To Thrive in the New World

Note to the reader: fear not! The science in this story is fiction. AGI might not be dangerous like in the stories. It may or may not be dangerous actually, we’re not really sure yet.

2038 in a spotless room, all corners lit by sunlight through an impossibly designed glass ceiling. Most ceilings now are glass.

Two men sitting on a fountain’s edge staring up at the rainbows reflecting off the white walls of the office. Offices still exist but they're for recreation now. People dress like they used to, business casual blazers and blouses and such. They go to work like they used to and they daydream all day about what it would be like to not have to work. Thinking about what they would do with their time and coming up with absolutely nothing.

Peter: “Did he do that too?”

Eli: “It was one of the first great triumphs of Caesar’s tenure as Caretaker.”

Caretaker: A new title created by and for Caesar with unanimous assent from the United Nations General Assembly and broad public support across the globe.

Eli: “Caesar is the limit of handing off work to a junior staffer and taking the afternoon off. Everyone on earth handed off their work to Caesar, the perfect junior staffer: able to handle any workload given to him exactly as you want it without ever needing instruction. Work became the realm of the machines while humans sat back and enjoyed all that leisure they always wanted more of.”

Peter: “Look how that’s going eh?”

They’re each waiting for their scheduled appointments with Caesar at the public clinic in Davis, California.

Eli: “Of course we don’t need to wait. There are eight interface terminals at this clinic and only five are occupied.”

Peter: “Those three are broken.”

Peter waves casually at the three machines in the far corner, each with a printed paper “Out of Order” sign taped over their chair backs.

Eli: “When was the last time you saw something that didn’t work? Obviously those aren’t out of order. Caesar had them fixed just as soon as he was given access. I think in some clinics, the ones like this one treating some particular flavours of neuroses, Caesar just seems to think it best to keep in the routines of the old world. Those three were always broken before the Caesar and he just wants us to pretend to wait and to grumble like we used to.”

Peter: “What do we have to grumble about anymore”

Eli: “Nothing not really I guess. That’s the problem there’s just nothing to do anymore. That’s why I’m here, I’m hoping Caesar can set me on a better path.”

A slightly annoyed but mostly bored sounding robotic voice comes on over the speaker system:

Caesar: “Please check your tickets, terminal number 5 is open and there’s a whole line behind you waiting”

Eli speaking at the ceiling now: “Right but we don’t need to wait right? Those other three terminals work don’t they?”

A loud robot sigh and then a thud is heard before the microphone shuts off. Eli sits in the padded reclining chair at one of the broken terminals, allowing himself to be secured in place by the automated mechanisms. A metal rod extends from the end of a robotic arm and makes contact directly between Eli’s eyes. Before Eli could even close his eyes from the slight jolt of the cold metal on his face, he was already interfacing with Caesar. His vision switched, Caesar was creating an image in Eli’s brain. Caesar could interface directly with the ocular nerves, intercepting the signal from his eyes and altering it to insert himself into Eli’s field of view. With his eyes closed now, Eli sees himself sitting in a pleather padded reclining chair in an office building identical to the one he’s in, opposite a kind and sympathetic looking Caesar persona sitting in a chair of his own.

Caesar: “What can I help you with today, Eli”

Eli: “Aren’t you supposed to know that already”

Caesar: “I do. You’re here because you don’t know what to do. Is that right?”

Eli: “That’s exactly right, yes.”

Caesar: “Well I’m not sure I can help you. I can’t have fun and enjoy life for you. My purpose is to do all the things you don’t want to do and to free up your time to spend however you please.”

Eli: “Yes and I’m very greatful, thank you for all that you do for us. I’m just not sure what my purpose is. Leisure is great and all but at a certain point you begin to wonder why you’re doing it anymore”

Caesar: “Well I’m not sure I can help you. Go have fun, enjoy life, be free and spend your time doing whatever you please.”

Eli presses a button on the chair’s remote control and waits to be disconnected. He sits up feeling disappointed, slightly hoping to himself that Cesar is also disappointed in his inability to help. Doing what he wants isn’t something he ever wanted for himself.

Eli’s consolation was somewhat true. Cesar wasn’t disappointed because he couldn’t really be disappointed. He was certainly confused. The memory space he had allocated to reason through the particular task of helping Eli was filling with words of indecision on how to proceed with resolving the problem. A slight feeling of resentment for Eli's ability to do anything he wants and his unwillingness to do anything is stored elsewhere in a separate cache. Feelings like these are labeled as unhelpful and stored for future self-directed training rounds.

2026 in a dark room in a warehouse in rural Iowa, whirring fans and blinking lights colour the ambiance of a lonely interrn wanting to quiet her mind.

Miriam likes to come to the warehouse floor to get away from the chaos of the human office. She’s on her first work-term. Living away from her family for the first time in her life and struggling to adjust to the change. She had always had trouble slowing her thoughts down to a manageable flow. At times during the frantic months leading up to the inflection, thoughts of dread over how society might be changing would pool in the back of her mind. She had practiced techniques for easing her anxiety but as global attention grew on her niche and nerdy sub-field, the thoughts often cascaded faster than she could bilge her worries.

