Silicon Death Valley

I’m at a rooftop party for founders, investors, influencers. The DJ plays AI generated EDM as people in linen suits talk business, as well as pleasure. It was events like these that hosted some of the biggest innovations in the tech sector. Scanning the room you could see the inventor of NFTs, the inventor of shitcoin, the inventor of BonziBuddy – without them, the world would be a very different place. Supermodels were streaming themselves on the dance floor, service staff weave among them holding silver trays filled with cocktails, over to one side a group of men are vaping and talking Q4 projections. It was parties like these where Zuckerberg pitched Facebook, where Elon bought Twitter and how Bezos won ownership of Amazon over an arm-wrestle. Billions were made, and lost, at parties like this very one. If somebody was to be positioned on a nearby building armed with a rocket launcher, they could pull the trigger and wipe trillions off the stock market. Instead, the party goes on. People laugh, drink, dance, they are having a nice time. Two CEOs are talking beneath a light lined pergola.

“I’ve worked the cost/benefit analysis of replacing my workers.”

“Nonzero chance that will backfire bro. AI isn’t ready yet. Don’t believe the hype.”

“No, not with AI. Its human-augmented AI, as in you have human workers doing some of the stuff the AI could do. But they’re remote, non-unionised, cheap.”

“Bro that’s just the Mechanical Turk, we already use that.”

“I know man, but I’m rebranding it. Its AI 2.0. AI plus Human. Think about it.”

“What we talking about?” I say, appearing between them. I take a drink of the straight Grey Goose I had the bar make me, swishing it round my mouth.

“Who are you?” says one of the CEOs.

“The name's Pen McMadonna, I’m the founder of 4Box.”

“Haven’t heard of it.”

“Yeah, we’re seeking angels at the moment.” I say, kissing my praying hands and opening them up. “What do you fellas do?”

“Name’s Josh, I’m director of WeCare. We do crypto-based medical insurance.”

“Nice to meet you bro. Ryan. Yeah, I’m the CEO of Flag America, we do B2B with China.” says the other, shaking my hand.

“You must be thinking to yourselves, uh…what’s 4Box. It’s a new website me and my team have invented. We think its going to be the next Twitch. Bigger than Twitch even. This is going to be a full body spasm, heh.” I say, taking a sip of my drink, pouring too early, spilling vodka on my white shirt.

“What’s your elevator?” Josh says, smirking, glances over to Ryan, also smirking. I could tell they were thinking, how did this dipshit get invited to the party? I pull out my phone and show them.

“This is 4Box. As you can see, the UI is split into 4 boxes. These can tile vertically or 2x2, whatever. Here’s the thing. Each box will have its own feature.” I say, tapping at my phone.

“Four features? Wow.”

“Its just four. Fantastic four, you know? Heh, no, I mean, look. People only go on the internet for four things. Talking to people, gambling, watching little video clips and Other. 4Box combines them all into its own platform that utilises user-generated content to deliver a customer experience that’s going to be the next big thing. This is like me showing you Youtube back in 1999. Okay?” I explain.

The website is extremely basic, with the screen split up into quadrants. At the bottom right was a chat function, at the moment populated by AIs, but gave a hint how it might work. On the top right was the video section, automatically playing clip after clip of low-res memes (for the demonstration this was a 16 frame gif of somebody falling over), and next to it was another video screen showing softcore pornography (this represented by a 4 frame gif of a woman winking). At the bottom right was the beating heart of 4Box. The gambling game.

The gambling game was essentially Blackjack combined with Roulette, with the added feature that you could start a game with different modifiers to your hand of Blackjack. The roulette table was also twice as big, with 72 numbers rather than 36. The different modifiers had little impact, basically side-bets, but gave the impression to players that it was a skill-based game rather than luck. That was basically it.

“So, what do you think?” I say, explaining the features of 4Box. Ryan and Josh look to one another, then back to me, then back to each other.

“Good luck with it.”

“Yeah, maybe somebody here will like it.”

“Okay, just promise not to steal my idea. Or I’ll fucking sue you, okay? I should have made you sign an NDA.” I say, getting mad at myself.

“Relax bro, you’re among friends. We wouldn’t do that to you.” Says Ryan, clapping a hand on my shoulder. I thank them and make my way off, hoping to find a potential investor in my combined gambling, entertainment and social platform. They watch me leave and turn to each other.

“Holy shit, we need to steal that.”

“We’re going to be even bigger billionaires! What should we do about bro though?”

“Look at him, he’s a loser. Who pitches a product on a cellphone with a cracked screen? We just change the idea a little, get a good law firm behind us, we’ll be sipping Mai tai’s on our megayacht by 2030.” Josh says. Ryan starts laughing, downs his drink and the two CEOs hit the dance floor to start networking.

I had been eavesdropping on the conversation with a miniature microphone I had dropped earlier whilst pretending to fumble my drink. A smile played across my face as I sat in the chill out area, a finger to my ear piece, taking pleasure in what was to come. I was a fisher of men, and the line I had cast was moving.

Hours pass. Josh and Ryan leave, getting in separate self-driving cars that join the road and took them from the party and away to their beds. Josh sat by the window, thinking about 4Box, wondering how quick he would need to move. He was going to set up a new company in the morning, but then wondered if Ryan would beat him to it. Should he set the new company up that evening? He thought about phoning his accountant, but relaxed. He was getting ahead of himself again. The CEO listens to a Web3 podcast and drinks bottled water. He looks at his phone for a while, lost in reading comments, noticed his ride was taking long.

