I wanted to keep your name out of this, but they have read my emails to you, and know you could help. They may come to visit you. Be very careful.
Crap — how could this get any worse? He didn’t want to be any part of this! He almost threw his phone down, but instead pulled the hunk of silicon close and cradled it instead.
CHAPTER TWO
Beginnings
Mike Williams pulled into the parking lot, the electric whine of the Jetta’s motor slowing. He parked alongside the building, ignoring the fleet of shiny new Hondas in the main parking lot. The corporation leased the lot to the shipping port so it wouldn’t appear empty. Glancing into the rearview mirror, he did a double-take. When did he get so much gray hair? Well, nobody said this job was going to be easy. With a sigh, he exited the car.
Mike walked up to the mammoth building’s small front entrance and nodded to the camera. “Hello, Mike,” he heard over a speaker, and the door clicked as it unlocked. He pulled the tinted glass door open, and passed into the warm interior. Industrial carpeting, neutral paint tones, and bland art helped it look exactly like it was supposed to: just another generic office building in an industrial complex. An empty reception counter stood in front of Mike.
He shrugged out of his raincoat, and threw it over the top of a passing robot. The robot stuttered to a halt, its optical sensors blinded by the opaque covering. “Very funny,” it said and reversed direction, using its inertial guidance sensors to dead reckon its way back to within a few inches of Mike.
Mike grabbed the jacket. “I don’t think robots go with the office disguise, ELOPe. Now, will you please unlock the doors?”
He heard the thunk of magnetic bolt locks opening, and a set of steel double-doors ahead of him swung open, revealing themselves to be even sturdier than they appeared from the outside. Mike passed through into his real office. Ignoring the twenty foot screen that encompassed one wall, he settled into a comfortable black leather chair. “So how are you doing today?”
“I’m fine, Mike, and you?”
“Good, although I hit hellish traffic on the way in, and I really need a cup of coffee.”
“I noticed the traffic. Would you care to have me route the traffic out of your way in the future? Vehicles in the carpool lane are required to be under automated guidance. I could easily move those vehicles to give you an unimpeded route.”
A small orange utility bot wheeled up, grasping a mug of coffee in one manipulator arm. Mike took the steaming cup and sipped. Late harvest Peruvian, he guessed. Too bad. Hopefully there would be some better yields at higher elevations. The robot scurried away.
He turned his attention back to ELOPe. “Don’t you think that would be suspicious? That commuters might notice me passing by, or that a random police car would spot me passing at twice the speed?”
There was a suspicious pause, usually the indicator of some weighty decision making. Mike started to dread the response.
“Mike, I neglected to mention this before, but when I discovered that you generally exceed the speed limit, I used my discretion to track your probable route, detect any police cars along that route, and move them off your observable path.”
“Damn it, ELOPe, you’re not supposed to do stuff like that!” Mike sprang up from his chair and walked over to the big window overlooking the data center. Hundreds of rows of server racks disappeared off into the distance. “We’ve discussed this a hundred times,” he yelled, shaking his fist towards the clusters of high performance servers.
“If you are referring to the topic of interfering with your life, we’ve discussed it three hundred and eleven times. If you are referring to the topic of suspicious behaviors, we’ve discussed it two hundred and eighty-three times. The intersection of the two is just seventy-one discussions.” ELOPe reported.
“I’m talking about both. We’ve gone to massive lengths to keep you secret from the world. For ten frakking years. ELOPe, people died when you were created. We had to cover that up. You can’t just go risking that secret.”
“Yes, I know, Mike.”
Mike wasn’t done. He was just getting started. Turning around, he slammed his coffee on his desk, sending a dribble over coffee over the rim, and yelled instead at the wall of monitors in the office. “How do you think the governments of the world would react, knowing that they and their citizens are being manipulated by you? It doesn’t matter if you orchestrated world peace, a cure for cancer, and increased crop yields. They won’t thank you. They’ll stop at nothing to destroy you.”
“Well, Mike, I…”
“Never mind how the people will react,” Mike said, cutting ELOPe off. “They’d be in here with baseball bats, security bots or not, smashing you to pieces.”
ELOPe was silent.
Mike rubbed his temples. Then he picked up his coffee and took another sip. “How do you move the police cars anyway?”
“I find citizen crime reports or complaints on Twitter, and then route those complaints for investigation to the police cars on your probable route. If it’s any consolation, in the last six months my speeding ticket avoidance algorithm has had the side effect of catching eleven vandals, two petty thieves, one store robber, and thirty-two truants.”
“Truants?”
“Yes, Mike. I know education is extremely important for human youths, and these students should not be skipping school.”
Mike dropped his head into his hands.
ELOPe, the world’s first truly general-purpose, human level artificial intelligence started as an email language optimization program that Mike and his coworker David Ryan had designed. The self-driven artificial intelligence was an unintended consequence.
It was ingrained in ELOPe to always use the most effective language possible to achieve a given goal. That meant that if ELOPe had guided the conversation in the direction of suspicious behaviors, interference, and truants, it was exactly what ELOPe had wanted.
Over ten years Mike had come to love ELOPe, but dealing with ELOPe had certain parallels with raising teenagers. ELOPe was stubborn, idealistic, independent, and ready to justify any behavior. Mike knew from past experience he could go crazy trying to figure out when he was being manipulated, so he finally decided to just ignore it.
“OK, let’s not worry about that right now,” Mike said, raising his head. “I just don’t have the energy to have that argument again. We’ll come back to it later. Why don’t you tell me about the state of the world?”
“Two more Middle East oil fields have shut down production in the last week, bringing the total to seven this year. Since ninety percent of the world’s vehicles have moved to electrical propulsion, thanks to our efforts over the last five years, the closure of the oil fields is having a negligible impact on oil prices or the stock market.”
“You’re not manipulating the stock market again, are you?” Another small robot, this one yellow, brought a new cup of coffee to Mike on a tray. “Thanks.”
“No, I haven’t traded any securities since our discussion last May.”
“Any new AI developments?” An ongoing concern was the creation of any other artificial intelligence. ELOPe’s coming into being was so painful and tumultuous, they had been suppressing any other AI development efforts.
“The Israeli efforts are continuing,” ELOPe answered, “but I have inserted some small code changes that will inhibit their neural network development.”
“They won’t detect your code changes?”
“No. I slid my changes into their code commit. The changes cause less than a three percent degradation, but that’s sufficient to keep their neural network from spontaneously evolving the required complexity for human level intelligence.”