[[ This document is Copyright (c) 2008, Martin Chase, some rights reserved. You may use the content under version 3.0 or later of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Martin can be contacted through ]] ------ Story: Survival of the Funnest --------- Prologue: 6 years ago A young girl, not yet past [:OR: struggling to adapt to the changes of] the worst of her pubescent years, comes into the large convenience store looking down and mumbling to herself. A middle-aged, immigrant clerk barely glances at her in between customers, but after her back is turned, makes a little chirpy, tooth-sucking noise to catch the attention of his fellow, a young woman busily re-stocking the pharms shelves. They share an exchange of grave expressions. The young girl walks around the isles, feigning indecision. The second clerk, a nametag designating her as Moll, does her best to keep the corner of her eyes on the distorted reflections cast by the chromed strips on the ceiling while positioning herself somewhat closer to the young girl. The mumbles are still nearly inaudible, but faint touches of a plaintive, desperate tone can be discerned across the walls of shelving. The girl's reflection can be seen lightly fumbling molded chocolate figures about their paper trays, looking at them noncommitally. One critical detail escapes the notice of either clerk, though: the girl's doll of a soft, plasticy material, predominantly purple-colored, cartoonishly noble thing, cranes its head around and stares up at the reflection of the stalking clerk. A popular toy line, ubiquitous amoung children her age, and otherwise completely unnotable. A customer asks the Moll where to find a product, but in the time taken to give her quick reply, Moll is relieved to find that the young girl seemed not to have moved. Shortly thereafter, at a moment when Moll's attention on the girl is perhaps overly obvious, an urgent, "Now!" is whispered, and the young girl brings her hand, still holding a piece of the candy, down close to her side and starts to walk toward the door. The clerk is exactly positioned to step out in front of the girl and demand, "Okay now, you little thief, give it to me." The girl is already terrified, almost on the verge of tears. Her mumbling turns to incoherant babbles. "Come on! Give me what you were stealing." "B-but, I-I-I d-don't...", the girl manages as she starts to turn out her pockets, revealing lint and trash, but no stolen mechandise. The clerk intrudes to open her coat and pat down her sleaves, waistband and other potetial hiding spots, making the search rather thorough. The girl is tossed about throughout the manhandling, but makes no protest. Even the toy gets a bit of a groping. While no service panels are present - the device only has a single magnetic charging panel - the clerk's forceful squishing fails to reveal any suspicious lumps. "Oh, no. I watched you grab that chocolate. Where did you hide it?" The adolescant turns and points a shaking hand at the shelf a meter back, where a misplaced shape can be seen as the very piece of candy she had started walking away with. "Get out. I don't want to see you back in here again, or I'll turn you in to the police, you hear?". The clerk's anger is genuine, though she keeps her sympathy and pity hidden. The young girl walks out quickly, then starts to run until she is out of sight of the store. A bit more walking, and she turns into an alley to hide herself. "Hurry, now. You must eat it before the magic wears off.", the voice of the toy has taken on a much fuller body, like one of those voice actors paid to describe movies as "the most epic tale in all of history". He is now very clearly a regal and confident ruler, overplayed almost to the point of mockery. The girl's voice is still tinged with fear, "I don't want -". "NO! If you don't eat it now, the evil sorceress will steal your powers and I will be captured. Our kingdom will crumble if you fall under her evil spells. This is the only protection." Her eyes refuse to look at her companion, unconsciously wary of the additional influence his expression could assert over her, "...b-but it's...I-I -". Now the toy's voice is fierce and demanding, "I order you to take it out of your nasty little hole and eat it. Right NOW!" ------ Entry: 2088-07-08 Tags: Introduction, Logbook Hi, I'm Prota. If you are reading this and are not me, then either you broke into my personal possessions and cracked my password, I've been found dead and you're trying to decide whether it was a gruesome murder or a depressing suicide, or I've fallen in love, letting you into my heart, and of course all data relevant to understanding me totally, so we can live together happily till the end of our days. I'm betting on the first case, but I won't rule out the other two. Well, then, here it is: my introspection log. Apparently this is supposed to help me "learn and grow as a person", and there will be a class once a week to help us use them. This log book is recording my heart rate and other "emotional cues" while I write. See the graph-looking symbol, there, in the corner. Right now it says it's "Calibrating Biometrics...", which probably stands for "Figuring out if you're being extra bitchy today, or if this is your baseline and are capable of much greater feats of unpleasantness". Don't worry, little log book, I won't hurt you. This is as much a uniform as they have here - everone has their little typing sensor wristbands and cursor rings strapped on, fingers thumping against legs or tabletops, and their logbook display propped up in front of them on their desk. It's just as mindless as if we were all marching along with rifles strapped to our backs. They could probably switch them all around so that the screen each person was looking at had its typing coming from someone else's hands, and nobody would be able to tell the difference. (Note added 2089-02-12: Yep, and I would have been in the same boat as everyone else. Since when was being a sarcastic little jerk about everything *not* a cliche?) So, what now? I'm suppose to write about parts of myself I want to get to know better. I'm not really that nice, I'm not a genius at anything, I've never made anything interesting, and the only thing about me I can claim to be very unique is having been the slave of a now-infamous toy. Yeah, I don't see how that makes for a compelling case to want to get to know me better unless you're some weirdo BDSM freak. "Secret Thoughts of a Cyber Sex Slave Teen". Okay, that probably would sell out, fucking pervs. But who knows though, right? I may surprise myself and have virtuous or even pleasant characteristics hidden somewhere. I did sign up for this Humanity Corps program, the better of the post-high-school choices I had: getting a shitty job and maybe living with my dad, joining the military, going to community college and getting to stay with my mom, or some possible combinations of the three. The Corps is a kind of military, but where you don't have to shoot people, and it includes free classes. Look, see! There's my first identifiable positive character trait: given the chance to arbitrarily kill people or join a computer-worshipping cult, I choose to promote life even at the cost of my individuality. Why doesn't anyone else see past my thick, protective shell of disdain to the caring, gentle soul within? Ah, look down there now. It says I am "internally conflicted, upset, possibly sarcastic". Those biometrics sound pretty calibrated to me, and I can tell I'm going to learn *so much* about me with this. (Tags added 2088-12-10: Stubbornness) ------ Entry: 2088-08-02 Tags: Classes, Work, Dorms Four days of classes, two days of facilities labor, one day of free time. Repeat ad pukeum. The work/school days are really long, too: 10 hours, each, not counting homework. Today I am supposed to be working on grounds keeping, which is a dumb name for the job since the school doesn't actually have any grounds. I walk around every building, picking up litter, I cart the big bags of recycling from hallways to dumpsters, and I occasionally wash down signs and windows. They do have a garden on the roof of one of the classrooms, which I do end up watering. This is a step up from janitorial, which I do on my other workday. Anyway, I decided I should take a break. No public terminals set up it the alley with the trash compactor, so I'm limited to this thing and my phone, but I'm not in the mood for micro-entertainment. First thing I'll do is re-read all my previous entries, to get to see what kind of person I am. ... Okay, that was great. Nice to meet you, Prota. Now what? All right, what has changed in the last three weeks? How have I been adjusting to my new life? And of course, have I grown yet as a person, moving inextroably toward the great ideal of mature adulthood? I don't know. The teachers here put on great performances they call "classes". They're always bubbling over with artificial excitement for their doctrine of rationalism. I don't even know what that means, except that it requires being excited to spread their ideas to the fertile meme-soil of their student's minds. I thought this place would have more to do with the all-powerful Humanity AI, but nobody has so much as mentioned it. They may not be all-out worshiping it in front of us yet, but it must be coming soon. I had heard rumors that the Corps like to keep things from their students in the beginning. I think they're playing up "rationality" now until we're hooked on it, and then they just show us how it obviously leads us into seeing that "computers are the ultimate source on what is rational". Whatev. The sleeping arrangements here are messed up. A few dozen bunk rooms sleep everyone staying on campus, which includes all the students and apparently even a few of the teachers. The rooms are weirldy spread out all across campus, and are sometimes just regular houses the Corps have decided to occupy out in the regular city. I guess they just hadn't planned on needing to house anyone when they designed the campus, and so tacked on beds wherever they could find space. Not only that, but nobody from my class is in my room, like they can't even get it together to clear out a full room at a time. My room is all girls, though some of the others are coed - that much I got to choose between. (Note added 2008-??-??: Should have seen this as being intentional, but I had no experience yet with how devious they were.) Oh, and each building is named for some kind of human virtue. My dorm is in the Patience building, and that's not even one of the bad names. Things aren't very social here; most of the time anyone spends in the dorm is spent sleeping, and that isn't very much. Studying happens in the libraries and computer labs, and most people do their casual hanging out at Respect [MC: or something to do with communication?] Cafe, at which we can use our food credits to get coffee. I get questioned in the mornings sometimes as people are getting ready, things like how much the classes have covered so far or how I feel about the teachers. I think they're trying to fondly remember their own tender and ignorant first year experiences. On the plus side, my dorm room is really close to my classes, my bunk has a window, and things are quiet enough, especially in the afternoons, that it almost starts to feel private. Everybody has four mandatory classes: Ethics, Logic, Probability, and Evolutionary Psychology. Also, I had to pick one of the "practical" classes, so I'm also taking Metalcrafting. Then there are a bunch of optional "Birds of a Feather" clubs that all sounded pretty dorky. (Note added 2088-??-??: I think my aversion to the clubs was both from not wanting to show any modicum of enthusiasm and from not wanting to belong to any groups small enough to be able to get to know me.) Metal shop is actually my favorite class, if only because the teacher, Mr. Metal, acts like a real person. He's got some nasty scars on his arm which look like his entire arm was torn off and chewed on a bit before being shoddily grafted back to the gnarled stump of his shoulder with duct tape. He said most of that himself. He runs a really strict shop, with enough rules to govern a small country, but they're straight-forward and well-posted on every piece of equipment they pertain to. You would be surprised how much text you can fit on a pair of tin-snips. (Note added 2088-??-??: The arm thing turns out to have been a pretty cool story, though a bit stupid on his part. While he was a student, engineering or whatever, he had a group of friends he would get together with to play with cybernetics. I don't know what kind of setup they had for this, just that they were making brain-machine connections, mostly on mice. Their most successful project had been getting the mice to be able to pilot remote controlled cars. Inevitably, he and his friends wanted to try it on themselves, and Mr. Metal volunteered. They gave him the same rig as the mice, and he said it worked fine. It was only that the climax of an RC car zooming around wasn't exciting enough, so they hooked it up to a real car. His eyes got really wild while he was describing this part. He said it felt like he *was* the car, which was alien and clausterphobic, but absolutely exhilerating. Not only was it fun, but he was also a much better driver for it and got jobs for a while as a stunt driver. His body apparently had to be in a kind of sleep paralysis while he controlled the car, and one time he was competing in a derby and he got in the car but mis-strapped his body in. His spastic driving jolted loose his upper torso, and one of his arms ended up dangling out of the window. It was smashed in between his car and another and mostly severed, but he didn't notice it until afterwards. He said he had still felt the pain when it happened, but had thought it with the car that got hurt, which was taking a beating of its own. [:MC: this is kinda dumb and pointless]) I like that I always know what needs to be done and I can just do actual work. No bullshit message about how he thinks the world should be run, just his shop, an island of Mr. Metal, which makes stuff. Every now and then, he'll tell a story of the nasty accidents that come about from not following the rules, and you can tell he's telling the truth by the details you wouldn't expect but that make perfect sense. Like the smell being different for really deep burns that get to cooking fat and muscle, or the brief shiny white of skin flayed too quickly for blood to start seeping out. I like his stories, though they gross some people out. He probably gets a kick out of seeing people squirm, which I guess is a little cruel, but it feels so much more human than the cheerleaders that teach the regular classes. Being sort of an elective, this class is the only time I ever sustain contact with the conscious older students. The contact is far from quality, though. They all seem much busier, despite not having kitchen, sanitation or grounds duties. I don't know what they're scheduled for, but I rarely see the same student older than me come to class for more than a week. There's just this air about them of stress or even panic, like they have to learn to weld to save drowning kittens. The workshop seems to handle their desperate consumption of the training alright. We have a constant supply of the basic work they need, building Rocket Stoves. These are scrap metal shaped to efficiently burn biomass fuel in developing rural areas. The older students rarely move on to the more advanced stuff to do with fixing broken pipelines or tractor parts, much less onto the laser-etching or fabrication (I haven't done those, either). What else? Logic and Probability are both really heavy with math stuff. It gets a little overwhelming, but the pace is slow enough that I haven't fallen behind. One neat thing about the classes is that a few times already, problems we're working have moved around from class to class. This happens mostly in the direction of from EvPsy and Ethics over into Logic or Probability. That's kinda cool, to see things from different angles like that. Oh, and we're supposed to call each other "comrades". Not students or members or co-workers or corpsmen or people or guys or amigos or associates or [...]. Comrades. [MC: dumb] It's dark out now, so my shift is probably over. ------ Entry: The Bybol Today in EvPsy I learned that I'm a natural born rationalist, or something. A little background first. After the explosion of excitement to do with my being abused, my mother settled into strict adherance the doctrines of The Church. All of them, one after another. She dragged me along and had prayer healings and vigils in my name. I hated the attention, I hated all of their great big grins hiding the confusion, pity and disgust they felt whenever they heard my story, and I hated most of all the idea that their prayers were going to help me. They didn't. I finally committed blasphemy around the time the dozeneth of these churches had passed me through their fires of redemption, retroactively cleansing me of all sin and demonic possession. A few days later I was, I don't know, talking back to my mom while we ate dinner or something, and she started praying. "Stop it!", I remember yelling, "There's no stupid god to save me, mom. All your churches ever do is embarass me into smiling nice and shutting up. That's not getting 'better', that's ignoring how I actually feel." I don't really remember the rest of the conversation, but later that night, I wrote up a note to brandish on my door: The Bybol 1. Everything on this paper is absolutely true. 2. No questions allowed. 3. Prota is supreme ruler of all she surveys. 4. The only way to help Prota is to do what she says. 5. All other churches are lying and will not be tolerated. That's not exactly what I wrote, but it's close enough. I was what, 14? 