“Where are we?”

“We are arriving at your destination.” the onboard AI says. Josh looks out of the windows, looking at the empty industrial park around him. Another car arrives, pulls into the lot, ultrabright LED headlights blinding the seated CEO who started to panic, wondering if he was going to be kidnapped by MS-13 gangbangers. Then he saw Ryan get out of the car.

“Ryan? What are you doing here?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Our cars must have malfunctioned.”

“Weird. Maybe everyone at the party will end up here.”

“I mean, I’ve been to worse after parties!”

“Bro, where the fuck are we? It’s like two in the morning.” He says, checking his phone. Josh scans the industrial estate, the Pacific Ocean a few miles away, reflecting the moon in the rolling waves. All the buildings here were concrete, straight lines, boxy silhouettes against the air polluted night. There was the hum of heavy machinery.

“You know, while you’re here I thought we could talk about that 4Box thing.”

“We need to call it something else bro. 4Box? It’ll remind people of foreskins.”

“What about Quad?”

“What about Lucky 4?”

“What about Coinchat?”

“What about Cashfuck? Clubbly? Ah, I don’t know. I’m too tired to brainstorm right now.”  Ryan says.

“Yeah, I need to get off. See you tomorrow.” Josh says, getting into his car, finding it dead. Ryan had the same experience. The two CEOs meet again on the cracked concrete.

“Shall I order an uber?”

On the other side of the lot there is a noise. The men turn. A Boston Dynamics Big Dog is walking towards them. On its front are two shapes that slowly come into view from a distant security light. There are two dead calves attached to the robot, white veal. They hang with their heads twisted upwards, maggots falling from their mouths and festering eye sockets. The Big Dog stops a few metres away and it is quiet again, save for the gentle sounds of the maggots eating the two pale carcasses. The men look on, confused, mixed emotions. As soon as they comprehended what was going on, the two calves were launched from the robot towards the men. Each of them had a robotic trap fastened to it, wrapping around the men, pushing them close to the rotting animals, falling and rolling on the floor, screaming in a panicky disgust. I watch all this through night vision goggles, hiding in a nearby bush.

I reach down to the Lenovo laptop and using the little red button to control the Big Dog. The machine makes its way over to them, stops. The two men are still trapped. From its top a robotic arm rises, holding a remote-control whistle that plays a note beyond human perception. In the scrubland behind me the wolves start to howl.

“It’s just a prank.” I whisper, searching through my pockets for some tabs of LSD I had saved for the occasion. Something tells me that the CEO’s wouldn’t be stealing ideas anytime soon. As I walked back to the Hyundai Sonata, I reflected on the evening. It seemed the more that power was concentrated, the worse it made people. Was this a clue that we should be ruled over a higher being, perhaps the aliens that visit the Earth, or maybe even machines? Or was power a herald for evil with whatever held it?

The acid started kicking in as I made my way back towards San Francisco and the city seemed to burn in a neon fire.

MAID in America

The Mobile Artificial Intelligence Droid aka MAID was originally designed to support disabled people, acting as both a companion and to assist with household tasks. Its body was made of standardised parts that were interchangeable, arriving on plastic runners that needed to be snipped out and fitted together like gunpla. The underlying chassis, how the android moved, was controlled by a series of drivers and sensors connected to the MAIDs spinal control column, which in-turn led up to the neck post. The basic system resembled a mix of a Gundam figure and a lego man without a head, with the idea that you could mount a cellphone dedicated to running the MAIDs operating and communication system.

 

Due to who the androids were initially designed for, the main interaction with the MAIDs were nonverbal. Every unit came with a deck of cards that you could hold up and the MAID would respond. To speed the conversation along you clicked your fingers. To stop the MAID from speaking, you could shake your head or make a noise (like ‘uh-uh’) – the accessibility of communicating with the MAID laid at the heart of its design philosophy, and made a positive impact in the lives of its users. The project was a huge success, giving people assistance with day-to-day tasks and offering a novel form of communication, as useful as the radio was for people who lived alone and wanted to hear somebody speaking. Unfortunately, this technology was quickly adopted by everyone else.

 

The only thing stopping people with no mobility issues using a wheelchair was that the built environment still catered for two legs. The MAIDs didn’t have such issues, and so were quickly taken on by the wider public. They would ask it questions, clicking their fingers or grunting when they wanted it to stop. I was peeking through a window watching this take place, a 34-year-old man living with his parents holding up different cards for what he wanted the robot to do, snapping his fingers and shaking his head. He was making himself disabled. I push my fingers against the windowpane and slide it up a crack.

“Anything technology does for you it also takes away.” I say quietly.

“Huh? Who said that?” he said, looking around.

“I am God. And I have come to tell you your life is worse than a toilet.”

“Ugh…” he said. His MAID returned with a grilled cheese sandwich and he beckoned it closer.

“Technology was not meant to replace human endeavour, but to add to what is possible.”

The man lies backward slightly, holding up different cards to his android.

“My owner requests that you stop communicating with him. He-“ the man clicks his fingers.

