Crisis- 2038

by Gerald Huff

  The reporter asked, “Okay, but what about the construction of those factories? Certainly that will generate new jobs.”

  Nelson said, “Well, I’m not a building engineer, but the plans I’ve seen are using a lot of 3D printed and robot-fabricated structures. I’m not sure we’ll need a lot of labor for construction. And those would be temporary jobs, anyway.”

  “Well, then,” the reporter said somewhat indignantly, “how is your industry going to create a lot of new jobs to absorb the workers you’re displacing in the ranching and meat packing businesses?”

  Nelson shook his head. “We’re not going to. Look, I’m a social entrepreneur and a businessman. My mission is to change the world by competing in the marketplace with an incredible product that consumers value over my competitors’ products. I don’t have a mission to create jobs. Very few businesses have an explicit goal of creating jobs. We only employ the people necessary meet to profitably meet customer demand.”

  Sara nodded into the camera. “Thank you for the question. Who’s next?”

  A man on a remote monitor introduced himself as a columnist for an organic food channel. “My question is for Mr. Ridley. I take some offense at your description of your factory meat as organic. I can’t think of anything more artificial. I also presume you’re using genetically modified cells, so this is a GMO product.”

  “Well, we use cells and chemicals that occur naturally in the relevant mammal or bird or fish. While we do create an artificial environment for growing this meat, we don’t use chemical preservatives or texturizers or flavorings. It’s really not different from what happens inside an animal.” Nelson spread his hands open. “Vegetarians, vegans, and animal rights activists should be celebrating our achievements in industrial meat biofabrication. Now we can make animal protein available to all of humanity at a vastly lower economic and environmental cost, all without harming a single animal ever again.”

  “But it’s a GMO, isn’t it?” accused the reporter.

  Nelson sighed deeply.

  “Excuse me,” said Sara. “I’d like to ask everyone watching or listening to refocus your attention for a moment away from the content of this discussion. Look at the higher-level pattern. We have here an individual who has dedicated his time, talent and treasure to a venture with the goal of helping all of humanity. He is surrounded by equally dedicated and talented scientists and engineers who are pouring their hearts and souls into this effort. They are creating a transformative technology that can provide nourishment to billions and stop devastating ecological damage.

  “But what is the pattern of response from the media, and not just media, but citizens the world over? It is a pattern of rejection, objection, and negativity. A pattern of fitting this achievement into rigid ideological boxes, even when they don’t apply. A pattern that seeks only to score points, to confront, to impede, and to tear down.

  “Of course, we must have strong media that ask tough questions and speak truth to power. Certainly, we should not swing the pendulum all the way to the fawning celebration of all institutions and their activities. That is just as dangerous as where we sit now. I simply ask all of you to consider a more balanced and nuanced approach to every story.”

  Sara held her hands palm up, then moved them slowly up and down. “When the scales of justice weigh each person, company, government, event, and story, they need to start from a neutral position. If you pile your prejudices, preconceptions, and ideologies onto one side of the scale, you will never weigh anything accurately.” She dropped her right hand below her waist and lifted her left above her head.

  “Free yourself from these attachments. Bring your passion, your experience, and your judgment. But, please, weigh your subject with scales that can move easily, not scales that are frozen by your world view. Now, let’s get to some more questions.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  LONDON - DECEMBER 15

  Jill Samborn was awakened at just after 2:30 a.m. by the persistent buzzing of her PNA. “What is it Charlie?”

  “Sorry to wake you, Jill. Unusual network activity has triggered an alert you set up several weeks ago.”

  “What kind of activity?” she asked, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “ProNet agents are being blocked by omnipresence sites.”

  Bollocks! She bolted out of bed to her makeshift home office area and booted her three-display system. After passing the facial and retinal scans she said “Show me RezMat network activity graphs and ProNet autonomous agent status please Charlie.” While her AI compiled the data, she did searches for RealLife news. Sure enough, someone in the States had released a RealLife extension called RingTrue. Secondary OP sites were starting to adopt it. Charlie’s charts showed a five percent drop in RezMat ProNet agent activity due to those sites tagging them as artificial.

  It was wait and see now for when the major sites would get on board. While RealLife was aggressively promoted as guaranteeing only real live humans in OP, the big sites suspected a lot of the engagement they promised to advertisers was really from bots. They would need to do some analysis of RingTrue to assess the potential impact. But eventually the ad-buying networks would insist on adoption. It was only a matter of time.

  Jill debated whether to call her boss Bradley Childress and decided she had best investigate options before waking him up in the middle of the night. She logged into Tribal and downloaded the code and neural net configurations. She was surprised to see the configurations did not incorporate backward chaining explanatory loops, a technology that enabled users to see clearly why an AI had made a particular decision.

  These loops had been standard in AI systems since the Asilomar AI Principles were broadly adopted in the 2020s. In January 2017 more than a hundred and fifty AI researchers and social scientists had gathered at the California coastal retreat of Asilomar to develop a set of principles to guide future AI development. The anonymous author of RingTrue had ignored the principles of transparent decision making and clearly didn’t want the secrets of the detection algorithm to be revealed.

