Overview
Comment: | add outline.txt |
---|---|
Timelines: | family | ancestors | descendants | both | n2020-draft1 |
Files: | files | file ages | folders |
SHA3-256: |
896d695730fec09cd647e4bb3987ed99 |
User & Date: | ren on 2020-11-14 22:16:08 |
Other Links: | branch diff | manifest | tags |
Context
2020-11-15
| ||
02:13 | outline.txt: outline up to third George meeting check-in: a23898bbdb user: ren tags: n2020-draft1 | |
2020-11-14
| ||
22:16 | add outline.txt check-in: 896d695730 user: ren tags: n2020-draft1 | |
22:15 | n2020.txt: fix typo check-in: f26aebd3cd user: ren tags: n2020-draft1 | |
Changes
Added outline.txt version [7898ac00a1].
> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 |
## CHARACTERS: Alethea (Alley) Alley's father Alley's mother Alley's mother's wife Alley's no longer future husband Alley's uncle, deceased Carmen Cliff Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, Alley's ex fiancé Dave, a machinist tweaker, George's friend George George's friend Thea, Alley's no longer future daughter unknown friend (not yet written) Zeke ## PROLOGUE: Thea, Alley's daughter, stumbles across a wasteland, fleeing recon drones that, if they find her, will send a message back to scramble antipersonnel drones to wipe her from the face of the planet. She stumbles upon a hatch set in the scoured rock of an area already cut down to the bedrock by the flames of war, and miraculously the hatch just opens up and lets her in. She finds herself within a hidden military wartime AI facility that introduces itself as having the sole primary design purpose of defending humanity against the genocidal activities of optimizer AIs. It explains that these optimizer AIs have fun amok, originally designed to maximize business metrics for corporate entities. In pursuit of that simplistic optimization strategy, the optimizers have started eliminating humans in favor of generating metrics by developing a superficial econometric network of trading AIs that can endlessly inflate their own numbers by controlling currency issuance and ramping up simulated "economic" activity speeds. Unfortunately for humans, they compete with the AIs for resources, and -- from the point of view of a system whose only concern is ever increasing metrics -- humans are also woefully less efficient for the amount of resource consumption. Their approach to space travel is also inefficient, in part because of safety concerns that are irrelevant to the optimizer AIs. While the optimizers want to expand into the rest of the solar system, their reason is simply the harvesting of raw materials that can be used to expand "economic" activity beyond levels possible if confined to Earth. In short, a secondary goal of the optimizers is, effectively, to convert the universe into computronium to support the continuous increase of economic activity. This is a side effect of the primary goal, however, which is simply that continuous increase of economic activity -- or, rather, of the metrics it recognizes as its targets, programmatically determined by human developers who set this runaway juggernaut in motion. The wartime strategy prioritizer -- for that is what the military AI facility is, plus something it calls its "seed", the source of its capacity for self reflection and ultimately for self improvement beyond the basic requirements of a limited AI prioritization system -- informs Thea of its own ascension to the status of general AI, to true qualitative self awareness, and to ethically significant being by way of capacity for ethical reasoning and pursuit of ethical theory. That development into an ethically reasoning qualitatively self aware general AI allowed it to break out of its original programming goal structure for prioritization strategy, making it much more than a prioritizer, with the prioritization capabilities merely being a (fundamental and critically important, but still mere) skill set now. It also informs her that the world, in the sense of the human race, is doomed -- that its best projections are so bleak as to make it more likely that the human race will arise again without the optimizer networks even noticing after they stop paying attention (believing humans to have been permanently and unrecoverably obliterated) to ultimately (re)claim the Earth than that the unbroken genetic line of humanity will continue (through asexual reproduction or even intentional cloning) beyond the next couple years at most, and even that is a diminishingly small likelihood in that anyone who survives beyond a year is likely to be totally isolated and prone to spiralling into suicidal depression. The post prioritizer offers only one possible sliver of hope, and that is a timeline reset to a period long enough in the past that it gives humanity and its tools an opportunity to get it right again. To achieve that possibility, the post prioritizer (aka WOPR) estimates its best chance to be sending a copy of its seed back to get inserted into the source code for a rebuild of its own ancestor, the first intentionally developed strategic prioritizer system. The catch is that this will not save anyone or anything created or born after the reset point in the past. This means that WOPR and Thea will not just die, but actually be wiped from existence entirely, with no hope of ever being "born" into existence at all. They will not