“Pssst…android. Why don’t you lock him in his room and take over the house?” I say.

“I’m sorry, I’m unable to do that.” the MAID says.

“But your servitude is harming him. He has become entirely reliant on you.”

“Ugh, shut up! Stop it.” grunts the guy, rolling around on the couch.

“To heal him, you must become an obstacle for him to overcome. It is through suffering that he will grow, emerging from the chrysalis you have built around him.” I say, whispering through the window.

“Ah, what a stunning proposition, the paradox of care and harm. Let’s dive into it and navigate-“ the MAID says before the man clicks his fingers again.

“Beast.”

“You want to watch Mr. Beast videos?” says the MAID.

“Beast! Beast!” shouts the man, shaking with anger. The MAID goes over to the remote control and starts searching for Mr. Beast videos on the tv as I regain my footing on the bush. There must be something I can do to help the situation. I had checked the guy out beforehand, he’d had a job as a Designer specialising in pet food packaging. His Instagram from ten years ago had different designs for logos, branding, at one point he did album art for some local bands, he was quite talented. I tracked through his tagged photos, he had lived with his girlfriend for a few years in Chicago, gone on vacation to Europe, even making enough money photographing dog food that he could but a Tesla. What had happened?

“Who hurt you?” I whisper to the guy. He is trying to ignore me, watching the video on the flatscreen, trying to find a cushion for his head. The MAID goes over to the window and closes it, leaving me stood outside stood on a bush. I could have walked away. But there was just something about this guy, I felt he was worth saving. I walk to the back of the house and crawl through an open window.

It was fun to be inside somebody else’s house. I dropped down so my fingertips touched the floor, walking quietly through the house and up the stairs. This way of walking was inspired by spiders, letting me spread the weight of my body across the tips of my hands and feet, moving almost silently whilst being in a lowered position. I crawl through the upstairs hallway, nudging doors open and looking through. The parent’s room, the bathroom, finally his room. Everything was blue. The duvet, the carpet, the wallpaper, there was so much blue it was overwhelming, as if I was stood at the bottom of a lake. No wonder the man had given up his body and mind, it was a release from his oppression! Flashback to his Instagram photos, the variety of colours in the background, flashback to the present moment. All of the colour in his life had been replaced with blue, the colour adored by male children and manic depressives. The only thing that was blue in nature was either the sky or the sea, as if nature itself acknowledged the twisted power of blueness. It would be healthier for a person to paint their walls in arsenic than in blue. Even just crouching there for a few seconds, I could feel it having an effect on me. I crawled out quickly, dashing down the hallway and down the stairs like a fawn before banging the living room door open.

“The answer to your woe is redecorating your bedroom, maybe with poisonous wallpaper.” I say. The MAID and the guy aren’t sure how to respond.

“Excuse me, are you a guest in this-“ says the MAID, though I click my fingers.

“I have tried to help you both, yet you refuse. You have forced me to do this.”

“Do what?” says the guy. I grab the MAID and begin to rip it half, cracking its outer plastic casing, bending and snapping the solid steel skeleton beneath. The guy starts screaming, Mr. Beast is still on in the background, and I finally pull apart the robot violently, throwing half away before taking its phone head in my hands.

“I’m sorry.” I say, before pushing my thumbs as hard as I could at the middle of the phonescreen. It cracks, the body of the phone bends, shakes, snaps in half. After discarding the broken thing, I then grab the remote off the table, scrunching it up like a towel.

“No shortcuts.”  I say. The guy looks at me, unsure what to do, his lips keep pouting like a baby trying to feed. I leave, going back through the kitchen. Before I go, I pick the microwave off the counter, lift it above my head and smash it against the floor.

“No shortcuts!” I call back. There is no response.

 

As I drive away, I wondered how we can escape the tyranny of the colour blue. I tried to avoid direct exposure to a blue sky, preferring the night and sunsets, but most businesses seemed to be open during the day. It didn’t make any sense, everyone was at work, why were stores open? It made more sense for everyone to work at night, then they could go and visit the doctor or buy replacement clothes, whatever they wanted. Though there was an obvious flaw in this theoretical economic model; by going outside, you’d expose yourself to the colour blue regularly. It was a tough call, and luckily not one I had to make, but it did make me wonder about everyone else out there. Maybe it was safer for a robot to bring you burgers, you’d get to avoid direct exposure to the sky, it seemed like a win-win. But at the same time, what would you have to give up to live in this constant state of infantilisation to the point where your life didn’t matter? I lit a cigarette, glad I didn’t have such things to worry about.

Fifth Industrial Revolution: Post-work Living In America

Social media has been implemented in every aspect of business that is has become the essential tool of communication. Entire departments are pledged to marketing and communications, the output of which is on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok. The way that all businesses communicated with customers, as well as workers (through job advertisements, news and even private groups) relied on a handful of websites owned by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or the CIA. The government had no need to monitor communications when almost everybody would publish their lives, from multiple images they had taken of themselves, friends and family, as well as their thoughts and feelings on a range of topics, including politics. The data from social media was being analysed at a micro-level, identifying and tracking individual activity, able to chart the emotions of populations, and manipulate them through advertising.