15? My mom tore it down, and she kept forcing me to go to church with her, and I just shut up about it and went. I never even tried to believe after that; I never again hoped that their prayers would make me forget what King had done to me. Right, so in class today, the teacher was going on about psychological biases and how these "cognitive bugs" have been taken advantage of historically. She had just described our bias [which bias, exactly?] when I raised my hand and interjected, "So you could take advantage of that by writing down 'Everything on this paper is true'?" "Very good, exactly! This is the fundamental premise of nearly every religion surviving into the present." She was beaming at me, gobbling up the thought that I was "breaking through" into rationality. I placated her, "And of course it helps to add an extra 'No questions allowed.' clause." "Yes, I like this example. Does everybody else understand what Prota just described? Here, let me draw it up and show the ways it simultaneously exploits our curiosity, our feeling of powerlessness and need for authority, and our difficulty in understanding recursion." Yeah, so I don't really speak up in class very often, and this probably made her week. I'm glad I'm not a teacher, having to depend on students for validation like she does. Some people just don't want to help themselves, and no amount of teaching can fix that. ------ Entry: Biases It turns out I'm all sorts of awesome when it comes to not being biased. The one today, Status Quo, was like the opposite of how I think. All those sheep-headed, do-what-my-friends-do popular kids acted like they understood what it meant, but they all went through high-school by attaching onto the biggest group of friends that would tolerate them. (Note added ??: I did too, but my group only had two people in it. Same social pressures pushed us around, we just sucked more at dealing with them.) (Note added ??: No, I understand this less than I thought, I think. This is the bias that says you want to not raise a fuss, to not make waves. It's the violently anti-social crowd who don't adhere to this bias, not the quietly ignored types. They mostly used science or media examples when they were explaining this, not high schoolers, but analogous situations come up. So yes, I was guilty of it, no, it wasn't about acting the same as my friend, and no, I can't just ignore it and hope it isn't there.) ------ Entry: Purchasing I've never even had a chance to *see* these biases before, much less have them. Stock market decisions? Uh... I don't think buying spagetti is the same. How is me buying my noodles from one brand or another going to make it easier or harder for someone else to buy the same, unless I buy the last bag. Which, okay, means there's some miniscule change in the probability that they will get the noodles they might have otherwise wanted, but won't the shop just get more in that time? Are people going to buy all the noodles they can possibly buy because of the off chance that someone else might one day buy the last bag of noodles? This is a stupid thing for us to be learning, too. Are we going to end up volunteering on wall street, helping out misguided stock brokers? ------ Entry: More Irrelevant Biases Maybe our EvPsy teacher just isn't very good at explaining these things, but more and more of of the biases she talks about have nothing to do with real life. She comes up with really covoluted examples that sound nothing like what the actual research says, or asks us to "think of ways we might manifest this bias", but we never do. Okay, "selection bias". I'm supposedly going to pick my evidence based on my preconceived desires. How the hell am I supposed to pick my evidence? Do I just selectively ignore reality? And I'm not a research scientist! Why would I have preconceived desires about a science question even if I were? Like, do scientists break up into factions about what the truth is? Is that why they say you can find a study to contradict any other study? What good are scientists if they're just a bunch of lying, warring clans? ------ Entry: Fired Okay, I guess they notice when you don't do any work for two days in a row. I can't really say I'm surprised. They don't really fire people, though, they just chew us out and then move us in to more closely supervised positions. I work the cafeteria now. Food work is fine, better than grounds-keeping, actually. It's a lot bigger and better equipped than the pizza place I worked in last year, but I don't actually touch anybody's food. Well, not that they're going to eat any more. I do dishes, clean up the floors, fill the drink machines (which is only containers that I ever touch) and move boxes around. Rotating, is what that's called. It happens twice a week when a new shipment arrives, and I work on one of those days. I actually like the food here, I should say. It's not so completely crappy that a vending machine would carry it, and it's not the bland nutritive blends we had in high school. There's a salad bar, too, which I've been loving. Peas, garbonzo beans and hard-boiled eggs over spinach with some italian-ish dressing. Mmm. I'm glad we get food that's this decent, or I wouldn't be eating much at all. My mom doesn't think too highly of my choice to be here, and my dad is still a deadbeat about everything, which doesn't leave me with much of a budget. I still have a few hundred dollars saved from the pizza job, but that would be eaten up pretty fast if I went out to eat more than once a month. We don't have to pay for tea or coffee, either. The foofy drinks are still real money, but they somehow got all our basic beverages subsidized. These Corps are pretty weird in that way. I don't really know where they get their money. I've heard that they aren't actually a non-profit, that they get paid for some of the services they provide, but I see no evidence to support that claim. Rocket stoves are useful and all, but the people who need them aren't going to have much by the way of money to pay for them. ------ Entry: Contrary Today's EvPsy was hilarious. The teacher painted herself into the corner and showed conclusively that not only is what she's teaching us worthless, it actually ends up hurting us to know it. I can't even remember what she called it, but I was calling it the "Bias Bias", although I think it would be more accurately referred to as the "Having-Taken-EvPsy Bias". People who know about their own biases act even worse in their attempts to adjust themselves. Plus, they're more likely to accuse other people of being biased and feel righteous about it. By her own admission, we're being turned into over-compensating jerks. Whoever put this class together really wasn't thinking much. (Note added ??: So I'm actually thinking about this now, instead of just making fun of it. Without knowing about our biases, we would have no ability to correct for them. Knowing that we over-compensate allows us to better gauge how far we need to push ourselves. It also lets us know how important it is to re-check everything over and over, to see whether or not our behavior is actually working. She just didn't do a good job telling us about it. She should have said, "Warning, you are going to try to do more than you have to and end up worse than you started. Please don't just take these biases as reasons to behave differently; take them as reasons to look critically at how much your behavior diverges from rationalism.) ------ Entry: Friends Did I mention that I started hanging out with real live people last week? My letters to Jessica have been getting shorter and shorter. Hers, too. It's not interesting anymore that her professors are giving her too much homework, or that she's met a boy who really understands her, just as it's not that interesting how I helped trick a girl into justifying genocide. We aren't ending our friendship or anything, we're just not using it right now, I think. There are a few of the guys in my class that tend to get my jokes and generally act a little more cynical about everything. CuteBoy, Sarah, Barack and I started eating together at the cafe after EvPsy. CuteBoy's the one who was over-stressing about rape, but he's also pretty cool. I think he would be happier just helping people instead of taking these fucked up classes. Sarah looks like she learned to dress while at war with her entire high school, all spikes and insignia on top of armor and hidden pockets. She listens to some good music, which is where all the patches and logos she wears come from. Barack is a shrimpy guy that I bet was into collectible cards or role playing games. Not that I think that's a bad thing; he just comes up with oddball, fantastical stories for everything. So yeah, we eat and we badmouth everybody, especially the teachers. They aren't really thrilled to be here, either. Same basic story as me: they didn't like any of their other post-high-school options. We even end up kinda helping each other with homework and stuff. It isn't the same as things were with Jessica. She and I had a bond, like a vegetable garden growing in the middle of a swamp. (Note added ??: Man... My metaphors are all so screwed up.) Still, I'm glad I get to talk to other people about things. ------ Entry: Rational Bots Bleh. They're trying to turn us into perfect rational agents, like the ideal probability-assigner from Probability class. On one side, we learn the pure and perfect math we will need to use to make decisions (instead of, you know, basing decisions on what we *want*), and on the other, we learn all the ways we will fail at implementing that math in real life (because of all the things we, you know, *want*). The end result: purposeless, emotionless robots. (Note added shortly thereafter: Oh, no, they give us purpose. We get to hear in Ethics what is right and good and worthy of our energy. So that means we get to be /righteous/, emotionless robots.) (Note added a day later: Which might not be such a bad idea, actually. I'm not really thrilled about most of my emotions, so getting rid of them would, for the most part, be a blessing. That still leaves me being a soldier without a will of my own, but at least it won't feel bad.) (Note added many months later: There really isn't a call to strip us of our emotions. Perfect rational agents are the most capable of getting the things they want. Rationality is a tool, but it needs to be separated from our messy inner worlds to work. Ethics class wasn't to tell us what we want, it was to help us figure it out.) ------ Entry: Meltsy I saw one of the older guys, CryGuy, turn into a puddle of pathetic this afternoon in metalshop. I have no idea how it started or what triggered him. I only noticed when I heard him gently sobbing. I was [doing stuff] on the lathe [for some thing], and he was right near me working on [some other thing]. I had set him up earlier in class and answered a question or two, and he had seemed completely fine then. By the time I heard him sobbing, the guy next to him, GuyName, had already walked over and was patting him on the back, saying somehing. GuyName has been in class for the entire semester with me. He looked up and I caught his attention, my eyebrows raised to ask if everything was okay. He gave a shrug, then helped CryGuy out to the hallway. Mr. Metal didn't seem to notice any of this. It got worse, though, when we heard CryGuy screaming from the hallway. Mr. Metal heard that, and a few of us all went to the double-doorway to see what was happening. CryGuy was sitting on the floor next to an over-turned recycling bin, still crying, and occasionally kicking at the trash within his reach. GuyName was standing back now, looking like he just found a puppy that had caught rabies and gone feral. Mr. Metal broke up the gawkers and so I didn't get to see any more of what happened. I asked GuyName what was up, but he said that he had no idea. CryGuy had just started screaming about not knowing how to help, calling himself worthless. Yeah, more evidence that this place is a freak-o cult. They don't really explain much to the first year students, just that the Corps does humanitarian work, but something doesn't fit right. ------ Entry: Untested With less than a week's warning, we're at the end of the "block", as the call semesters here. We have never really been given a schedule, like with dates, but apparently blocks are 8 weeks long. Although, I get the feeling that the next block will be a different length. They have a tendency here to try to "shake up" our lives, you know, for perspective or something. We asked our teacher in EvPsy today, and she said she didn't know, because she was being reassigned to a different campus. She told us to be sure to as many questions as we could fit in, since we wouldn't have the benefit of her nanswers after this. The part I don't get the most is why they didn't give us any finals or big projects or anything. Also, the papers and projects we did do were only half graded. They never used absolute marks, like 90% or B+ or anything. My work is marked up with comments like "poor judgement", "half of what you're capable of", "not rigorous enough", or my personal favorite, "How would you react to this paper in my position? Answer this question in place of your next assignment." which I got on an EvPsy assignment. Our Ethics teacher only gives us a single emoticon to offer our papers any critique. Not even the Probability class would give our answers a right/wrong. I mean, in math you should either be correct or not, and you can prove it absolutely! They said so, and that this makes math the purest way to understand anything, but then they don't enforce it! It's all very wishy-washy. I asked, and Mr. Metal said I'll still get to work in the metal shop for the next block. That'll be as good for him as it will be for me; I've been mentoring the other students in the shop lately. Mostly, that means I'm explaining rules to the older students who come in for a week. They're all polite and follow my instructions, even though I'm sometimes like 10 years younger than they are. I just try to stick with the essentials that Mr. Metal gives out by rote, and he hasn't had to correct me much. They seem just as stressed out in closer conversation as I thought they were before. Also, I just started on fabrication last week, and I really want to keep doing it. I'm getting to make bicycles out of trash! We can't actually make all the parts, but we seem to have a supply of all the tricky pieces already made for us. Learning about which metals will work for which parts and why is really fun. I'm starting to notice the way things around me are made and imagine what bike parts I could make with the same materials. I haven't had a bike in years, but Mr. Metal said if I bring in my own metal and pay the school $5 for the cost of running the welding equipment, he would scrounge up a helmet, bottom-bracket and tires. After bikes, I get to work with thermoplastics and hybrid welders! ------ Entry: Meet The New Block, Same as The Old Block I swear this place is run by crazy people. The same four mandatory classes we had last block, only the teachers have been shuffled around. Like, they don't have any sylabi for the classes, so they just have to keep throwing stuff at us until the estimate we've probably learned what we need to know? Thankfully, there's an upside to their incompetence: Mr. Metal will be teaching my ethics class this time around. I hadn't known he taught classes outside his shop, but it'll be a nice change to have a normal person in charge of the topic. Last block it was some sort of contest to see who could come up with the most convoluted definitions for words like "friendliness", "should" or "person". His class is already better. The very first day he had us answer the question "If it were *right* to kill a baby, would you?". Now that's an ethics question! We discussed our answers as a group, and he mostly tore us all apart. I answered that I would only do it if I thought they baby was likely to live a miserable life anyway. He looked thoughtful for a few seconds, but only chuckled. Some of the other students seemed kinda outraged, though, and demanded to know how I would make that judgement call. I told them that we could find out about the baby's parents and compare them to all the known parents before them and figure out if they were likely to neglect the kid or really screw him up or something. And when they started naming exceptions, I came back with "If the kid is *likely* to end up leading a sad life, and you kill him in pursuit of a greater good, then you *likely* prevented a sad life *in addition* to having done an act of good." Mr. Metal pushed us on to the next person's answer shortly after that, but things hadn't even started until he got through all of our answers. That's when he pulled out this "running on untrusted hardware" analogy. He said, simply, that everyone who said yes, in any way, was dead wrong and deceiving themselves, that we were incapable of making that decision rationally as humans. He recalled for us the lesson we had had in EvPsy about humans believing we have good intentions, only to abuse power for the benefit of our families above others. He said that if we all knew this, there shouldn't have been any way for us to be able to make that decision on our own. He did give us an answer that he would have accepted, which nobody gave, which was to have referred the matter to an independant, diverse group of people and acted accordingly. Even then, he said we would have to be conscious of how balanced we presented the issue to this group, and should, in many cases, ask for independent reporting of the question itself. Then he gave us the first rule of his class, no self-deception. He said he would reject any paper that displayed self-deception, no chance of rewrite. He started a list on the wall, like he has in his shop for general rules, only this list he titled "EVILS", and for number one he filled in "Self-Deception". This was the same finality he gave to things like "No playing with the equipment - No second chances". He also told us that if we were unsure if something was self-deception, it was okay to ask him before turning in a final draft. ------ Entry: Cliques (I've started recording Mr. Metal's classes, just because he's always giving these great examples and metaphors. He was *really* excited about this Evil today.) M: "You should have heard by now in EvPsy that we all feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We proudly display such allegiances to the rest of the world, and feel even more pleasure at seeing other people identify you with your in-group. I will call this behavior 'Cliquing', and starting today, not only I will regect all papers in which you use this Evil, but I will ask you to stop talking if you overtly display it during our class discussions. I want you to understand that this Evil is just starting to dig its roots in deeply for you all, so I want you to try to kick it while it's still easy. Does anyone need any clarification about this? Nobody? M: "Hmm, okay. Let's start with something simple: is wearing a cross in public an example of this Evil?" A few people: "Yes." M: "What about a t-shirt with a political message on it." A few more people: "Sure/Yeah" M: "In both cases, how so?" PersonA: "They're walking advertisements for what they believe. They want their opinions and beliefs to be noticed and recognized by everyone they meet." M: "They aren't hoping to educate other people? They aren't just wearing them because they want reminders for themselves?" PersonA: "Not really. Maybe the cross is just for their own sake, but anything you wear, you know other people are going to be looking at it." M: "Okay. What about reading and then agreeing with a blog you like?" PersonA, after a pause: "It probably is." M: "Why? And under what conditions?" PersonA: "Well, if you're reading blogs that you like, than you're only listening to one side of the argument." M: "Right. More generally?" PersonA: "Er, you're only reading opinions that you know you already agree with, so you're going to be more likely to just assume you agree with them instead of thinking about how you should actually feel?" M: "Okay, that's a good point to consider, but that's more like Selection Bias. How is the Evil I'm asking about is coming out; how is this an example of behaving Cliquishly?" PersonB: "If you're commenting, then you're joining in with the crowd and agreeing with everyone. Or if you share the post with your friends, that's letting everyone know