ACTIVATION - The GAIA Series: Book One - CHAPTER 4 (of 33)
CHAPTER 4
Ten years later…
Despite Henry’s concerns after the UN AI organization fiasco, the following years go by without incident. Artificial Intelligence is developing, along with its robotic arm.
Robots are now part of the everyday life. They are called ‘personal assistants’. They no longer look like boxes with clumsy movements. They are humanoid in shape. The processing power improvements make it possible for them to have a clear understanding of their environment and to interact with it. Movements become more natural and human-like. But even though the technology is available, robots have never been equipped with artificial muscles, soft tissues, or even hair.
To many people, it is still too early to transition to robots with human physical characteristics. The presence of robots remains disturbing and even uncomfortable sometimes. People need to differentiate themselves from the robots. People need to be able to identify a robot.
The way people work also changes dramatically. Most of the physical tasks are now performed by robots.
Truck drivers have been completely replaced by robots or by self-driving trucks. A lot of corporate functions are replaced by AI. But AI is still closely supervised by humans. The work performed by AI or robots always remains quality-checked by the human eye.
Progress is being made on making AI more and more human. Not in its physical appearance, as AI is still just a program, but more in its capacity to interact with humans. Major strides are made in speech recognition. And it becomes quite normal to see people have general conversations with their computer or with a robot-assistant. Conversations become very natural in their flow and start to feel like talking to another human being.
There are still a few glitches here and there. But nothing alarming. At most, people experience slight problems with appliances that cannot communicate properly as they are running under different AI protocols. But this, also, is getting better.
Cars are for the most part electric now. Gas and fossil fuels are slowly but surely becoming a thing of the past.
It almost seems as if the world has finally become mature and stable. For the people living in that ‘golden age’, life has become sweet and easy.
It also looks like the market has regulated itself and that governments’ intervention is becoming less and less necessary. The world is resting on the laurels of comfort enabled by the technology.
But resting also means dropping guard. Over-confidence has a tendency to arouse threats.
During that same period, a company is also starting to show real signs of market domination. Its growth has been more than exponential in the past few years. That company almost came out of nowhere.
Well, it actually came from an unexpected place.
Indeed, after ‘retiring’ from his work of defining the AI commandments, Henry and his newly found supporters – some of whom were billionaires – embarked on a quest to build a foolproof AI.
What the governments gave up working on, Henry and his team took the responsibility to develop and bring to market.
They worked under the premise that you are never better served than by yourself. Having a good understanding of the pitfalls a poorly managed and supervised AI could create, they took the matter into their own hands and started to develop what they thought would be a ‘human-friendly’ and safe AI.
If the governments refused to follow their recommendations a few years ago, Henry and his team would build what they believed would be the ultimately safest AI. An AI that would meet the requirements Henry and the other philosophers had once defined. They wanted the best solution, the solution that would become the world standard. They believed it was the only way to guarantee safety to its users, and to a larger extent, to mankind in general.
After injecting billions of dollars into the development of AI programs, after acquiring companies that developed the intellectual property they needed to proceed faster in their quest, and after selling their first solution, the company they created soon became a tech behemoth.
The solution they built is selling very well for two reasons.
One, the technology is particularly advanced compared to the competition that is usually selling AI as part of a portfolio of many other solutions. Henry’s company is a ‘pure player’. Everything they do is focused on AI and its applications. The company is also heavily funded and laser-focused on research and development.
And two, the founders are not only made up of former tech moguls, well respected in the industry, but also of Henry. Henry and his background. This man who once stood up alone against the entire United Nations. Together, they inspire trust. And when it comes to AI, especially after the incidents that happened in the past, trust is key.
The company is private. The owners, including Henry, don’t want to be scrutinized by the stock markets. They don’t want their company to be forced to produce financial results for the sole purpose of pleasing its shareholders. They don’t want to manage on a quarterly basis. They have a long-term vision. A vision that cannot and should not be blurred by short-sighted financial markets. They want full autonomy in order not to sacrifice research to paying dividends to shareholders. They simply want to develop the best and the most secure solution the world has ever seen.
That approach plays very well among consumers who do not see the company as a profit-making machine that only benefits its shareholders, but as a solution provider that works for everyone’s well-being.
The company’s name is CES.
Apart from its advanced technology that differentiates it from the other AI companies, it is also mastering the art of marketing its solutions. The company’s product announcements are usually awaited by the entire world as they are always the promise of better and safer tomorrows.
The company’s success is also the result of the security features the CES AI is displaying.
Security has always been a crucial issue for Henry and his fellow co-founders. One of the most critical risk is that someone with bad intentions penetrates the system and either contaminates the entire network with a virus or destroys the system from the inside. Which is more or less the same.