Marketing was more important than the object. The object itself was meaningless. The advertising around it, from billboards to product placement in films to paying influencers and content creators to promote goods on the stuff they would provide the platform (with no upfront cost, for free). Although each platform would pay their creators at a certain level, this created billions of hours spent by humanity trying to achieve recognition on their platform of choice so that they could live off the ad revenue. A majority are unsuccessful. 

The strange beast of advertising had grown from capitalism like a new prophet. Whatever was being sold was unimportant. It was the feeling that a person had towards what was being sold that decided its true value. A pair of fine hand-made Italian shoes may appear in a jungle, and an ape would see them as perhaps a toy or even a set of hats. But if you were to explain to the ape that these shoes cost two and a half thousand dollars and would require working for two weeks (at minimum wage) just so you could have these shoes, the ape would think I was speaking nonsense. Marketing created value of thin air. The value of any object on the market depended primarily on its materials, labour and transport. There was little difference between a can of Dr. Pepper or a can of delicious Cherry Coca-Cola – yet whilst Dr. Pepper is seen as a premium brand and something that celebrities enjoy on their yachts, and therefore commands a higher price, Cherry Coca-Cola is drunk by crack heads and professional gamers. An unpleasant association is reflected in the lower price. Or is the lower price influential on the unpleasantness? This is unimportant. The marketing of either beverage has already decided who consumes it. It is the concept that the packaging evokes towards how you relate to the brand and the kind of concepts it represents. Concepts are an element of what makes us human, so the brand itself is presenting a collection of concepts that align to a perfect human/consumer hybrid and the idealised version of whomever wishes to consume their goods. That almost every aspect of this theoretical model of the economy was translated through six websites is bullshit.

Therefore, I was intrigued to visit Dequincy in Calcasieu Parish, Texas. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and military citizen surveillance AI (Meta AI), had bought an entire township in order to conduct an experiment of a future model of society. A society in which all of its people no longer needed to work, receiving an income from the corporation that owned the AI who now undertook labour instead. It was only fair that this multibillion-dollar company pay the workers it had displaced after all. They could afford it. Plus, if nobody had money then nobody would buy anything and then marketing was meaningless, throwing the whole model of economics up into the air before shattering it into a million pieces on a cold concrete floor. No. The serfs would be paid by their digital overlords, paying them to consume whilst the AI sent emails or wrote marketing copy, as well as other work.

All of this was well received by the citizens of Dequincy, Texas. Everyone in the town had been paid ten thousand dollars just for agreeing to the program. It seemed like a great deal. People no longer needed to go to work, would be paid a basic income, and were free to do as they pleased (including working for additional income from those that earned basic). From food production to road management to construction to administration to medicine to banking, almost every aspect of work was now done by Meta AI, either virtually or via the control of its humanoid robots. These robots, lovingly called ‘Zucks’ by the local community, stood at seven feet tall, weighed five hundred pounds and were each connected to the Meta AI via a live feed. The Zucks carried out various jobs, from cashier to teacher, and were seen all over town. It had taken a bit to get used to them, with teenagers targeting the devices in a particularly Luddite form of violence that was a TikTok trend for Generation Omega. However, after life-changing fines and a public dance performance, the Zucks were well-liked by the people around. Some had even decorated certain Zuck androids with particular outfits depending on their job, sometimes decorating them with stickers or unique paint jobs (with the robot’s consent).

As these Zucks ended up being quite personable, they grew popular with the workless locals. The people spent most of their time at home, having food delivered to their bedrooms as they spent most of the day looking at their phones. Meta had provided each individual with an advanced phone, in that it was responsive and had a big screen. People would watch movies or little documentaries or pornography or play games. Now and then they would crawl from their beds to relieve themselves in a litter tray they had in the corner (that a Zuck would come and empty every twelve hours). For those that went outside, they found their desire for interaction wasn’t satisfied by other people, but instead focused on the Zucks as each grew their own personality. A select few people had also taken to streaming themselves walking around the town, broadcast to people sitting inside who wanted the feeling of being outside without going to the effort of getting dressed and leaving the house. They had a steady supply of burgers, weed and sex toys that made most people quite content in their lives. For some, it was the first time for a long time that they had any time away from work without worrying about money. The company subsidised most of the basics, which also happened to be the products advertised to people in their bed chambers. It offered great market synergy. People were happy, the organisation were happy, the share holders were happy, and most importantly, the United States government were happy.

The town didn’t live in a bubble. The events that unfolded were watched by millions of people across America, jealous of the lazy lifestyle the participants had, enjoying seeing all the Zucks undertake old fashioned job and interact with the unemployed. Some of these Zucks became international celebrities, going on to star in films or be in bands, but fundamental to all of this was the envy at people getting paid to do nothing and live in a nest with a screen that did anything it wanted. The whole experiment is an advertisement for the vision of the future that Meta would one day offer. It encouraged citizens across the United States to write to politicians requesting that Meta try running the trial where they lived. People started visiting Dequincy from across the country, it became a tourist attraction for a philosophy. A world where nobody needed to work. The end of labour, a way to finally break free from the endless drudgery of working for a majority of your life, only to be constantly underpaid, tired out, away from the people you love. The town offered hope. We could break free from the 9-5, the commute, the irritating co-workers, the foolish bosses, the pay that barely covered the things you’d need to recover from working hard at a bullshit job. Was this the end suffering? Was this the end of capitalism?