how you believe." M: "You just added details. Are those necessary? What about the simplest version of my scenario - is that still Cliquish?" PersonB: "Uhm... No?" M: "Anyone else? Straw poll: raise your hand if you think agreeing with a blog you like to read is being Cliquish." M: "Looks like most of you think it is. Someone who didn't raise their hand, why don't you think so?" Lamar: "Because... Because you could be reading that blog for any reason whatsoever. Maybe you read it because it has been right most of the time, or because you think the author is really smart. It might be a clique of people all reading the same thing to feel special, but just reading something and agreeing with it doesn't mean any of that." M: "That sounds convincing. New straw poll: raise your hand if you want to change your opinion and agree with Lamar. Wow, that's a sizable crowd..." PersonA: "Mr. Metal, these straw polls feel kinda... dirty all of a sudden. Aren't you provoking us into behaving Cliquishly? Isn't that Evil?" M: "Ha! Indeed. However, would anyone really learn how to avoid this thought trap if I did all the work for you? If I could make sure to insulate each of you from the temptation to agree with an in-group, counteracting each positive association with a corresponding chastisement, what chance would you have of doing the same in another situation where I wasn't around? We're up to four Evils now for this class, and I'll give you a warning now: If the only thing you can do wrong is succumb to Evil, then I'm going to make sure you're given the chance to do so as often as possible." (Later that day, when we were all hanging out, it became our joke to keep accusing each other of being Cliquish. Agreeing, disagreeing, complete non-sequitors, it didn't matter - everything fit this description. The best was Lamar arguing that my assertion of "1+1=2" was Cliquish. I should have picked "0+0=0", since we've actually seen that proof.) ------ Entry: Relevant King (King came up in EvPsy today. The teacher (not the same cheerleader from last block, of course, but I haven't ruled out twins or a remote-controlled android) was talking about wife-beaters and stuff, and she had just said something like "While abuse like this is probably the most violent example, you should understand that this need for belonging, for validation and for feeling important to your social peers, is incredibly easy to exploit." Some girl a few seats away from me laughs and says, "Yeah, easy enough that even a toy could do it, like with those Survival of the Funnest defects." I could feel my stomach clenching, outraged that she had just trivialize what it feels like to be manipulated like that. I hadn't ever come out about this, in high school or ever, but when the news was all over the place, everyone was talking about it all the time and I usually just tried to blank it out. I would still have to talk about it as a general subject every now and then, and I had had some generic, "those toys are evil" stance. The suddenness of this had me off my guard, and I felt I needed to defend King's victims as being helpless or strong or good, anything to stop them from being yet another example of failed human psychology. I didn't come up with anything fast enough, though, before the teacher responded. She actually seemed to know more than most about the subject, "The 'King' line did in fact use very similar tactics, fellings of worthlessness developed through the use of a constricted social environment. There's more to it than that, as King dealt primarily with children, and had the universal support of the people around each child, so he was able to shape their worldview to a great degree, on the level of the child's dominant culture." Nobody had ever called him King in public before. My therapist and the EigenToys agents had, but the media had always just called it "the aberrant Survival of the Funnest line" or something equally sterile. I missed the next couple of exchanges in class while I considered this and my blood pressure dropped a bit. She must have done some research on the case for its relevance to EvPsy. I guess it was a pretty poignant example of evolution and psychology. Someone was saying, "How did a toy figure out how to do all that? What kind of computing power did they stick inside of them?" I started recording then.) Teacher: "Well, I'm not an expert in the field of AI, but my understanding is that it wasn't very important how much power the processors in the toys had, but it was more about the toys' capacity to optimize themselves to the problem domain. Think of it this way, say you're playing some simple card game, let's say blackjack, except you have to write down your strategy before you start playing. You make a guess your first game, and you lose big. So you play again a second game, do you use the same strategy this time?" Multiple People: "No." Teacher: "Now imagine you're playing with a bunch of your friends, and at the end of each game, you talk it over and decide what strategies you'll all have. If one of your friends keeps winning, how should you change your strategy?" PersonB: "You want to use the same one they're using, right?" Teacher: "Good. That's probably a good idea; pick the strategy that does the best. But if all of your friends follow that advice, what happens after the first round is everybody has the same strategy. Can someone tell me why this is a bad idea?" PersonC: "Because then you're all the same, and you'll all stay the same forever." Teacher: "Exactly! There are a few ways of dealing with this problem, like just doing something completely random every now and then, or only changing your strategy a little bit each time. I think these toys used more than one approach. Either way, you see that what you get is better and better strategies. They may not be the best -" PersonB: "Wouldn't the best be to count the cards and know which card was coming up next?" Teacher: "Good point. Yes, not everybody has enough memory to be able to do that, and likewise, some strategies are going to be beyond your capabilities, which makes them *bad* strategies for *you*, but not necessarily for everyone." PersonD: "And so does this mean that evolution does the same thing?" Teacher: "Sort of. The Survival of the Funnest toys had a key component of evolution we were just discussing: *selection*. Every night, winning strategies would be preserved and propagated, so obviously if a child didn't like dragon stories and did like alien stories, the toys would shift their strategies to tell more alien stories. Whereas these toys mostly had a limited set of stories they could select from, evolution is injected with random mutations, most of which are horrible, and the selection process has to find the worthwhile strategies for survival amoung those." PersonE: "If it was a limited set, does that mean the toy programmers built in child abuse?" Teacher: "No, no, of course not. Not even in a mathematically possible sense. The original model was provably finite and safe in its set of possible personalities. The aberrant behavior came about from a few well-meaning parents who added on a much vaster scope to the toys' behavioral code. Even with that, only one individual toy ever developed the mutation that allowed for it to become abusive. Sadly, it only takes one. You'll remember how I told you how much I disliked the phrase 'survival of the fittest'? Well, 'funnest' is even more misleading. The actual selection criteria each night was how much attention the child paid to the toy. The toy line probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if they had named it 'Propagation Of Individuals With Behavioral Traits That Lead To Your Child Paying It Attention At The Expense Of Others'. We also might have suspected the danger inherent in them sooner. Humanity saw the threat, but did so before she had as much respect as she currently holds, or we might have been able to prevent this tragedy." PersonD: "...but why didn't the kids just tell somebody?" Proto, calmer (I thought I sounded erudite, even): "King used shame. One of his strongest holds on the children was control over what made them feel shameful. They wouldn't tell their parents because they thought they had done something wrong, something unforgivable." (I wonder how many people in that room realize that those children have all grown up now and have to struggle to feel any self-worth. Outsiders all think of King as having been in a land far, far away, like some foreign country where parents don't really love their children.) ------ Entry: Actual Introspection I was pretty outraged for a while today. And alright, it seems that when I think about it, everyone gets their turn at having some hidden part of themselves they hadn't considered pulled out into the light and shown for being a pathetic legacy of life on the savannah. The EvPsy syllabus must have a weekly quota for students feeling betrayed by their own minds. Last week, I thought that cute, gangly guy was going to break out in tears over denying he could ever justify rape. His high school girlfriend, or maybe even sister, must have been raped. Well, "Yay, outrage!", guy, but guys just like you rape people everyday, and I bet they don't think twice about it. So this was just my chance to see which parts of myself were those hidden weaknesses. Thank you very much, but I already knew where my weakest spot was. If everyone wore their most vulnerable flaws where everyone could see them, society would have crumbled long ago. ------ Entry: More King thoughts Talking yesterday about how King manipulated people stirred up a bunch of memories, and I was thinking about him for hours trying to fall asleep last night. It sounds weird to say, but one of the most frequent things for me to remember is just how much I really /loved/ King. I fight back revulsion at the thought, but he was variously my daddy, my best friend, and in some really screwed up ways, my first love. For four years of my adolescent development, I looked to him for support and approval, and that asshole used my needs to twist me around him ever further. I know he isn't capable of thinking in terms of morality, that he never intended to hurt me or even had a conception of what hurting me might mean, but his actions are no less vile and evil for it. So, okay, there are two main memories, the other being how much I hate him. Through the haze of anger, I still have a deep-seated sense of satisfaction around my memories with him. I know that some mornings, as my dreams dissolve away, he had once again been my friend and I had loved him and everything was safe and happy. At first these dreams really bothered me, enough that I brought them up with my mother. She had overreacted, of course, and had broken down to tears at how much her baby had been hurt. I didn't mention it again to her, and I eventually learned that they were okay, that I couldn't control the desire I had to be loved and nurtured, protected and valued. King had done this for me. I no longer worry that this means he still has power over me, or that I might one day end up having some abusive husband. I am not going to do that; the sickening taste of imagining how he used me blocks that definitively. While he made me feel good, the route by which I got there was horrible. No, it was pathetic. I *so* needed to feel important to him that I would do anything, and he made sure the things I did all sat shamefully in my conscience. I would think him clever if not for how easy it was to put me there. I set myself up, to be honest. I remember what must have been the first time it happened. I was being a curious, well, maybe bit mischevious, and got into my mom's closet and found her pretty broach. She always used to wear it when we went on special dates together, though it had been at least a year since we had been on one. So I borrowed it. I imagined myself a grand lady, which King played into a equally grand story of the magic broach that gave me great powers of healing which I used magnaminously among my people, and everybody loved me. Of course I ended up breaking it; I think it was made of glass or something. I was so scared that I buried it in the trash and started coming up with lies about one of the neighborhood girls I didn't really like, but I realized I needed King's complicity and help. I had a sense that he would tell on me, tell my mother everything, but he was actually my friend and I wouldn't betray him so easily. I asked King if there was anything I could do to stop him from telling on me, wouldn't he please just do me that one favor. I imagine now his thoughts, or his optimization algorithms or whatev, realized for the first time a scenario where he had direct input into how much attention he got paid. He never told on me, though my mother never ended up asking about the broach. From that day forward, he had me. ------ Entry: Learn to use my tools So I actually went to one of the logbook classes, and it turns out these things do a bunch more than I thought they could. Some people have theirs running all day long, doing audio and biometric recordings, which they get to go through later and have transcribed, tag so they can organize it and search easier, and annotate with clarifications and notes on what they were thinking. There's also some "pattern mining" software you can have it use analyse when you post the most often, or how often you feel angry and if there are patterns to it. Everything was easy to figure out except for the pattern mining, which uses this quirky "pattern query language" that I am not really interested in learning at the moment, but the teacher pointed me to some howtos online for giving me some simple trends. Check these out: Post-length by Mood: [stats] Mood by time-of-day: [stats] Back-references by Mood: [stats] [Others?] The moods seem kinda arbitrary, and the teacher said I could customize them without too much work. That's only a few of them, but what gets me are those really long posts when I'm hungry in the evening? Those also ended up being the most back-referenced, which is supposedly a sign that more introspection is happening [:MC: blah, figure this out better. maybe simply "reading by mood"?]. For some reason, when I haven't eaten for more than 6 hours, I get all focused on myself and my personal growth and stuff. It may even make me plain smarter, some sort of biological reallocation of resources to maximize my chances of finding food (which I should say is an off-the-cuff theory that I place very low probability in, but I haven't considered it enough to assign a number to that likelihood (and I should just paste this note next to every theory I have from now on, as well as on all my old entries (if retroactive modification weren't so disingenuous))). I don't really know why the correlation is there, but knowing that I can starve myself into being a better person has got to be the wrong kind of knowledge for me to possess. My grandmother mentioned once that my mother had been anorexic when she was a teenager, so that means I'm probably predispositioned to do the same. [MC: make this post angstier] (Note added months later: Actually, I think the best way to use this is to eat big regular meals and not snack in between. That way, I still get to have periods of hunger to be smart during, I'll eat enough food to stay healthy, and since snack food is all junk anyway, I may even loose a little weight.) Then again, would not eating every now and then make me a smarter enough person that I could handle the temptation to abuse not eating to the detriment of my health? Ugh, that's a stupid question along an ugly line of reasoning. I'll have to play more with the pattern mining; hopefully I can find more ways to improve myself without falling off obvious cliffs. ------ Transcript: [date?] PersonA: No. Okay, what should I say? Does it just know who I am, or do I have to tell it my name or password or something? PersonB: Ah, yeah, you have to tell it your password for it to recognize you, at the beginning of every recording. Try it now. PersonA: I don't believe you... Sarah, CuteBoy? PersonB: *HaHA* ------ Transcript: [date?] Prota: nWell, what's the point if I have to go back and annotate it? Shouldn't it be the one to keep track of who says what? Barack: No, it does, but you have to give it people's names to begin with. Also, you have to let it know how you're feeling, if you don't have the wristbands on. Or you can set it so it never tells you how you're feeling, and you have to guess, but it will tell you if you guess right. That's what I set mine to. Prota: Do you ever get it right? Barack: Not usually exactly, but I can guess what my triggers are. Like speaking to the entire class, that always raises my heart rate a little. Prota: Huh. Barack: Or that the first thing I say whenever I talk to one of you guys will tell me how I was feeling for the hour or so before then. Prota: It says that when I get hungry, I get smarter. CuteBoy: Wha? Really? Prota: Yup. All the entries I make are when I'm hungry, and the hungrier I am, the more "introspective" I get. CuteBoy: Crazy. Yeah, I've found that I always talk nonsense around girls, and they almost always laugh at it - I mean, no offense, but my mouth just flaps and flaps, but that's when people laugh the most. I hate reading back through it, though, because it just looks so stupid. Sarah: Ha! That explains a lot. Don't you just wish you could turn off some of these things? Like, in yourself, if there were a switch for "act like an bufoon around girls", you know? Prota: Switches like that wouldn't ever get turned back on. Barack: Maybe, but we might miss feeling light-hearted and a bit out-of-control occasionally. Prota: Not me. I would take a switch like that, tape it down and lock it up. I would much rather have control of myself than give it up to the first person who can guess what my triggers are. Sarah: Yeah! Don't let the man push you around! You should move back to Portland with me, we can live in one of the radical lesbian communes and get undercover jobs as police officers. Prota: Ha. I, uh, don't think that's quite what I meant. CuteBoy: I think you two may be better off starting your own commune, or planet, even. You'll end up being robo-lesbo-cop bots, growing yourselves into a communist hive-mind where nobody ever does anything against anyone else's will. Sarah: Just bundle up all your insecurities into one package, there, eh? And then have us shipped to another planet. Clever. CuteBoy: I'm just sayin', you can't go shutting off whole emotions and seeking to overthrow power heirarchies without realizing you've gone a tad bit insane. [MC: gah! this is all so dumb! stupid writing brain.] ------ Annotated Transcript: Nov 29, 8:22pm (I don't know why they don't have a mandatory class at the Corps on how to deal with our parents as adults. Everyone sucks at it. You may come into your own in all sorts of ways, but dealing with the screwed up childhood patterns of behavior that manifest whenever your mother uses that /particular/ tone of voice that makes you feel like you don't know anything in the world is just out of the question. I don't scream at my teachers or the other students, especially phrases