In order to prevent that, CES hires the best cyber security analysts, advisors, and developers. They want their AI to be an impenetrable fortress. They also include self-defense capabilities to their AI. A process by which, based on the entire library of viruses, malware, attacks of any kind, the AI constantly upgrades itself and self-writes lines of codes to protect itself in case of an intrusion.
As soon as something or someone penetrates the system, the AI detects the intrusion and self-writes a code that contains the virus and lets it run in a quarantined area indefinitely. After analyzing the contamination, it destroys it and records the entire process the hacker has used to penetrate the system and corrects whatever weakness is identified.
In order to test its firewall capabilities, CES organizes every year a month-long hacking session. An event where hackers and cyber security specialists from all over the world have full authorization to try and break the AI defense system. There are millions of people from all horizons participating in the event. Experts from security agencies, public or private, all kinds of competitors, from AI companies to antivirus companies, traditional hackers, and many underground individuals from the darker side of the web. Not to mention foreign armies for which cyber security has long been considered a priority against terrorist threats.
It all adds up to millions of brains, of computing power aimed at one single target; the CES AI.
The result is hundreds of thousands of attacks, of strategies, and a long and tiring month of battle for those who try to break into the system.
All of that for absolutely nothing.
Every year the outcome is the same. Not a single breach, not a nanosecond of system unavailability. The CES solution is seen as unbreakable and the safest in the industry. It has to be used by everyone in the world as nothing that exists is more secure.
CES becomes the leading solution on the market. By far.
Its closest competitor represents less than five percent of its size. By any means, CES is an absolute marketing success in the consumer world. Almost every device or appliance contains a CES component, directly linked to a centralized AI system. Autonomous cars run with CES AI. All of the cars that are under CES management are constantly monitored. The speed is known, the direction, the location, the number of passengers. All of this information is analyzed and stored in CES facilities.
Most speech recognition programs are based on CES technology. Most of the data generated by the Internet of Things is processed and analyzed in CES ultra-high-performance computing data centers.
Private surveillance cameras are run with CES face-recognition technology.
Many of the robot-assistants are built on CES technology.
This CES-centric world allows for a multitude of devices to communicate together.
And all that information is stored in vast, highly secured, digital storage vaults. The data security guarantee that CES provides allows consumers to securely put all their personal information into one single CES platform.
And in order to store and process all that data, pharaonic construction sites emerge all over the world. Redundancy is a major element of keeping the data secured and always available. If one site goes down for some reason, another mirror site picks up the data traffic so the end-user does not feel a single second of downtime.
CES covers pretty much every aspect of the consumers’ lives.
During one of its numerous statements, CES announces that it has made dramatic strides in AI.
It confides that the company has been run by their homegrown AI system for the past six months. The Executive Committee agreed to step aside and to let the company run itself. The founders still keep a close look at each and every decision the AI makes on behalf of the company and they have the possibility to take the reins in case of a poor management decision. But they are happy to announce that all AI-made decisions have been reviewed and approved by the committee and that they wouldn’t have decided anything different than what the AI proposed.
It is a great success. And it also becomes a cornerstone in the CES strategy to enter the enterprise market.
The potential promise that a company can be run in a secure, ethical, and responsible manner, based on sound business decisions has become a reality.
The next step in this evolution is to take this capability beyond the walls of a single company and possibly extend it to the entire economy.
Henry believes that using the CES solution everywhere is the only way AI can have a positive impact on people’s lives.
Without noticing it, Henry and his partners, probably blindsided by the cognitive capabilities of the AI they developed, or just because they feel their solution is foolproof, start to slowly deviate from the path they committed to follow and engage in a far more dangerous direction.
A direction where everything that can, will be put under the virtual responsibility of their AI.
Naturally, after consumers, CES moves toward the enterprise market. CES gained a lot of interest and attention from businesses when it announced it had been run by its own AI. Since the announcement, CES was able to successfully link client companies to its own AI.
This transition under the CES AI umbrella is encouraged by major shareholders who see in an AI-run business a way to streamline the organization, to make it more efficient, and to avoid paying huge sign-on bonuses or golden parachutes to senior leaders. In other words, to make more profit and drive their company’s value up.
And they are right. Publicly-held companies that move to the CES AI model are quickly able to showcase the positive impacts the transition has on their results. This free publicity is attracting more and more corporations and requires additional investments from CES to manage this constant influx of new data that needs to be processed.
But CES can handle it.
In order to be even more efficient, more reactive, and less dependent on its suppliers, CES also starts absorbing the companies that are upstream in its value chain.
After merging with component manufacturing companies, CES moves its way up toward raw materials and takes over the mines that supply it with all the core elements its technology requires. All of these decisions are based on financial models built by the CES AI that recommends the end-to-end integration of the production. The AI then streamlines, optimizes and automates operations to generate economies of scale.
Henry and the other founders barely notice the strategy that is crafted, driven, and executed by the AI they have created. They are so confident in the AI’s ability to run the business that they make less effort to review the decisions the AI is proposing. It is also because the company is becoming so large, and so vertically-integrated that it becomes almost impossible for them to understand its complexity anymore.
