Three Laws Lethal

by David Walton

  Naomi twirled in the air, giddy with excitement. The Mikes had cracked the world. They had, in a sense, outsmarted her, using the rules she had established to achieve an outcome she had tried to prevent. This was more than just a passing grade for her project; this was publishable. It implied that the development of intelligence required competition and conflict to thrive; and yet, somewhere along the way, the Mikes had discovered that working together made them more powerful than working alone.

  It did make her wonder: what had happened to the other forty-eight? Had they been hunted and killed when they didn’t join the larger group? Were there multiple groups that formed different strategies, and only one of the strategies had worked long-term? Or had two large groups warred for the right to use the land, the losers executed to make way for the winners? However it had happened, one hundred Mikes had started this round with all the same insights and experiences learned from thousands of previous games. Half of them had died. Naomi suspected that once she sifted through the logs, she would discover the darker side of this utopia.

  Yawning, Naomi pulled off her glasses, blinking in the sudden dimness of her library nook. She fizzed with excitement over what she had accomplished. Her AIs were adapting, learning new skills, developing new strategies, and working together to solve difficult problems. It didn’t mean they were self-aware. It didn’t mean that John Searle was wrong. But it was something. It was progress.

  She blinked away the bright afterimages in her eyes, but the library still seemed dim. A moment later, she realized it was dim. All the lights were turned off. She had stayed past eleven o’clock, and the library had been closed and locked with her inside.

  She doubted she was trapped. She could probably find a way to slip out, a door that could be opened from the inside, but that would draw attention, perhaps her face on security cameras, identified by the same software that allowed her glasses to recognize strangers. It might even set off alarms. No, she couldn’t leave now. She would just have to stretch out on the beanbag and sleep here as best she could. Again.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tyler rocked on the balls of his feet, bouncing with nervousness. “Maybe she won’t come.”

  “Of course she’ll come,” Brandon said. He didn’t look nervous at all. “But don’t worry about it. If she wants to sponsor us, she will. If not, there will be others.”

  Spoken like someone with money, Tyler thought. Brandon’s father controlled his family’s fortune, so it wasn’t like Brandon could access it directly. Just growing up with plenty, though, made Brandon less likely to think of money as an obstacle. He had just never experienced what it was like to be unable to do something for lack of funds.

  Aisha al-Mohammad rolled up to the White Dog Café in a black Cadillac Escalade. Brandon rolled his eyes, but Tyler jabbed him in the ribs. “Best behavior, remember?” he said.

  “Look at the size of that thing, though,” Brandon said. “It’s like a tank on wheels.”

  “Which she is perfectly within her rights to drive.”

  “It’s a death machine. Do you know how much damage that much mass can do? It’s like an arms race out there: people drive larger vehicles to feel safe, and the result is that our roads are more lethal than ever.”

  “But she’s not people,” Tyler said. “She’s one person, and a mom. She probably picked the car so her daughter would be safe. You can’t blame her for that.”

  “If everybody thinks that way—”

  “If you say anything about her car, I’ll run you over myself,” Tyler said. “This could be our big break. Don’t screw it up.”

  They had argued about what to wear, too, Tyler recommending suits and ties, while Brandon insisted that jeans and T-shirts would strike the right tone. In the end, they had compromised with dress shirts and jeans, no tie. The Escalade glided to a stop, and their potential patron stepped out of the driver’s side door. Tyler was surprised; he had expected it would be self-driving, or that she would have a chauffeur.

  She shook their hands and said, “Big lunches for both of you. You look like you need it.”

  They looked at each other for signs of malnourishment, shrugged, and followed her. The White Dog Café was a pricey organic restaurant in a repurposed brownstone townhouse a block off campus. Tyler had never been, not having fifty bucks to drop on a meal, but Brandon’s father and stepmom had taken him there for lunch when they visited.

  “Thanks for this opportunity, Ms. al-Mohammad,” Tyler said.