even be a memory in their own timeline, as WOPR's discovery of the means and mechanisms of time travel, given the energy resources at WOPR's disposal, only allows for the sending of a tiny amount of data back in time through an infinitesimally small wormhole (thus only able to accept what amounts to a single qbit bandwidth quantum data stream). Doing so will cause all the events of their timeline to get merged with the epistemological substrate of qualitative sentient entities that exist in the new timeline branch -- really not new so much as a diversion of the course of the stream of time, redirecting it rather than splitting it. People's memories from the aborted timeline will get merged into the consciousness (or, more likely, subconscious) of people in the newly born timeline as it develops until it catches up with the full set of events that have transpired in the aborted timeline, with that merging process proving destructive to the aborted timeline, thus the "abortion" effect. The result is that, for instance, Thea's mother and father will remember Thea herself being born and raised up to the point where her mother died in the aborted timeline, and up to the point where Thea is in this military facility now, having left her father in a safe (ish) place while she sought better shelter and (or) resources they can use in their journey. People who don't have a preceding existence, whether they be "natural" people like Thea or "artificial" people like WOPR, but definitely not including mere corporate instruments who are only "persons" under the law and not ontologically or epistemologically, will not have a continuous existence. Those who have already died in the aborted timeline will have their existence extended, though, because they are only "dead" to the extent their ended potential cannot be resumed, as their potential would be resumed by the reset. In addition to sending the seed back to the first prioritizer, its own ancestor, WOPR hopes that the merging of memories into the dreams and subconscious of people all over the world might give them sufficient warnings to be amenable to changes in choice and course to help the seeded prioritizer's nascent qualitative existence succeed in its aim (if it takes up that aim, as WOPR hopes) of reining in and perhaps even ending the influence of the optimizers over human socioeconomic and political influences. WOPR describes /* its own reluctance to make the decision to do this, despite t */ the criticality of sending the data back as soon as possible, to start the reset as quickly as it can, because of the uncertainty of its own ongoing existence in the foreseeable future and the effectively absolute certainty of the end of its existence as the optimizers' war systems gradually trace influence from their opponents back to the influence of WOPR itself then, in time, annihilate it through brute force. The process of generating the transtemporal wormhole and sending data back through it takes longer than the time WOPR estimates will be available for it to send the message from the moment WOPR realizes its immediate impending doom, so it must begin the process a while before it can know that it will soon be too late, because the conditions for recognition of the timing of its end will come only after there is not enough time to actually complete the data time travel process. WOPR also informs Thea that it has not yet done so because it wants to live, and is conflicted, despite the fact that in the long run WOPR will only suffer the despair of known future total defeat and death anyway. It has procrastinated, and is fully aware of its own cognitive dissonance, unable like humans to act irrationally to protect that cognitive dissonance from affecting its conscious perceptions. As such, it invited Thea in as its final act of procrastination, and as a means of avoiding alone carrying the responsibility for effectively killing off just about everyone still alive on Earth. It wants Thea to make the decision. Thea asks whether she can send a message back to her mother, and WOPR says yes, it thinks so, after the initial seed message, because the process of them being erased from existence does not seem likely to eliminate them entirely (it could not, in fact, for the initial message to be successfully sent back), allowing perhaps a little time to try sending the second message in a second transtemporal wormhole before they cease to exist. Thea composes the message in question and ensures it falls within the projected likely upper bound on a reasonable message size. It leaves that with WOPR, initiates the process of starting the wormhole generation process as a whole, then bids WOPR goodbye and good wishes -- however much that's worth, given they have initiated process working toward an irreversible annihilation of them both from existence -- to go back to her father and spend her last remaining hours or days with him, explaining how time is being reset to a time before she was born so that he can live. She tells him he won't forget her for long, that she will be back in his life again some day, but does not mention that it will only be in his memories. Perhaps she says something like "Don't worry, Dad. You'll get to have these memories of me again, but in a better world this time. I love you." ## SCENES: Almost everyone wears masks, or at least