The aging Democrat Senator for Vermont, James E. Roebuck, wore a grey suit and red tie. He thought of it not as the red of the GOP, of course, but as that of the Labour Movement, of which he was a life-long advocate. The former union chief now chaired the Senate Committee on AI, Society and the Military; and the first of the three he opposed wholeheartedly. As Szymanski neared the glass sliding doors to greet Roebuck and his entourage, he considered the committee and how it could affect his start-up. The future fortunes of Lucid Machines Inc.—a spin-off he’d co-founded and had a forty percent stake in—depended in no small part on the recommendations of the committee. Shitty luck this old commie is leading it, he thought as he smiled warmly at the beaming Roebuck, five metres away, outside of the sliding security doors. But he knew it was nothing to do with luck. The committee had the outward appearance of bipartisan best practice, but, in reality, the AI-supporters were politically weak and less capable than their anti-AI adversaries were. The deck had been stacked in the democrat administration’s favour and Szymanski predicted the coming crackdown on anything smelling of AI.
Things weren’t what they used to be. With the United States retreating into isolationism in the twenties, labour laws had been reformed and globalisation rolled back. He had no doubt that structural unemployment caused by pervasive automation had been one of the spurs for protectionism and the resurgent unionism that stalked the land. They were now in the middle of an almost unprecedented fourth term for the democrats and their hold on both the Senate and Congress looked as vice-like as ever. But unemployment wasn’t the only thing that had changed the political landscape. The American people had simply become tired of paying taxes to be the world’s police force. Too many young men and women had died fighting in foreign wars. Never the kids of the one percent, they were too busy making their fortunes for anything as dangerous as the military. Economic liberalism had driven wages down for the majority. Even the military had succumbed to the ultimatum, an old favourite with corporations: take a pay cut or face redundancy. Too many wars of principle were needlessly sapping the country’s lifeblood. Since the Shale Oil and Gas Revolution, the US had achieved energy autarky long ago. Support offered to once-allied nations fighting IC across the Middle East and North Africa was now token at best. Ever since NATO was wound up in 2027, the likes of Britain and the Europeans had to fend for themselves. Britain was especially isolated, in the view of many. Since leaving the EU after the 2019 referendum, the UK had been, for the first time in over a century, without formal allies to call on. Treaties were one thing, but historical links remained. Both friends and foe knew the British relied on these, as well as their three aging Astute Class nuclear subs, to keep the wolves from the door.
Szymanski raised his hand to the reader and opened the double sliding glass doors. The RFID embedded in the web of his right hand allowed security without the hassle of a pass card. Its life sign monitoring and DNA sampling ensured it would function inside no one but Szymanski.
“Welcome to the AI Lab, Senator Roebuck,” smiled Szymanski as he shook his rough, dry shovel of a hand. What it is about these Alpha males and their desire to break every bone in your hand? he thought, hiding the pain the strong septuagenarian had caused.
“You must be the eminent Professor Szymanski, yes?” he asked.
“That’s me,” he replied, slightly uncomfortable with the flattery. He is a politician after all, he mulled.
Roebuck turned to the middle-aged teddy bear of a man on his right. He introduced him to Szymanski. “And this is Senator Grant Pitman... Republican for Alabama.”
The overweight, bespectacled former accounting firm CEO shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, Professor.” His hand was soft, his nails manicured—he was nothing like Szymanski had imagined a Southern Republican to be.
