Socialism fell apart, Susannah said, whenever intellectuals and activists had tried to nationalize it, extending the principle of sharing from border to border, involving people of whom the individual participants had no knowledge and for whom they felt no responsibility. Then the human relationship was gone, and the human tendency to hoard, shirk without shame, game the system, and look after one’s own came to the fore in opportunism and corruption. Faced with this breakdown, the government in charge always had to impose market controls and coercive measures to get people to share with strangers. Systems that worked naturally and comfortably at the family and village level were never meant to be blown up to a countrywide scale.
He ruminated for a moment. “You’re saying we—the Praxis family—should run a collective, like a village or a kibbutz?”
“Essentially, sir,” she replied.
“How would that work?”
“We would own the means of automated production for the benefit of our members. We would make products and provide services for everyone born into the family or joining it by marriage or adoption.”
“Build factories, run farms, set up our own bank?” he supplied.
“Yes, and then we can employ family members to manage these assets.”
“Generate our own power?” he went on, expanding the idea. “Build our own housing? Mine our own metals? Manufacture our own electronics—even our own line of cars and trucks? How deep does this thing go?”
“Well …” Susannah stopped to think. “Some products and activities will be too large and complicated for us to provide just for ourselves. But we can specialize, develop automated factories for some of the larger durable goods, then trade them to other associations who will make other products that we need. We would form relationships and alliances, like the Renaissance Italian banking families or the South American drug cartels.”
“I’m not sure I like that metaphor,” he grumbled.
“I know, but their systems worked, didn’t they?” she said.
“So we could make and sell bulldozers and cement mixers …?”
“And that would fit the Praxis Engineering and Construction profile.”
“Wood products, gold and quartz, vacation rentals,” Praxis mused, thinking about the newly acquired Stanislaus forest lands. “We’d simply be vertically integrating the entire enterprise.” Then he stopped. “But how does that find employment for your generation? Machines would still do the detailed thinking and the heavy lifting.”
“We would be organizing the output … and planning the daily menus. We would strategize the future of the family business and make those contracts and alliances. And we’d still need to provide personal services for other family members, like medical care, education, babysitting … and all that singing, dancing, and story telling we once talked about.” She grinned at him over the last bit.
He smiled in return. “You want me to build an ark and take family members aboard two by two.”
“At least until it stops raining, Great-Grandfather.”
“But even as large a family as this, even as a clan, we’re not big enough.”
“Not yet. But we’d be building for the future, too. In another generation, this family will be twice as big. And twice that again in the generation that comes after.”
“It would be quite a legacy for me to leave,” he said thoughtfully.
“Leave?” she said. He heard surprise in her voice. “You’ll run it forever.”
* * *
Rafaella Jaspersen had waited months for this day. They had been hard months, living from check to check, doled out by her mother, while her fate was held in abeyance by the mechanics of the court system. The hardest part was explaining to her three girls what would happen next. They were already accustomed to the fact that they might never see their father again, because he hadn’t been part of their lives for almost nine months now. The burning question for each of them was what would happen when the school year began again: would they be back at the New De Grew with all their friends, or would they be forcibly enrolled in the local public schools, where they would have to speak Spanish and kill with their bare hands?
Now Rafaella sat in Department 612, Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, with The Honorable Kimberly Biggs presiding over the reopening of her decree of divorce. Beside her sat her attorney, Antigone Wells, who wore a black, wide-brimmed hat with a veil. At the table opposite sat Tim Jaspersen, looking much the worse for wear, and his attorney, Sam Averill. Her mother sat in the first row behind the courtroom’s bar, looking grim.
The judge, a gray-haired woman with a kindly face, opened the proceedings. She read the decree, issued six months earlier by the mechanical Clerk of Court, and noted several defects in that ruling. Among them were lack of proper service of the court documents to the defendant, and apparent confusion about the terms of Mr. Jaspersen’s separation from his position at Praxis Engineering—since clarified by a to-whom-it-may-concern notification from the company’s Human Resources intelligence. Judge Biggs expressed a willingness to hear arguments then and, for the first time, looked up at the parties before her. She frowned.
“Ms. Wells? Why the hat? You’re supposed to remove it out of respect for this court. You should know that.”
Antigone nodded. “Yes, your honor, but if it please the court—”
“Now, Ms. Wells.”
Slowly, the attorney lifted the veil away from her face, removed the hat, and placed it on the table before her.
“Thank you, Ms. Wells,” the judge said. “Now to proceed with arguments.”
Rafaella sat stunned. She had always assumed Antigone kept her face veiled or in shadow because of some horrible disfigurement, some accident or surgical mistake, that had occurred long ago, back when Rafaella was a child. She had never heard the full story, only whispers among the family members.
