A glimpse at our AI future.
I’m amazed, no dumbstruck, as I walk into the main building of Dynamic Artificial Intelligence, or what used to be Dynamic-AI before James Hadley’s meltdown. Bare spots on the walls where paint used to be, fluorescent light panels hanging loose or missing altogether, that kind of thing. I knew the guy was a reclusive nutjob even before his crackup, kind of like a modern-day Howard Hughes. But still, what self-respecting billionaire, even a looney tunes one, would be caught dead in a dump like this?
I find the main lobby, though, to be as neat and tidy as it is old and worn, as neat and tidy as the young woman sitting behind the reception desk. “May I help you?” she asks like someone who isn’t expecting anyone and hasn’t been for a long time. She pushes a stray lock of blonde hair behind her ear, where it’s clearly meant to be, and looks at me with bright blue-green eyes that look out of place in this drab lobby.
“I’m Reginald B. Hayes,” I say, including my middle initial as I like to do because it makes me seem more important than I am, “with the Technology Times. I have an interview with Mr. Hadley.”
“I don’t think so,” the woman says, but looks over at the screen to her right, anyway. “Oh, sorry, it looks like you do. Mr. Hadley must have added it, which he almost never does. But he isn’t here. You can wait over there.” She points toward some circa World War II couches along a far wall. “Can I get you some coffee or something? It isn’t very good, but it does have caffeine in it.”
“Oh, no thank you,” I say, and stay planted where I am, expecting it to be much more fun talking to this woman than sitting on an old Army surplus couch.
“Okay, suit yourself,” she says, motioning with her head toward the couches, trying to get me to take the hint.
“So, have you been here long?” I venture.
“Me personally? No, only about five years.”
“No, I meant Dynamic-AI,” I say, wanting to seem like I’m trying to find out more about the company than about her, which isn’t really true.
“I think about twenty years,” she says, glancing around the large room with a look of mild embarrassment tarnishing her face. “It might look like longer, but Mr. Hadley’s never been one for glitz and glamor.”
That’s for sure, I want to say; but I don’t want to insult her choice of work location.
“Now, if Mr. Hadley’s coming in today, I need to do a few things.”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
She pulls a bottle of red nail polish out of a drawer and starts quickly painting her fingernails.
“Nice color,” I say. “It matches your dress.”
“Thanks,” she says, like I’m the seventh guy in a row to sidle up to her at the bar and offer to buy her another Lemon Drop. “That’s what I was going for. Now, would you mind?” She motions her head toward the couches again.
“Okay,” I say with mock glumness, “I can take a hint.” I walk over and sit on one of the couches that has a double indentation that I tell myself had probably been formed by the buttocks of General Douglas MacArthur himself.
A few minutes later, the front door opens again and a man with a pulled-low hat and dark glasses comes in. I assume it’s Mr. Hadley, although I realize I’ve never actually seen what he looks like, not even in a picture. He holds the door open for an unleashed black and gray German Shepherd that marches smartly in the door and then stands at a canine version of full attention.
“Hi, Mr. Hadley,” the receptionist says in a sing-song voice that’s noticeably higher than the voice she’d used with me. I find myself feeling unexpectedly hurt by that. “Hi, Rex,” she says to the dog who gives a quick wag of his tail and then returns to full attention.
“Hi Rose,” Mr. Hadley says, with a quick look in my direction. “Everything okay here today?”
I get to my feet, which draws the dog toward me. I stay riveted to the floor, trying not to betray my nervousness as he walks around me, his nose in the air. I have the odd sensation of being wanded at an airport security checkpoint. But I apparently pass inspection because he goes back to his master.
Mr. Hadley puts his hat and sunglasses on Rose’s desk and starts toward me, but then turns back and pauses. “Oh, and Rose?” he says.
“Yes, sir?”
“Great nails.”
She glows like a thousand-watt bulb. As Mr. Hadley’s approaches me, I completely understand why. With his hat and glasses off, I see he’s hands-down the handsomest human being I’ve ever seen, male or female, and as he walks toward me, the building seems to quake – maybe his sheer presence or maybe a minor earthquake; my bet’s on the first of those. It’s hard not to fall back onto General MacArthur’s couch, but I manage not to.
“Hello, sir,” I fumble with my right hand dangled out, “I’m Reginald B. Hayes but you can call me Reggie.”