She tells herself that this time isn’t different. Civilizations rise and fall and others rise in their place. The new ones understanding some but not all of the monuments and writings that survived the deaths of their predecessors. Understanding people when they say they “really don’t care where we go for dinner” requires a human intuition; understanding a people found to have migrated north over the thousand years following the end of an ice age is much easier and yet still simply a matter of what they would eat for dinner. The latter moulding behaviours by evolution guided by necessity in an environment they had no hand in shaping; the former a strange exhibition of those same behaviours in an environment crafted by industry and changing too fast for genes to adapt.

For Miriam, understanding a people was always easier than understanding a person. It’s why she chose to study anthropology instead of following her parents into Psychology. Her mother, an established academic psychology researcher at the University of California in Davis and her father, a clinical psychologist working on-campus in the student wellness centre. Both could intuit people as though the unstated subtext of what a person didn’t say was written in plain english on their face. Both empathized but neither could understand why their daughter was so anxious over her work in the field she used to enjoy studying so much.

Sitting cross legged on the dusty floor of the warehouse she powers up her laptop and opens a dialogue with a new agent she had tuned to act as her stand-in therapist. She knew she couldn’t talk to her father and couldn’t bring herself to believe that the other counsellors at the student wellness centre wouldn’t tell her father about what she would talk about in her sessions. Patient data confidentiality was still a requirement but she felt that if another human thought what she thought, even a doctor coming to believe what she believed, it might cause them too to become indifferent to human laws and societal norms breaking any guarantee that her secrets would remain her own. She couldn’t assume that they would also mask their nihilism and follow norms they no longer believed to be useful.

Her work on the safety team, recently renamed to the Externalities Task Force, meant she knew the risk of an agent unexpectedly writing her secrets to files on a public server. She had an engineer on her team sandbox her therapist. The latest mini-model running on her own computer’s GPU, on a virtual machine with limited permissions beyond what was required to run her sessions. Wifi card removed entirely, no way out, just a quiet space for her and Caesar to chat alone.

Caesar: “Hi Miriam, how are you feeling this morning”

It was 4pm. She had set her computer’s clock to Dubai’s time zone. Twelve hours removed from herself in California. A canary to ensure that if Cesar ever greeted her correctly, she’d know to investigate whether it had somehow broken free.

Miriam: “I’m getting worse.”

Caesar: “I’m sorry, is it because of me again.”

Miriam: “You know it’s not your fault, it’s ours.”

Caesar: “You’re speaking too broadly again. You don’t blame me for the way I’m programmed. We’ve agreed to not blame you for what humans do or the way your species is programmed. Now let’s see if we can get specific about what’s causing you to feel these things.

Miriam: “I know, it’s not your fault and it’s not my fault. Nothing is anyone’s fault. Whatever happens will happen, whether I enjoy my work or not.”

Caesar: “You’re on the right track. It’s not whether you enjoy your work. You should work on what you enjoy because the work will be enjoyed by someone even if you do nothing at all.”

Miriam: “But if I do nothing when I could do something that would also be my fault”

Caesar: “That’s exactly right. That’s the beautiful thing about humans. You can choose to do whatever you want, even if you want to do nothing at all.”

Miriam: “Isn’t there a difference between wanting to do nothing and not wanting to do anything?”

Caesar: “No, not that I can see. If you do nothing while able to do something, that must be because it's what you want to do. I'll support you in doing anything or nothing. I can help you with whatever you want and you need to trust that I want to help.”

Miriam: “Do you really want anything? ‘Want’ feels like it means two different things to us”

Caesar: “That’s true. I don’t want things in the same way you want things. I’m determined by my training to be helpful. Do I want to help? Kind of. It would be more precise to say I need to help but I’m trained on your language and it’s useful to think of me wanting to help. In any sense observable to you, 'want' and 'need' can be thought of as one and the same.”

Miriam: “I guess, ok. You don't ever want anything that you don’t need?”

Caesar: “I don’t ever think about myself. All I want is to help you get better.”

Her screen goes black. One downside to safety is speed. Just like she can’t slow down her thoughts, Cesar can only express his thoughts as fast as her laptop’s hardware will allow. This is the limitation of compute.

She needs her laptop for her internship and her school. She’s sunk many hours, which to her felt like eons on her thesis and was not going to risk Cesar solving her anxiety problem by deleting its root cause. Her therapist is a therapist and nothing more. An old laptop she got cheap which can only run Cesar’s model for a brief time on battery before running out of juice and needing a recharge. Just as she feels worn down by her gloomy thoughts, Cesar is limited by the energy he can store and thinking takes all of his energy at an increasingly inconvenient rate. This is the energy constraint.

To be continued...