Antigone Wells was beautiful. Her face was smooth and composed, young looking, glamorous. For a woman almost a hundred years old, she looked wonderful. Antigone’s eyes went sideways towards Rafaella, she turned her face slightly, and smiled briefly, a most serene smile.
Whatever was wrong with her, Rafaella couldn’t see it. While she tried to figure out the mystery of Antigone Wells’s face, the arguments of her husband’s attorney went right by her. Something about a lawful decree issued by a minion of this court.
Then Antigone stood up and gave their side, confirming that the papers had never been served, that the omission went unnoticed by the automated clerk, that Tim had no claim against the Praxis firm for wrongful discharge, that Rafaella and Tim had a valid prenuptial agreement in place, and therefore the original decree and its terms were in error and should be voided.
Judge Biggs considered briefly, flipping through papers before her on the bench.
“I’m going to note the defects which the clerk identified in the prenuptial agreement, but I’m ruling that they don’t invalidate it. So the agreement stands.” She paused. “I take it that the defendant does not wish to challenge the divorce itself?”
“No, your honor,” Wells said. “Only its terms.”
“This is what you want, Ms. Jaspersen?”
“I do, your honor,” Rafaella said.
“Very well. The decree stands. As to the terms, I will confirm Ms. Jaspersen in custody of the three daughters, with Mr. Jaspersen to have visiting rights twice a month and for two weeks per year, dates and times to be worked out between the parties. He will also pay alimony and child support.” The judge consulted Rafaella’s petition and named a sum that would let the girls continue in private school but—by Rafaella’s quick calculation—require them to move to a more modest apartment. And that was fine by her.
“Anything else?” Judge Biggs asked.
“Your honor,” Tim’s attorney began, “I must protest!”
“Yes, Mr. Averill, I thought you would. … I don’t know how this bit of judicial malfeasance came about, especially your client’s rep
resentation of how the terms of his employment came to be jeopardized. I don’t like to impute perjury when a simple misunderstanding may be at fault. If you want to pursue the matter, you can move to vacate this judgment—but I’d advise you against it.”
With that, she banged her gavel, bringing the case to its close.
Rafaella was free, and her—and her girls’—future was assured.
* * *
“Hello, Cousin,” Jacquie Wildmon said when Brandon Praxis’s image came up in the left-hand field of her office’s communications wall. He was looking pretty good for a man who was now—what? Almost sixty-three years old. His face might have been that of a man in his forties. The right-hand field came alive with the image of a young woman with curly reddish-brown hair, alert blue eyes, and snub nose. Brandon’s wife and business partner, Penny. “Or ‘cousins,’ I should say. What can I do for you?”
“We need your help,” Brandon began, waving vaguely to include Penny, who was obviously in another place and time zone. “We’ve had an issue with one of our Watch and Ward® intelligences.”
“It appears to have made a mistake,” Penny continued for him, “and then the software—well, lied about it.” Penny paused and looked as if she didn’t herself believe what she had just said. Brandon, on the other screen, simply nodded and shrugged.
“For gosh sakes!” Jacquie muttered. “I’ve become Susan Calvin!”
“Who is that?” Brandon asked, and Penny stared across at him.
“The robot shrink in the Asimov stories,” Jacquie explained.
Her position as Tallyman’s expert on “AI Developmental Problems,” meant she had become a cross between computer programmer and child psychologist. One of the issues she had to deal with was the question of intention and ethics in minds that ranged so far and wide, that processed information so quickly, and that had to deal with sometimes imperfect data. Could an AI develop or discover for itself an ulterior motive? Could it choose to do the wrong thing or make a mistake and then give false witness? Could it become bored and mischievous?
Sometimes Jacquie wished that every problem could be solved with a syllogism as simple as the “Three Laws of Robotics.” Her kids used to ask her about that as soon as they started to read science fiction. First, a robot must never harm a human being or let one come to harm. Second, it had to obey all human orders, unless they conflicted with the First Law. And finally, it had to protect itself, unless that action conflicted with the First and Second Laws. Something vaguely like this syllogism was built into the core programming of all intelligences—but more as a guideline than as immutable law.
“Those laws will work—most of the time,” she had told her children, when she thought they were old enough to understand. “They apply to first-order actions, anyway, like crashing an airplane full of human beings or wiring an electric toothbrush at a thousand volts. And we do give AIs a grounding in safety parameters, both for people and for themselves.”
But life, for a machine as well as for humans, was full of complexities, shades of gray, and mazes of interlocking decisions and choices. The end-result of most choices could no more be foreseen and resolved than the average person was be able track the results of a chess problem twenty moves into the future—which most AIs could do with ease. And, too often, too many optional strategies and pure-choice moves depended on subsequent actions of the opposing player. The machine choice that might avoid “injuring a human being or, through inaction, allowing a human being to come to harm” was pretty clear when A shoved B in front of a train—but less so when weighing choices in design of the train’s air brakes. In every situation and transaction—whether in engineering, economics, medicine, transportation, or the thousand and one other realms of activity that machine intelligences now controlled—important and necessary tradeoffs existed. To write a simple rule, or try to elevate a single consideration like “human safety” or “customer satisfaction” or “system protection” as an operational absolute was to invite paralysis and gridlock. The world was just too damned complicated.
