by Amy Webb
The lack of interoperability between AI frameworks and systems led to segregation by PDR and household, and that is why we now have a digital caste system. By choosing Google, Apple, or Amazon, you are forced to align your family values with the values of the corporation. Apple families are rich, maybe a little less AI-savvy, and live in fancy houses. Google families might be rich and techy, or middle class and fine with marketing, or complacent enough that having a lot of choices in life doesn’t matter all that much. There is no way to sugarcoat Amazon families: they’re poor, even if they have free access to cool gadgets.
Families are locked into their PDRs, and that designation travels with them. It’s easier for a Google Yellow family to port into the Blue or even Green level than an Amazon to port into the Apple system. That’s why most families opted-in to Google when they had the opportunity. Your status is visible to all of the AIs you interact with. Self-driving taxi services like Lyft, Uber, and CitiCar don’t pick up Amazon riders with as much frequency, and cars sent to them tend not to be as nice. Waymo cars exclusively pick up Googlers. For Greens, the car is preset to the rider’s desired temperature and ambient lighting scheme, and it drives along the rider’s preferred routes. Yellows are subjected to advertising their entire trip.
Advertising isn’t the only headache for Yellow Googlers. One downside to all the subsidized (or free) gadgets, appliances, and gear offered to Google Blue, Google Yellow, and Amazon families is that it’s impossible to disconnect the AI health and wellness minders, which continually monitor, diagnose, and nudge. When they were built, computer scientists defined health and wellness with rigidity out of necessity. Now the collective values of AI’s earlier tribes are an oppressive souvenir of a simpler time. A failure to comply with health and wellness minders results in a litany of consequences.
Remember those Amazon Lockers, which you used many years ago to pick up all the things you ordered on the Amazon app and on Amazon.com? They made their way into Amazon Housing. The US Health and Human Services Department thought nudging poor people was a clever way to improve health and wellness, so the department issued new policies requiring all public housing customers to be outfitted with Locker technology. The Lockers may look like ordinary pantries, refrigerator doors, and closets, but they act like AI-powered juries. If an Amazon Housing customer hasn’t had her exercise that day, the Locker system will decide to keep the freezer closed and won’t let her eat ice cream.
We feel the negative consequences of things that give us pleasure outside our Apple, Amazon, and Google homes, too. High-tech brothels, staffed with AI-powered sexbots, are socially acceptable because they offer a clean, disease-free alternative to sex with other people. The brothels operate on their own platforms, and they require a membership, which allows you to build and train an AI personality. (Or personalities, for those who can afford the premium package). You simply choose a body and look into its eyes—tiny smart cameras scan and recognize your face. Once your companion wakes up, they chat with you as if no time has gone by and they are responsive to your every desire and command. You find regular sex, with regular people, an utter letdown.
It’s not impossible to intermarry—occasionally an Amazon will marry into an Apple family—but that old adage “opposites attract” no longer applies. All of our AI-powered dating services now match us based on our PDRs and our status. On the one hand, we no longer suffer under the tyranny of choice since dating AIs have drastically reduced the selection of possible suitors. Yet some choices that once made us uniquely human—like May-December romances or dating someone our parents don’t approve of—are less available to us now. In America, society is beginning to feel uncomfortably Huxleian, as we acquiesce, get married, and have babies with our fellow Apples, or Google Blues, or Amazons.
Just as predicted, AI and automation begin to obviate jobs—far more jobs than we’d anticipated. The widespread technological unemployment that had long been on the horizon arrived, but not at all how we’d imagined. We were prepared for unemployed truck drivers, factory workers, and laborers, but our projections were wrong. We kept assuming that robots would take over all the blue-collar jobs, but it turns out that building physical robots capable of doing all that physical labor was a far more difficult task than we’d ever imagined, while cognitive tasks were easier to program and replicate. Ironically, it is the knowledge workers who are no longer needed.
As a result, America and its allies have an immediate and critical need for the all the blue-collar jobs we said would be gone. We simply don’t have enough highly skilled plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. Robots can’t provide the human touch we desire, so we also have an immediate need for massage therapists, nail technicians, estheticians, and barbers. We’re experiencing a backlash against automation, too. Most people don’t want their coffee drinks and cocktails made by robobaristas and robobartenders. We want human companionship along with whatever’s in our cups. Our laser focus on STEM-first education at the expense of liberal arts and vocational programs was somewhat misguided. Blue-collar workers are inheriting the Earth, not the meek computer scientists and techies. The nerds programmed themselves out of work.
Without intending to, Google, Amazon, and Apple create a trifecta within AI, which leads to massive consolidation. In America and throughout all of our trading allies around the world, we have spectacular new products—but very little choice. For example, you can pay and upgrade to OmniVision smart glasses, which allow you to see beyond the biological limits of human vision. But only two companies make them: Google and Apple. If you don’t like their designs, or if they don’t fit the unique shape of your face and ears, you’re out of luck. Amazon sells anything and everything you can imagine, but everyday necessities are the company’s own branded products. In democratic nations worldwide, we have an abundant supply of things to buy, but variety and choice in the marketplace is tightly controlled. Even though we have money to spend, we have very little purchasing power. In an odd way, it reminds us of the old Soviet Union.