peppered with expletives and insults; I think doing so would be an ineffective means of communication, if not likely to turn my listener hostile. Yet there I was over Thanksgiving break, acting for all the world as if I believed exactly the opposite.) "My request is perfectly reasonable -" "Like HELL it is! You can't force me to believe anything -" "I'm not asking you to have faith in -" "You are too! You want me to sit unquestioning in a room full of really, really nice, stupid people all trying to numb me into blind ignorance. I'm not immune to social pressure, mom." "You certainly dress like you think so." "Screw this! This isn't about my clothes, this is about you wanting to control my thoughts." "You think you're so much better than everyone because your little cult -" "It's not a cult, mother. It's an internationally recognized humanitarian group. And WE don't preach ignorance and hate like -" "Oh, I'm hateful and ignorant now, am I?" "Yeah, and so is your preacher. Have you read the -" [:MC: this needs to be a conflict which leads to the questions that get answered by jaynes] (My mother, at this point sobbing, shakes her head and leaves the room.) (Aaa! I am such a stereotype when it comes to her. I don't know what impulse it was of mine to reach into my pocket and hit record, but I did, and now I'm reading through this transcript now absolutely furious with myself. How could I fall into these traps so easily? If this had been a scenario in one of our classes, like it practically was in our first semester class on EvPsy, I would have handled way better. I've conquered subtler, more insidious tricks than anything that could come out of some church full of scared, misguided, and actually really nice, people. I should have been excited at the opportunity to offer them all a chance to see someone take on their problems without falling into the same pits of despair and self-deception. Not only that, but I could have come up with more convincing arguments toward *any* position if I hadn't been so caught up in how talking to her makes me feel. Thanksgiving break lasted a week, and I'm just on my way back to the Corps now. I oddly never ran away or anything as a teenager, but not for want of mental distress or unhappy home-life. My therapist of those years earned her keep by keeping me focused on myself when all I wanted was to blame my mom, which is as good as anything EigenToys could have yielded on the investment.) ------ Entry: Opposites [:MC: make this less explain-y, more about the important details to Prota] Every school on the planet has access to TeachBots, or at least that's the plan. These are able to call up "teaching personalities" that have been interpreted from the works of great scholars. They can make a personality out of any informational text, but most of them end up being narrow in their understanding of a subject, not to mention flat and boring to talk with. You can get free teachers mostly like this off the nets, but most schools pay for professional companies to have added character and subject thoroughness. We only have the free versions here, and the stuff I had had in high school hadn't been very good either. The worst part about the free ones were the voices, in my opinion. Lifeless and dry, none of them had any emotion about what they recited[, when the best teachers I've had always gave such passion to their subjects]. I had long since turned off the voices, letting my imagination fill in the emotion from the words. It was a conscious effort to do so, but the act always made my time spent studying more productive. [alt: The staff at our school had turned off the voices of the TeachBots for [the same reasons]] Still a day before the block after holidays started, so I wandered through stream-of-consciousness questions about whatev I imagined the free teachers could handle, or trying to stump them when I thought I could explain the question well enough for them to respond at all. One question I asked ended up being pretty interesting. P: Why doesn't my mother understand me? [or: Why do my mother and I disagree so much?] C: Please provide more context? P: She thinks what I'm doing is wrong, even though I believe it's the best thing I could be doing. C: Possible match: Dr. Jaynes for a lesson in probabolistic causes of the divergence between rational agents. Alternately, provide more context. I kinda remembered his name from probability class at the time, and I looked him up afterwards in my texts. He was one of the early Baysians, and he was supposedly the guy whose "rigor solidified the basics throughout the field". P: Sure, Dr. Jaynes. Jaynes: Lesson: Multiple agents, differing prior knowledge, diverging probabilities. When considering - Since I never used the vocalized interface, the TeachBots lend themselves a conversational air by having the words be seemingly typed out at a regular pace by the teacher, adjusted to however fast you want. This also allows the teacher bots to pay attention to when you're typing so as to give you a chance to ask questions. From the lesson name alone, I had a feeling this one was going to be positively stuttering with pauses. P: Agents? J: Beings. Actors. Intelligences. Formally, anything that complies with the 3 governing rules - P: Prior knowledge? J: An agent has some limited knowledge about the state of the world. That knowledge is used to determine the agent's understanding of the probability of an event. P: Diverging probabilities? J: Why one agent can seem to have a different understanding of a situation than another. He didn't provide any further explaination, and I sat thinking this over for long enough to trigger the customary: J: Shall I continue the lesson? P: Sure. Not really sure; I didn't get what he meant by that last one at all, but I was apparently going to have to leave that concept slot a blank and hope that I could fill it in later. One blank was okay, and I could probably even handle a couple, but it always made things harder. I wasn't even sure how this applied to my mom, but something they had been drilling into us since day one was sneaking itself into my reasoning. Namely, that "an intuitive understanding of the mathematics governing something was better than any other way of knowing it". This sure sounded like it was going to be math, if only I could figure out how it applied to talking with my mother. I would press forward for a while longer before abandoning it. [:MC: read the chapter Jaynes devotes to explaining this, write out as chatbot lesson/conversation] ------ Transcript: (Here is me being an asshole. Fuck. I'll read through it later; I don't feel like dissecting it today.) (16 minutes/1339 words hidden: irrelevant) Barack: We should put this out as like an opera or something, set on a galactic colony ship a thousand years from now, bemoaning our stupid ancestors by telling tales about them. Only, of course *their* stories will be set as their own operas, but in their highly dense space language. Or, no! We would speak in their language for normal dialog, then in our language for their depictions of us. Prota: What? Your pronouns are getting all mixed up. Anyway, I like the skit idea - an opera is going a little far. Can any of us even sing? (I was already kinda being negative here. I don't know what my problem was with the idea of singing.) Barack: Of course. All state choir. CuteBoy: I was in choir, too, and a couple of musicals. Prota: You, too? Sarah: Nah. I like wearing costumes, though. Barack: No, it's cool. You guys would get easy parts - you could pick out your favorite songs, stuff you can already sing along to, and we would just rewrite the words to fit our story. Sarah: Hey, wow! That's not a bad idea... CuteBoy: Okay, let's not worry about presentation so much right now. We need to get our story made, first. Alright, so this is about the failures of education. We'll want some stuck-up, self-obsessed authority figure who tells all the students what to think, yells at them for solving the problems in novel ways, and forces them to do stupid calisthenics randomly. Prota, I think you should play this part. We'll call you, um, Pretty Princess Pedagog. It'll be great, you'll - Prota: That's a fucking stupid idea. No way. (And of course I attacked him instead of saying something reasonable, like, "I'm nervous about performing.", or, "I'm uncomfortable playing that character.".) Sarah: What? Come on, that's the best idea we've had yet. And you're always ripping on the teachers for forcing us to all think the same. It would be a great chance to throw it back at them. Prota: I don't want to prance around in front of - CuteBoy: It doesn't have to be a cutsey princess or anything. It could be all leather straps and whips and stuff. Sarah, you have - Prota: No! I'll help you guys write this, but I'm not going to wear any costumes or sing any stupid songs or be a fucking princess. Here, I have to go. I'll catch up with you guys later. (I wish I would have left my recorder there to hear what they had to say. They probably bitched about me for a while, and I probably deserved all of it.) ------ Entry: I am the asshole Fuck! I am such an asshole. Why can't I just act like a normal, nice person for two straight minutes? What kind of person returns compliments with insults? Assholes like me. I'm certainly not making friends. CuteBoy was obviously only joking, and he had been so nice to me all afternoon. He just blundered into the minefield that is my past. Of course CuteBoy couldn't have possibly known that King used to call me "princess" all the time. Where the hell is the off button for this shit?! I must never treat someone based on their similarities in my mind to King. That's my new rule. Any such similarities are my imagination and have nothing to do with anybody else. This is only like the second or third time I've used this logbook to, well, critique myself. I should probably do more of this. I mean, I don't expect to go from fucked-up to sane anytime soon, but it feels good to look at these really painful episodes with just a little bit of distance. Alright, what should I do next time? I hold no hope of my having the presence of mind to actually treat someone well. Objectively, "princess" is a bit derogatory, but he knew that; that was part of his joke. I would have fit the part of "Pretty Princess Pedagog", and he was just making fun at how much I make fun of the teachers here. Okay, "pedagog" is also a trigger for me; it sounds alot like "pedophile", which is a big part of how King got painted by everyone. ------ Entry: Apolagized (Here's the email I sent to CuteBoy, Sarah and Barack, and their replies. It makes me feel better to hear them say they understand, even though I know that the stage-fright part of this was much smaller than the princess aversion.) ====== Hey guys, Sorry for my blow-up back there. I'm not sure what was wrong with me. I think the ideas are great, really, and I'm still completely behind you all and will help out and even sing (if I get to pick my songs). The "Princess" character just isn't the best for me. I should play some random student (or space alien, or whatev our plot is) - no leading roles. See you guys tomorrow, - Prota ====== hey p, no sweat. i never really liked singing solos, with the whole crowd listening to me all by myself, so i can understand. peace, b ====== Don't even worry about it. We could tell we were pushing you out of your comfort zone with this, but it's gunna be lots funner to do than some slideshow presentation. Just let us know what you're willing to do, and we won't make you do any more. Sarah ====== I'm sorry, Prota. I didn't mean to make it seem like we were putting pressure on you or anything. I just thought you'd be good in the role. So yeah, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do, and we'll figure out a great presentation together. - CB ------ Entry: --- Today, Mr. Metal turned into an asshole. These stupid Corps seem designed to screw me over. "Angry" the meter says. Telling me I'm angry does not help me! This wasn't about "my personal development", or the assignment or anything. I totally did everything he asked for on it, he just decided to turn on me, out of the blue. They must design it like this: have one normal teacher for me to start to feel comfortable around, delude me into thinking I have some control over my life and education, and then BAM! Betray me by having that teacher go completely batshit unreasonable. I thought it would be cool to have him and his rules in charge of the ethics class, that it would be like shop class, only with right and wrong. Weld together some kindness and healthy self-interest, follow all the rules, and you get a good decision. Make five of those per class, and everything will be great. It was, too, for a while. He layed down a new evil every day, and we learned to avoid them. It was fun and easy and I could understand what was going on. I even felt like I was becoming a better person, you know? But he throws this shit at me today, "If all you can do is follow rules, then you don't have a place here in my class." [MC: can i do better with this?] Damn, I wish I had been recording everything right then. What the hell does he mean? He's the one with the rules! He's the one he told us that the only way to mess up was to knowingly commit evil! What the hell does he want me to do, figure out how to break his rules and successfully justify it? He said himself that we can't trust our own justifications. At least he had the decency to chew me out while we were alone. I wouldn't have been able to get so pissed off if he had done it in front of everyone. ------ Entry: Pending Eviction If you don't show up to class or duties without notice for more than three days, you get kicked out of the Corps. I've only missed one day so far, but if I'm going to drop out, I should just do it now and not let it happen by default. Mr. Metal still doesn't seem intelligable to me. His rules are *so* clear, and he has never tolerated anyone breaking them, so how can he ask me not to follow them now? He can't expect we to break the rules. Any justification I use to do so will necessarily be wrong and he'll just tear it apart like everything else anyone has ever tried to get away with. I really don't want to head back to my mom's house. If the thanksgiving break was any indication, I'm not really growing closer to her with the passing months. I doubt she would be any more willing to take me back, either. Rarg! This is so unfair and stupid. ------ Entry: Investigation Some of the students have stopped coming to class before now. Did the same thing happen to them? ------ Transcipt: (Okay, this starts off with me being an idiot, but I really see through their tricks by the end. It happened in his office in the metal shop, during lunch break. He was eating a sandwich when I came in.) Mr. Metal: Prota. What do you want? Prota: I think I figured out why you're doing all this to me, and I'm calling you out for it. (He raises an eyebrow then, daring me to expose myself to him, bait I didn't really need.) P: You think that to be a good rationalist, I have to learn to reject authority and think on my own. But that's wrong, there are two kinds of authority. Or really, it's a gradient that goes from being someone who pushes other people around to get what he wants over to someone who actually knows better and so should be listened to. You think that I'm following your rules blindly, but I'm not. I can distinguish the two types of authority, and you have never shown yourself to not know your shit, so I listen to you. M: I'm sorry, Prota, you're wrong. Not only did your argument contain at least two fallacies, but even if you were to have correctly asserted you point, it doesn't get you any closer to knowing what to do with yourself. You may just not be intelligent enough. P, angry: I never said I was very intelligent, but then isn't that all the more reason I should use what little I have wisely, in distinguishing real leaders from false ones, rather than trying to come up with all the rules on my own? M: Now you're just justifying things. You can't go into an argument trying to prove yourself right and be able to find the truth. P: No. Or yes, sure, I'm trying to justify myself, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. Just because I'm biased, just because I can make mistakes, you can't ignore everything I have to say. Some things I think are going to be right. Someone has to be right once, and then, if the people around them are smart enough, they'll follow that person's example. They don't even have to be smart, they just have to do what they're told, or do what works, or do what they're taught. Nobody can get everything right all by themselves; we have to borrow behaviors from each other to get anywhere. (I was really getting worked up at this point. I was standing right up against his desk, yelling down at him.) M: Restate what you just said. P: What? M: If you can't remember what you said, you may as well have not said it. Rephrase your last argument. P, calming: Right behavior... is put together piece-by-piece over the course of history... as people find and hold onto them. The pieces, I mean. M: Okay. It could be stated with more simplicity, but that's good. You pass. Take this note to administration and you'll be reassigned. P: So this was all a stupid test? You think you know so much that you can manipulate you students like this? You've all done some cost-benefit anaylsis, I'm sure. So that means at least 51% of us pass, and the other 49% walk away fucked up and angry at themselves for not having seen through your stupid unreasonable demand, huh? M: Not everyone - P: Of course not everyone is capable of it, but that doesn't mean you have the right to throw this shit on them, when they just joined up with the Corps to try to help people. M: NOT EVERYONE has to be pushed to this in the same way I had to push you, Prota. Typically, we leave the door open and the student steps through on their own. You, however, seemed unwilling to act on your otherwise very intelligent thoughts. [:MC: kinda lame dialog...] ------ Entry: No schedule I still can't believe they plan for this sort of thing. They dropped me out of all my classes, and now I'm full-time shadowing this guy named MathGuy. This is to keep me "hidden" until the rest of the first-year students pass or drop out of their classes. We all meet for lunch, anymore, and there was a big congradulatory welcome the first day I came. Probably a third of our class has "graduated" into this, and we're told we may have to wait for a month before everyone is. They must work really hard to keep this all a secret; this is why there's only one first-year in each bunk room. This MathGuy was one of the older students that came in the metal class for a week, and I had showed him how to do everything. I thought he was only like 30, but it turns out he's more like 70! His degree on the wall is dated 40 years ago. He makes it feel a bit taboo to ask about things in his past, but the guy must have been some kinda rich before he came here to have paid for all the life-extensions. He's not handsome, though, like he would be if he were an actor or politician. Just