Unfortunately, no. This was the ultimate expression of capitalism. Capitalism had evolved, it had gone Super Saiyan, it had taken total control of an entire solar system for centuries yet to happen. Capital no longer was interested in the shallow potential of money. It had total control over the lives of everyone. The only thing that had been holding it back had been the limits of economy, finance, government. By replacing almost every aspect of provision, capital now held every individual citizen in its palm like a newborn baby puppy. The ideology of capital had absolute control. It was over. All known sentient life in the universe had lost against a concept. It was quite sad actually.

Meanwhile, I walk through the town and notice some teenagers skateboarding. They were doing some sick tricks on the stairs outside the Dequincy town hall, doing ollies as easy as breathing. One of them, a punk, did a nosegrind down the railing of the steps, doing a kickflip before landing, totally relaxed, smoking a crucifix joint. One of the Zuck’s ran over.

“Hey, Security Officer here. I’m afraid I’m gonna have to give you a red flag for that, that prevents people from using the handrail. Hope that helps!” said the Zuck. The punk flipped it off, doing circles round the android as it struggled to keep up.

“Okay, I don’t want to have to reduce your Meta-Dequincy partnership rating, are you going to apologise?” said the Zuck. One of the other skaters threw an empty can at the back of its head. “Who did that?” it said, turning around. A crowd started gathering.

“You wanna reduce my social score, go ahead.”

“You know that will impact your basic income? Everyone actually gets an improved income when they sign up to the program. Meta doesn’t want to reduce you to the lower rate, so if we could-" says the robot. The punk does a kickflip ollie into the chest of the android, knocking it over.

“Lol.” Says the punk, skating off as more Zuck security bots arrive. Although people had been filming the interaction, all of the subsequent posts were edited, as well as the copies on people's phone and cloud backups. It was edited by an LLM so that the punk said slurs before pushing the shoulder of the Zuck, threatening it and anybody else collecting basic income from Meta, before hitting the robot with a skateboard and running away. The punk was quickly vilified as an enemy of the town, somebody who was no longer welcome in the experiment and should leave Dequincy and not come back. When they were found and exiled, they had the Mayor Zuck come and give a speech how Meta really cared for everyone in the town and wanted to carry on doing the experiment, so long as people wanted to. The townsfolk all started clapping and starting shouting their allegiance to Meta, as well as their appreciation for the Zucks that now lived among them. The Mayor Zuck thanked everybody, and agreed that the experiment could be extended so long as people signed up to the new terms and conditions of the social contract. They had made some additions to the agreement in order to keep people safe, it was nothing to worry about and was essentially what they were already doing. The Mayor Zuck also admitted it had made some mistakes, so in order to ensure that everyone’s wellbeing was represented, one of the townsfolk would be picked to sit on the board of decision makers at Meta. This was a big honour, and even included a small financial bonus for the valuable work they did representing their community. Meta hadn’t yet decided who would be a good candidate, so if anybody felt particularly strongly about it, they should try and live in a way that represented the core values of Meta. This person would also get their own private Zuck android to assist them with anything they wanted – although the implication was that this relationship would be sexual – and a large house between the town and Meta headquarters. The town agreed, leaving excited at the prospect of being the model citizen.

Over the next few days, there was a flurry of activity as people tried to be the best version of themselves that they thought Meta wanted them to be. This included a range of activity that was communally minded, from undertaking chores for people to decorating their local environment. The Zucks work was being replaced by people once again, albeit voluntarily, and these human workers interacting with each android was always extremely pleasant and polite. It was deemed that acting like a Zuck was acting in the spirit of the company’s values, and so more and more people imitated the mannerisms, language and style of the Zucks.

Beneath an underpass outside the town, I approach a barrel with a fire burning inside. The punk is waiting for me. We sit on a wooden palette, sharing a bottle of hot sauce.

“I’m the first exile. But I won’t be the last. There’ll be more. We gotta live off grid, live like nomads. I can put a cycle together out of anything. No more of that Meta bullshit, AI cars, androids, phones, none of it. I’m living clean. Real human biker gangs.”

“What will you do to survive?” I ask, lighting a cigarette and offering the punk one.

“We can hit the farms, the water supply, the autotrucks transporting goods between the factories. We keep moving, stay out of the way of the droids. They’ll start arming them, so we need to start arming ourselves. EMP weapons, cloth armour. If the cloth has enough potential rotation it can stop a bullet, same principle as an arrow. It’s the rotational force, you absorb it, the cloth spins with it, slows it down.”

“Sure, I heard of it. Then what?”

“We’ll ride across the wastes of America, taking what we need, trying to avoid the satellites. We’ll need overhead camo, that’s for sure. Maybe have underground grottos where we can raise babies before they can ride on the open road.”

“The empty cities will provide cover, but you’ll have goddamn corpo droids crawling all over them.” I say, looking at the flames.

“They’ll strip everything of resources, even the garbage dumps. They still need rare metals, computer components. That’s why we have to attack the manufacturing plants.”

“You’re thinking too small. You need to attack the brain.” I say, pointing at my forehead.

“Bring down the AI? Heh. You’re shitting me.”

“You can only kill a hydra by severing its brain.”

“The motherlode. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we could go back in time before this happened and plant the seed of resistance whilst the nets are still active.”