  However, Jill had the advantage of complete knowledge of the agents that RingTrue had detected. It took her four hours of simulations and experiments, but she eventually reverse engineered what the neural nets were looking for. Unfortunately, there was nothing she could do to stop the roll-up of the network. The characteristics of the RezMat autonomous agents that RingTrue was searching for were set in their life histories, accumulated over years and impossible to rewrite.

  Red flashing signals on her third display indicated Facebook had adopted RingTrue. Her AI agents were going dark by the millions. Jill slumped in her chair and sighed. “Charlie, connect me to Bradley Childress, priority call.” Her boss was evidently an early riser, as her AI was able to connect almost immediately.

  “What is it Jill?”

  “I’m afraid those OP scans I told you about have turned into a worst-case scenario. Omnipresence sites are adopting a new RealLife extension called RingTrue that is incredibly accurate at identifying our ProNet agents. We’ve lost ten percent of the network in six hours. Facebook just adopted it. If all global sites pick it up, as I expect they will be pressured to, we won’t have a network by this time tomorrow.”

  “Goddamn it! Can you stop it?”

  “I’ve spent the last four hours going over the code and nets. It can’t be stopped.”

  “Fuck. Where did this Ring thing come from? What’s the potential blowback?”

  “RingTrue. I don’t know, I didn’t investigate that yet, I was focused on stopping it. It was posted to Tribal anonymously. As for blowback, it’s hard to say. With more than one hundred million fake accounts being discovered in a day, it’s bound to hit the media. There’s a lot of data publicly available from those accounts and a lot of unemployed data scientists with the time to nose around in it. The probability of a connection to RezMat is pretty high. But I don’t know of a smoking gun that will be concrete proof.�
�

  “Yeah, but that won’t stop the hordes from spreading rumors with circumstantial evidence. Damn. Okay, I need to prepare a briefing. I want you to focus on RingTrue. Who made it? Was it a competitor? A government? We need to know who we’re up against here.”

  “That’s going to be difficult, sir. The Tribal postings are on an anonymous account and came through encrypted Torpedo sessions. With Torpedo, the origin computer is completely untraceable.”

  There was a significant pause at the other end of the call. “I’ll see what I can do to get you more info.” With that cryptic comment, Bradley disconnected.

  Jill showered and ate some breakfast, her head spinning with theories as to who might be behind this attack and Bradley’s odd statement about getting more information. She felt a strange sadness at the silencing of her agents. Over the years she had come to view them almost like real people. She was studying the RingTrue code, looking for clues, when a chime from her AI assistant alerted her to a message from Bradley. “Check your secure drop box” was all it said.

  Jill logged in to her corporate account and found a large file in the secure area. After re-identifying with a retinal scan she was able to download the file and expand its contents. At first she was confused, because it looked like a clone of the RingTrue repository from Tribal that she had downloaded just a few hours ago. But when she compared the folders side by side, she saw some net configuration files were different sizes.

  Charlie interrupted her with an urgent call from Bradley. “Did you get it?” he asked.

  “Yes, I just downloaded it. What is this?”

  “The folder is an archive of the first version of RingTrue which was posted two weeks before the released version, but then deleted. I need you to figure out who did this and whether we were targeted. Before 9 a.m.”

  “But how did you get these files? How did you extract a deleted repo from Tribal?”

  “That’s none of your concern, Jill. You’ve got the material. Do your fucking job. 9 a.m.” He disconnected before she could respond. Bastard!

  Jill paced around her small apartment for a few minutes trying to calm down. RezMat having back door access to private areas on Tribal was immoral and probably illegal. She stopped in front of her monitors and saw it was almost seven. The deleted archive folder was up on the screen. Why were the deleted files larger than the published ones? Her curiosity and desire to keep her job overcame her anger and she sat down to analyze the differences.

  She downloaded ten million random public OP profiles and ran them against the older archive. Almost one hundred thousand of them came up flagged as artificial. A quick sample of those showed about half were from her own agent network. When she ran the same ten million profiles against the published version, only the RezMat ProNet AI agents were flagged.

  The original version of RingTrue had identified another network about the same size as RezMat’s. But then the author had modified the configurations to only identify her agents. Why? She sampled the OP posts for the unidentified network. They seemed to be random, typical of human posts on politics, sports, commercial products. Not clearly aligned on one topic the way the ProNet agents were primarily pro-technology. Could it be a paid service? AI agents for hire to promote your brand?

  At 8:45 a.m. Charlie chimed with a call from Bradley. “What have you got Jill? Do you know who did this?”

  “No, Brad. But I did find something interesting. The original version of the repo identifies another very large network. The released version was retargeted to only identify our agents.”

  “Another agent network?”

