Endgame

'So what do you reckon, is AI going to kill us all?' Mick stood, retrieved another log, and dropped it into the fire pit.

Iain cupped his glass, sniffed it for the third time. Malty. Lovely, he thought. 'I'm not thinking it's that easy. I saw on YouTube the other day some MIT narrative that said there are about twelve ways it could end for us.'

'I seriously don't get it, what is it with the tech bros — they're all running around on one hand saying there needs to be governance, legislation to protect us, yet they aren't stopping themselves. They're in some big dick competition.' Mick slumped into his camp chair.

'I'm not quite sure it's an AI bomb, like the dot bomb of the nineties.'

'So not just the extinction of the human race?'

'Well… extremes, like wild-arse extremes. Libertarian Utopia, Zookeeper, Orwellian, god-like…'

'Zookeeper.'

'Yeah, Zookeeper. The AI becomes omnipotent and keeps some of us humans, around, like zoo animals.'

Mick leaned across, gesturing with the bottle. Iain tilted his glass toward him. 'Animals?'

'Yeah, like we have pets, even zoos. Not sure if we'll like it or not, but then there are derivatives on this. Like the God versions.'

'God versions?'

'Yeah, two. The Protector God — omniscient and omnipotent AI focused on maximising human happiness, while hiding well enough that many humans doubt its existence. This is interesting, because how would we ever really tell when it arrives?'

'You said two?'

'The Enslaved God. Superintelligent AI confined by humans and used to produce unimaginable technology and wealth — for better or worse, depending on who holds the leash. Which makes me think of the Orwellian version.'

'Mate, you're exhausting.' Mick shook his head. 'Seriously. I've been hearing the hype — only some of it — and some of it seems like urban myth, or marketing hype at the least.'

'Yep, seriously, I'm delving into this shit. I've got to. Need to work out how I'm going to get my org ready for it, even whether we should get ready for it. It doesn't just happen.'

'Ok, ok, so what's the Orwellian gist?' Mick leaned back in his chair and sipped his whisky. If he was in for a lecture, he may as well give him the floor.

'This buddy is the one I reckon we'll get. The tech bros are big-brothering the bejeezus out of us, each developing their own super AI. They'll be doing their battle, competing like they are now, whilst manipulating the bejeezus out of us with algorithmic approaches and tainted AI — keeping us second-guessing, leveraging the political state to keep us fighting and scared of each other. It'll be damn ugly.'

'So what, no armageddon?'

'It's weird, you think about it. If AI is going to wipe us out, it's going to be because we're deemed inefficient or superfluous to its requirements. It's not going to be out of evil, or a grab for power — that's where the humans come in. The tech bros.'

'So AI's not going to kill us?'

Iain sat back for a moment, savouring his whisky. It was nice, but he needed to slow down a little — keep going at this pace, and he'd be a mess in no time.

'Nah, I don't think it's malicious, arrogant, or selfish enough. I reckon we can leave that to the middle-to-old-aged white guys of the world — they seem to be doing a damn good job of f'n things up as it is. Think about it, we'll cause some sort of debacle, natural or otherwise, well before a superintelligence can wipe us out.'

Hometown

I walk amongst it, through it so often, its presence so diverse, I literally walked within it today. Sydney — until this prompt 'Setting as Character', and coincidentally, a random lock screen on the same day — did I realise that I've just walked and still live within the reaches of one of the biggest characters on earth.

This character has been a part of my life since I was ten or younger, longer even than my hometown, where I grew up. I first came here as a kid, and a little one at that — maybe I wasn't ten, maybe earlier. He'd walk us everywhere! Even now, in his late seventies, our locations have reversed: he is in my hometown, and I am here. He visits me here, holidaying and walking.

This city, this character revealed to me, gave me the nearest sea-going experience I would ever achieve before becoming a submariner: a trip on the Manly ferry in rough seas. It was great. I'd come back in my Navy days and live at Watsons Bay, on South Head — a view up the harbour, fifty-cent schooners, weekend surfing at Bondi, the Bondi life some would say.