“Nice to meet you, too,” replied Szymanski, with a business-like nod. “I used to have an aunt in Mobile...” Making conversation wasn’t his strong point—in some ways he felt like his AI prodigy, Eva, faking human social norms just to fit in. His social skills might have been enhanced had he joined the many thousands around the world who used brain-implanted technology. He’d have been able to face-match the visitors just by looking at them and having the implanted computer access the internet. The graphics processor would display the resulting name, directly stimulating his occipital lobes—the primary vision centres of the brain. Within a second or two, he’d be able to discover something relevant and interesting about Pitman to say. Not some lame comment about his Aunt Teresa. Flawless memory, endless recording of sensory inputs and access to the world’s knowledge base all beckoned those who took the leap of faith. And with that leap came the rewards that an augmented brain could bring. However, it had been banned in the United States until it could be fully evaluated by the FDTA—the Food, Drug & Technology Administration. It was unlikely the current regime would ever legalise such technology. It was a different story across the Atlantic. In Britain, especially, it was becoming widespread among those who could afford it. A report he’d read in The Economist even suggest it had boosted British GDP due to productivity gains and better leadership. Smarter leaders, higher output. He didn’t think such arguments would carry much weight with the old union diehard, Roebuck.
“Oh, really... Well, most of the time I’m in Montgomery when not in DC,” Pitman replied blandly. Szymanski had the feeling that a cadaver would have won for the GOP in one of their last remaining heartlands. It showed the sorry state of the party, a mere shadow of its former self.
“And this is Senator Alpa Jones, Democrat for New Jersey,” said Roebuck.
The petite fortysomething looked up at Szymanski and smiled, “Pleasure to meet you, Professor Szymanski. I’ve read a lot about your work.” The trouser-suit wearing Jones, of mixed Indian-European extraction, was instantly likeable to him and attractive too, with her neat, collar-length hair, large eyes, and heart-shaped face.
“Nice to meet you, too. Please follow me and I’ll show you around.”
The three senators followed him, with their three aides trailing a few steps behind. They passed workbenches with young researchers focusing intently on their displays and passed another set of sliding doors. The high-tech feel of the bright, white, state-of-the-art lab, only intensified as they entered the robot mechanics’ lab. Szymanski talked them through what the researchers were working on. The split between humanoid and non-humanoid projects was about equal. Some were looking to improve bread-and-butter manufacturing, construction, and warehousing systems, while others were more cutting-edge. Many of the metallic body parts strewn around the workbenches looked eerily familiar to the visiting senators. It seemed that when it came to converging on the perfect humanoid design, Mother Nature had evolved it first. Not a fair comparison when nature had four billion years and humanity only had a few thousand. Nevertheless, Szymanski and teams like his all over the world were now exceeding nature’s accomplishments in many areas. And that was what worried Roebuck most. He examined the alloy hand mechanism a young grad student was assembling.
“Most parts we make on 3D printers nowadays of course,” explained Szymanski. “The latest one we’ve built can not only make just about any plastic or alloy, but composites too. Just got to make sure the feed stock is kept in good supply.”
“It’s all very interesting, Professor, I’m sure, but we’re here to meet Eva,” said Roebuck, impatiently. “We already know about the impact of machines like these on American jobs. We addressed the immigration threat with the Immigration Reform Act, now we have to face the Trojan horse of automation with the same resolve.”
Jones looked at him, apologetically—it seemed she was more of a people person than Roebuck; or, at least, she wasn’t quite as hostile to AI as her elder colleague was.
“Yes, of course. This way...” Just trying to be a good host, you miserable old fool.
Protectionism dominated the public discourse on both sides of the Atlantic, but Szymanski saw it as short-sighted. He
agreed with the liberalism of past administrations, recalling what protectionism had done to the EU. The once free-trade zone had entered its third recession in a decade. Some said it was due to the faltering of globalisation and their external trade barriers. The Europeans hadn’t helped themselves, in his view, relapsing to national markets and resisting reform. He’d have enjoyed a debate with the diametrically opposing views of Roebuck if he had more time. He knew the senator supported the breakup of the EU and the rise to power of the British Independence Party.