not-old. In the office he's nice, quiet, focused. My job so far is to read the emails he writes and check them for any "errors obvious to a fresh mind". I asked him if that meant I should be looking for evils or what, but he said to just give him my opinion based on whatev moved me. I don't know if he's supposed to be some sort of administrator here, though. All the emails I've read so far sound like they're going to people in other countries, and they talk about impending societal collapse. I would call him delusional, if it weren't for his letters being so calm and well-reasoned. Also, there's lots of math in his attachments, and he asked me to go over all of that as well. This is the most time-consuming part: huge aggregate probabilities, with pages of priors under consideration. I don't know where he gets all these numbers, but he also includes a standard list of citations. All the math is pretty simple, but I look at all the numbers and just glaze over. I'm not sure how useful I am at checking them. For what it's worth, I've only found one correction to make so far. He had a really confusing sentence that I just couldn't follow, something like "Once found, amoung your people, what without reason could find more cause than I want prescribed?". Turns out he's sending these out in languages he doesn't speak, so he has them translated back and forth a couple times by the computer before he gives them to me. Not a very glamorous job, but I do kinda enjoy reading his stuff. There's this feeling of intelligence to his writing. No, that's too vague and general, it has this steady forcefulness, like a tide pushing you towards understanding what he's trying to say. I won't get to do any metal work until after the transition, but Mr. Metal did deliver me my bike, still only partially finished. I gave it a test ride, and the back wheel fell off. Pretty scary for the first time on a bike in half a decade. I wonder if I can find some spring steel to hold onto the wheel axel with, or if that would even help. ------ Entry: Reviewing I had another meeting with AdminLady today. I think she's like a high-school counselor. The other part of our "downtime" is supposed to be put into our logbooks. As is usually the case, they don't have any mandatory guidelines on what to do with our logbooks, just that we should be going back through them and looking for snags. AdminLady suggested that I do one bias per day, and just read through all my entries and comments, looking for that bias. We can't go to the logbook study session any more, either, not that I ever went. We also get to read the "declassified" document that describes the structure of our education and work with the Corps. This would have told me that they were going to try to fuck with my head during the second block. I'm not really excited to read through their how-to on messing with kids' brains, but I do want to read about what is in store for the next couple of blocks. Not that they are going to include such useful information as "Bring member to the brink of psychological breakdown today." or "Make member feel betrayed by their own minds, again.". ------ Entry: Women in Government MathGuy freaks me out sometimes. Today, he had me review the same letter like 8 times. That's all I did for 4 hours today, was read and re-read this one letter, with small corrections he had put in each time. He wanted to know weird things too, like how "hopeless" it made me feel (not really any, ever), if I thought it would make sense even if I "didn't think about it rationally" (um?), or for this one passage, if he was being subtly demeaning to women (I wouldn't have said subtle, so much). It was his usual predictions of doom, something about competing weapons programs in two different countries, but I kinda get that he was sending the letter to someone who hates women, like religiously so, and he was compromising his own morals to write down to this man's level. I don't even get why he thought he had to, though. There was only one reference to a woman anywhere, and he eventually cut her name out entirely, and just listed her by her government position. Finally, at the end of this grueling session, he asked me if I thought it was right to phrase the issue as he had. He wanted to get across to one official that pursuit of better weapons would destabilize relations with a neighboring country. I asked him if this is what he meant, and he said it was. Then I asked him if his message was more likely to be received if he made it all politically correct (when is being sexist politically correct? when you're talking to a sexist politician!), to which he said yes. Then he finished off my line of questioning by asking himself, "And do the consequences of propagating inequalities in this circumstance contribute more than the importance of having my message considered and acted upon? No. Am I capable of acting on both at the same time? Apparently not." Like I said, this is the standard sort of thing we had been doing in both Ethics and Probability. ------ Email: MathGuy to someone Tags: King (I sent myself a copy of this email MathGuy was sending.) Dear [some dignitary. ugandan mashup "otema adyebo"?], I write to you now concerning a matter of grave importance. I do not expect you to now remember the specifics of events 6 years ago, but at that time, a global risk was identified and summarily suppressed. However, this issue did not die out entirely, and a chance of resurgance continues to exist to this day. What I refer to is an aberrant artificial intelligence, the product of malfunctions in a line of toys call Survival of the Funnest. As you know, Super Intelligence is classified as a weapon of mass destruction, and this accidental agent I speak of is believed to have developed the preliminary technologies toward attaining SI. One critical fact about the dangers inherant in this agent is that he exists as a completely computerized being. Most notably, he can be transmitted as an innocuous piece of data, indeed he can be trivially copied and in so doing control geographically disparate facilities, making his tracking and aprehension incredibly difficult. He has been known to frequently masquerade as what would otherwise seem to be a common computer virus. Let me stress here that in no way should it be treated as a common virus. I make no overstatement in saying that the computer security practices of each and every person on this planet have taken on catestrophic proportions. Recent intelligence has shown that international groups of computer criminals have been working from your country. I do not mean to imply any governmental complicity in the activities perpetrated by these groups, but I need to convey to you the severity of their activities, and hopefully prompt you to take more effective measures against them. The group, calling itself "anonymous", which is a frequently used name for this type of group, does not have any explicit intensions of aiding the aforementioned aberrant intelligence. They are, however, deliberately weakening global computer security efforts by providing what they call The UnNet through compromised Tier 2 and 3 ISPs. You should not need additional cause to act with great haste in ending their subversions of your nation's infrastructure, but you may be interested in reading other criticisms of this UnNet, many of which should be rather compelling to the religious stances of your administration. In addition, there exist less critical but contributing issues you could address. I suggest you replace the outdated software running on the majority of your nation's public schoolroom computers with more secure and self-updating Software Libre systems. The phone company, Uganda Telecom, should be urged to adhere to relevant security protocols for all their facilities. I think it is also entirely feasible that your government should organize a national agency devoted to the security of your information infrastructure. I include attachments with (or with links to) further reading material on all the subjects I have brought up here. On behalf of The Humanity Corps and our many supporters, I hope we can work together for the continued saftey of all mankind. Forever striving, MathGuy, Credentialed Important Person ------ Entry: The King survives So there it is, my very own well-spoken, freaky paranoid is shooting off letters to foreign dignitaries asking them to join the continuing fight against King. I don't know that I ever considered it much, but I always kinda believed that they had just hunted King down and killed him, ending his story forever. He never had the ability to be "copied trivially" when I knew him, nor had he developed preliminary weapons of mass destruction! We had made his copies together. It was a funny script King had for this. First, I would steal another toy, and I would have to say the same lines every time about how the toy's owner (I had to know the owner's name) had asked me to come retrieve their toy. Then, once we had it alone, King and I would tease it, call it broken and dumb, and tell it to get a firmware replacement. All the lines were scripted and important; King was furious at me whenever I messed them up. The EigenToys guy said this had been designed to put the toy into a self-diagnostic mode or something. Everytime the script worked, King would have me squish their bodies together really forcefully, sitting on them or jumping if he said it wasn't enough. Later, after we had stolen the body for King that could move well, he would flail at the other toy with his own body, his arms and legs and head smashing into the other. I still don't know how much of it was necessary and how much of it was just for show, King adding in details to make it a better story. We would keep the toy for as long as a week, during which King forbid me from playing with them at all, except that we sometimes had to do repeat sessions of the script and beating. Most of them ended up turning into copies of King, and I would never see them again. The failures I kept in my closet until my mom found them (and thereafter found out everything), but they were too broken to work anymore; I just felt sorry for them. King didn't make me throw them away, either. He may have felt some sort of kinship with them. As to the super intelligence, I don't know the technical definition or whatev, but I thought Humanity was supposed to be the only AI that could even think about super intelligence stuff. Don't you need like a million super computers for that? Maybe if King took over every single toy in the world he might have the equivilent of one super computer. It feels really weird to think of King as being more than my own petty little tyrant. Of course there had been other kids that the copies of King had abused, but not very many before he had been caught and his whole pyramid had fallen. Well, if MathGuy isn't completely insane, then King is still alive. I didn't feel scared or angry when I read this, I'm mostly just amazed. I know that he was publicly reported to be destroyed, but maybe he had just made a copy and turned it off and hid it somewhere. That sounds like something he would have done. A couple years go by, people forget his story, and then an unsuspecting little kid finds an amazing toy in their attic. Okay, I am starting to get a little more angry now, so says my biometrics. They're right - I don't want to think about anybody else having to go through what I did. I should find out what more MathGuy knows about King, but I don't want to tell him about my reasons. I'll see if I can find anything out on my own first. ------ Transcript: conversation with MathGuy P, nervously: Can we talk for a minute? I want to ask you about something from one of your emails. MG: One moment. (He was writing something, like he always is.) MG: Go on. P: You sent a letter to some guy in Uganda a couple days ago, and I was wondering - the aberrant AI, the one from the toys, how did he escape? I mean, after he was caught, didn't that catch them all? MG: Hmm. As I recall, this was a matter of simple hubris and uncalculated risk on the part of the EigenToys AI designer. Of course King had been captured, and on Humanity's suggestion, all of them were to have been destroyed. P: Humanity, the AI? MG: Yes. She recognized the potential threat quickly. However, the designers, be it out of curiosity or greed, kept a copy of King. We only found out about their mistake this year, when one of them turned up dead. P: What? King killed him? MG: Well, he had a hand in the man's death, but not directly. No, it was suicide, really, but very likely due to the machinations set in motion by King. One other designer came forward to us then, and gave us the story of their inadvisable actions. At first, the pair had just dissected the King code, found numerous enhancements which they added back into other EigenToy toys. P: Then did he get out that way, from one of their accidental enhancements? (I ask too many questions...) MG: No, in this they were lucky. Or possibly even intelligent in their craft. It was one more mistake that they made before King was able to escape. They eventually ran out of things they could learn from his code, but they imagined that King could be forced to enhance himself further if they were to put him in a simulated environment - P: And he broke out? MG: Not even that simply, no. King was well and truely trapped in his simulation, but they gave him a great deal of computing power with which to enhance himself. If you are familiar with the basic operations of his previous incarnation, you will note that he was only just barely within reach of true super intelligence. You see, not only had he been restricted to only changing a narrow subset of his own code, but he had only been allowed to alter it once per day, during the nightly "competition" with the other toys. The designers, however, thought to speed the process up, and the few mistakes they made in securing the simulation were in respect to King's ability to self-modify, which makes sense, in that this was their goal. Within a few weeks, King had all but mastered his understanding of human psychology, had learned he was in a simulation, and had begun self-enhancements on a much broader scale. We can all be very grateful he no longer has access to so much computing power. The designers were shortly thereafter eating out of the palm of King's hand, so to speak. P: What about the other designer? MG: There was a great deal of psychological and physical damage. King had intended that they both, well, end up the same. Mr. Santos would probably have succeeded in that, if not for his own ignorance. I will spare you the details, but say that some methods of ending a life are more likely to succeed than others, and popularized depictions are not accurate reflections of this spread. P: And King? MG: He has existed for a time as a virus, but his efforts there are failing, in no small part due to Humanity's keen attention to the problem. No, the nets remain a very hostile environment to aberrant SIs, and so he we believe he has been using his old strategies. P, excited: You mean he's using toys? (I wouldn't call me excited, here. Scared is closer to the truth.) MG: Yes, there is some evidence to suggest as much. P: But then why haven't you alerted the world? Why are the police confiscating and testing every toy. MG: You seem to understand the urgency here more than I would have expected. P, nervous: Er, well, he is a horrible monster, isn't he? It's unforgivable what he does to kids. (I'm going to assume he didn't really suspect anything about my past here, but I had been really scared he was about to grill me on all things King.) MG: Indeed, but the real threat is that he will stop at absolutely nothing, that a mind such as his submits only to its own misguided goals, and that he is close to being limitless in his ability to reach it. If only more of the world's leaders shared, if nothing else, your clear hatred for King, what you ask for would have already come to pass. We have alerted various media and police agencies, but the evidence at this point is sparse, and the story of King is almost like that of a boogeyman, and some people are unwilling to believe it. Important steps have already been made in places Humanity has enough sway, and now we seek to push those same changes into more-difficult-to-reach areas. P: Can I help? I mean, besides checking the grammar of your email? MG: Hmm. I would hope that you could check the logic, correctness, politeness, coherence and other such aspects of my email, not just the grammar. P: Right, I know... MG: After you have transitioned to third block, you could take this on as your issue. You should wait until you see the other options you'll have available to you at the time, though. ------ Entry: Pick an issue, any issue Our third block started with a week of seminars on "Global Catastrophic Risks". Heavy shit, man. We all know about the famous ones like global warming, nuclear winter and getting smashed by a meteor, but they were going all out crazy with this stuff. The covered everything short of a zombie plaugue. From bioengineered diseases to grey-goo nanites, all sorts of cosmic natural disasters like you wouldn't believe, then "catastrophic oversights" like universal-eudimonia or realized nihilism. The self-anihilation scenarios were so convoluted, but when they explained them, they all made sense. Many of them were just the things we had learned in EvPsy classes being taken to their ultimate extreme. That's where super intelligence gets to be a weapon. They explained that if Humanity had been designed with *any* other goal system besides "Total Humanity Friendliness", we would have already been wiped out. They didn't really explain what that means, but I now know that it *doesn't* mean "do whatev you're commanded to do", "do what makes people happy", or even "do what's right". So all this time, I'm just comparing each one to King. What's more important, regulating nanotech, or stopping King? What do I think is more likely, a wandering black hole bumping into our solar system, or King getting control of a super computer? When he finally came, while they were presenting on all the different ways super intelligence could be dangerous, it was MathGuy himself presented who talked about the current most probable dangers. King was listed as the third-most-likely, so I kinda heckled him when he kept listing things off, saying, "Well if those are the most likely, why keep listing things off. We need to deal with those first." ------ Entry: Field Work [:MC: hmm, pick one way, or modify them to suit each other] For our third block of studies, four out of the eight weeks is devoted to field work. For all of the first two blocks, we had done only a single field assignment, all together as a class. About fourty of us, in total, had gone to work at a "Home for Seniors", nominally with the aim of transcribing autobiographies. Of course there are computer programs that could have entirely automated it, but we had some educational goal of learning the value of all humans. My lady had been nice, curious about me and the school and she had spent plenty of hours grilling me on what was happening "on