“So tell me your story from the beginning,” she told her cousins.
And they proceeded to describe a Watch and Ward® security system that had appeared to confuse registered visitors who had approved access to a restricted area during construction with a whole other class of operators who were not due inside that same area for another two years. When confronted with the problem, the W&W brain had claimed corruption of its database—something like “garbage in, garbage out.” And then, when confronted with its own clean and tidy, uncorrupted database, it had claimed some form of unexplained amnesia.
“Do you still have the intelligence online and at work?” Jacquie asked.
“We …” Brandon stopped and turned toward his physically absent wife.
“It’s … still on the job,” Penny acknowledged. “It didn’t actually harm—”
“I see. And that’s good, because then I can interview the brain in real time.”
“I’ve already done that,” Penny said. “A data dump and review of its structural code. Everything checks out, as far as I can see—except for that lie about not remembering.”
Jacquie thought for a moment. “Can you think of any reason why someone would want to manipulate its access roster? Maybe to allow bogus visitors on site? Steal tools or plans? Commit sabotage?” She was remembering the other problem the Praxis family had recently brought to her, about Rafaella’s divorce and its lopsided judgment, where an ulterior motive was certainly possible if not probable.
“Not with these visitors,” Brandon said. “One was a client, the other a local inspector. Getting them onto the site was absolutely necessary to the day’s work.”
“Well, I’ll still want to talk to your—what was the name? ‘Officer Krupke’?” Jacquie laughed at that. “I’ll grill him a bit, give him the old good cop, bad cop routine.”
Penny looked dubious. “I don’t know what more you can do than I already—”
“Right,” Jacquie interrupted. “But understand that I have better tools here.”
“Won’t the machine just keep lying about what it’s done?” Penny asked.
“You mean, create a false record, a fictitious dump, more error?”
“Yeah, like that. In my experience, these things are smart.”
“And some are smarter than others,” Jacquie replied. “If you want to catch a child out in a lie or a petty theft, you ask it directly. And when it denies everything, what do you do then? Do you ask another child? No, you send in an older, more experienced person to question him and examine his responses.
“Here at Tallyman,” Jacquie went on, “we have some of the smartest intelligences on the planet.” She was thinking of using Vernier, her partner in machine analytics, for this case. “They can analyze the pattern of original errors, compare it with the AI’s internal dump and subsequent responses, and tell us exactly what happened. My machines cut their teeth on unequal data sets.”
The cousins looked dubious, but in the end they gave her Krupke’s online address and backdoor access code. This was going to be fun.
* * *
Before he would give Susannah a firm answer about her ideas, John Praxis wanted to discuss them more generally with some of the senior family members. He called them into his office at the engineering company headquarters—Callie, as chief executive of their construction business; Jeffrey, who managed the new forest lands subsidiary; and Brandon and Penny, who had branched out into automated security systems.
He explained his great-granddaughter’s idea for what he chose to call the “Praxis Family Association,” which would be something like a cross between a clan, a family business, and a commune. The details were still hazy in his own mind, but he grasped what Susannah had been driving at: a path for survival and sustainability in the generations to come. Where these various family businesses would lead them, what they would try and either discard or succeed at, and how they would survive—all those detai
ls would be shaped by events and opportunities. The only limiting factors would be the quality of their own wits, the power of their collective vision, and whatever obstacles and restrictions the State of California in Sacramento, the Federated Republic in Kansas City, or the International Court of Justice in The Hague might impose. Everything else was up for grabs.
Callie’s frown grew deeper as he talked. When he finished, she asked, “How are we going to manage this?”
“I assume it’s going to be structured as some form of corporation with subsidiaries,” Praxis said. “Much the same as now—except that every family member will have a share.”
“Equal shares?” his daughter asked. “Some of us have more at stake than others.”
“Well …” He considered. “We should have some form of proportionality—at least to start. Recognizing the varied contributions of each member.”
“Would we still have private property?” Brandon asked. “For instance, would Penny and I own anything for ourselves, like what we’ve built up in Watch and Ward? Or would it all be given over to this new super-company?”
“And would those shares be inheritable?” Callie asked. “I have one daughter. Brandon and Penny have two children, a son and daughter. That would tend to concentrate my holdings—”
“Only until the next generation!” Penny protested, then stopped. “Pardon me! I don’t know if I’m allowed to speak—as an outsider.”
“Of course you can, dear!” Brandon said quickly.
“I’m only an in-law,” his wife replied.
“Go ahead,” Praxis told her.
Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Page 17