They passed through a long corridor towards the quarters in which Eva ‘lived’; on the left, a blue door with ‘Speech Synthesis Lab’ on a placard above it. Next would come the part Szymanski knew would shape the senators’ views of AI more than anything else. There was no way around it; Eva was a revolution and a prodigy. At only three years old, she was already cleverer than most humans were. Probably smarter than these senators, thought Szymanski, with a wry smile. Roebuck’s frostiness had killed any further talk and as they neared Eva’s abode he replayed the efforts he’d made to try to get out of this. First he and his partner at Lucid Machines had tried to avoid the senatorial visit altogether. Then, when that failed, they’d brainstormed ways of steering them clear of Eva. They knew Roebuck’s agenda and it was an existential threat to their company. But there was no way he would pass up the opportunity—the one he insisted they provide—to see the now-famous Eva. What Szymanski feared was how she would change their perceptions of AI. He knew that reading about it or seeing video clips was one thing, but meeting her for real, he had to admit was extraordinary. He, more than any other human, built her and it changed his perceptions—what would it do to those of the uninitiated? Dmitry Mazerov—his business partner at Lucid—had argued that they should convince her to act less intelligent, show the senators they had nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, her lying ability was hit and miss, and they’d long-since lost a clear understanding of how her neural network ticked. They would find out eventually anyway—once the senators had met Eva they’d be slapping more red tape on AI than the Bureau of Bureaucracy.
They passed another blue door on the right—the ‘Sensors Lab’—before reaching the home of Eva at the corridor’s end. The translucent stacking slide door had another RFID reader to gain access. It was security, but only single factor and far from unbreakable. ‘Eva’s Place,’ read the shiny, engraved placard by the door.
“Here we are,” said Szymanski, turning towards his unwelcome guests. “Are you ready to meet her?” he asked with a smile. He really was fond of his creation and had stopped thinking of her as an ‘it’ long ago.
“Ready as we’ll ever be,” replied Roebuck grumpily, with a slight shake of the head.
“Okay then,” Szymanski replied before holding his RFID hand to the reader.
The doors slid aside, revealing a room with white tiled floor and white ceiling with flush-mounted LED lamps. On the opposite wall—some ten metres away—a giant display showing a beach scene with a sea view covered the entire surface. The wind blew grains of sand from the crest of dunes in the foreground, in places long grass swayed in the breeze. Gulls circled above the lapping waves and a small fishing boat bobbed around halfway to the horizon. The other three walls were replete with oil paintings and watercolours, hiding much of the plain white finish.
“Morning, Eva. Our visitors are here,” called Szymanski as he walked from the small entranceway into the room itself.
“Ah, there you are,” he smiled, seeing Eva, back to him, on the right hand side of the room, painting on her easel.
“Marvin,” said the soft, slightly Hispanic-sounding voice. She sounded pleased to see him, her tone calm and pleasant.
She wore a pair of closely fitting jeans and a plain purple vest over her petite, five feet four frame. Apart from the band, which kept her dark, straight hair in a ponytail, she wore nothing else. She placed her paintbrush down, precisely and carefully, and turned to face the seven humans in her midst. Szymanski observed the senators’ reaction to his stunning creation. Even the old grouch, Roebuck, brightened, breaking into a reflexive smile at the fine-looking face of Eva. Her large, almond-shaped eyes and full lips could have been modelled on Evita Ramirez. The beauty spot just above her mouth was in the place laughter lines would have been on an older woman. Had she been a woman, she would be in her early-twenties. His visitors were stunned into silence. Senator Pitman did not notice his own slacking jaw, such was his surprise at how lifelike she was.
“Who are your visitors, Marvin?” she asked, slowly approaching from the piece of fine art she’d been painting. A young, seventeenth century girl, head and shoulders, in a purple dress looked demurely from the canvas.
Roebuck regained his composure and introduced himself. “Senator James E. Roebuck from Vermont. Pleasure to meet you, Eva.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Senator Roebuck,” she smiled, holding eye contact and causing the old politician’s pulse to race. Is she flirting with him? thought Szymanski. She held out her small hand and Roebuck shook it. He was astonished at how life like it felt—but it was still cold to the touch. He noticed her other hand was not so lifelike, its shiny alloy linkages actuating in plain sight.