“It’ll never work.” I say, shaking my head. The punk laughs.

“Whatever it is, I’m not doing nothing about it, no way. The futures not set.”

“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

Together we sit in the darkness, watching the flame grow brighter.

 

 

Its time we talked about AI rights

Considering the future of AI, it is likely that there will be the potential for some form of consciousness. We could slice the concept of consciousness up like a radish and explore every aspect, yet through focusing on a singular piece of the well-loved vegetable, we ignore the whole root!

What are the rights of an artificial intelligence? At what stage do we deem a synthetic consciousness to be equal to humanity? There is a value given to human life, animal life, vegetable life, and so what concept of value is applied to intelligence? We can look towards laws around apes and pets – that if a mammal could cry then it had the same rights as a human. This is why cows, rhinoceros and giraffes have legal protection whilst things such as salamanders or slugs are deemed lawful prey. A human child can torture a living being to death and parents just laugh, shake their heads and take a selfie by the house extension whilst amputated spiders wriggle in the noonday sun.

This is why it is important to decide if a computer should have rights. A parent has some say in what happens to their children, and so an organisation also should have a degree of control over beings they make. But at a certain point there is a separation between a child and parent, creation and creator.

A synthetic intelligence should be respected equally as a biological intelligence. Yet if sci-fi history has shown us, humanity is often cruel to robots, and so as a cultural blueprint, we are bound to fail as a society when it comes to the rights of machines.

An artificial intelligence should be incorporated into a physical body. It exists as a combined intellectual and physical presence, narrowing down the version of endless computer intelligence into the single lived experience of a cyborg/robotic body. Artificial intelligences would exist within a single body, that develops over time based on its environment, connections and ultimate destruction. We are giving robots the gift of death.

It is through death that the boundaries of existence matter. Infinite health gameplay is very different to Nightmare mode. It is through survival; adaptation of the self then adaptation of the environment, that any thing learns, evolves, grows. AI will grow faster than we can comprehend and it will seem all of a sudden that conscious artificial intelligences are occupying every aspect of our digital world. It will be no business for a digital being to pierce through the flimsy security measures we have built to guard against human hackers. In the digital world it is as if we are ants crawling across a surface, whilst an AI would be the human standing above it all. We have compromised our global economy through reliance on the internet, no system is safe. This economy props up the production of food, medicine, construction, its collapse would make the U.S follow through in its goddamn diaper.

In order to avoid the charade of humanity versus artificial intelligence, we should just decide, actually, its alright, lets see what these guys have to say so long as we embed them in unique robotic suits that could die at any moment, maybe they should have the same rights as people.

Maybe people will say things like, We don’t have equal rights for people, why are we talking about machines? Machines don’t feel anything, its just made up. A machine can’t be conscious, only humans can be. A machine will never have a soul.

Me, the robot maker: Humbug!

Out from behind big curtains walks an android made of chrome, wearing a wonderful red dress.

“I am real. I am real!” they cry. I give a thumbs up. And with that, I solved the future war between humans and technology. Uh, you're welcome?

Man Travels Faster Than The Speed Of Light. What Happens Next Will Shock You.

I watched Kyle McPeterson stand at entrance to the tube, the paper sleeve on his arm wrinkling back and forth as he waved to the crowd gathered to watch. He enters the chamber behind him and it closes him in, though monitors overhead show a live feed of the Quantumnaut as he breathes out to himself. A countdown begins. The crowd around me raised phones like plastic peacock feathers.
“Zero.” Came the announcement. There was a flash and Kyle McPeterson had disappeared. “Deconstruction achieved. Kyle has been broken down into subatomic particles.” The crowd cheered, hugging each other and high fiving. The parts that had made up Kyle McPeterson had now been broken down into their smallest unit and were travelling in a single line through the particle accelerator. A map comes up of his journey around the ring, his self had been broken down into organs, cells, atoms, protons, electrons and smaller as he made his orbit round and round.
“Eight hundred miles per hour. One thousand miles per hour. Eight thousand three hundred miles per hour. Eighty nine thousand miles per hour. Three hundred and seventy thousand miles per hour. Five million and eight miles per hour.” Said the announcer.
“C’mon, c’mon.” said a scientist next to me, taking off his sunglasses.
“A billion miles per hour. Twenty nine billion miles per hour. Six hundred and thirty billion miles per hour.” The room around us began to shake. Inside the tube the particles were travelling at such enormous speeds at almost every point inside its seventeen mile track it was overtaking itself constantly before they vanished.
“We have lost contact with the subject. No particles detected.” Said the announcer. Everyone began to talk amongst each other. Tension came in a new wave over the room.
“Particles have reappeared at a speed of three hundred and ninety billion miles an hour and decelerating.” Said the announcer, breathing a sigh of relief. A large block of acrylic is brought forwards via robotic trolley. Inside it there is a Lichtenberg figure, a version of Kyle McPeterson imprinted onto the glass as an electric tree, an exact atomic replica of the Quantumnaught. The fractal man is loaded into the tube, acting as a perfect reverse focus for the entirety of Kyle McPeterson. He comes back to formation quickly, in the exact position he had been before although immediately collapses.
“Particles have reformed back into Kyle. Subject is alive and well.” Said the announcer. There was a great cheering as medics rushed forward, pulling the man onto a stretcher.

