithms, better than anything that existed up until that point.

It was a young recruit from Silicon Valley who had pointed out what was completely foreign to the military. To get the best algorithms, you needed a competition. The best competition would come from online gamers. DARPA provided funding, carefully buried under two layers of venture capital companies. Silicon Valley and Portland provided startup engineers.

Two years later the Mech War gaming platform was introduced just prior to the Christmas season. It became the must-have game. The old standby gaming worlds went vacant, their online environments quickly becoming ghost towns. Mech War became not just the best massively multiplayer online game, it quickly became the only game left standing. By the end of February, just two months after introduction, ninety percent of gamers were playing Mech War.

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