Salesforce, the customer relationship management and cloud computing company, partnered with Google, Amazon, and Apple very early on to build out an education module for our PDRs. Now the rigorous testing and classification that were hallmarks of American education in the 1980s and 1990s are popular again. Our cognitive abilities are assessed before preschool, and our academic achievement and enrichment is tracked throughout our lives.
Metrics and optimization have always been core values at Salesforce, and now they are core values of an American education. Concerned that we’ve replaced wisdom with an accumulation of now useless information, our educational leaders discarded the Common Core curriculum in favor of something new. With the American workforce in crisis, students are divided into two categories during their kindergarten entrance exams: vocational or executive. Vocational students are trained for agility across disciplines, while executive students are trained in critical thinking and management. There is no need for the kinds of skills possessed by middle managers, since most middle managers and entry-level knowledge workers are now AIs.
With unemployment in unexpected sectors; crime is up—but not for the reasons you think. AI-powered policing software didn’t work as promised, so our crime statistics don’t accurately represent the real world. The algorithms built by AI’s tribes and trained on a limited set of data never learned how to correctly identify and classify a gender-nonconforming person—someone who identifies neither as female nor male and might look completely androgynous, or who might have both a beard and eyelash extensions. As a result, hundreds of people who don’t satisfy the characteristics of one traditional gender are falsely accused of identity theft every single day: when they try to pay using face recognition, as they move around their offices, and when they try to video chat. For now, the only solution is to assimilate during certain transactions. They are forced to put on a gender-specific wig or to remove their makeup in order to temporarily become a distinct him or her in the eyes
of a computer-vision AI. It’s a humiliating and public reminder that diversity never really mattered enough to fix a broken system.
AI bestows immense economic power on Google, Apple, and Amazon—and unimaginable geopolitical and military power on China. By the end of the 2030s, we realize that AI has developed along parallel trajectories, supporting capitalism in the West and China’s brand of communism throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. America and its allies, who once celebrated in the G-MAFIA’s successes, are living under a system of AI totalitarianism. Citizens throughout China and all the countries supported by China’s direct investment and infrastructure find that they, too, are living under a pervasive apparatus of AI-powered punishment and reward.
2049: Biometric Borders and Nanobot Abortions
The G-MAFIA are now just the GAA: Google, Apple, and Amazon. Facebook was the first to declare bankruptcy. The remnants of Microsoft and IBM were acquired by Google.
It is the centennial of the Chinese Communist Revolution and Mao Zedong’s declaration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Grand celebrations throughout all of China’s subsidiary partner countries are planned to honor the late Xi Jinping and the rise of what’s being called the Réngōng Zhìnéng (Artificial Intelligence) Dynasty.
All of humanity is now surrounded by AGI systems, which were supposed to help us lead freer, happier lives. From the very beginning, AI’s tribes in the United States said they wanted us to live our best selves, to pursue creative endeavors, and to collaborate on humanity’s biggest challenges. It was a utopian ideal born in the bubble of Silicon Valley, whose progenitors had completely lost touch with the outside world.
All of these systems were built to make our lives easier but have instead emboldened our laziness. They’ve eroded our sense of productivity and purpose. We rely on systems to make decisions for us. We resign ourselves to limited choices. We are going through the preprogrammed motions of daily living, optimized by AGI for everyone on the planet.
Many AGI systems evolved to compete rather than to collaborate. China’s bacon attacks two decades earlier seem so docile and simplistic now. You’re in an AI-powered prison of your own making. You constantly get locked out of your oven, closets, and bathrooms, and you don’t bother fighting back anymore. There’s no point. The reasonable response, you’ve been taught, is to sit and wait it out. Google Greens and Apple homes can purchase a backdoor premium upgrade, which is supposed to send a repair AGI in to overwrite malicious code—but AGIs are caught in a loop of self-improvement. All the money in the world can’t buy a household out of ongoing system glitches.
A concentration of wealth has allowed the GAA to achieve amazing breakthroughs in health. Google was the first to commercially pilot microscopic, injectable robots capable of delivering medicine to only a specific area of the body or assisting with microsurgery. Nanobots now come in many different forms. For example, there is an autonomous molecular robot made of a single strand of DNA that treats the inside of the human body like a distribution warehouse. The nanobot can walk around, pick up molecules, and deposit them in designated locations. Another variety of nanobot, propelled by gas bubbles, can deliver microscopic amounts of medicine without causing injury. The advent of commercially available nanobots, which share information with our PDRs, have replaced one-size-fits-most medications and therapies, treating our specific ailments without causing side effects.
