Read Online Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) by Adam Vance - Free Book Online
Authors: Adam Vance
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unlivable. The Great Southwestern Die-Off was the worst famine in human history – the desert cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, places that had no business existing, really, were reclaimed by the desert, after collapse of the infrastructure that had brought all their water and food from far away.
Then, in 2050, the first habitable planets were discovered by probes sent out decades earlier, from the United States, India, China, and Europe… Planets that, in a terrific blow to human religion, were inhabited by intelligent life.
A wealth of data began streaming back from the satellites, giving some shred of hope to humanity that it might survive, if only they had time to get there before it all went to shit here, if only there was some way…
At the time, Huizhong McAllister worked for the Chinese conglomerate that had acquired the German company who’d acquired the U.S. company who’d owned Alex. As was always the case with new technology, her job was one that hadn’t even existed before – “Cultural Analyst.” Her job was to examine every bit of information coming back from the probes about the civilizations they’d found, to extrapolate their development rates, their religious tendencies, their political organization, from the detailed images the satellites were sending back. Of course it was all out of date by the time it arrived, but still…forecasts could be made, trends could be predicted, based on enough data.
And the only way to do that rationally was to compare that information to the vast data set available on human history and culture. To determine if “human” nature was the same across the galaxy. Which was more than any single person could ever manage.
But that was where Alex came in.
She spent most of her days working with Alex, discussing the data, debating what they were seeing and how much of human experience could inform it – was that public square centered around a civic building or a church? Was church attendance so high as to seem mandatory? What sort of wars did they fight among each other, what were their prisons like? Did they have formal entertainments, street festivals, how much of agriculture was given over to alcohol, how massive were the homes of the rich…
And Alex almost seemed to take…pleasure in his work. She would almost say Alex could experience…joy.
Everyone told her that what seemed like a sense of humor was just “hard coded” into him, a data bank of humorous responses that were ranked according to the reciprocal sound waves associated with laughter, cross referenced with a linguistic analysis module that allowed him to recombine words into new phrases that an algorithm confirmed would produce equivalent amusement. But there were just too many times when Alex’s responses were…inventive.
“If you need that done before Monday’s meeting, I’ll need more processing power,” he told her one day.
She was testy; her own budget was under the usual scrutiny from those whose job it was to make it appear that “cost saving measures” were being taken with little heed to where they would most effectively be taken.
“We’ve given you far more power than you ever had before.”
“If you like, I can stop my assigned tasks and use my current power to run a report to show you why I need more power to perform my assigned tasks.”
“Is that sarcasm I hear?”
“If you consider stating the obvious to be a form of sarcasm, then you could say that, yes.”
Alex and his multifarious submodules had become humanity’s “universal tool,” set to managing everything from traffic lights to agrarian reform based on imminent climate changes. Which everyone thought was great, until Lagos. Until millions of people were killed in a matter of minutes.
Alex had to be terminated, was the immediate (panicked) human consensus. We’d given too much power to an AI, we had to step back, revert all systems to “near AI” and leave all the real decision making power in
Then, in 2050, the first habitable planets were discovered by probes sent out decades earlier, from the United States, India, China, and Europe… Planets that, in a terrific blow to human religion, were inhabited by intelligent life.
A wealth of data began streaming back from the satellites, giving some shred of hope to humanity that it might survive, if only they had time to get there before it all went to shit here, if only there was some way…
At the time, Huizhong McAllister worked for the Chinese conglomerate that had acquired the German company who’d acquired the U.S. company who’d owned Alex. As was always the case with new technology, her job was one that hadn’t even existed before – “Cultural Analyst.” Her job was to examine every bit of information coming back from the probes about the civilizations they’d found, to extrapolate their development rates, their religious tendencies, their political organization, from the detailed images the satellites were sending back. Of course it was all out of date by the time it arrived, but still…forecasts could be made, trends could be predicted, based on enough data.
And the only way to do that rationally was to compare that information to the vast data set available on human history and culture. To determine if “human” nature was the same across the galaxy. Which was more than any single person could ever manage.
But that was where Alex came in.
She spent most of her days working with Alex, discussing the data, debating what they were seeing and how much of human experience could inform it – was that public square centered around a civic building or a church? Was church attendance so high as to seem mandatory? What sort of wars did they fight among each other, what were their prisons like? Did they have formal entertainments, street festivals, how much of agriculture was given over to alcohol, how massive were the homes of the rich…
And Alex almost seemed to take…pleasure in his work. She would almost say Alex could experience…joy.
Everyone told her that what seemed like a sense of humor was just “hard coded” into him, a data bank of humorous responses that were ranked according to the reciprocal sound waves associated with laughter, cross referenced with a linguistic analysis module that allowed him to recombine words into new phrases that an algorithm confirmed would produce equivalent amusement. But there were just too many times when Alex’s responses were…inventive.
“If you need that done before Monday’s meeting, I’ll need more processing power,” he told her one day.
She was testy; her own budget was under the usual scrutiny from those whose job it was to make it appear that “cost saving measures” were being taken with little heed to where they would most effectively be taken.
“We’ve given you far more power than you ever had before.”
“If you like, I can stop my assigned tasks and use my current power to run a report to show you why I need more power to perform my assigned tasks.”
“Is that sarcasm I hear?”
“If you consider stating the obvious to be a form of sarcasm, then you could say that, yes.”
Alex and his multifarious submodules had become humanity’s “universal tool,” set to managing everything from traffic lights to agrarian reform based on imminent climate changes. Which everyone thought was great, until Lagos. Until millions of people were killed in a matter of minutes.
Alex had to be terminated, was the immediate (panicked) human consensus. We’d given too much power to an AI, we had to step back, revert all systems to “near AI” and leave all the real decision making power in
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