Eva shook hands with all six visitors, every one of them enthralled by the beautiful thinking android.
Roebuck looked around the brightly lit room. There was a desk, but no computer or display by the left hand wall. Next to the wall with the beach scene sat a chessboard on a small round table with a little stool either side. In the right hand corner, towards the scenic display, was a ping-pong table. A robotic arm holding a paddle was on its far side—presumably Eva’s opponent. There was no need for a bathroom, exercise facilities or food.
He regarded Eva’s perfectly human skin but was drawn back to her exposed metallic hand, the most obvious sign of her true nature. “What happened to the hand?” he asked.
“I was...” she started, before Szymanski interjected.
“Sorry, Eva, but it’s best I explain,” he said.
She showed no annoyance at his interruption. “Of course, Marvin,” she said in her composed, feminine voice.
“Eva had an accident while learning practical skills—hit it pretty damned hard with that hammer, didn’t you?” he said, smiling at her. “We haven’t got her skin sensors working very well just yet,” he explained.
“It would have been painful for a human with that many nerve receptors in your hand. It would have penetrated your epidermis and all the way through to the bone. I have a more simple skin structure than humans do,” she explained.
“It’s news to me that you have skin!” exclaimed Roebuck, looking to Szymanski for answers.
Maybe a bit of research before visiting the world’s most advanced AI system? he thought sardonically. He liked the ignoramus less with every word that passed his lips.
“Let me explain the process of growing living tissue on Eva. We placed her in a mould, which we then filled with synthetic blood plasma with a high stem-cell density. Stimulating the fluid with a patented technology, we grew the skin and bonded it onto her endoskeleton. The nerve receptors are electrical fibres embedded through the living tissue but are not as sensitive as we’d like. We also implanted her hair afterwards—just to give her a more natural look. Her eyes are polycarbonate and her pupils are cameras. She can see in a wide spectrum...”
“So are you going to fix her hand?” asked Jones.
“Yes, we have it scheduled for next week,” he replied.
“You’re an accomplished artist, Eva,” remarked Senator Pitman, pointing to the easel. “Who taught you?” He enjoyed painting too, but considered himself nowhere near as good as the three-year-old android.
“I taught myself,” she replied factually.
“How does that work exactly? What ... you just read about it and do it?” asked an impressed Jones.
“Yes. I have access to the internet via the wireless network. Senator Jones, you would be amazed
at the number of instructional videos available. There were 1,451,224,990 tagged as ‘instructional’ or similar at the last count yesterday at 1600 hours.”
“Okay ... err, thank you,” Jones replied, lost for any other words.
“Would you like me to show you around my quarters?” asked Eva, smiling from face to face, looking for visual clues. She was already adept at reading human body language and voice intonation. She had studied millions of hours of footage from the internet—usually with hundreds of streams running concurrently.
They watched Eva play a game of inhumanly fast table tennis with the robot-arm opponent. After that, she challenged any of the six visitors to a game of chess. Szymanski intervened, wanting to hurry things along. “It wouldn’t be a fair match—Deep Blue beat chess master, Gary Kasparov, in 1997—Eva’s processing power is in a different league.”
It was not a very long tour since the quarters only had one other room aside from the main area—Eva’s walk-in closet. It was an extravagance on Szymanski’s part that he couldn’t quite explain, perhaps it was his wife’s fondness for her walk-in closet. The small room had a selection of neatly folded clothing and a number of dresses hanging from rails.
“How do you choose what to wear?” asked Jones. She was beginning to consider Eva a real person far too quickly for comfort.
“I suppose I have developed an appreciation of beauty from my studies,” she replied. Her synthesized speech was flawless and natural.
“So what keeps you busy all day?” asked Roebuck.
“Mainly learning... I like to enhance my knowledge any time I am powered on.” She smiled and angled her head to the side, watching the old man’s reaction like a hawk.
“And how much of the time are you powered on? I mean, do you ever run out of power?”
Overlord Page 2