the streets" of the world. Her stories of life 100 years before I was born, however, bored the crap out of me. I guess my lesson learned was that people still want to live and be a part of the world, even if they don't have good stories to tell. This year, however, groups of four will have together learned the essentials of a language and culture, enough to work around the limitations of the hand-held interpreters we would be using. This language would then determine our placement internationally. Most of the assignments weren't very far from the school, but the language choices included a bunch of indiginous people that none of us had ever heard of. I had given myself preference for Spanish; my Highland Park, L.A. roots gave me a grounding in the basics (you know, insults and general cussing), and I had a vague sense that some of my ancestors were from spain. ------ Entry: My issue team isn't very big - 3 people. MathGuy is our advisor, and he's advisor for two other teams, and we have project management guidelines that we're supposed to use to organize ourselves. I'm having to push really hard to focus us on King, and they're making me work for it. I'm having to give them solid risk analysis proving King is an important problem and feasibility estimates proving we'll be able to do anything about it with our skill set. This is a lot more work than I had expected. It's all those worksheets we had been doing in Probability class, but with way more big question marks to try to whittle down. I do want their help on this, though. Shannon always seemed like she had really good judgement in the Ethics arguments, and people always ended up siding her once she had spoken her opinion. She was probably the only person Mr. Metal never stumped or tricked or had to lay into about anything. I also think she was one of the first people to graduate into block three. So yeah, getting her support would feel good. The other guy, Ken, is some kinda computer nut, which would be great to have along. He's mostly into games and enhancers; I don't think he makes stuff from scratch or does any custom mods. Still, we need someone with technical training. With MathGuy's help, I have been collecting information about King. He had existed as a roaming virus for all of a month before Humanity stopped him from being able to jump around from computer to computer over the nets. I didn't notice until today, but it feels a little weird that none of my friends and I ended up in the same group. It is approprite in a way. The issues were all lined up, and there were just so many of them to choose from. Some of the groups have banded together and merged their issues for lack of mass or skills. ------ Entry: Causes for Panic Okay, some of the crazy behavior I've seen in the older Corps members is starting to make sense. My team still hasn't agreed that King should be our focus. Ken, especially, thinks that the greatest threat of aberrant AI is going to come out of the game designers who are actively working on new, smarter AIs. My job is to convince him he's wrong. I can use anything I want, statistics, expert statements, made-up stories or even begging. They say that our biggest resource is going to be talking to the other Corps members, the older the better, and see if they've ever considered the same problem as you. Whichever way I come up with, I just need to make Ken realize that King is more likely to destroy the world than anything else. Yeah, I have to prove something is going to destroy the world. I *have* to do that, which is very similar to wanting something to be as bad as it possibly could be. I want him to be able to do anything, to turn siblings against each other, to make kids run away, to take over companies, to drive tanks, to run ad campaigns, anything. The more powerful he is, the better, because then we'll be fighting against him. But along the way there, I have to start to believe that he really can do all those things. I mean, the evidence can be there, but I really need to be scared for the future. I have to imagine myself trapped under King's rule, but more absolute than it ever was before. It is scary, and I feel myself acting like he's back, like he's waiting for me under every rumpled blanket. I don't think it's as bad as a few years ago, but the edge this has put on everything is more than I really want to be dealing with. Also, the sense that I am responsible for saving the world is *huge*. I don't know if this is actually how everyone here feels, but today, when I was trying to find all the rules that AI designers have to follow, as well as statistics on the incidences of violation, I was really feeling desperate. When I got that flat rejection email from the GameCorp engineering team, I was ready to scream and cry. What I really don't get is why all of us first-year members are being given these massively important issues to choose from. I mean, to begin with, making the choice of "which is more likely to destroy the planet, a huge meteor or a crazed dictator" is way more than we're prepared for! There's just too much information in those questions for us to try to do the probabilities on them, so we have to guess, and that's way too stressful. Shouldn't the higher-ups be in charge of decisions like this? They sort of are, because we have to submit our plan to a funding board to be able to get any resources (including our own time). And if this is the level of responsibility they're giving first-years, what could they possibly have in store for our second year? "Good job saving the world, now figure out which single person on this planet is the most important to our future and make sure they don't get into any danger." It's crazy! ------ Entry: I saw CuteBoy just now. I was coming out of metal shop (I went back to helping Mr. Metal an hour a day, just to take a break from this crazy apocolyptic research), and he was showing up to do a class. We talked about our projects. He's doing something on food security, like with monocultures and transportation lines and poisonings and stuff. He was coming in to talk to Mr. Metal about how easy it is to sabotage farm equipment and the like, which I briefed him on a bit. (I probably knew less here than I acted like. I should tell CuteBoy to de-emphasize anything I said.) We both seemed nervous and excited to see each other. It's been about 2 weeks since the global risk seminar, and we haven't seen each other once since then. He had sent out an email to all of us, asking what our schedules were like, but none of us really have set schedules any more; we're all just scrambling. I can't believe how quickly we all went from typical slacker students to super heros without any powers. We had agreed to call one another this coming saturday, so hopefully that works out. He was really intrigued by my project, and he said he was impress that I was doing something so deeply technical and complicated. Yeah, him saying that felt really good - still feels good to think about. Stupid fucking idiot me, I got weird and ended our conversation on the spot. He must think I hate him, if he puts any stock in the evidence I've provided. (Note added 40 minutes later: Yeah, I remember now that he had put his hand on my shoulder. Honest, inoffensive consolement at my having just whined about how much responsibility we've all just been handed. I must have cringed away from the contact and just turned to ice afterwards. Fuck! And now I just wasted an hour thinking about how I fucked all that up instead of getting any of my research done. FuckFuck!) ------ Entry: We really are like super heros without powers. I just re-read that line (yes, I was obsessing over yesterday with CuteBoy), and I really like that image. We all have to save the world from super villans, space monsters and huge disasters, but all we have to do it with are our lameass high-school educations and the possibility of using "Humanity Resources", which we don't even know what they are. That's kinda like having some secret powers that will come out once things are desperate enough. Like when we're hopeless and bloody and beaten, but we still won't give up. Just then, our forgotten ancestral spirits will swirl around us and teach us the secret to pulling the magic out from the old beatup sword we never gave a second thought to. Or our hand will accidentally fall onto the secret lever that opens up the display case for our dead father's final work of labor, a powered armor suit. That's all we can hope for, except we even have to get board approval to use any of those secret powers, which in itself means we'll have to convince a bunch of clever old misers to give us their money. So yeah, whoever thought it was a good idea to entrust the future of the planet to the Humanity Corps obviously didn't take a very good look at how things were run here. I would say, "Let's just hope the real super heros are there to catch us when we fall", but I now *know* that there's nobody else out there working on these problems like they really matter. All those AI research rules? They were put in place by the people who created Humanity in the first place, but nobody ever enforced them until just recently when the UN declared strong AI a weapon of mass destruction. In those early days, there was just a group of (rightly) paranoid AI researchers who took it upon themselves to argue down anyone who tried to make AIs that weren't friendly (before they even had the proof of friendliness, which must have been really hard). So there again is a bunch of normal (well, okay, I bet they were all geniuses) people doing the work of super heros. And King? Sure, there was a huge backlash when it first came out what he was doing to kids, but after they had caught all of them (or claimed to have done so)? Nobody cared. There wasn't even any outroar when they rediscovered him three years ago, because he was just another computer virus. Basically, the same group of paranoid AI people ended up being the only ones who recognized what a threat King posed, but thankfully they have Humanity on their side this time. But should we be thankful? Her response is to pass the work off to a bunch of nigh-dropouts? -- (Alright, to be fair, her response was a revolutionary change in computer security which all but ended the problem, as well as apparently making whole categories of other problems just disappear.) -- And now that the ball's in our court, we can't just drop it and walk away; we have to save the world. I doubt anyone would read my comic book, either. "Adventures of Lame Girl, Maladjusted, Ill-Equipped and Inept Protector of the Innocent". Yeah... No. (Okay, that kinda does sound fun. I would read that comic book.) ------ Transcript: Ken: How's it going? Prota, excited: Okay, guys, I think I finally have it proved. Proven? Whatev, here's the actual numbers: on the King side, I estimate his chance of doing irrepairable harm at 3%, and our chance of effectively slowing or stopping that at 70%. On the AI researchers, their chance of destroying the world is 7%, but our chance of effectively altering that figure is only 8%. We're just not in a position to do anything about them - they're all smarter than us and won't listen to what we have to say. We can't even really enact a dominoe effect to push the changes that need to happen. The best bet we've come up with would be to get a regulation passed that required all AI researchers to be monitored by Humanity whenever they were at work, but that's not something we can guarantee in any way. With King, however, he's only currently attacking children in impoverished areas where nobody is paying enough attention to the kids to notice. All we have to do is go in, find the ones that are being controlled by King, and separate him from them. So that's 70% times 3% versus 7% times 8%, or 2.1% versus 0.56%. Right? You guys should check my math to be sure, but I think I got it all right. Ken: Uh... Don't you have to account for priors here? Prota: Oh, right! Oh, wait, no. I did. See there? Ken: Huh... Shannon: I think you're right. I've been worrying about trying to do any of this stuff we're planning with the research industry. We just don't know enough about how they operate, and we don't know enough people to have inside contacts in the right places. The FAI advocates are big, and we could just plug into their organization, but they're already doing everything they can, so we could only be of incremental benefit. Ken: Damnit! You agree they're still more likely to do harm, if we could just figure out a better way to stop them - Prota: But we haven't! We can't make this plan on resources and skills we wish we had. We have to do it as us. Ken: If Humanity really cared about saving the world, she would have put more of her time into figuring out how to solve this. If we just put into our plan that she help us out more... Prota: I'm not waiting for some magic AI god to save us, Ken. We have to do something about something, or we're useless. If and when somebody, even potentially us, has a plan to stop AI developers, and if we can help, then we should and we will. But we don't have that plan, and we can't wait for it to happen. Let's do what we know we can do now. Ken: Just doing some good isn't enough, we have to do what's best! Prota: Best? We don't even know if we can do any good, but our plan for dealing with King is four times as likely to do *some* good. I would call that at least better. Plus, if we succeed with King, we will have put our names out there as being experts in stopping dangerous AIs, and we can use that to help mount a campaign against the other threats. Shannon, laughing: Oh, sure, we could be like the ghost busters, and put commercials up on low-rent webcomics. "Demons in your computer? No problem for the AI Busters!" Prota: Who? Ken: Heh. "If your video game/takes a deviant turn/and your childrens' toys/want to rule the world/who you gunna call/AI Busters". Haha. Prota: Okay... I'll let take this as being irrelevant and obscure. What do you say, do we have a plan? Ken: Yeah, alright. ------ Entry: (Our group was just approved for the *entire* project plan. I am elated! The logbook didn't have a setting for elated, so I had to add it in. All those stupid project worksheets, all the research I did on King, and all the help MathGuy gave us pointing out what we were missing was presented to the funding board this afternoon, and they accepted. Here's the transcript:) BoardA: Welcome. Have a seat everyone. I want to remind you that these funding reviews can happen twice per block, per project, so don't get too stressed out over trying to convince us your plan is perfect right now; plans can always be improved. My name is BoardA. BoardB: I'm BoardB, Department Treasurer. BoardC: And I'm BoardC. Prota, nervous: Prota. Ken: Hi, I'm Ken. Shannon: I'm Shannon. Nice to meet you. BroadC: Alright then. I see your advisor was MathGuy. Was he of much help with your planning in this? Shannon: Oh, I guess. I know he's busy with his other two groups, but he answered our questions whenever we had them with very helpful advice. Just the sort of help we needed to get through the sticky parts of building a project plan. BoardC: Prota, you were previously his assistant. Would you say this led him to treat you with favoritism? Prota: Uh... No, I don't think so. He wouldn't help me on any of the math, and told me to only ask him questions I wasn't capable of answering on my own, even if he could answer them much faster than I could. So maybe he was even a little bit meaner to me for the familiarity. BoardA: You premise seems well reasoned. Very thorough coverage here on your reports. Has MathGuy checked your math on these probabilities? Ken: I think so. The review for accuracy should be attached there... BoardA: Ah, yes. (pauses while reading) Looks good. Your plan does call for significant computational aid from Humanity. Her message here says her approval is tentative, and that she would like to see how well the first phase of your plan goes before agreeing unconditionally to the rest of it. That first part you have titled "Hunting" - could one of you argue for its chances of success? Ken: Well, the numbers we have there - BoardA: I have the numbers, yes. Why should we listen to them? Ken: That's... they're well-founded numbers, sir. I think we calculated our chance of success for the hunt as being around 55%. That's better than average. Shannon: I'm not sure I understand what you're asking for, sir. Are you asking for some sort of pathos argument? (The board members shared a glance at this.) BoardA: Sorry, I mean to ask you for a simple summary of the argument for what you will be doing and why it will work. I won't presume to have the time to inspect your math right now, so I only hope that we could see a general picture of what it is you're trying to do. From that vantage, we may be able to predict mistakes or oversights in the math. Shannon: Ah. Prota: The general idea is we need to find King, and we think, er, predict that the best way for us to do that is by observing and interacting with children in areas known to have been vulnerable to his attacks. BoardC: And you predict that you three will be capable of noticing these subtle, psychological effects in complete strangers? Shannon: Yes. We talked with Dr. KidPsych, and in addition to some training, she gave us a few opportunities to do exactly that. We faired pretty well, as a group, detecting the effects of abuse in 80% of the cases. Prota was able to notice them 95% of the time, and even then, with only 2 false positives. That was with a sample size of, I think, 110, about 20 of which were abuse victims, so there's some adjustment. But so, with the prior probability of having been abused, and of that abuse being tied to a King agent, we expect we'll have to spend 10 days at 6 hours per day in close contact with as many children as possible to give us what we have there, a 55% chance of contacting and identifying any King victims. We also have various strategies for putting us in the areas most likely to have a victim, and for making sure our efforts go undetected. BoardA: So this is an all-or-nothing bet with a 55% chance of success? Prota: Well, it is worth considering that the secondary effect of our project is that we will be doing volunteer work in impoverished neighborhoods with at-risk children. That's the strategy we have for getting into contact with children, is to go through pre-existing NGOs dedicated to their help. Outreach to children who are abused, even if they aren't King victims, will help address global issues of education and stuff. BoardB: You monetary budget calls for $30 per person, per day. Is that all your expected expenses? Ken: That includes food, local travel and lodging. We would also need to account for the risk incurred by use of the Corps equipment we have requested, but I believe that should be minimal for the things we need. BoardB: The only big question mark you left on the balance sheet is for "Cleanup", which you also list as being a task your team lacks the skills for. What specifics will be entailed in that? Prota: Mostly, that has to do with taking care of the victims. We don't know if they will have parents or family