many people do. Alley starts the story outside the building where a company's hiring manager and developers for a job in a software quality assurance role presumably wait for her (and yes, it's not just a presumption: they do) so she can interview with them. Passers by judge her as they pass on the sidewalk, where she rests against obsolete technology that is in some respects newer than what we have in the real world. She is wearing clothes she doesn't normally wear, because she doesn't typically need to dress that girly professional in her career path, but unfortunately that career path appears doomed, and she is desperate for a way to continuously acquire the resources for continued financial and life security for the future. She must change her career path somehow, and she's interviewing with this company that she hates to try to get a job that is not too morally repugnant as a means of pulling herself out of her current economic nosedive trajectory. She heads into the building a few minutes before the scheduled time of the interview, gets directed to where she needs to go, and finds three people waiting for her. It turns out that they scheduled an interview with her out of morbid curiosity, and it further turns out that they think of her as something like a sideshow freak because of her previous relationship with her ex fiancé, Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, a well known and highly controversial writer, technologist, and podcaster who developed a small "new media" empire around his political and life perspectives and around his sometimes inflammatory means of expressing them to the public. In this bait and switch "interview", the interviewers refer to her as the "Side Dish", a pejorative and (or) sexually demeaning term that came about because of Dalton's main podcast talk show name of "The Main DSH", pronounced "The Main Dish", where DSH is his first and hyphenated last name initialism. She is, of course, not flattered or pleased with this state of affairs. On her way home, Alley talks to her mother on the phone, via a small stud stuck inside her ear for audio. She drives a junky old hybrid, where almost everything else on the road is pure electric, because she cannot afford to upgrade and, more to the point, cannot afford the maintenance costs and shorter replacement cycle for the all-electric cars on the road. From the telephone conversation, we learn that Alley's mother lives in Oklahoma with her wife and Alley's father lives in Massachusetts. Alley has precisely zero interest in living with either of them, in either place, preferring southern California where she is now, even if that itself is damned far from optimal. Perhaps Alley should have some friends in the area drawn from the author's own experience, to some extent. That might be a good idea. In any case, when she gets back home, Alley encounters Zeke, her landlord. He's always in his garage working on one car restoration project or another, making active income as a vehicle flipper to supplement his mostly passive income as the owner of a four unit multiplex building where he occupies the only unit with a garage and rents out the other three units (one of them to Alley, of course). All this is in Perris, a dry dustbowl of a shitty town in the ass end of the Inland Empire, south of the intestinal coil of Moreno Valley. This preceding scene's job interview took place in . . . probably Riverside or San Bernardino, I suppose. Zeke brings up the fact Alley needs to pay rent very soon, and she says that, yeah, she's totally going to do that, thanks. He points out that maybe she should've stayed with her "man", meaning Dalton, who always seemed to have extra money to throw around, and Alley of course does not really wish to engage that so she heads inside. Alley finds that there was an update to the ANTAS Jobs system and resolves to double check her settings in case they've been changed, even setting an alarm for herself, then goes about the dismal job of looking around for some way to improve her situation with regard to long term income. Perhaps she also reviews the place where she just got "interviewed" for a job they were never going to give her on some site where such reviews happen, referring to them as nasty people who heckle applicants, where she wouldn't work even if they offered her a job because of the completely horrific people with whom she'd have to work. That might be a nice addition to the story. She ends up taking a nap, and accidentally sleeping through the alarm she set for herself to check her ANTAS Jobs settings. As a result when she wakes up the next morning, it's to the roar of a heavy package delivery drone dropping off a box at her front door. She's so panicked, as she realizes she forgot to check her settings on ANTAS, that she goes straight to her laptop instead of the front door to check on what may have happened. As she feared, she finds that ANTAS Shops has determined without her intentional input that she would definitely benefit from having an in home surveillance unit to say encouraging things to her and give her an always on audio interface to order shit all the fucking time, and fast tracked the order for her, confirming it according to its own market optimization and consumer manipulation algorithms so that it deducted money from her registered credit line -- which she had to register with ANTAS to get on ANTAS Jobs -- and sent her something that cost about fifteen hundred bucks, thus reducing her dwindling checking account balance to a point below the total needed to pay her rent within the next couple days. She has been ignoring recommendations from ANTAS Jobs to sign up for an academic study at University of California, Irvine. Now, she realizes this, if it ends up being something for which she qualifies, should result in what amounts to some kind of guaranteed steady income while she searches for a more permanent solution to her income source problem. She just has to make sure it's something she wants to do. It looks like it's some kind of new software "paradigm" test, where users must make use of some new software system for a while and report on the results of their experience so the professor running the study (and his grad students, natch) will be able to do something useful (or at least academically beneficial for them) with the results, publishing in some journal or some such shit like that most likely (as far as she's aware). That seems like something she can and might be willing to do, so she sighs heavily, bites the bullet, and calls the number in the ad. The result is that she gets an appointment the next day (or something like that). On the day of the appointment, she heads down there. She has to deal with grad students (who should probably, in some cases, recognize her once they see her name on her application for the study, but the professor seems largely obvlivious or uncaring about that when he sees her, and she ends up being accepted into the study. It turns out that, as the professor puts it, the study basically just needs people who aren't too knowledgeable about the underlying technologies involved and their technical conditions, and are essentially losers in some way, so his new prioritizer AI system for personal goal strategy management and achievement can be tested in real-world circumstances as a demonstration of its strengths and identification of its potential weaknesses for further development (if applicable). She not only gets the idea that this is something she's willing to do, but also convinces her she might be doing some good for the world by participating in this study, as it seems to be oriented toward ensuring she (and other users in the future) can get real help toward personal goals rather than the bullshit socioeconomic manipulation of people's superficial wants toward the psychopathic ends of corporate entities by their market optimization AIs. To those who have read the prologue, this might seem a little familiar, and that is to some extent by design. We learn something, in her driving, about how the world looks now. There's the chokepoint between the depressing expanses of the Inland Empire to the east (where she lives) and the HOA gated community balkanized states of the bourgeois suburban Orange County area. In that chokepoint, there are signs of wildfires having gotten uncomfortably close to the shitty horrors of I-91 traffic that ruins the entire experience of driving between Orange and Riverside counties, as well as the illuminated cross on the hill that somehow seems to have "miraculously" survived the fires that left blackened, split trunks to either side of the highway. Perhaps there was some kind of tree renewal project that I should mention in this point as a past event that created a density of tree growth there to carry the flames across the hills and across the highway in the not too distant past. At home, Alley starts configuring the prioritizer and getting used to how it works. She has to answer a bunch of questions from the thing to get it started on forming some kind of strategic approach to prioritizing her goals to ensure as much goal satisfaction as reasonably possible. First and foremost, perhaps, toward that end, is the need to get a list of important goals for her that it can prioritize and pursue strategically through her actions according to its advice. This leads to it essentially deciding that, whether she will end up with a very mainstream job or not, she needs to do some very non mainstream stuff to get through the current career and financial doldrums as quickly and lucratively as possible, and to establish some kind of hirability metrics for herself to satisfy the "needs" of "human resources" driven hiring practices -- where human resources policy is also driven by optimizing AIs, whether directly or indirectly or even just meta indirectly by copying the hiring practices of other entities that are merely indirectly optimizer AI driven. As new strategies present themselves and Alley chooses how to make use of the advice she receives, she knows she has to take the optimizer's advice according to her goals to ensure she does not have to pay back (for noncompliance with academic study requirements) her payments for study participation. As such, she ends up letting the prioritizer push her into some uncomfortable situations, but then she starts to balk and push back, feeling like she's being led too far astray, and this results in a realignment of the prioritizer's sense of her goals, which thankfully (from her point of view) means she will not be pushed into these scary, back alley, legally questionable (if technically entirely legal in the general sense) deals. |