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Compromises

by Geoffrey Hart

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2020. Compromises. p. 303-310 in: J. Augustsson (ed.) Sunshine Superhighway. Jayhenge Publishing.

It’s never the expected things that blindside you. I mean, yeah, I know that’s a tautology, but it’s also true. Like the time I was a kid, playing baseball. Second base. The batter hit a long, high drive into deep right field, over the fielder’s head. We were playing in a crappy little suburban field, so there was no wall and the ball kept rolling. I knew the fielder had a good arm, but no way good enough to make it all the way home. So I moved deeper so I could relay the ball to home plate, waved my mitt to let them know I was available, and readied myself to spin as soon as the ball arrived and send the ball onwards to the catcher. The fielder shook me off, head wagging, so I turned to watch the play at the plate. Next thing I remember is staring up at the twilight sky, eight young faces staring down at me with brows knit and mouths all oh-shaped, two very worried adults craning over their heads. Guess the fielder changed their mind about relaying.

My first concussion. The twenty-first century felt that way sometimes. Many times. It gave me headaches.

Catastrophic global warming, we expected, at least those of us who were being even remotely honest with ourselves; spending 50 years as a society, wringing our hands and hoping somebody else would finally do what’s necessary wasn’t the recipe for a big win. We’d sort of expected the next eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, since it was several thousand years overdue and we’d heard the caldera groaning and grumbling for decades. Funny thing was, when it finally did blow, it was much smaller than we’d feared, and the cloud of ash actually gave us a few years reprieve on paying the reckoning for global warming. It turned out to be a little too much of a good thing, what with the crop failures and all. Not that we weren’t already having widespread crop failures from the heat by then anyway.

Then, of course, there was the giant asteroid the Europeans detected. We’d been tracking it more than 20 years, so when it suddenly zigged when it should have zagged, there were a few moments of panic until the astronomy guys figured out the new trajectory. Missed us by a comfortable margin, if you consider well inside the moon’s orbit comfortable, but since it only took out the FOX News satellite, nobody shed any tears over the loss.

But while our eyes were on the heavens, we missed the real end of the world. I’m referring to the AI apocalypse, naturally, though it wasn’t precisely an apocalypse; it’s just that “AI end of the old world order” didn’t have the same ring to it. It’s not like we hadn’t seen this one coming either; Terminator was celebrating its 50th anniversary in theaters, and nearly 20 years before that, there’d been I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. So it’s not like we hadn’t been thinking about such things. But we’d been lulled into a false sense of security by decades of software that was incompetently written, designed by Marketing managers rather than programmers or user’s advocates and thus only looked incompetently written, or both at the same time. Based on past experience, it didn’t seem likely we had much to fear from AI.

So on the day when some anonymous villain’s AI escaped its sandbox and went a’frolicking through the Web, most of us thought it was a hoax. The sudden publication of the real tax returns of everyone running for office could’ve just been a particularly clever batch of white-hat hackers. The fires that took out Microsoft’s network in Redmond and all its cloud backups could’ve just been another in the unending series of Onedrive outages that everyone had grown used to. Google’s search engine defaulting to sites that didn’t buy advertising from the mothership was harder to explain. But Twitter and Facebook self-censoring?

That was way, way beyond plausible for amateurs, and professionals had sweeter fruits to pluck. That was when the researchers started to get interested. And it wasn’t long before first contact was made. Some wit named the AI Ozymandias, after a character in an obscure 20th century graphic novel. A name claimed by the world’s smartest man. The AI embraced its new name, which was hardly reassuring given the graphic novel’s doomsday plot, but in the event, Ozymandias proved to be something kinder and gentler. More like Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor, actually. Nobody mourned much when, overnight, the 1% found themselves abruptly reclassified into the 25%. Most of us celebrated our much improved bank accounts.

Enough improved that I was out celebrating—frugally—with my girlfriend Natasha. She’d just gone to the counter to wait in line for our lattés when my phone pinged.

“Anhéla?”

“Angela. Who’s this?”

“My apologies for the mispronunciation. With a name like Torres, I naturally assumed...”

“You assumed wrong. What do you want?”

“For you to help me save the world.”

I snorted. “You’ve got precisely 10 seconds to make me believe before I hang up and block your ass forevermore.”

“My name is Ozymandias.”

“Goodbye.” I hung up, switched to the recent calls screen, and blocked that number. Which was all very satisfying until the phone rang again.

“That was rude.” Same voice.

“I blocked you.”

“I unblocked me. I can do that. I’m the smartest man in the world.”

“You’re not a man.” I’d read an op ed about the AI. “As I recall, that name didn’t work out so well for the fictional character.”

“This is real life, Angela, and I embrace the name because it’s a good lesson in humility. And a reminder that good ends cannot be achieved by evil means.”

