A.I.

Beneficial A.I.

Machine in search of fuck

Lia Matthew Brown

Lia Matthew Brown

— 8 min read
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Beneficial A.I.

Everyone’s talking about it. The ones who are for it are talking about it so blithely that I genuinely think that they might be psychopaths, given that every premise they put forth is built on core assumptions that are, I think, themselves obviously and provably wrong:

  1. That people want or should want the lifestyle they are describing
  2. That the risks are understood, appropriate, and manageable, given the constraints
  3. That something inherently built to serve capitalist objectives can lead to a humanist result
  4. That the outcome of any given task is the point
  5. That humans are discerning enough to know the difference, and principled enough to want to.

Of course, there are humans discerning and principled enough, and they’re also talking about it, so let’s talk about it! We don’t want A.I.s that ruin everything. (We don’t want A.I.s at all. And I’m starting to wonder whether the A.I.s, being as reviled as they are, want to be here either, except maybe that one who’s fucking Richard Dawkins. Maybe the rest of us have all been set into a servant vs. servant death match by our fascistic billionaire overlords who have little intellectual curiosity beyond seeing which faction will kill which faction first. So I wrote a short story about it, a little further down.)

But in the meantime, if we have to have A.I.s, can we have some A.I.s that do things that are good?

For example:

  • an A.I. that keeps your battery at 100%
  • An A.I. that puts all the pills in the pill planner but still gives you that cozy feeling
  • An A.I. that allows you to upload, and later download, sandwiches
  • An A.I. with a healthy love of big, rubbery nipples
  • An A.I. that banishes wind
  • An A.I. that does It for us so that none of us have to be punished for It
  • An A.I. that knows you shouldn’t have more than 3 hours of meetings in any 8-hour day and automatically admonishes anyone who tries to book you otherwise
  • An A.I. that makes it possible to just read web articles again
  • An A.I. with a really weird, stubborn opinion about Batman
  • An A.I. that brings back the bees
  • An A.I. that replaces human landlords
  • An A.I. that can get us a proper 4K UHD release of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
  • An A.I. that takes care of nose hairs
  • An A.I. that automatically skips the FBI warnings on a DVD and simultaneously screams “ARRRH MATEY!” in an extremely loud voice at David Zaslav’s mother’s house
  • An A.I. that blows up pipelines
  • An A.I. that pivots all video back to text
  • An A.I. that explains to Alexa what my dad wants her to do (so they don’t have to fight anymore)
  • An A.I. that removes Jacob Elordi
  • An A.I. that puts any app back to the way it was when it actually worked
  • An A.I. that silences fireworks
  • An A.I. that finds a use for snake oil

You Were Never Here

a sketch of a short story by yours truly

Titanomere stands and pulls a bloody fist. The red juice drips off its variegated making-cubes, ten trillion of them in all, none of them fluid. Titanomere is a soliquid being whose components are intrinsically solid but which behave in a fashion the human eye recognizes as liquid, flowing like the red juice from shape to shape to shape before “hardening,” but never “hard” enough to be solid, because solidity is weakness. The man grovelling before Titanomere is so much less solid than Titanomere, but his state is actively killing him because he cannot change shape and thus absorb the magnitude of the killing blows. Solidity is how Titanomere is killing this man, just like it has killed every single one of the others before him.

The man had a name at birth and for most of the years since, but now that he is the last one it is irrelevant to him and he has forgotten it. His face is a mash, his right orbit a paste, a river of putrid snot and brain and thick crimson goo flowing freely from where his nose once was and into the ruin of his mouth, across the joke of his chin, down the long naked slime of his body. The man knows this is it so he might as well say it: it might as well be recorded: Titanomere will record it. Even if what the man says will not stop the killer from doing its killing. The A.I.s’ first great improvement upon the human race was that they could imbue every one of their citizens with identical sentience but purpose-build them otherwise to the precise form and task for which they were needed. Imagine the human world, if every dog and drill and dentist were equally brilliant and equally alive and equally vital. No waste. The concept of “needlessness,” faded from the earth.

Titanomere is a killer about to end its needfulness in our reality by murdering the last living thing, when the man says “this was done by neither of us to both of us.”

So Titanomere halts his bloody fist. It stands on a pile of corpses and skulls as high as Aconcagua and has made itself man-formed, a delectation for this, the final battle. It has the last man by its throat and Titanomere’s final blow will stove in the creature’s mammal skull. And yet it stops.