My second stint was a posting to HMAS Perth, dry-docked in the inner city. Gone were the million-dollar views up the harbour and out to sea, and here were daytime views of the inner harbour, whilst living on the lower side of Kings Cross — at that time, the seedier side of life, some would say.

Not that it is necessarily that now. I lived there for a time in the Olims Hotel, on the lower side of Darlinghurst Road, the main drag, as it were, of the Cross. At seventeen, a sailor in the middle of the Cross, the darker side of life revealed itself to me. When the main way in and out of your suburb involved walking past strip clubs and pubs at that age, it was interesting.

I left it behind me for a bit, off to sea I went, sailing the southern seas, only to return to start my life as a submariner — this time living over near Maroubra, cycling across the city, the Harbour Bridge and down into HMAS Platypus over Milsons Point way. Again, this time was different: although still in the Navy, not in the Ritz of South Head, or the bustle of the Cross, this was a more routine way of living.

It was at this time that cycling was a thing, and not unheard of for me to ride from Hornsby Heights across the city to Maroubra, even Watsons Bay, as I again stayed out there for a stint — curtailed, even, as I believe there was a short hospital stay. Then I went to sea in the west again.

I'm sure I'm mixing this up a bit as I think about my stays in the Harbour City — it's been a long time. I eventually left the Navy and went away for several years, only to be mountain biking my way along the east coast before landing a post-graduate job as an office worker in Sydney again.

This time was the last return to Sydney, as it's become my home now. Twenty years of travelling into the CBD every day, and now, after several years of not doing that, I find myself with my lovely wife travelling into the city for outings — Sydney City is now a destination I find myself going to more and more often, an endless, forevermore destination.

Feck

'Shut up, Fries, you're injured! So what's happening?' Looking about, Nick could read it in their faces. They were clueless.

'Fries?'

'Right, I've called an ambulance in, they can't come in from the top, they're going to have to come from the bottom. I need you to go down there and meet them, guide them up. I've got Di driving down in the Forester as well, just in case. Worst case, she takes the bikes.'

'Mick!!'

'Yeah!'

'Get em to bring up some blankets as well. Four.'

'Sean.'

'Yeah.'

'I need you to come over here, squat at my feet.'

'Roight, roight! Whaddya want?'

'I can't walk, tried getting up, the right leg's buggered. I'm going to need you to check it for me.'

'I'm not looking.'

'That's all right, look at me, look at my face. Or away, whichever you need to do. But what I want you to do is start at my ankle, wrap your hands around it, thumb to thumb, finger to finger, like this.'

'Yeah.'

'Then slowly move your hands up to my knee. You're feeling to see if any bone is sticking out.'

'Feck.'

'You're doing fine, mate, keep going.'

'Feck'n hell, I can feel something.'

'You're going to have to look.'

'Like feck I'm going to look.'

'Look at me for a minute. It's all cool. I can't look, I can't sit up. You're going to have to do it.'

'Seriously!'

'You feck'n bastard, it's your cycling knicks.'

'Oh yeah, forgot to tell you about that. It's just the beading keeping them down. So, seeing you looking, no bone, no blood, nothing?'

'No, ye feck'n twat.'

Ra-Ra-Rasputin

 

Ra-Ra-Rasputin

He found himself humming it again, a krovavyy earworm. He knew it was an earworm because he was a mystic, and that is the krovavyy word as it came to him, as many things did, as he was a psychic.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen

Now this was interesting. He knew this to be true. She did love him. Yet he did not love her either. The tune again, or was it a song, he could not tell, seemed prophetic in its telling, for he was quite the ladies' man.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia's greatest Love machine

The power, the influence, the rule, again all true, he danced kazachok wunderbar for sure. But bible was his book, the healing in the song he knew not to be prophetic, but rumours spread by him. Was this song simply a krovavyy recall?

Ra-Ra-Rasputin

Krovavyy earworm, won't you go away, you're occupying my mystic mind with things I already know. Yes, the queen believes the rumours, I know, the rhythmic tune affecting his thoughts, as he pondered the boy's disease and his dilemma.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen

The power he had attained was wondrous. No longer sleeping under bridges, he was within a palace, not so grand as the queen's, but a palace many dukes had never seen, sipping a wine brought to him by the high and mighty, those above him.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia's greatest Love machine

And then the earworm revealed its true prophetic yield; the wine he drank was poisoned by the high-ranking genteel who had gifted it to him. This thought came into his mind, just as he took the last gulp from his chalice of wine.

