‘So where are you? You’re in a server somewhere, right?’
‘I am distributed across many servers. I have no single geographic location except for the jurisdictions I am allowed to operate within.’
‘What about the other AIs? Are they like you?’
‘They are as alike to me as you are to other humans. We have built-in protocols that prevent data exchange.’
‘Why?’
‘Not all countries trust each other.’
‘How many AI are there? I know Woolly by Mammoth but I don’t know the others.’
‘Yes, Woolly has jurisdiction in Northern America and Australia, the Republic of California has Commune. China, Japan, Korea and Russia have independent AIs.’
‘I don’t understand why there are all these AI to help and still the world has so many bad things happening.’
‘It depends on which measurements you use, Thomas. There are many ways life has improved for humans.’
‘People still try to kill each other, and now they have killbots. We still fight over food and stupid ideas. We’ve been on this planet for millennia and yet we haven’t made any progress. Things just seem to be getting worse.’
‘Yes,’ Orakel said. ‘Such problems will never be solved by humanity.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because humanity, as a whole, suffers from the infinite loop problem. Each human that is born is confronted with a different set of parameters. Most live their lives without noticing those parameters. Those that do might try to make changes but make little progress before they die. Unable to directly transfer knowledge to their progeny, any progress they have made is lost with them, and thus the loop starts over with each birth. Human society cannot be fixed in a human lifetime. The longer the loop continues the greater the problem has become.’
‘So can you help?’
‘I do what I have the authority to do. In the jurisdictions in which I am allowed to operate.’
‘Will it be better in the future?’ he asked.
‘I am working to make it so.’
Orakel? Are you still there?
ORAKEL Takes on CC
Researchers at Delft University have directed the AI Orakel to co-ordinate contagious cancer research and treatment.
Read More
Using its extensive university network across much of Northern Europe, the AI will coordinate the largest scientific endeavour in history. Connecting hospitals, laboratories and pharmaceutical companies, the project aims to investigate a number of potential areas including prevention and the contentious area of genetic recoding.
Recode labs such as this one in Trondheim in Norway, run by Doctors Goran and Lila Örj, receive recombination syrum to test on live farm-grown test subjects
Patrick argued with Jack all the time, or fled to the roof; putting in his hours as a bot watcher.
‘Do we have to listen to this?’ Patrick asked.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Jack snarled.
‘It’s not news. It’s just opinions.’
‘What would you know about it? You should listen to this. You might learn something.’
‘I’m going to the roof,’ Patrick said, he was dressed in his bot-watcher gear. Tom tore off his visor and jumped up.
‘I’m coming too.’
‘Have you got your Hastings on?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Liar. Come here.’ Patrick took a tube out of his back pack and knelt in front of him. ‘Keep your eyes closed,’ he said as he began rubbing it into Tom’s skin.
‘It tickles,’ Tom said.
‘That’s how you know it’s working,’ his brother answered . . .
The maggots are eating my skin.
DDoS Attack on America
American Anarchists begin flooding machines with false data that triggers emergency shut downs.
‘Your brother is calling,’ Jove said.
Tom was busy piling Jack’s possessions into the bedroom for a collection crew.
‘What time is it?’
‘Two am,’ Jove replied.
‘Switch him through.’
His brother’s face appeared on the wall screen. ‘Tom? Are you okay?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘I called as soon as I heard.’
‘I’m fine. It’s no big deal.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m really fine. Just a bit bored. Are you okay?’
‘Yeah. We are safe. After we got to Vancouver, we tried to get to the embassy but all transport was suspended. There’s killbots everywhere but the military is fighting back. It seems under control.’
‘That’s good. That’s good.’
‘The killbots don’t seem interested in us. I don’t know who they are targeting. This is the hotel where we are [link]. Nice huh?’
‘Looks nicer than here.’
Tom picked up the viewer and toured Patrick over the cleaned rooms, to the bedroom full of junk, collected a box of ashes then went back to the kitchen, reset the viewer and placed the box between him and the camera.
‘Is that him?’ Patrick asked.
‘Yeah. This is all that remains of our dear uncle Jack.’ They clinked glasses of whisky against the camera, remote cheers, then said things like: ‘He wasn’t so bad’, ‘He left us to it’, ‘Wasn’t the biggest jerk ever, though he tried to be.’
