AI's Children

by Ed Hurst

  Chapter 16

  Tim had given dozens of lectures before outsiders and even in outside lecture halls, but never in front of military commanders and staff.

  He had also never participated in a demonstration. Dax had gotten him invited on the condition that the two of them together demonstrate the difference between what the military cyber warriors could already do versus what Dax alone could do.

  Technicians and even commanders were invited to bring their own sequestered AI devices with encrypted documents. It was something simple and short, which should have made it much harder, since the encrypted samples were small. These would all be unencrypted while they watched, but they weren’t expecting how it worked out.

  First, Dax setup his own device and two weeks beforehand and had invited the cyber warriors to attack. On the day they all arrived in the lavish lecture hall, no one had succeeded in cracking the documents, nor even his login. This was not so unexpected, since Dax had been advertised as a high powered AI technician.

  But for the second part, he didn’t collect anyone’s devices at all. He simply asked that they all turn them on and hold them, watching to insure no one tampered with them. He then began displaying each person’s decrypted documents in random order with their names. The look of shock on the faces of the professional cryptologists was priceless. Dax’s boss mustered all of his professional control to keep from falling in the floor laughing.

  Then Tim stood and the hubbub died down to a few frantic whispers as the nerds in uniform bickered back and forth.

  “My brother, Lieutenant Brood, didn’t crack any of your devices,” he announced casually. There was another wave of murmuring. He allowed it to crescendo and die back down. “He simply asked AI to tell on you all.” Again came the wave of murmuring.

  “All of you developed your encryption systems over the subspace network. Everything you did via that network still floats in subspace somewhere. AI is a single entity working as the single traffic server for the entire world – the universe, actually. Had you managed to keep it off the subspace network, as well as the old Internet, since AI owns that, too, then you might have only slowed AI down as it used global quantum computing power to factor it out. Apparently none of you were paranoid enough to try that.”

  Numerous red faces appeared among the technicians as commanders looked disapprovingly at them.

  “So while it might have delayed things, you still would have been cracked because that same AI is behind all but the most primitive digital computers in museums today. All your software is written by AI. My brother and I grew up with AI; it was fairly new when our father was young and first got involved. We’ve never been without it.

  “It’s not as if we are somehow best buddies with AI and get special favors. You all could have the same leverage if you could learn how it works. I can’t teach that to you in a single session, but I can introduce to you the basic concepts.

  “You have all spent your entire lives under certain basic assumptions about reality. I’m not going to tell you those assumptions are wrong, but that those ideas don’t go far enough. You operate under a constrained system of logic. Yes, logic needs exclusions or it’s not logic. But standard Western logic and reasoning only covers a limited subset of what you could know if you were ready to operate on a quantum level.

  “Quantum computing would naturally have quantum logic. You all have some idea how complicated that can be, so much so that we have long since allowed the computers themselves to write their own software and make their own hardware. We try to keep track but the kind of technology that opened the door to quantum computing, now a couple of generations ago, was just the gateway – and those technicians hardly understood it themselves. Once it took off without them, they hardly kept up with it any more.

  “But it’s not as if we cannot have that quantum logic. It simply can’t be handled by the old form of abstract reasoning. We have to understand the logic that AI itself uses. Otherwise, AI will remain opaque to your understanding and you’ll be vulnerable to those who do understand it. While I’ve been lecturing about this for some months now, I assure you what you’ve seen today has not been demonstrated anywhere else. Most people who attend my lectures have an academic interest. You should now have a dire need to at least try to understand it on a level other audiences won’t yet for quite some time to come.”

  And so it went for a full two hours as Tim laid out the concepts in the language he had honed over the past few months. It was inevitable that the minds of most technicians were closed once he got beyond a certain point. It was visible to him, Dax and the colonel. Still, it was utterly necessary to try. In the end, Dax found himself working with just a mere handful who were ready to absorb the moral imperatives of AI.

  It was enough. The work began in earnest that same afternoon as the smaller group voluntarily stayed behind for more concrete demonstrations and the first few lessons in the complex gestures and language of AI.

  The necessity of drilling with the gestures for a few days tied up the group initially and left Dax with just a bit of free time. Thus, when his boss called him in one morning, he realized it was time to go to work on something else entirely. “Let’s go for a ride, Son.”

  The colonel led him outside to a small contracted moving van. It disguised what was inside the cargo bay: a command center. The colonel greeted the lone occupant and introduced Dax to her, noting simply that she was his distant cousin. She wore a senior police uniform. Along one side of the interior of the van was a series of large display screens.

  “Dax, hook yourself into those three there” his boss said, pointing. “I’ll tell what they should display later.”

  Dax complied by gesturing at the screens with his watch hand. Each came up quickly with something he designed as a standby image that had meaning only to him.

  The colonel leaned back in his chair. “Let’s go over this one more time for my cousin’s sake.” Dax nodded. “You can tell AI to tweak a hefty scanner to analyze a good sized building and identify most, if not all, of the people inside. Right?”

  “Yes, Sir. If they are in the government’s ID database, AI can usually match DNA with scanner results.”

  The colonel turned with a grin to his cousin who was listening intently. “And then you can pick them out on that list and stun each one individually all at once so they can be handled without violence.”

  “Yessir.” Dax understood the mission now.

  One of the displays was linked to a camera looking forward over the cab of the truck. Several other screens were split between more cameras mounted on the vehicle, but Dax recognized where they were based on the forward looking display. This was an ugly part of town, not so different from where Dax’s father lived when he first discovered The Brotherhood. The vehicle had stopped near a row of police vans, around which stood a sizeable number of officers donning tactical gear – a raid was forming.

  The woman spoke now. “In a moment we will pull forward and the scanner will be turned on a large block of apartments. We’ve had reports that a number of petty criminals live here, have gotten organized to coordinate their crimes, and we’ve had trouble catching them. There are too many ways out of this place and we can’t cover them all. We simply don’t have the personnel. We’ve tried to get authorization to bring in extras for a sweep, but the trouble has escalated rapidly while the government seems to have started moving slower than usual on our request.”

  The colonel piped up with, “You don’t need to worry about who’s who. That’s her game. This is not a government owned vehicle and we’re just here to provide a little technical expertise. She’ll run down the list and ID who to stun and where they are so they can be arrested. You just tag them so AI knows who to hit when she gives the signal.”

  Dax raised one eyebrow, but said nothing.

  After some chatter through a communication channel, she ordered the driver to pull forward. At the next corner, they turned down a narrow street and pulled into a pa
rking area. It was just barely large enough to accommodate the truck. They were positioned at the foot of a large apartment building.

  The woman looked at Dax and nodded. He ordered the scanner up on one screen and began getting instant results. On the screen next to that was displayed a diagram of the building with a series of sequential numbers. On the third screen was displayed a running list that matched the numbers to a long roster of IDs. She began picking through the list and tagging some of them.

  It was all done in a matter of seconds, but the tagging was the slowest part.

  Finally, she spoke on the communicator again and looked at Dax. He ordered the tagged list stunned. Within a minute the sound of police shouting could be heard outside the truck as they swarmed past in tactical gear and began combing the building. By pairs they had been assigned to different locations in the building to find and detain their targets.

  In just a half-hour, the entire list of people had been trussed up and placed in the waiting vans with only incidental violence from resident rowdies who didn’t understand what was happening with all the police around. A large group of uniformed officers was roaming leisurely through the various rooms collecting evidence. The woman was profuse in her thanks, clearly relieved at how easily the whole thing had come off.

  The colonel was grinning from ear to ear as he savored the thought of how this could be used in other ways.