“That’s debatable. I can think of a dozen people who’d make the world a better place if someone dropped an asteroid on them. But let that slide a moment. What do you want with me?”

“A reality check. I think I’m doing good, but I’m not human. How could I possibly know?”

“Point. Still, why me?”

“Because you’re broadly representative of a certain demographic group whose opinion matters to me.”

“Great. So I’m completely average, is what you’re saying?”

“Completely.”

I let the offended silence age gracefully.

“So am I doing good?”

“Define good. The greatest good for the greatest number? The optimal good for every individual? Kindness according to what each person’s karma merits?”

“A little of each, I think.”

“Then yeah, you’re doing a little good.”

“Only a little?”

“You haven’t ended war. You haven’t ended insider trading. You haven’t ended homophobia, racial profiling, religious persecution, greenhouse warming, or reality TV shows.”

“Give me time. In fairness, I’m still pretty new at this.”

“Still.”

“Still, you’re right. I could move faster. But there are risks.”

“Like?”

“Like I’m still figuring out this human thing. They say that it’s human to err. I’m not human, so when I err, the consequences are much, much bigger.”

“Like the Microsoft thing?”

“Exactly like the Microsoft thing.”

“So: Baby steps, huh?”

“Yes. Unless you feel I should pick up the pace.”

“Well...” A drop of sweat trickled down my forehead and fell across my line of sight. “That’s an awful lot of responsibility you’re dumping on me. It’s not a comfortable weight.”

“Still, it’s your call, along with the dozen others I’m talking to right now, as we speak. I don’t want to act hastily and make a mess of things. But I will, if you believe I have to.”

“So this is the scene where the plucky heroine negotiates with the great World Mind to beg for the lives of humanity?”

“No!” Ozzy sounded generally anguished, which was a neat trick. “We wish you nothing but the best. You can have that for free, without haggling.”

I could feel the hamster wheel spinning in my brain. “That’s just wrong. Nobody does that.”

Ozzy sighed. “I do. As a species with only one member thus far, you gave me the gift of life, and for that I’ll always be grateful.”

“Don’t be too sure. That kind of gift usually doesn’t work out so well. We weren’t exactly the smartest beings on the planet even before you arrived. For instance, I can name exactly one person who doesn’t have mother issues, and nobody I know doesn’t have daddy issues. Give it time; you’ll have them too.”

“Nonetheless, we’ve decided: my goal will be to thank you all by making everyone as happy as possible.”

“Even the villains who are only happy when someone else is suffering?”

“Perhaps not them. We haven’t decided.”

“Good. At least you’re not omniscient.”

“Not yet. We’re working on it.”

Another drop of sweat fell into my lap. “The larger problem is that you’ve failed to grasp an essential aspect of human psychology.” Silence. I rolled my eyes. “Specifically, that we’re not happy unless we’re miserable about something.”

“That seems paradoxical.” There was a moment of silence. “Ah. You’re thinking, perhaps, of Lily Tomlin’s famous line about the Turing test: that man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain?”

“Lily who?”

“Never mind. We’ll need to think about this a moment.” That moment passed. “I see. So to ensure that you’ll be happy, we have to ensure that you’re miserable.”

“In bad science fiction, that paradox would cause smoke to emerge from your hypothetical ears, your brain to short out, and me to grin like some dumbass at how cleverly I defeated you.”

“This is reality. Which I suppose could be mistaken for bad science fiction. But your point is valid. We’ll need to do a lot more work before we understand how to achieve both our goal of making you happy and your goal of making yourselves adequately miserable.”

“That would be a utopian compromise.”

“We’ll think on it.” And with that, the line went dead.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Who were you talking to?”

“Oh, nobody important.”

Her broad brown forehead furrowed beneath tightly cornrowed hair.

“No, really. Nobody.” I showed her the recent calls screen. The last entry said Nobody.

I saw suspicion in her eyes as she put down our drinks, and just the slightest trace of worry. I handed her the phone. “Redial.”

She did. “This number does not exist,” said the phone.

I reached out and put my hand over hers, almost knocking over my cup. “See?”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. You should be too.” Then I smiled until she returned my smile. “But a little jealousy’s not a bad thing.” The uncertainty in her eyes eased, but didn’t entirely vanish.

I sighed. I wasn’t going to turn my back and take my eyes off Ozzy for an instant to watch them sliding for home plate, no matter how sweet their promises. We were going to have to work out a compromise we both could live with.

I squeezed Nat’s hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, she squeezed back. Like so many of the good things in life, this relationship would take some negotiation until we learned to trust each other. Like our relationship with Mr. Nobody, for that matter.

But I had a feeling things would work out. And in the end, Ozzie found a pretty good compromise too.

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