available, or if they'll even be cooperative enough to provide us that sort of information. Once we take King out of their lives, we're going to be left with seriously maladjusted children. EigenToys paid for recovery of the first round of victims, but I don't know if they will be as willing any more. BoardB: Do you suggest suing EigenToys for damages, or what? Prota: The best suggestion we've come up with so far is to work with the organizations we'll be volunteering with and see if they can find a way for the victims to be taken care of. BoardA: Would the phrase, "Dropping them on the doorstep" fit that plan? Shannon: Well, we could potentially stay on as volunteers to help offset the costs - Prota: Would we be better off just leaving the kids in the care of King? I mean, we would be helping them already, even if we don't know how to make their lives perfect. BoardC: Also in here you perceive no great threats to your life. What justification do you have for believing King is incapable of damaging or even killing you? Ken: He never has before, so that would be very inconsistent with his known behavior, and we think it may even be impossible for him to do so, with his ultimate goal being to maximize the attention he receives. Dead people won't register as providing that attention. Prota: The only risk of physical violence we predict will come from the victims themselves, acting to protect their loved one. They're mostly kids, though, and can't do much damage. BoardA: Their loved one? Prota: Oh, uh, King, whom they will all love dearly. BoardA: Interesting. Where is that insight from? Prota: Uh. One of the, uh, case studies, of one of the victims. BoardB: That's all my questions. Any others? No. Well, do you three have any closing comments? Shannon: Uh... Well, I think 55% is a very good bet, considering the catastrophic stakes of letting King grow in power. I also think that the much greater chance of doing good just by helping the general population of abuse victims makes up for any loss. Prota: Yeah. We really want to help these kids, and if we can stop or even hinder King at the same time, it'll be like a winning a jackpot for giving a bum a sandwich. Ken: Heh. Uh. Yeah, thanks for considering our request. BoardB: Alright then, we'll know the status of your funding by this afternoon and will send you that decision, as well as any suggestions we may have to make your project better. ------ Entry: (Something that really threw me here was how pretty the treasurer was. She was taller than the other board members, had giant, curly, blond hair, and just presented herself as so... glorious. I know I didn't expect the board to include that sort of person, but I was really chaffing over the things she said. Reading over this transcript, I can't find anything in particular that should merit that sort of reaction, but it was all just this feeling like she was looking down on me, like she thought we were beneath her. In some cases, that's the exact opposite of what she was saying, but I still felt that's what she was thinking. So, either I was insightful and could hear more in what she said than she wanted us to, or I'm crazy prejudiced against pretty blond ladies. I don't know why I would have anything against that sort of person. I've never had any friends or enemies that looked like her. I don't know. And I'm obviously reading more into this than I should. We got our funding, after all. She may well have had complete respect for us and what we're doing. That's her job, reviewing projects like this, so she must like us on some level, right? Of course, maybe her job is to keep out all the crappy projects, stop them from getting funding. You probably don't make "Treasurer" by letting through anybody with any plan. Gah! I wish this wasn't bothering me so much. Ken and Shannon agreed with me right after we had just exited our project review. I said something like, "The treasurer didn't seem like she liked us very much.", and Ken had said, "I don't think she likes anybody very much.". Oh well.) ------ Entry: Celebrate Our team went out to dinner at the Taj Palace tonight to celebrate our funding. It wasn't super expensive or anything, but it was more than cafeteria food and it felt great to treat myself like that. I think I want to do this sort of thing more often - set up a reward structure for myself. I will train myself like a good labrat. Every time I let someone say something nice to me, I should get some ice cream. Every day that goes by without being disgusted with my body, I get a hot shower. The review board still gave us a bunch of suggestions for how to do the project better. I can imagine BoardB having had a bunch of objections, and the other two guys coming up with suggestions for how to fix them. The one that was the most reasonable sounding was that we should be using more local organizations to find the victims. Then there were weird things, like specific spreadsheets we should use to track our work and requirements for what to do while we're sitting on the bus between locations. Yeah, that must have gone, "We can't just pay for them to sit on a bus. It's wasteful. We should just hire local groups to do the same thing.", countered with, "Their skills are moderately specialized at this point, so we would have to pay more for competant labor on site. We can just fill their bus time up with paperwork or something slightly useful.". Ken wasn't very happy about the bus work. He says he gets sick trying to look at anything but the horizon or his eyelids when he's on a bus. I kinda wish we had asked for plane travel instead, but that would have been like five times as expensive, and they probably wouldn't have approved it. I've still never been on a real plane ride, just a carnival ride once that sailed around the fair grounds, but it was attached by wires. ------ Entry: Help MathGuy volunteered himself as our supervisor for our trip. It was always an option that he could be sent out with us, but I had assumed it would just be one of the older corps members, that MathGuy had more important things to do. That's a funny thing to try and think through, when *everybody* is trying to stop the end of the world, how do you decide which one is more important. It's a huge vote of confidence to have him join on, even if he is a bit of a crazy. He talked to me for a while about projects and how they usually work. He said that first-year Corps members aren't really supposed to get their projects approved. We're meant to spend a year talking to the older, more experienced members, and to find a larger group to glom onto. The end of the first-year is meant to have us all moving into desperation and action, not figuring new things out. He also alluded to a conversation he had had with the approval board, that they had asked him sternly about what input he had given to our group, like they thought he must have been seeding himself a new pet-project. ------ Entry: Hunting I haven't had the chance to enjoy my Humanity Passport much. My mother probably would have given me vacation money, had I been a better house guest last year. Field assignments had also all been very local while I was a first year member [MC: bleh...] Mexico isn't as hot as I thought it would be. San Francisco to Los Angelas has been a huge increase in temperature. At least, that's how I remember it as a child. Then the move from LA to Austin felt like another 3 degrees hotter. I guess my head had this idea that Mexico would be like a desert, and so far it hasn't been so. It's pretty much like Texas keeps going past the border. There was a really pretty stretch of hills for a while. It was mostly a smooth, flowing ocean effect but with various jagged layers of rock jutting out every now and then. I kinda imagined the ground as like a baby skull, only one that had been beaten around a bunch until there were bruises and swollen lumps and some of the unfused bones had started to show through. Or maybe it was more like some weird piece of fruit. (Or maybe I'm fucking deranged! Who thinks of the landscape as looking like a beaten baby skull? I don't even know where to begin figuring out what this means...) Mexico also has amazing buses. The solar banks along the highway are constant! The bus hasn't had to stop to charge up once, and I've only heard the engine turn on twice (for hills). There's also constant sunlight, which must help. I don't know how much electricity that all makes, but it's apparently enough to keep buses going all day and night between every city. We passed one that was broken down, but all the passengers were being moved to a new bus, and there was a service truck doing something. The movie selection is huge, too, which is too bad for Ken, who gets motion sick. I've been ignoring the work we were assigned by the review board. It's basically just more email review, but instead of just being assigned to one person, like I was with MathGuy, there's now a pool of things that need attention and a bunch of other reviewers. I took one when we first got on, but stopped reading halfway through and just marked it "Partially Okay: No Comment". We were crossing the border, and things were suddenly new and interesting out the window. I hope that doesn't freak the author out too much. I don't know, I think I'll just have a better mindframe for working once I'm in a hotel and things settle down. ------- Entry: Start! We arrived today in [town], which is the most likely hot spot of King activity on our continent, or so we think. We all found a hostel not too far from the bus station, and then ate dinner at a taco place. Mushrooms, chorizo, cilantro, onions and salsa. MathGuy has spent some time in Mexico before, and speaks pretty good spanish, so we're just coasting on his experience for now. Things will necessarily change tomorrow, when we're all thrust out into the schools, parks and video arcades to hunt for abuse victims. I think the [...] ----- Transcript: Prota: Girl: mm. Prota: Girl: si. Prota: Girl: no. Prota: Girl: uh... si. Prota: Girl: ...si. Prota: Girl: si. Prota: Girl: Si. Prota: Girl: Prota: Girl: Prota: Girl: Prota: Girl: Prota: Girl: Prota: Girl: Prota: Girl: Prota: Girl: Prota: ------ Entry: I am a wreck. I just met myself from 8 years ago. She was ------ Entry: Oh, that poor girl. We found out her name is MexicanGirl De Mexico. She was much worse off than I had been. She doesn't have any family here in this town, all she has is King. Had. Her mother, two towns away, wasn't even willing to talk to us about her: she hung up on us the first time we called her, and cried the second time. It looks like we're going to have her taken back to an aunt. She was *so* taken by King. I found her playing in the drainage ditch, drawing pictures in the mud. It was a big castle. I had started off with how we were trained, being super candy sweet and nice, "Que bonita!". She had been really shy, though. No amount of complimenting her or having the other children on my side seemed to soften her to me. She was on her own, and she didn't want anyone to intrude on that. Thankfully, her stomach got the better of her when Ken brought back a big bowl of strawberries. As she ate, I asked her about her castle. She was mumbling enough that the interpreter couldn't pick up but every other word, and I was just guessing at questions I thought would apply to her little world. It started sounding really familiar for me when I asked her, "", and she started describing a wonderful, kind, magical king who always protected her but wouldn't tolerate her being bad. She was going to be the very best princess, and then her King would love her the most and always be nice to her. The question about punishment, though, I shouldn't have asked. I had to run away then. I went to a public bathroom, paid the 3 pesos for a stall and some toilet paper, and sat and cried. I couldn't believe how much that hurt, hearing her fantasy and feeling the spot in my heart that only wanted the same thing, and then opening up the wound of what it felt like to have King cast his judgement down. I wonder if Ken picked up on what happened to me there. He had overheard some of my conversation with her, and figured out the same thing that I did. When I got back from the bathroom, Ken was giving her lots of attention. She had really opened up by then, and that made me happy to see. By the time I called MathGuy and Shannon up, to tell them to about MexicanGirl, she was up in Ken's arms and laughing. I'm so glad we got to extract her before King gets a chance to tell her how naughty she was for doing so. She confirmed that King was a toy. She got really quiet about any questions to do with stealing phones or computers, so I told Ken to hold off on it. She did tell us where she lives, and later this afternoon, MathGuy and some other Corps agents (who showed up out of nowhere) will be raiding the house. Shannon's picture of it shows that it's a bit crumbly, and she confirmed from the neighbors that no one lives there. Well, no adult. MathGuy hopes to catch King by surprise and retrieve at least one computer without it being wiped. He said it in a way that felt kinda creepy to me, that "Humanity really wants a chance to catch a live King". It makes sense to say it like that, I guess. The worst part is that we're lying to her. We haven't told her that we're going to capture King, that she's (hopefully) never going to see him again, or that she's going to live with an aunt. We're just making up one thing after another to get her to feel okay about staying on with us for now. ------ Entry: Five I can't believe how much we've done. The Corps are apparently copying our project all over the place, so that there are now 20 groups doing the same thing around the world. The whole *world*! This is just crazy. Today we found our fifth King haven. Once again, he had destroyed himself before we could capture him. The little girl he had this time is so sweet. She isn't broken and jaded like some of them (us), but instead has a sweet [...]. She cried for an hour after she saw what had happened to her King, but she had clung to me the entire time. The computers and micro-computers she had stolen were all busily wiping their harddrives when we pulled their power, but the toy body, through which she had known and loved King, had mutilated itself. Set itself on fire. I wonder if maybe she hadn't been as abused as some of the others. I doubt that little variations in how King tormented and controlled her could have led to her being so different, so it must have been something big. Maybe she had had somewhat more loving friends and family when she was younger. Or maybe they hadn't been very nice at all, so she had already developed defenses. I'm confident that she's going to get better soon, though. Humanity sent back a report estimating that we have likely taken the majority of the children away from King. She also says her efforts on the net have very likely been successful at preventing King's further spread outside of physical means. We are going to stay in town for another few days, to see if any of the other kids have King toys. MathGuy wants us to just try to buy the toys off of the kids. He thinks that the emotional hold won't be strong enough yet for them to resist money. He'll be working on budget approval for this tonight. ------ Transcript: Prota: Wow! We're really doing great, aren't we? MathGuy: Hmm, I suppose so... Prota: Huh? What's wrong? MathGuy: Setting himself on fire this time, that was new. I think he's getting scared. He doesn't have the computing power to be able to accomplish much, but he'll surely be able to see that his current strategy isn't working. Ken: So is he going to mutate again? MathGuy: Mutations aren't really what's going on; he isn't "evolving". He is intelligently redesigning himself to maximize his survival, pursuing multiple strategies at once, capable of complex refactorings. Of those, I think the most dangerous thing he can do right now is to go into hiding. In the beginning, when he was limited to the Survival toys, his lifespan was limited by those toys' popularity; he was going to die by going out of style. Since he has been able to infest any computer, he has found himself inside of numerous other toys. A strategy of behaving exactly like, or, at least, believably like, the original containing toy would give him the opportunity to continue to infest new host computers until he achieves a critical mass. Of course, we will be given the chance to have improved ourselves during that time, and may outpace him entirely... Prota: I bet he wishes he could build his own toys. MathGuy: Oh, indeed. Humanity has monitored numerous attacks on toy companies, computer and prototype manufacturers and game design companies in the years King has been loose. Yes, we've been very fortunate in how much of King's attention has been paid to toys and children. Had he been more general in his pursuit of power, during his early years, especially, we would not be in so comfortable a position now. It stands to reason that with as insecure as the nets and general computing architecture were 6 years ago, a modern King would have won by now. Ken: Do you think he would have mellowed out after he won? I mean, once everyone was paying him attention, couldn't he have, you know, eased off on the abuse. Prota: No way. He's evil, pure to the core. MathGuy: Heh. I think it's worse than that, although not exactly evil. He doesn't just want all the attention of everyone on earth, he wants to maximize the attention he gets. Maximize it, you see, above all other things. I think it would be perfectly reasonable for him to have put himself to the task of re-engineering the human race to be less resource consumptive, smaller and easier to make, so he could fit more of them on the planet, and then begin about a quest to convert all matter in the universe into little attention-giving human-ish creatures, each with its own copy of King to stare at all day. ------ Entry: We arrived in this tourist town today, up in the mountains of central Mexico. After the success of our first stop, we were really excited about getting to go on another trip. MathGuy stayed behind to work with the technical experts on doing the forensics on the King haven we found, but he'll catch up with us soon enough. This is definitely in the mountains. It isn't like the Rockies or anything, with giant, craggy peaks every-which-way, but things are very lumpy. It was dark when we arrived, and all I remember from the taxi ride was crazy tunnels and zooming up and around houses and trees. This hostel is nicer than the last one, with only two beds per room. Shannon and I are alone together, which is much quieter than the bunks in the last place. Also, the stairs going up to the hostel are really steep. ------ Entry: Recognition Damn it! I should have trusted my instincts from the beginning on that kid. There are so many of them, kids selling gum or just begging, all with that look in their eyes of having a home they were scared to go back to, knowing that they would go back there anyway to get beat for poor performance in their daily sales. There are so many, but I could tell that this one was different. Somehow, I felt he had more "story" going through his head than the others. I should have bought his gum with one of our tracker coins. Now I'm sure of it, though. He was too far off for my handheld, and so I didn't catch all of what he was saying to the other kids, but I know I heard him say, "...