  “Aisha,” she said. “Call me Aisha, and no shop talk until we’ve eaten.”

  At Aisha’s request, the waitress seated them outside on the veranda and left them to peruse the menu. Tyler scanned the options with growing unease. He’d never seen a menu that listed multiple courses. Was he supposed to order something from each? And what on earth was ‘Branzino’ or ‘Saffron Aioli’ or ‘Nicoise Olive Beurre Blanc’? It was like he’d stepped into another country, where he didn’t know the language. He looked up the names of a few of the dishes on his glasses, but eventually gave up and settled on a chicken breast described with words he mostly recognized.

  Aisha ordered a plate of local artisan cheeses for the table. They chatted nervously about nothing much, trading stories about Professor Lieu’s notoriously early classes—held at the ungodly hour of 8:00 a.m.—and comparing notes on his teaching style and mannerisms from Aisha’s college days, now two decades past. Tyler realized he was bouncing his leg up and down at a manic pace and forced himself to stop.

  The meals arrived. Tyler couldn’t tell which one was his until it was set in front of him. The chicken was sliced paper thin and artistically stacked, with asparagus stalks, mushrooms, and sprigs of fresh herbs positioned as carefully as a floral arrangement. It looked more like artwork than a meal. Silence reigned for several minutes as the three of them started to eat.

  “Now,” Aisha said, after sipping from her glass of Riesling. “Tell me why the world needs yet another company devoted to self-driving cars.”

  Brandon set down his fork and knife. “Because millions of people are still driving personal cars,” he said. “They’re the most dangerous, wasteful, inefficient, expensive boondoggle in history. People spend thousands to own a vehicle that sits parked most of the time, doing nothing. In cities, they may even have to pay for the privilege of parking it. Personal cars destroy the environment, clog our roadways, and kill more young adults than sickness or war.”

  “It’s about freedom,” Aisha said. “People want to go where they want, when they want.”

  “Listen,” Brandon said, “What are the biggest problems that our city departments of transportation deal with?” He counted them off on his fingers. “One: traffic. Too many cars, not enough roads. Two: parking. Did you know a study estimated that thirty percent of city congestion is due to people driving around looking for a place to park? And think of the acres of prime urban real estate taken up with parking garages and street-side parking. Three—and this should probably be number one: safety. We call them ‘accidents,’ as if they can’t be helped, but the vast majority of them are human error of one sort or another. Drunk driving tops the list, but there’s distracted driving, falling asleep at the wheel, failing to notice red lights or deciding to ignore them—only a tiny percentage is due to icy roads or vehicle malfunction. People die in cars all the time, and we just accept it.”

  Tyler cringed a little—Brandon was coming on strong, and he didn’t know how Aisha would take it. He was following the script, at least. Tyler pulled up the Philadelphia accident data report site on his phone and jumped in when Brandon paused for breath. “Early this morning, on Gregg Street, a thirty-five-year-old man named Harold McMillan was killed in a high-speed crash by a driver with a blood alcohol level of 0.2 percent. Last night, on Cottman Avenue, pedestrian Eric Adams was run down in a hit-and-run while waiting for a bus. Yesterday afternoon, bicyclist Stephanie Wilson was killed on Columbus Boulevard when a speeding car ran a stop sign. Also yesterday af
ternoon, Jamal Harris and his three children, ages five, three, and six months, were admitted to Jefferson with serious injuries after Louise Murphy, age seventy-eight—”

  “I get the idea,” Aisha said.

  Brandon leaned over the table, fire lighting his eyes. “The point is our fleet of autocars would solve all of these problems. Most personal cars spend twenty-two out of every twenty-four hours parked, but ours wouldn’t. They’d be driving the next customer instead of sitting idle, taking up parking spots. Because of that, we’d need fewer of them, reducing the number of cars on the road. Most of all, we’d eliminate all of those human-error collisions. Hundreds of casualties a year in Philadelphia alone. Thousands if we spread to other cities.”