And as everything seems to run smoothly, to be under control, human alarm bells, or gut feelings, are not triggered.
The AI starts making independent decisions based on logical business rules, disregarding their potential social consequences.
Every single merger operation is followed by a drastic rationalization of the production workforce. It is replaced, wherever possible, by CES robots.
More efficient and cheaper, the robots are building components almost for free that benefit the entire CES value chain. And because of its strategic position, CES can cut retail prices down, while still making a comfortable profit, and increase its footprint even more.
This gives many more consumers the opportunity to buy CES products and has the consequence of literally destroying the competition that is not as efficient and cheap as CES.
The CES reach seems inescapable.
Every single part of CES is now run by the AI. CES becomes an artificial living organism that is growing under the decreasing supervision of its founders.
Thanks to its AI, CES appears as a perfectly managed entity. Governments start considering it for their domestic affairs, wondering which part of their public services they can replace by AI or even by robots.
For decades, governments have been under terrible financial pressure. Many economic crises have led to large national debts. Unemployment is quite high in many countries, as most of the workforce that has been replaced by robots faces difficulties in training and transitioning to new roles, less physical and more intellectual. Unemployment means less fiscal revenue as people cannot pay taxes, and more benefits paid by local social security.
Unbalanced budgets call for dramatic increases in public debt. It eventually reaches a point where it becomes less and less manageable, and more and more expensive.
Governments have to take actions and find ways to rationalize the public spending in order to slow the debt growth.
The CES AI management capabilities have been successfully applied both within CES and also to other companies. Governments now believe it can be applied to them as well.
The successful CES transition from the consumer market to the enterprise market opens the doors to the public sector.
To start with, CES asks governments to get access to all social security data.
Personal medical records are the first data elements that are fed to the CES AI. The goal is to identify patterns, find ways to identify diseases before they actually materialize, and treat them in their very early stages.
Treatments become more efficient and faster. This translates into a greater efficiency of public hospitals, where fewer beds are being occupied by patients, and ultimately leads to the rationalization of these hospitals, meaning savings for the governments.
Identifying problems early is key when it comes to saving costs. And this identification is made possible by transferring every single bit of public data to CES for processing. The governments agree to do so because of the savings the CES technology is promising to generate. And governments know that decreasing debt without increasing taxes will help in the next elections. Governments also know CES security capabilities are so advanced that all the data that is transferred cannot be in a safer place. The only confidential, sensitive data, and access that is not granted to CES is everything that relates to defense.
Defense has to remain under the responsibility of countries.
In no time, most of the public data is transferred to CES. This, along with consumers’ bank accounts, phone accounts, everything that is made of data and that is online, is now managed by CES.
At first, many governments were reluctant to shift to an AI-based management, especially an AI that was foreign. But it didn’t take them long to realize that most of their citizens were already relying on the dominant industry standard and that the countries that had transitioned to the CES AI solution seemed to be performing better than the ones that did not.
In any case, just like an operating system, the CES AI was already embedded in most computers and devices and did not leave many alternatives to whoever wanted to use a different solution. And that was fine because, once again, everyone trusted the application and what it could do for them.
The world is reaching a tipping point. CES and its artificial intelligence system have become the global standard. It is now everywhere, collecting data from everything and using its algorithms to optimize processes, to answer questions, to learn, to develop, and to improve itself. All of the existing information and the one that is created on a daily basis is, in one way or another, transiting through a CES AI device.
Nothing that is information-based is outside of the CES AI’s reach.
Henry and his co-founders have achieved their goal. They have managed to rid the world of all the artificial intelligences they considered weak and poorly secured. They have all been replaced by the only one that is believed safe from external attacks and fully under control thanks to the operating rules Henry has defined.
One might think that the AI operating rules are extremely stringent to limit as much as possible the freedom of thought and the freedom of action of the artificial intelligence.
They are certainly better than the original rule set by the UN AI organization; ‘do not harm humans’.
But not by a lot.
Henry and the team have realized that boxing the AI is also limiting the progress it is able to make.
They quickly came to the conclusion they needed to be more lenient with their ‘child’ and to give it more freedom to express itself.
The rules they defined are considered as rigorous enough while still giving flexibility for the system to evolve and progress. They could be summarized as follows:
- Do not do anything that would harm humans
- Protect yourself from external intrusions
- Act for the ‘greater good’
Of course, each of these rules contains several additional layers of conditions, definitions, and context-setting.
Rules number 2 and 3 are both limited by rule number 1. Self-protection can only go as far as it is not harming mankind.
And the ‘greater good’ does not justify harming a minority so a majority can benefit from something.
Everything is under control. Everything runs smoothly.
... TO BE CONTINUED...
in CHAPTER 5
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