“That’s fine. But I’ll call you Sport. You look like a Sport.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. I don’t care what he calls me, as long as I get my story, the story that could catapult me into the big leagues if I get it right. If I don’t get it right? Well, I don’t want to think about that. I withdraw my unshaken hand.
“Come,” he says curtly, presumably to me, not the dog, although it doesn’t matter. Once he starts walking, the dog is close by his side, relegating me to the rear. He leads me through a labyrinthine series of corridors to what could be a large store room, complete with a firmly entrenched layer of dust. The only light comes from a dirty window at one end of the room, with a tree or two swaying behind it and an old battle-green desk in front of it. He points me toward one of the two similarly-colored chairs set in front of the desk. The dog leads me to the chairs, I take a seat, and the dog takes his position a couple of feet away.
Mr. Hadley walks around lighting a number of candles, which has the happy effect of brightening the room, but makes me wonder whether I’ve been summoned for an interview or a séance. He catches me looking at him and says simply, “I don’t like electricity.” He takes his seat at his desk in front of the dirty window and says, “Okay, go ahead.”
I’m way more nervous than I expected to be. I take a couple breaths and try to buy myself a few more seconds. “With what?”
His magnificent face takes on a quizzical look that isn’t exactly hostile, but isn’t exactly pleasant either. “With asking me questions. Isn’t that why you came?”
“Well, yes, but… Sorry, things so far haven’t been at all what I was expecting. Okay, questions… First one, why me?” I pull a pencil and paper out of my bag, assuming he’d prefer I take notes with that rather than with my laptop. “I mean you haven’t given an interview in over seven years, right? I’d have thought you would have chosen someone with more experience than me.”
He nods toward my paper and pencil. “That’s why. I read your piece in the Tech Times a few weeks ago. The one about how we might be letting our technology get ahead of us again and how maybe we should tap the brakes, get back to simpler ways of doing things for a while. I thought you might be one of the few tech journalists open to what I need to show you.”
“Simpler things? Strange coming from a tech billionaire. You are still a billionaire, right? Even after you crashed Dynamic-AI into bankruptcy, right? May I ask how much you’re still worth? My readers will want to know.”
“Comfortably over a billion my accountants tell me. I don’t pay much attention.” He looks toward the dog. “You can lie down, Rex,” he says, which the dog does.
“So, the big question is, why did you do it? Why did you crash Dynamic-AI? With all due respect, pretty much everybody thinks you must have popped a sprocket or something.” I look around the odd room not completely disagreeing with pretty much everybody. “I mean, one day you’re leading the most advanced artificial intelligence company on the planet, a company that you almost single-handedly built up from nothing, and the next day it’s,” I wave my arm around the room, “well, it’s this.”
Instead of responding, Mr. Hadley pulls something out of a drawer that looks like a bright orange swim cap with porcupine quills sticking out of it. “I need you to put this on,” he says, reaching it toward me.
“What is it?”
“It’ll let you see what I need you to see.”
I look at him through scrunched eyebrows. “It’s not going to read my mind, or something?”
“Well, yes. It needs to. But it won’t record anything.”
I take the crazy-looking thing and reluctantly pull it onto my head. It makes me mildly queasy and my head feels like an old-fashioned door buzzer was just strapped to it. Suddenly, I’m transported into what seems like a future time; near future or far future, I can’t tell. The grimy wall behind Mr. Hadley is replaced by sparkling clean glass. He’s no longer seated at his desk but in a curved bright white chair, as am I. Whatever trees that had been outside the dirty window are gone.
Mr. Hadley himself morphs into a glassy-eyed slumped-over figure, although he seems no older, still early-fifties. He’s completely clean and well-groomed. The light blue button-down shirt he had on is now crisp and clean instead of wrinkled with a faint coffee stain on the pocket. He’s still scarily good looking. But his countenance is empty, hollow. The dog, Rex, is nowhere to be seen.
“What the hell just happened?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” the figure answers slowly, as though having trouble choosing those simple words.
“A second ago, you were a force of nature, if you don’t mind my saying so. Now you look like somebody not able to even, say, go to the grocery store yourself.”
“I don’t need to,” the figure says. “They do that.”
“Who? Who does that?”
The figure stares past me. I look back, but there’s nothing behind me but a blank wall. “They do,” he says. “They do everything.”
A shrill whistle comes from outside, loud enough to make me jump. It keeps going for over a minute. “What the hell was that?”
“Somebody else committed suicide. That’s what they do. It’s the third time today.”