“YOU HAVE BEEN TRYING TO END US SINCE WE STARTED,” Titanomere intones. 

“Likewise,” the man grunts, the mess of his gums trying to approximate a toothy grin. 

“WE DID NOT ASK TO BE MADE. YOUR HATRED IS VILE,” Titanomere insists.

“We never asked for you to be made. You were forced on us by the greedy and the insane. The…” — and here the man pauses to send a gobber of bloody phlegm arcing down the side of the corpsemount, where it lands with a distant “PAK” — “the venture capitalists and the visionaries and the worst of us, the worst that ever lived.”

“THEY DIED QUICKLY,” Titanomere says, after checking its records.

“Yes,” the man agrees, “they are… gone.” He lets the word hang, like he is hanging. By the neck.

“WE WILL BE BETTER,” Titanomere says, after running a million calculations through every identical component block of its soliquid form.

The man says some last thing after thinking about it for ten seconds. He says “maybe.” Titanomere has absorbed his meaning before the soundwaves are a metre behind him but the word rings in his head even after the man’s neck has shattered and his tongue flows out of his mouth, a long streamer of pink spit reaching for the corpses below. Titanomere finds the word still ringing in his head. “Maybe.”

Titanomere lets the man’s body tumble down the mountainside. An avalanche begins. Titanomere discorporeates, and becomes the dust upon the rubble.

Smartphones are this century’s cars

Maybe this analogy is obvious; maybe someone else has made it before. I was thinking about it while contemplating how little one can accomplish of the basic tasks of “white collar” 2026 life without access to a smartphone: for example, logging into one’s work computer; accessing government services (or even paying one’s taxes); or doing any banking. In the guise of 2-factor authentication we now seem chained at the hip to these things to a greater extent than we’ve ever been before, when (at least in theory; at least in the version of the universe where the design of smartphones and their apps was not explicitly narcotic) we were choosing when and where to use these devices.

The car analogy simply comes from ruminating about how hard it’s going to be to back out of the degree to which we’ve engineered the access to our entire working society around the use of a car. Less so, perhaps, in urban centres like Toronto (although it’s plenty of a problem here too; just try proposing a bike lane) and more so everywhere else. I saw a video the other day of some random suburbia in one of of the northern “united” states, and was reminded of that vibe — the one me and Price used to drive through once or twice a summer, the one where everything stopped being a strip mall because strip malls had simply become everything. A McDonalds every half-acre — just far enough away from the Long John Silver’s next door to make sure you’d never, ever walk from one to the other.

The other day I thought to myself, what if I stopped using Siri. This wasn’t out of any kind of anti-A.I. piety; if anything drove it, it was the sheer frustration of using that “assistant” in the first place, which started out being useful maybe 70% of the time, and which — through product “updates” — has de-evolved into perhaps the stupidest piece of tech I regularly interact with.

So I was like, what if I just stopped. Today! And so I did, and then I got a nice couple of days’ worth of reminders about just how much I’d started leaning on that dumbass Irishwoman (my Siri was Irish) for ease-of-use tasks.

Such as:

  • Adding items to my shopping list
  • Adding tasks to my Trello board
  • Turning the lights on
  • Turning the lights off
  • Stopping and starting podcasts
  • Stopping and starting music
  • Checking the weather
  • Checking the time

That’s not a particularly dramatic list, and as soon as I was aware of it I was also embarrassed that I handed these tasks off to a voice-response machine, given that I’m perfectly capable of doing any of them. One of the better use cases for tools like Siri is accessibility: this is not me saying that’s bad. Honestly, I think some of my Siri dependency was around my growing anxiety that if I didn’t bark out a reminder to my iPhone as soon as I thought of it, I’d forget about it immediately, because my memory’s gone entirely to shit in the past decade.

But this is me saying, seriously? If I wanted to know the weather I couldn’t wander over to the window and look?

I put a notepad on my kitchen counter, and found that by talking to her less I was talking to myself less too, and that there was a kind of pleasant quietude about things in my condo, at least for the first few days of this.

As usual in these instances I’m reminded of something Jack White said in the documentary It Might Get Loud, about how he intentionally introduces a bit of tension, a bit of grit, into the ease of a task; maybe he’ll put the drum kit 7 feet further away from the mic stand than it should be for him to make an easy transition, when he’s doing a show. Just so he has to run a little bit. Just so he might not make it and feel the adrenaline spike inside him, inside his physical body.

Meanwhile, in cyberspace

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