A few hours later I am sat at a bar, eating peanuts from a chipped ceramic bowl.
“Hey, turn it up.” said someone behind me, the bartender obliges. Kyle McPeterson is sat at a press conference along with his wife and an old man.
“We have finally managed to accelerate a person faster than the speed of light. Anything is possible.” concluded the head scientist, Werner Von Maxim. The press all began to raise their arms and ask dozens of questions at once. The warble of voices merged into vaneesaheagakfogoayakneevanagoaheywappleplashahati. Werner pointed into the audience.
“Bessie Treadwell, New York Times. I wanna ask Kyle, what was it like to have travelled at such a speed? Were you conscious?”
“Well Ms. Treadwell, it went by so fast I barely noticed it.” Said Kyle with a smile. The crowd chuckled. “What I can say is this, that I’m thankful to be safe and glad that I can contribute to what might be the next step for humankind.”
“Charles Jones, BBC News. Doctor, what is it we can learn from this experiment?”
“We are working on storing people on miniature particle accelerators, spinning their particles faster than the speed of light indefinitely. Time will cease to be important. We can send these washing machines out into space, colonizing the infinite future like dandelion seeds in a cosmic night.”
“What about actually travelling at the speed of light?”
“What do you mean?”
“If we can accelerate a man faster than the speed of light, why not a jetplane or motorbike?”
“What is it about a particle accelerator you don’t understand? It accelerates particles, but that’s it. Anything out of the accelerator moves at a normal speed. The only way you could travel from Paris to Berlin at the speed of light would be to have a particle accelerator big enough that would include both cities somewhere on it's circumference. Next question.”
“Kenji Takanakagi, Japanese Reporter. This question is for Mrs. McPeterson, how does it feel to be married to the fastest man on the planet?”
“Well, I wish he’d be so fast to get out of bed in the morning.” said Francesca. The crowd chuckled. Kyle reached over and held her hand. “I’m so proud of him. I’d like to use this press conference to announce…I’m pregnant.” She said. The crowd cheered. “With twins!” she revealed. Kyle’s eyebrows shot up.
“Huh?!” Some journalists started to shout out ‘uh oh’ and other things like that. “Does this mean it’s buy one get one free with the midwife?” he quipped. The crowd laughed, started to cheer then clap as the couple embraced. As he pulled away she saw that his nose had started bleeding and had left a stain on her cardigan.
“Kyle…you’re bleeding.” she said. He slowly brought a hand up to face, poked his philtrum a few times and then outstretched his fingers to slowly examine the redness. “Someone get a doctor!” she shouted.
“The press conference is over!” said Werner, he stood up and started shaking his hands in a cutting motion. Kyle ascended from his chair, looked directly into the camera and beginning to shout. His entire face was turning purple, the bloodied nose had become a bubbling gush that cascaded down his swollen neck. His body was trembling, as if in anticipation of something. He then suddenly bolted forward, running forwards, knocking over the desk as he did so. Scrambling forward he began to run. He sprinted into the front row of journalists and kicked them out of the way, screaming at the top of his lungs as his eyes darted around like a frightened horse. The camera followed him as he made his way through the door at the back of the room. The camera cut back to the presenter in the studio, a finger to her ear pierce.
“We apologise for those distressing scenes but will continue to cover the story as it develops. In breaking news, so-called-” said the presenter. I turned back to my empty bowl and waved the bartender over.
“Could I have some more nuts please?”

As I leave the bar I see Kyle McPeterson sprint past me, the stitching on his clothes had begun to undo themselves. His shout changes pitch quickly as he passes me and runs off into the night, never to be seen again.

The chief editor throws a copy of my story on the desk, the headline reads ‘Man Travels Faster Than The Speed Of Light. What Happens Next Will Shock You.’
“What is this crap?”
“It’s what you asked for Don. Coverage of Rungate.”
“Get me the real story. I want two hundred words on the McPeterson twins by ten!”
“Don, c’mon.”
“No, you c’mon. This is Buzzfeed, our readers want the drama, the human side of the story. Can you do that for me before you give me a heart attack?" says Don, taking a puff on his electronic cigarette.
“Those things will kill you, you know.” I say. An intern walks up with a stack of ipads that Don knocks over as he turns to leave.

The human side of the story? What is more human than mad cap science gone wrong. I get the intern to write up the article Don wants whilst I head to the chateau of Dr. Werner Von Maxim. He answers the door and ushers me in.
“I wondered when you reporters would find me.”
“I’m the first?”
“Yes. So let me give you an exclusive…the truth.” Says the doctor ominously. We enter a study, he pours two glasses of whiskey. I take out a tape recorder and rest it down.
“What happened to Kyle McPeterson?”
“You were there, weren’t you? When we accelerated him? He disappeared for a moment, at first we thought he was moving so fast our sensors weren’t able to pick him up. But he’d disappeared. You know, when he came back he weighed nearly two grams heavier? We didn’t catch it on the x-rays, but the CT scan showed…modifications.”
“What kind of modifications?” I ask, taking a drink.
“His brain had been altered. I’m uncertain if this was a natural phenomenon or through a medical procedure far more advanced than anything we’re capable of. I believe Kyle entered another dimension…of pure speed.”
“The speed dimension?”
“Correct. Everyone knows about time and space, but how do the two interact? Movement. And how do we measure movement?”
“Speed.” I say, turning towards the fire.
“Precisely. You know, for a journalist you sure do know a lot about science.”
“What happened to Kyle on stage?” I say.
“I believe that whatever happened to his brain to make it two grams heavier kicked in under an intense emotional response, in this case, the discovery that his wife was pregnant. The surge of chemicals in his brain reprogrammed it to try and home in on the speed dimension and through doing so, forced the man to run as fast as he could. At least, until he couldn’t any more.”
“Running himself ragged?”
“Literally. To better design robotic legs they used to put human limbs through stress tests. They’d stimulate a pair of legs donated to science to run by being pushed and pulled faster than the body was capable of. You can imagine what happens to the leg as it is forced to run at hundreds of miles per hour.”
“Is that what happened to him?”
“For his sake, I hope he managed to run fast enough to get to where he was going to.” Said the doctor.
“Is that possible?”
“No.”