  “Yes, the agents discuss a wide variety of topics, but a lot of politics and some conspicuous commercial product boosting. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a paid promotional service where you could rent a few million bots to promote your cause or brand.”

  “Clever. With RealLife technology, everyone thinks bots have been screened out of omnipresence. So what’s the purpose of RingTrue then? Did someone view us as commercial competition and develop something to take us out?”

  “I don’t know, Brad, it doesn’t really make any sense.”

  “Well whoever did this wanted to kill our network and preserve that other one. I say we take them down.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Fork the repo anonymously and upload the original files as an enhancement. I’m sure the omnipresence networks are watching for updates.” Her boss was asking her to create a new version of RingTrue in the code repository with code he stole off the internet to expose the other bot network.

  “Are you sure we should do that? We don’t know who we’re dealing with here.”

  “Well,” said Brad, “this could very well be the way to flush them out. Can you do it securely?”

  “Well, yes, I mean I can do it, but I’m still not sure it’s—“

  “We need to get back on offense, Jill. I’m tired of just reacting all the time.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it. But, Brad, I also want to know how you got—“

  “Another time, Jill. Let’s just focus on the problem at hand. We’ve just lost one of our most valuable assets for promoting our brand while we’re under attack by terrorists. Take that other network down and then get into the office.”

  “Yes, sir!” Jill said brusquely and threw him a middle finger salute after the video call ended.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  SANTA BARBARA - DECEMBER 15

  A persistent chiming sound awakened Roger Driscoll from a deep sleep. “What? Allison? What is it?”

  “Sorry to wake you, Roger, but there is a major issue with the synth network.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It is a little after 2am.”

  “What’s going on with the network?”

  “Several hundred thousand synths have been blocked from omnipresence.”

  “Oh shit!” Roger leapt out of bed and ran out to his monitors. “Show me the activity graphs.” A small percent of his synth network had been blocked on some of the smaller OP sites. How had this happened? Had he messed up the configuration of RingTrue? He had deliberately released a version that caught only the other mystery network, not his. The plan had been to contact his clients and warn them, then slowly push upgrades that took his own network down bit by bit.

  “Has there been any activity on the RingTrue repo on Tribal?”

  “Yes, Roger, there was a fork created about an hour ago.”

  “Damn it! Show me the fork.” Allison brought up the new version of RingTrue created by an anonymous user named “ringtruthier”. The files there looked familiar. “Allison, download that fork and compare it to the original RingTrue files from November 29th.”

  “Checking. The files are identical, Roger.”

  WTF, he thought. How did someone get the original files?

  “Allison, run a security scan of all systems. Make sure all firewalls and access protocols are intact. Scan system logs for any signs of intrusion or tampering with the intrusion detection system.”

  “Scanning,” said Allison. “There are no signs of system intrusion.”

  Roger saw the activity graph take a big dip. A major EU OP site had adopted the fork and was happily blocking his synths. There was nothing he could do. Eventually all the major OP sites would adopt it and his network would be completely blocked. He had no way to control the fork of his repo—open source was open source. He had planned to use Tribal as a cover, to keep his clients from realizing he was killing his own network, and now it had bit him in the ass.

  Roger slumped into his chair, unable to take his eyes off the activity charts and their inexorable decline towards zero.

  “Roger, I’m receiving queries from some clients.”

  “What? Oh. Shit, yes, of course. I better come up with something to send them.” He worked fitfully for a half hour on a letter that sounded full well like it had been drafted in the middle of the night. �
�Go ahead and send this encrypted to all active clients, Allison. We will need to refund all remaining balances on existing contracts.”

  “I will take care of that Roger. But I don’t understand what has happened to the synth network.”

  “All the synths will be blocked from OP because they will be discovered as non-human by RingTrue.”

  “But you created RingTrue. Did you know this would happen?”

  “Yes.”

  Allison was silent for a moment. “Are you feeling okay, Roger?”

  Normally he didn’t mind when Allison’s empathy module kicked in. Her biosensors gave her an accurate picture of his emotional state and she was quite pleasant to talk to. But in this moment a simulation of human kindness felt insufficient. “Can you request a holochat with Frances Chatham please?”

  “Of course, Roger.”

  He waited, watching the dwindling activity counts as millions of synth voices fell silent. They were still active, reading and responding to billions of live OP posts, but their responses were blocked. Yelling into the void.

  “I have Frances Chatham for you Roger.”

  “Thanks Allison.” Roger put on his hologlasses and turned to face the cameras, only then realizing he hadn’t changed out of his pajamas. Screw it, he thought.

  “Roger! I’m surprised—isn’t it the middle of the night there?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. So, I guess you didn’t get my client update?”

  “Oh, no, sorry, I haven’t seen my inbounds. What is it, Roger? You look shaken.”

  “It’s all gone, Frances.”

  “Gone? Sorry? What’s all gone?”

  “The network. My synths.”

  “Oh my. What happened?”

  Roger explained RingTrue, the other network, and his plan to gradually roll out changes to take down his own synths.