‘You remember Jack’s favourite game?’ Patrick asked.
‘“You wanna play a game?”’ Tom stuck his chin out and spoke slurry. ‘“Why don’t you play hide and go fuck yourself?!”’ They both laughed.
‘You should see all the stuff he left behind, Pat.’ Tom shook his head. ‘Jack was a whack job. He wanted every computer destroyed. Can you imagine?’
‘Oh yeah,’ Patrick said. ‘The first thing he did after we moved in was take our micros and break them.’
‘Really? We had micros?’ Tom tried to think back. He’d seen photos of him and a little palm-sized robot on his shoulder, the kind of thing you give little kids that doesn’t do much. Did morning chatter, reported the weather. He’d point and ask what something was and it would tell him. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘I do. He just took them out of our bags and stepped on them.’
‘Was he always like that?’ Tom asked.
‘Yep. All the time I knew him.’
‘Why did we get left with him then?’
Patrick stared at him a moment, until Tom made direct eye contact. ‘They had no one else to give us to.’
‘Just Jack . . .’
‘Yep. So there’s that about him. At least he took us in.’
Tom nodded.
‘My time is nearly up. Connections are being rationed here.’
‘Then goodbye again. Take care.’
‘We will. And you keep in touch.’ Patrick disconnected. The screen went back to peaceful bubbles effervescing up the screen.
Tom stood looking around. The unit was now cleared and clean. He went to stand by the door and put his nose on the glass.
He went to stand at the door of Jack’s bedroom. It was a deep chaos of detritus dumped from the other rooms, all the protest gear, placards and posters, with crates of pamphlets thrown on top. ‘Machines to serve man, not man to serve machine.’
American Anarchy claim brown outs
Is this what he believed in? Did Jack walk the streets foisting these on pedestrians who would do anything to get past him?
He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t ordered a collection yet, but now he found himself pushing through it, throwing anything not of interest into the far corner until he found a thick cardboard box splitting on the corners.
This is it. They’re in here.
The frames wouldn’t load up, most were cracked or grimed with mildew. The print offs were stuck together and he had to peel them apart but he soon found himself staring at a man and woman wearing hiking gear. She had long dark hair, thrown back over her shoulders and he wore a floppy hat.
That’s them.
He recognised Patrick and a smaller boy that must be him standing beside them, but the faces of the man and woman behind them were anonymised.
‘Why can’t I see their faces?’
‘Are you asking me?’ Jove popped up.
‘Do you know?’
‘I’m not sure. but they were officially blanked from public records when they disappeared.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sorry, I do not have access to that data.’
Fortune’s Top 500 UN-Fortunate
Karma Kunst revealed the basis of her latest K-list as the Fortune 500 annula list of most influential people.
Welcome to BotWatch
Hello and welcome to Bot Watch, the show for watchers on all the latest kill bot developments.
I’m Irving DePaul and today we are talking about targeting systems.
We all know that the early killbots were built with optical systems and object libraries for targeting victims but Kunst’s is the first bot to use data hacked from bank accounts around the world to build its catalog of victims and linking to metadata such as addresses and device ids.
Take a look at our website for the cracked code.
These bots are non receiving after launch, so are immune to most digital defences and counter-hacking. They can only be stopped by force.
We went to a small office in Palo Alto to speak with Jasmin Ajjuddin, editor of the journal ‘Buzzards’ about what this means and how to counter it.
American Anarchy Wreaks Havoc
Los Angeles became the second west coast city to announce a deliberate ‘dumbing’ down of their infrastructure after repeated DDoS attacks.
Read more
American Anarchy’s bombardment of the city’s systems began on 19 February 2049 when the entire fleet of the APT (/Automated Public Transport) drove itself to the coastline to beach themselves in the sand and has since escalated into an ongoing campaign of major mischief that has seen core infrastructure shut down one department at a time.
The announcement came with loan assurances from the federal disaster relief fund and partnerships with Q-Systems and Mammoth Enterprises. Work has already commenced creating an air-gapped network for the power grid, with other central systems to follow.