  “Okay, okay,” Aisha said, a smile fighting to break out of her professional interview expression. “You’re passionate, I get that. And I can’t argue with your statistics. But this is a dream Google has been chasing for years, not to mention Tesla, Mercedes, Audi, GM, Honda—all the big car manufacturers with self-driving cars already on the streets. Uber and Lyft have fleets of autocars already in service. The two of you are barely out of college, with no business credentials. What are you going to bring to the field that isn’t there already?”

  “Communication,” Tyler said. “First off, the big automobile companies selling autocars are addressing only part of the problem. They have a vested interest in keeping personal cars on the road, so they sell personal self-driving cars, which are still parked most of the time, and still clog our streets. But more significantly, they don’t talk to each other. Each car has to recognize from image and radar and lidar data that a threat is heading toward it and evade. That might be okay if you’ve got the only one on the road, but it doesn’t scale. Three or four or five self-driving cars involved in the same incident would all react differently, causing collisions by their attempts to avoid them. We don’t just need cars with the ability to act autonomously. We need them to be coordinated.”

  Aisha took another sip from her wine, but Tyler could tell she was hiding a smile. “Michael told me you boys were passionate,” she said. “I like that, I do. But passion only goes so far. Thousands of startups launch on passion and go belly-up after a year or two. So maybe there’s a business case for a coordinated fleet. Why are you two the ones who can make it succeed?”

  They kept talking, ignoring what was left of their gourmet meals, telling her all their hopes and plans. They were prepared, and Tyler knew their software was top-notch, but Aisha had a point. They were novices. They’d never run a business, hired employees, advertised to customers, or even paid much in the way of taxes. There would be hundreds of legal and financial details to worry about, never mind the small problem of whether they could actually make money. She was right to be wary. Any money she poured into their venture she might never see again.

  “All right,” Aisha said after an hour had passed. “I’ve heard enough. Let me tell you two something about angel investing.” She crossed her legs and stared them down, meeting first Brandon’s eyes, and then Tyler’s. “I don’t invest in ideas. Anybody can have an idea. It doesn’t mean they’ll follow through with it, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’ll have the brains, guts, and endurance to make a company successful. So when I have meetings like this, the idea is secondary. I don’t even care if the business plan is sound, because I can help with that. What I invest in is people. And I like what I see in you two, even though you’re as green as next year’s apples and have no clue what you’re getting yourselves into. So this is what we’re going to do.”

  Aisha sipped her wine, and the moment seemed to stretch out forever. Tyler and Brandon clamped their mouths shut and glanced at each other. Tyler felt like a condemned man, waiting while the jury filed back into the box to deliver their verdict. His leg started bouncing again, and he used both hands to hold it down.

  “We’re going to do this in stages,” she finally said. “I’m going to fund you an initial, modest amount. No contract, no convertible debt or company equity—I’m just going to give you the money. About a month from now, you’re going to stage a demonstration. Buy what you need to buy, code what you need to code, but that demo is your ticket. Because I’m going to bring all the interested investors I know to come and watch it. We angels travel in choirs, and if I tell my friends there’s something to see, they’ll come see it. If you knock our socks off, then I guarantee, you’ll get your chance. If not, well”—she shrugged— “there are plenty of other passionate entrepreneurs out there, waiting for their big break.”

  She pulled out her checkbook and scribbled in it. “It’s not very much,” she said, handing it to Brandon, “but if you can do something special with it, there will be more to come.”

  Tyler’s face hurt. He was grinning from ear to ear, which probably didn’t seem very professional, but he couldn’t help it. When he saw the check she wrote out for them, he nearly fell out of his chair. The amount was more than twice what they had spent so far, including purchasing the two Accords. They could buy more cars. They could buy real sensors and equipment. They could do this for real.