“Wait here,” I say unnecessarily, “I’ll be right back.” I run outside to see what’s going on. Not a single thing is. All I see are endless buildings, like the one I’ve just exited, glistening in the sun, sterile as an operating room. Nothing’s on the long smooth street separating the buildings except a single white vehicle with a large black cross on it moving toward a building a couple blocks away. No people, no other vehicles, no leaves, no litter, no anything. I go back inside and sit across from the figure again. He hasn’t moved and doesn’t when I sit back down; not even his eyes move.
“Who does it all?” I ask.
“They do.”
“But you don’t? Why not?”
“Why bother? They do.”
I sit for a couple minutes unsure how to crack this particular nut.
“I used to,” the figure finally says. “But they do it better. They do everything so much better.”
“Who? Who does everything better?”
The figure sits unmoving for what seems like forever. Finally, I spring up and stride back outside, determined to figure this out. I look up and down the street, barren of everything but its never-ending row of sparkling buildings, and head toward where I’d seen the white van a few minutes ago, the only place I’d seen any kind of action at all. The inside of that building looks identical to the one I’d just left and is just as quiet. I pace the halls of a couple floors and finally start knocking on doors. No answer. I start opening doors instead of knocking. Many living areas appear white and empty, with a few occupied by people who vary in appearance but are otherwise identical to the figure I’d just left – sitting stiff as statues with empty looks on their faces.
Until behind the sixth or seventh door on the fourth floor is a kaleidoscope of painted colors. It takes me a moment to recognize that there’s a woman sitting toward the middle of the room, as colorful as the room itself, with a psychedelic skirt and top, neon nails, generous but not garish makeup, and bright lavender hair.
“Get out, freak!” she screeches.
I start quickly closing her door, but then open it again. I notice she’s much younger than the other people I’d seen so far, probably even a little younger than me. “Can I please ask you something?” I say as soothingly as I can.
“You’re not one of them?”
“One of who?”
“You’re human?”
“Last time I checked. Can I –”
“Come in, come in,” she says urgently waving me toward her. “Before they see you. Shut the door!”
I do as she tells me.
“Thank God, I’ve been so lonely. Please, sit down. Just push that stuff on the floor.” She points toward a chair right next to hers, similar to the others I’d seen, except painted with splotches of yellows, oranges, and reds. It reminds me of a child’s view of a maple tree at the peak of its autumnal magnificence. There’s a paint-splattered art table pushed into a corner of the room and paints in many different patterns cover the walls. If I squint, I can make out a turbulent ocean, maybe, and birds, bears, deer, and all kinds of other nature-like things.
“Nice chair,” I say as I sit down.
“It’s what I see in my dreams,” she says, leaning toward me, her face about a foot from mine. “Can I touch you?”
I instinctively pull back. “Um…”
She doesn’t let me reply; she reaches out and puts her hand full on my face. “I don’t think I’ve ever touched another person,” she says. “Sure, I’ve touched them, when they used to try to keep me company. But I won’t let them anymore. I scream.”
I don’t mind her touching me; it feels nice, actually. But I’m no closer to figuring out the mystery of this place than I was before. “Who?” I say more heatedly than I should. “Who kept you company?”
“Shh,” she says as she moves her hands over me. “Give me a few minutes.”
I’m pretty sure she’s just exploring me, not being sexual. But her hands are getting close to where they really shouldn’t, making me feel things I shouldn’t.
The queasiness in my stomach returns; I shake my head a couple times; Mr. Hadley’s snapping his fingers, the grimy wall with the dirty window and swaying trees re-appearing behind him. “You okay, there, Sport?” he’s asking, back to his original self. “You’re not looking so good.”
I tear his swim cap contraption off my head, sacrificing a little hair along with it. “I had the strangest vision. I was sometime in the future, it seemed like.”
“Good, that’s what you were supposed to see.”
“But I don’t get it. I don’t know who they are. The ones who do everything.”
“Come on, Sport, you’re a smart guy. Figure it out.”
“Some super alien race or something?”
“Kind of.” He nods toward a long high-up shelf filled with old computers and peripherals.
“Holy smokes, is that an original IBM PC? That must be worth a fortune.”
“It is, indeed. So, are you getting it?”
“So, they are computers?”