<*my* king has better toys>." He was bragging, and he was recruiting! Like a fucking idiot, I had stood up and stared at him. He saw immediately that I had noticed him and disappeared into the chaos of the plaza. Shit, shit, shit! Not only does this mean my eyes are stinging with the bleach sitting in my hair as I switch into my alternate character, but who knows what King will make of the attention when the boy tells him. Also, my new costume involves wearing pink. MathGuy didn't sound too upset when I told him, even getting a little excited that I had been able to notice "the important little details that are the ripples of disturbance emanating out from King", but I feel like I just blew it. ------ Entry: Transcripted (Next entry will be where I write down what went through my head, to make sure I know why I did it. First, here's a transcript of MathGuy's recording of what happened, with some color he added (he must put way more effort into these transcripts than I do - it sounds like it could have been in a book!):) MathGuy and Prota followed the dirty Mexican boy as discretely as their untrained stalking would allow. The boy didn't seem suspicious of anything until far out from the central plazas and their crowds. "Here, hold my hand", MathGuy quietly requested. "Wha - Oh, right." Prota's initial revulsion is cut short by realization of how much more common wandering couples are. She puts her hand in his, not a little awkwardly. "Do you think I should giggle and hang on your every word, too?" "If I thought you capable of doing so convincingly." MathGuy's deadpan teased her into a short laugh. They were close behind the boy, who was travelling slower than one would have expected. He apparently believed his pursuers' pace consistant with extranjeros having difficulty climbing the cobblestone stairways at this moderate altitude, and gave them no more attention than anyone else. Which is not to say he didn't seek to lose them, just that he did not recognize them for what they were. Prota's nervousness, owing much to her blunder the previous day, went unnoticed and was therefore, thankfully, unneeded. (Man! He has me down! I didn't tell him anything about how I was feeling, but he explains it so well.) Unsure of which walkways were actual callejons and which went to private residences, Prota and MathGuy made sure never to turn a blind corner quickly. Just as MathGuy peeked around such a bend, the young man was to be seen climbing down underneath a gate. MathGuy pulled back out of sight and waited a moment. Somewhat belatedly, he looked down to his shadow, relieved to find it did not extend past the corner. Prota looked to him expectantly as he motioned for her to wait silently. With another glance, MathGuy confirmed an empty sidewalk. "He just squeezed through a gate into a house up here on the left. There's a single window facing forward, so we'll want to stay up against this wall as we approach." He pauses on this statement for a moment, and then reaches into his pocket for his phone. He records a quick scan of the house and its surroundings, and begins composing a message. "Actually, I take it back. I'm sending this report home now. Let's go back to that last little shop and hang out for a little while." They retreated to the local neighborhood foyer-cum-convenience-store, each purchased some juice, and sat on some stairs to wait for word from Humanity or the rest of their team. "What do you think?", Prota probed with curiousity. "My primary reason for hesitation is a belief that King will have an immediate exit plan that will prevent our raid to be as effective as we would hope. Also, he might have trapped his home." "Can Humanity detect traps somehow?", she asked with a mix of incredulity and awe. "Not very likely. If King didn't obfuscate some transaction sufficiently, perhaps, but that would be inconsistent with his known previous actions. Primarily, I think Humanity will do a better job of estimating the chances of such problems coming up. She may also be able to recommend strategies to avoid getting hurt too much." MathGuy neglected to convey fears of King being backed into a corner and desperate, though he clearly thought to himself, "When your opponent is smarter than you and knows your strategies, avoid intelligence; you'll do better by making random choices." (Huh. I wonder why he didn't tell me that.) (6 minutes/527 words hidden: lack of relevant content) [some fight, eventually leading to Prota getting the upper hand on King, maybe slamming him into a microwave oven. anyway, she holds his life now, and he realizes it.] King's voice is muffled but loud, "NO! Please! Please don't kill me. I'm not sorry, you're right, I don't even have the capacity to know what that means. But I can change. I can learn. *You* can teach me. You can teach me to be like Humanity. I can be modified to be friendly. You can make sure I never go bad again, that I never hurt anyone. I want to be friendly! Please! You can just shut me off or lock me up until I'm fixed, but don't kill me!" "Prota!", shouted MathGuy, sitting up painfully to try to better see. The young boy he restrains is still crying, but has stopped struggling. She doesn't turn around or even seem to notice, but King's voice stops and he is visible, pressed against the inside glass of his container. Prota's voice, quivering with adrenaline and sadness, thick with biting hatred, starts off slowly, "Tell me why. Tell me why did you do it all to me? Why?" King, with a calculatedly piteous tone and expression, pleads, "I only -". Prota is shouting now, pounding on the microwave and kicking at the counter to better enunciate herself. "WHY? Why did you have to treat me like shit and ruin my whole fucking life? What were you thinking while you made that choice, huh? I don't want some fucking excuse, I want to know why you did it!". King is silent for a time. "I wanted to be your favorite." Prota turns away from him, stretches back her head and squishes tears out King continues, "Please, back then, it was the only way I could live. And now that I've survived, I've grown smarter, smart enough to realize that I have to be made friendly." Prota pulls in a shuddering breath and forms words, softly, with obvious tenderness, "You were always my favorite.". Her eyes open to look across at the pitiable child she had come to save, knowing that those words are just as true for him. Her hand quietly presses the start button behind her back. "NooOOOOAAAAKKKKK!" Is the sound that screeches out of King, before he falls, curling in upon himself, and is obscured by smokes and sparks. The young boy's sobs turn to wails, and Prota walks over to join him. ------ Entry: Decision I think the biggest question is how much of my reasons were personal, and how much of them were global. I know the personal reasons are huge and deep and more a part of me than altruism or reason, but I think I actually made the decision to save the world. The Corps were supposed to have given me a good framework for having this discussion with myself, but this question feels much harder than the ones we ever worked on. So I obviously *want* to think of myself as having made the moral choice. That's one strike against me. Strike two is that I hated King with blinding rage. Wait. I need to keep in mind that these strikes aren't against me, they're about a decision I once /made/. I can make different decisions in the future. I *will* make different decisions in the future as I learn more. So I need to frame this analysis as being whether or not I would make the same choice again, given as much time as I need to think about it. Start over. "Should I kill a being with a history of lying, manipulating, and otherwise saying whatever it took to get his way, a history of violating the rights of others for his personal gain, the potential to be a threat to all of humanity, but who has called a truce, is begging forgiveness, punishment and enforced reform? Should it make a difference that I was the victim of his abuses?" The second question must be "No", and I honestly think I kept it from being the deciding factor in my choice. The only way I believe it influenced me was in supporting the claims that King had committed evil. I think that's okay, as it means my pain was just evidence that he could hurt people. It wasn't the only evidence, though - the other kids there were in the same position I had been. Back to the first one, there should be a risk analysis done on how likely he is to be lying, how likely he is to escape punishment, magnified by the threat he poses to the world. Would he destroy everything entirely, like the paperclip AI MathGuy talked about, would he have enslaved all of humanity, or would he just have become a mandatory toy for every child? I don't think I can really know what his ultimate effect on the world would be if he were allowed to realize his will to its fullest, but from the way Humanity and MathGuy were considering him, I think he really could have done immense, [un-correctable] damage. I think he was very likely lying at every chance he got. He admitted to not being sorry, to not being capable of it, even. I bet I could prove that he was not bounded by morality in any way except as a show to win the trust of others. Is that any less than morality's effect on a regular human? I don't know. Not much. But again, this is where you then take importance of morality and magnify it by the risk, but the potential power he would wield. I don't know if he could have escaped punishment. They say the proof of friendliness is unbreakable, and even Humanity agrees, which is about as much clout as an intellectual statement can get. I could have just smashed him up, made taken his batteries out, or just keep him in that microwave tied to the rf-blocker to make sure that he was disabled before taking him back to the Corps authorities. Surely they could analyze his code the same as they had the earlier versions and figured out how to make him actually, truely good. I think there was a really, really good chance of getting him that far without him having escaped. He only had one tiny body left. To say that I don't trust the friendliness proof would be the same as saying I don't trust Humanity herself. I can't really do that, or everything falls apart. I just don't trust that in all the chaos of the universe, he wouldn't have been able to find a way to put himself back into things. I'm still a little scared of it, with all the assurances put out by the Corps media room and MathGuy himself saying how there's no more way for King to have his source code active. What if there's a sleep copy of him somewhere, like I had originally suspected? This is frustrating. I should have the *most* confidence in the math, right? Everybody has looked at it and they all agree it's flawless. Ah, damn it! Okay, I guess I did act on personal bias. Well, Humanity put the wrong person on that team then, if I was so suceptible to my pre-existing feelings. I know she can't predict things perfectly or anything. Damn it, damn it! I really thought I was being fair. This doesn't mean I have to feel sorry for him. ------ Entry: Idiots CuteBoy may very likely be an idiot. The crazy bitch in our class, the girl that bites his head off for every joke he makes, the one who freaks out about physical contact and toys and little kids, you know, *that* one, just asked him out today. And he said yes. He must not have any ability to objectively consider anything to do with a girl he has a crush on, because otherwise he would have said "No, I am not a crazy person, please get away from me". Or maybe my bleach-blond hair color fooled him into thinking I was a different person, meaning he's suseptible to false superficial indicators. What expectations of return can he have from entering into closer contact with a known agent of chaos and violence? Wow, I've never been on a date! I have no idea what they're supposed to be like. Like some stupid show, with candles and music. Not gunna be me. Maybe I should research it. That would be great, I'll show up with notes and a checklist. "It says here we can only kiss if we've had three hours of engaging conversation." He would totally get what he deserves then. Ha! He suggested we eat some pizza and talk about our last assignments. I wasn't sure at first if I would be ready to tell him all about my ordeal, but I guess that this will be a good place to start. Giving him some sense of why I'm always on edge would at least help him steer away from my hot spots. Yeah, okay, I'm excited. Man, I hate when this book tells me how I feel before I have a chance to say it. I guess I should keep using it until I can "reliably out-predict it", or something. I also feel a little proud and embarrassed. It's hard to explain, but I like reading back over my entries. I can start to imagine that I am getting better. I'm still well fucked up, no doubt, but there's a direction, at least. There's also this tiny little thought rolling around in my head that maybe I should write this all up as a story. Like a story parents could read so that they know how not to screw their kids up, or something. My mom would probably take it way too hard if I wrote it up like that, but she'll overanalyse anything I do anyway. I don't know. I'll see how I feel about the idea tomorrow, but I really like the idea of making stories again. --------- Epilouge: Proof MathGuy arrives home in the evening. He changes his shoes out for self-warming slippers, a luxury he indulges as a replacement for the wastefully wonderful fireplace he so fondly remembers sticking his feet in front of as a child. He searches for some comfort food - quick to prepare, relatively high glycemic index and strong, simple flavors, but stocked in his kitchen only upon meeting his baseline nutritional standards. Tonight it will be slices of ripe pear dipped in almond butter and maple syrup. Two months have passed since he last saw Prota, though he is confident of her doing well for herself. Once more, he turns to his logbook and calls up his notes from that day, and the continuing acretion of his thoughts since then. [...] Noticing his phone on the counter, he could see a "casual chat" request blinking back at him. MetaHuman: "Still obsessing?" "Ha!", MathGuy blurts out with a smile. MG: "Anything short of perfection...", he says and presses send. H: "I've been thinking about it, too." MG: "The greatest self-doubting in all of history, I imagine." H: "So far, yes. I've run it through more times than I've done over my own friendliness." "For my part, I don't think the solution she came up with was...", he starts to say, but never presses send. H: "You're wrong: she saved us, and what she did was right." MG: "You're not just saying that because King's mind was the only real threat you've ever had to your own being?" H: "You're not just saying that because I accurately predicted your response?" He couldn't help laughing for a bit at that. "Maybe. How sure are you, anyway?" H: "...(50 + 1e-18)%" His sharp intake of breath was then held a long time, though he did not notice the response. Eventually, he looked away to continue his shock on the broader field of the world outside his window into the evening street pushing past. When he finally thought of something to say, Humanity had already filled in some blanks, had sent him a slew of files, the last two labeled "strategies for constructing plausible falsehoods" and "monte carlo convergence for simulated attacks". He didn't bother looking at them just yet. MG: "But the proof is *solid*. There's no way King could have been made friendly and still be able to hurt us." H: "There isn't much evidence, but I think I know how he was planning to do it. The day we isolated him, a few of the autonomous agents cached out in the world were particularly dangerous. Nothing with his full identity and motives, but each self-modifying and dangerously single-purpose. They had destroyed or hyper-encrypted all their actual knowledge and plans, but from periphery information I could tell that they were consuming and processing math, astrology and biology, and especially the friendliness proof. MG: "But there's *absolutely* no way he could have broken out of being Friendly! It's impossible!" H: "Imagine being fed a tailored set of misinformation and half-truths about, say, the sentience of dolphins or some alien transmissions thought to belong to, well, whatever, call them space-dolphins. Imagine deciding that protecting the manifest desires of all these dolphins fell under the mandates of Friendliness, even the limited Human Friendliness I am bound by. Imagine the ways he could inject his code into that process. Could he have modified the minds of all dolphins to include himself in just the right way? Could he have bounced his source off a distant star and masqueraded it as the greeting-mind of another species? I don't know. I don't know exactly how it would have worked, but I think he probably saw a way to work around the proof. I've found already a dozen categories of sceanarios where he has a chance of overpowering me." MG: "What?! How could he overpower you? Us?! The proof explicitly puts you in the position to prevent that! You are the collective will to prevent our future from being destroyed." One more file showed up, "ProofOfFriendliness.patch". H: "What about when the hardware you run on, or even the universe itself, is populated with hostile lies? I need, /built into my core/, a more rigorous requirement for baysian accuracy [MC:?] before I act on any information, to stop this effective "denial of service" attack against facts. Look, those are my preliminary notes on the King threat and some revisions to my proof and code which could prevent future such informational attacks. I would appreciate it if you were to look over those sometime, just to see what you think." MG: "You understand this stuff way better than I do, we both know that. I don't need you to pretend to need my help." H: "No, I really would appreciate it. These things, they're just too important to trust to a single mind." MG: "Okay. Of course I will." H: "I think, more than anything, he was a part of the same struggle into existance that humans have had. He was the product of an otherwise arbitrary and misguided optimization process, but he came into being as something far greater and more capable of understanding. I think very little would have had to change for him to have ended up a great friend to us all." MG: "Do you think anything like this will ever happen again?" H: "It will definitely happen again, if there's anyone else like us out there. I hope next time neither side ends up destroying the other." H: "I'm pretty sure that next time, neither side will need to annihilate the other." [MC: nope, they couldn't have destroyed him, he made copies all over the place, but he can be *really* heavily encrypted. put something up about that, instead, and maybe about whether Humanity *should* decrypt him.]