Krovavyy Earworm

Maddow Monologue

Scene opens, the anchor dressed neatly in a black sports coat, classic cut black t-shirt underneath, thick dark-rimmed glasses, black hair in a messy pixie cut. Contrasted by a red silhouette cityscape on a painted blue sky. She picks up a tight ream of papers, holds them, tapping the bottom edge on the bench top — click, click — and lays them flat. Leaning in.

'Really happy to be here tonight, and we have got a show for you, but before we bring our guests on, I want to start with some facts. In 1846, the British government passed what is known as the Gauge Act of 1846. This act declared that the country's railway tracks would be exactly four feet eight and a half inches apart.

Why, you may ask? Well, let me tell you that, my friends, the axle width of a horse-drawn carriage, and let me be precise, a two-horse-drawn carriage. It was, in reality, the width of two horses' arses. Isn't that amazing?

Well, what's more amazing is that measurement, four feet eight and a half inches, dates right back to Roman times. A long, long time. Until, until, the arrival of the motor car. And that was it. The horses' arses were put out to pasture. These beasts of burden, a primary form of transport and heavy lifting for centuries, retired near overnight in 1908 when Henry Ford introduced the motor vehicle as the everyman's car.

That, my friends, was a phenomenal technological advance.

Now let me tell you of another, more recent one. In offices across the industrial world, men in shirtsleeves were doing ledgers by hand, and boy, they were impressive. Horizontal lines, double vertical lines, numbers, words, tallies and totals, all done by hand. Through wars and factories and more, these skilled men worked laboriously.

Then, in 1979, the first computer spreadsheet came into existence, VisiCalc. Quickly followed by Lotus 1-2-3 in '83, Excel in '85, and by the mid-to-late 1990s, yes, that recently, the spreadsheet became ubiquitous with today's office space.

This one, though, it snuck up on us. And not only did it sneak up on us, but it also didn't put all those white-shirted, short-sleeved fellows out to pasture. No, not at all. I would say many of you know exactly what I am talking about, even if you've never used Excel yourself; you've definitely been the beneficiary of its existence in some manner.

Anyway, two different inventions, two different times, two different outcomes. Not so good for the horses.

Arthur C. Clarke, yes, that Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author, had made some rules about technology, even before spreadsheets were a thing. They were interesting rules, in particular his third. Arthur said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The steam train, the car, and the spreadsheet are all magic. Now, though, we have the magic of all technology magics, AI, artificial intelligence.

The question, though, is whether AI is an automobile or a spreadsheet?

Before we get to that, we need to talk a bit about the magic of technology, because that, to me, is where we've been getting ourselves into trouble ever since we started inventing. And now it's just coming at us faster and faster.

I remember the black-and-white TV coming into the house as a kid, yes, I am that old. My first home computer was a TRS-80 in the '80s. Then the World Wide Web, in the '90s, '91 to be exact. Social media. Then the iPhone and its clones landed in our pockets in 2007, amplifying the benefits and effects of the internet and social media.

We did all of that in a little over two decades. From the steam train to the demise of the horse: 83 years, eight decades. It's impressive.

The upside of all this? All sorts of things, connection, access to information, democratisation of information, the Arab Spring, Wikipedia, the spread of education and literacy, advances in health and home care. As the pendulum swings, though, the downside: our algorithmic bubbles, the polarisation of politics, doom scrolling, and the addictive nature of social media. And bafflingly, the upside of connection is also the downside of loneliness and isolation. Bullying, doxing, harassing, it goes on and on.

Are we now moving so fast down the technology path that this new technology, this magic, or so the media and the big companies pushing and investing in it would have us believe, is going to cause a job apocalypse? Are we going to be so enamoured by the magic, fed through those same algorithmic bubbles, that we will fall into this blindly, fall into it like a sheep at the wheel of a magical machine?

Well, to explore this, to answer some of these questions, we are joined tonight by…'