Now that both Amazon and Apple are offering personalized medicine, most people have willingly injected themselves with organic nanobots. Even Amazon families have access through a subsidized program approved by the US government. Nanobots continually monitor and treat us, so the life expectancy for average Americans shot from 76.1 years in 2019 up to 99.7 years today.6
It didn’t take long for us to see the potential drawbacks of injectable AGI. The nanobots did exactly what their creators had intended. They behave unpredictably and learn. Thinking back now, building and training AI systems to make choices we’d never thought of before was a primary goal of AI’s tribes. It was a key to solving wicked problems that humans alone couldn’t crack. When AlphaGo Zero made autonomous strategy decisions decades ago, we heralded the achievement as a milestone for AI. Inside our bodies, however, nanobots and the AGIs they answer to are self-improving and have more decision-making power than we’d intended.
We now have a new economic chimera of humans. Apple and Google Green homes can unlock superpowers and gain access to enhanced cognition, extrasensory smell, and heightened touch.
Those from Google Blue, Yellow, and Amazon homes not only don’t have access to upgrades—they find themselves biologically restricted. When a person gets pregnant, AGIs continually run predictive models to determine the health and viability of the fetus. What no one saw coming was that AGIs would take goals to an extreme. Because the programmed goal was to support humans as they grew viable fetuses, the AGIs went looking for fetal tissue abnormalities. If one was found, the AGI automatically aborted the fetus, without giving the parent an option to weigh in on that decision.
Similarly, nanobots monitor you as you age, performing a calculation to determine at what point the continuation of your life is more painful than your death. Once you need home health care and become a drain on the established social safety nets, AGIs intervene. Death is induced comfortably so that neither you nor your family has to decide when it’s time to let go.
The laws of GAA countries were superseded once AGIs improved and created the kind of functionality that determines who among us lives and dies. So individual governments around the world have hastily passed regulations and laws. But it is of no use. Prohibiting nanobots would mean returning to the traditional practice of medicine, and we no longer have big pharmaceutical companies manufacturing all the medication we’d need. Even the most optimistic projections show that getting our old health care systems up and running again would take a decade or longer—and in the meantime, millions of people would suffer greatly from a wide variety of illnesses.
Instead, researchers have developed a new kind of AGI nanobot that can control other nanobots within our bodies—mimicking the way our white blood cells fight a virus. Like all of AI, the idea was inspired by human biology. As our bodies fight undesirable AGI nanobots, it’s far worse than the symptoms we used to experience with the flu, and far more dangerous.
Large corporations are led now by CAIOs—Chief AI Officers—who calculate strategic risk and opportunity. Human CEOs work alongside their CAIOs, acting as the “face” of the company. Smaller and medium-sized enterprises—restaurants, maintenance shops, and beauty salons—are all partners of one of the GAA. In addition to personal and household PDRs, every business and nonprofit is now registered, too, with an Organization Data Record.
Yet scores of people in America and our strategic ally countries are out of work. Without a broad enough social safety net in place, Western economies are in sharp decline, as we have yet to recuperate from waves of unanticipated technological unemployment. This has created vulnerabilities—and a window for Chinese investment. Soon, government leaders are forced to choose between economic viability and democratic ideals—an especially difficult decision for politicians facing reelection and under pressure to solve immediate problems at home.
In retaliation, the United States tries to contain China’s expansion through trade blockages, secondary sanctions, and other diplomatic tactics. However, America finds that it no longer has the geopolitical clout it once enjoyed. US leaders spent too many years deliberating rather than acting on China. They made too few trips to Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. They never earned the trust, favor, and friendship of their foreign counterparts.
China’s AI initiatives gather momentum. The social harmony score is now active in more than 100 countries worldwide, and it’s replaced traditional travel papers. China has always excelled at building walls, and the Great AI Wall of China is no exception. It provides both a protective barrier against outsiders and a method
in which to extract and analyze everyone’s data. Those with a high enough social harmony score are granted unfettered (but monitored, of course) access within the Great AI Wall to any of China’s network of connected countries. China has established biometric borders with facial recognition to determine who may come and go. There is no more immigration department to pass through, and there are no more passports to stamp.
There is now a wall at the southern border of the United States. It’s made of sensors and was built on Mexican soil by the Chinese, to keep us in. Since Americans can’t get access to the social credit score, you are denied entry at what used to be your favorite vacation spots: the Bahamas, Jamaica, Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, Costa Rica, and Aruba. If you attempt to cross a biometric border illegally, an AGI emits a sonic attack that causes nausea, concussion, bleeding from your ears, and long-term psychological stress.
Americans and our allies are locked in—and we are locked out of communicating with friends and family members in China’s network of connected countries since the CCP controls the entire network infrastructure that powers them. If you need to contact someone in a CCP country, you must go through China as an intermediary, knowing that every word uttered is being listened to.