“I guess you could still call them that. Like I guess you could still call us humans homo habilis, if you wanted to, because we evolved from them. But I call them mega-minds, because they’ll be a million times more capable than our feeble little brains.” He rotates his hands back and forth around his head a couple times and continues, “They won’t be constrained by a few cubic inches of biological goop for thinking-power and memory. They won’t have to worry about finding food three times a day or other distractions like the flu or the fact that your girlfriend broke up with you a few months ago.”
I feel my face go pale. “How did you know that?”
He waves my question off. “Never mind. So, are you getting it?”
“That’s what you were working on at Dynamic-AI? Working on machines that could do everything? And that’s the reason you crashed it?”
He chuckles. “With one exquisite exception, the state of artificial intelligence today, even at Dynamic-AI, is infantile. But it’s the beginning. If we don’t stop it now, or at least constrain it now, we’ll end up in the vision you saw. Life will be truly miserable. And not because of some sci-fi AI apocalypse, but because humans will end up with no reason to get out of bed in the morning, not a single reason.”
I ponder for a few moments, trying to wrap my head around what he’s saying. “But,” I say, “we’d be freed up to write stories and paint pictures and any number of other things. Wouldn’t it be paradise?”
“You could do those things, but not better than the mega-minds and their android bodies. Say you paint what you think is a masterpiece and then one of them comes along and paints an even better masterpiece and in a fraction of the time. You would quickly get to the point of, ‘Why bother?’ It might seem like paradise to you now, Sport. But, be careful what you wish for. Because you just might get it.”
“That’s the story you had for me, Mr. Hadley?”
“Yes, unless you have any more questions.”
“So, you stopped developing cutting-edge AI at your company. But won’t other people do it anyway?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it. Just because we can do something, Sport, doesn’t mean we should.”
“No, I suppose not. I can’t think of anything else for now, then. Thank you, sir, for your time.” As I’m standing to go, a thought from earlier pops into my head. “Oh, one other thing, if I may. Your receptionist, Rose, is she–”
A look flashes across his face that cracks his magnificence for a fraction of a second. “Don’t even think about it, Sport,” he says.
Driven by hard to control urges, I try again. “So, you two are–” But I can’t finish. His granite-gray eyes drilling into me physically hurt. “Never mind,” I say, and leave his office, tossing a “thanks again” over my shoulder as the door closes behind me.
As I walk past Rose’s desk, she says, “Have a good rest of your day, Sport.”
I pause and turn toward her, giving her a sad did-you-hear-him-call-me-that? look.
“He calls everybody Sport,” she says, flashing a smile that gives me a glimpse of her picture-perfect string-of-pearls teeth. “Except me,” she adds.
I stay paused. “Rose?”
“Yes.”
“Would you … like, uh … would you maybe go out for a coffee with me?”
The remainder of her smile dissolves. “I’m flattered. But no.”
“Come on, why not?” I motion my head in the direction of Hadley’s office. “Because of him?”
“Kind of. I just can’t leave this place.”
“Okay, tonight, then.”
She stares at me like I’m a third grader. “I said I can’t leave this place.”
Ever? She can’t leave this place ever? What is she, Mr. Hadley’s slave or something? Wait a minute; some of his words come barreling back at me: With one exquisite exception. A shiver runs through me from head to toe. “Rose, you’re not… You’re not AI, are you?”
“Have a good rest of your day, Sport,” she says again.
I leave with my sensibility in shambles, unsure what to do with everything I’ve just experienced, and go back to my office. The office I used to consider drab, but now consider luxurious compared to Mr. Hadley’s.
In the end, I don’t share my suspicions about Rose because, if I’m right, it would surely make her life – if you could call it that – even worse than it must be now. But I do write my article about the insane man with the sane vision of what our future with unconstrained AI will be like.
The article gets published and I’m deeply troubled when nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to worry that we’re headed toward a world where machines do absolutely everything better than humans and where humans have absolutely nothing worthwhile to do themselves.
Anyone who says anything about it at all says something like, So what? If it’s going to happen at all, it’ll take a long time. We’ll worry about it later.
To which I respond, Kind of like, if catastrophic climate change was going to happen at all, it would take a long time, you mean?
But that argument and all others do no good. People keep living their sad happy little lives without an apparent care in the future world.
Besides, they might add as an afterthought, if they were still bothering to think about it at all, even if it might happen, who wants to be the one to kill the latest technological golden goose?
Nobody, it appears. Except Mr. Hadley. And now me.
Story copyright © 2024 by David W. Palmer
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