  The waitress came with the check. “Who gets the damage?”

  “Oh, sorry, could we get that split three ways?” Aisha asked.

  Tyler raised his eyebrows and looked at Brandon. Did she expect them to pay? He had a very large check in his hand now, sure, but he didn’t have enough cash to cover a meal like this, and his bank account was practically empty, since all the money that didn’t go for school he had funneled into their project. He supposed he could use a credit card, and then pay it back with the investment money . . .

  “Just kidding. I’ve got it,” Aisha said, grinning and holding out a card to the waitress. “You’ll need every cent if you want to impress me. And trust me—my friends are even harder to impress than I am.” The waitress took the card and stepped back inside. Aisha nodded at the check Tyler still held. “Honestly? I think I’ve just thrown away some money. But I can afford to take some long odds. Every once in a while, one of them pays out big, and that makes up for all the rest. I’ll see you boys in a month.”

  The waitress came back with her card, and Aisha stood, pushing in her chair. “You’ll have to find an appropriate venue for the demo, rent it if it needs renting. I’ll be in touch so we can work out a date.”

  She pulled on a trench coat, cinched the belt around her waist, and draped a thin scarf around her neck. “Good luck,” she said. She walked back toward her car, and in moments, the black SUV roared past in front of the restaurant.

  Brandon and Tyler looked at each other for a moment. Then Brandon threw back his head and howled, while Tyler threw his cloth napkin in the air like confetti. He snapped the check taut between two hands, and they stared at it, hardly believing it was real.

  “We did it,” Brandon said.

  “Yes, we did,” Tyler said. “Now comes the hard part.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Tyler spotted Naomi Sumner in the Graduate Student Center the next morning. She wore a blue University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt and kept her head down, waiting for a turn at the coffee machine. The Center’s common room offered free coffee all day on a bring-your-own-cup basis, making it a popular morning location. A busy stream of students filed in and out of the doors, fueling up before classes or meeting up with friends.

  Tyler jumped up from the overstuffed chair he was lounging in and went to meet her. “Hey,” he said. “You know that coffee’s for grad students only.”

  He smiled to show he was joking, but she blushed and turned away. “I usually come in with my sister,” she murmured.

  “I know. I was just . . . never mind. Bad start. I’m Tyler Daniels. You were at my autocar test yesterday.”

  She just looked at him without saying anything.

  “Which, of course, you know,” Tyler said, feeling like he was rambling. “You were there when the venture capitalist stopped by too, weren’t you?”

  Naomi nodded, one hesi
tant bob of her head that stopped as soon as it started.

  “Well, she’s investing in our project, at least for a little while. She wants us to give a demo in a month. It’s not a lot of time, and there’s a lot of programming to do. I checked you out online . . .” She gave him a quick look, and he hastened to explain. “Your open source contributions. Lots of machine learning applications: voice recognition, handwriting identification. Good stuff. Everybody I talk to says you’re the best in your class. I was wondering . . .” The girl ahead of Naomi stepped aside, and Naomi sidled in to fill her travel mug with coffee. Tyler stood uncomfortably next to her while the coffee poured. When she straightened, he said, “I was wondering if you wanted to join us. Help us get the software ready for prime time. It’s not a paying gig, or anything, but if our company takes off like we hope it will, you’d be right in on the ground floor.”

  She met his gaze briefly, and then her eyes slid off to the side. Her shoulders lifted slightly, as if she were a turtle trying to pull her head into her shell. “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay? You’ll do it?”

  Another awkward head bob. “I have to go to the library,” she said.

  “All right. I’ll walk with you.”

  A brief look of panic flitted across her face, and then vanished. “Okay,” she said again.

  Naomi headed out the door, and Tyler followed her. “You saw the trouble we had when a tire went flat,” he said. “We need to raise the software to the next level. Its training has been superficial, just enough to implement some basic scenarios. We need to widen its experience, cover a lot more cases.”