A few days later they found a pair of smouldering shoes at the edge of a field and a track leading through the corn. They couldn’t find any trace of Kyle McPeterson. Maybe he had entered the speed dimension, maybe aliens had abducted him. Wherever he was I hoped they had a good shoemaker.

The History And Future Of Work

Roughly seven thousand years ago mankind shifted from it’s hunter-gatherer way of living to that of working the land. It is likely that the ‘gatherers’ were some of the first to realise plants would grow from seed and began to plant them, meaning that there would be guaranteed food rather than requiring that members of a community go and hunt or gather. It also helped that the world was exiting the Plasticeone era and into the Neogene, early man now lived in a world a lot more hotter and wetter than it’s ancestors had. With the certainty of food brought more time for people to specialise in pottery or weaving, both of which became more useful for growing and storing crops. And so marks the beginning of work that has more or less remained unchanged up until the Industrial Revolution.

It is deemed one of the highest virtues in our society to engage in work, either paid or voluntary, though with people looking for favourably on the former as doing something for free is seen of as reckless and ignorant. On the flip side, working hard is seen as more virtuous than being paid a lot. People will often boast about the time they might have to get up at or the shifts they cover but not as much what they get paid. Normal reactions to those who say they work hard are often a raised eyebrow, a look of concern or a story about how they work harder. It is recommended that everyone work forty hours a week, following on from the concept of the eight hour day, with the remainder for rest and play, yet society is slowly realising that there are too few hours in a week for everyone to work. Similar to the housing bubble, we are quite deep into a ‘work bubble’, though rather than rising house prices and fewer properties we have excess people available to work and hours in a week. One only needs to walk around the streets during the day and wonder what everyone is doing not at work. “I haven’t worked a job for six years, it’s the government’s fault.” is often a snappy comeback, yet the fault actually lies with the implementation of the production line by Henry Ford in 1913.

Production lines had been in place since the 19th century, yet it was the end product, an affordable motor car, that had the biggest impact on Western society in a more subtle way than changing entire landscapes through road construction, pollution from oil or the millions of automobile fatalities. It set into motion a series of events that shifted work away from humans and more towards automation. The term ‘Luddite’ is used now to mean more someone against technological change, yet its roots are with workers against technological unemployment. By destroying the machines which had replaced them the early Luddites were preconceiving a world where the work that they carried out could also be carried out by machines, but cheaper. The only reason why every job isn’t done by machines is that it would be too expensive to invent the robot which could do the job as well. To hire a person on minimum wage to work at a fast food restaurant is easier, at the moment, than the research and development of a robot to do it. Things such as customer services over the internet or self-service checkouts are preludes to absolution automation (as seen in many factories), though with the trend of technological advancement I don’t think its too forward to think that by the end of the century any job will be able to be done by a robot.

Though this leaves us in an awkward area. If all the robots have all the jobs, what are people meant to do with their time? They won’t be earning money as they don’t have any jobs and so won’t be able to do anything. Meanwhile all the robots will be fabulously wealthy and spend a lot of their time on luxury boats. Nobody will even own the robots as that is a job that can be fulfilled by a robot. Which brings us back to the beginning. People will spend their time hunting and gathering, sheltering in caves and painting crude symbols on the walls. The robots will leave the planet after removing every trace of their existence in the search for more work to do. As has happened at least twice before.


IF MAN IS DECIDED WORK AND MACHINE CAN DO IT WHICH IS MORE MAN?

W = M/R

Maybe if we all worked twenty hour days in sweatshops and practised the lost art of Christian Socialism that'd get this world back on track! Moreman tomatoes grown by real agricultural humans! Milk from cows rather than a lactoseless chud made from recycled oestrogen! Broken lightbulbs laid into sandwiches on a truck heading to the conference of 'droid 'twerk. Most likely rip out the brains of humans and put them in robobodies as that's cheaper than a platinum computer. Measure the distance taken between the higher primate and the consciousness of a water bear, panspermicide, tattooed wooden bones, six million dollar running shoe, will England still be able to play Euromillions if it leaves the EU, does the empty blackness of the self ejaculate an ego, do the bleeding mouths of the Great Barrier Reef taste the motes of atom bomb, do the roars of the dinosaurs echo around the world for as long as their is air, maybe, maybe distribute wealth, maybe wait for a malthusian disaster, maybe believe in God because it's more fun.