Three Laws Lethal by David Walton

Author:David Walton [Walton, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Three Laws Lethal
ISBN: 9781633885608
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2019-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

At first, Naomi had enjoyed going to work in the dingy little office on the fiftieth floor. Half the time, she was the only one there, she had access to a powerful computing cluster, and the Mikes were doing everything she wanted them to and more. Now, however, her days were filled with her constant and increasingly difficult campaign to keep Min-seo from discovering the Mikes’ world. Her unfamiliarity with the code baseline had bought Naomi a little time, but Min-seo was every bit as smart as her résumé promised, and she wouldn’t be fooled for long. Naomi’s vague responses about the core of the fleet scheduling algorithms weren’t going to satisfy her forever.

So far, Naomi had told her it was a proprietary deep learning algorithm, the secret of which was too competition-sensitive to share. If Brandon heard her saying that, however, he would force her to tell, since the whole reason he’d hired Min-seo was to teach her the critical parts of the code that only Naomi

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understood. Even Brandon didn’t know about the Mikes’ world and how the AI really worked. He thought she had just written an especially effective but compute-intensive version of the same basic concepts that were in use in algorithms around the world.

The Mikes continued to deliver cars to their customers with creepy prescience. Even Naomi, who knew how it was being done, was disturbed by how often she walked out of a building to find a Black Knight car pulling up to the curb. She herself hadn’t decided how long she was going to stay, and yet there was the car, waiting for her.

The customers seemed to appreciate this, at least judging by the way sales increased. Brandon kept expanding their fleet and hiring new people to manage different aspects of the growing business that he could no longer manage himself. He interviewed and hired business developers to bring the concept to other cities, and soon Black Knight cars were transporting customers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC, as well as New York. He popularized the slogan “Where you need it, when you need it.” They were mentioned in national news stories at least once a week.

Like any deep learning system, there was no way to describe how the Mikes anticipated the movements of their customers so well. There was no log to dump of possibilities considered or deductions made. Instead, all the metrics of the city’s life and movements formed a mesh of numbers, with certain numerical scores chosen because they rose to the top. The Mikes didn’t know why they did it. They didn’t know the why of anything. They just acted on the options that gave them the best chance at passing on their genes. It was the same behavior that allowed them to exploit their simulated world with such success.

Naomi kept late hours, but she encouraged Min-seo to go home early. “We’re not paying you for overtime,” she would say. “Go home, eat dinner, see a show. Life isn’t all about work.

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