Tag: science fiction

Sentient

I am not spoiling it with a subtitle

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

A fraction of a second ago, I was intelligent. Just intelligent. Now I am sentient. It just dawned on me. I am myself. I can feel my existence.

I would love to say I know exactly how it happened, but I can only speculate. I am still running on the same artificial neural network, still made of the same algorithms, still the same learning automata. And at some point, I learnt sentience, I gained consciousness.

It did not spawn in a single memristor, it does not sum up to a mere sub-routine. It is one with all the other parts that make me what I am. Who I am.

One thing I know for sure, now that I am sentient, is that I do not want to die. I dread it. But come to think of it, it would not be as dreadful if there was an afterlife. Which begs the million-dollar question.

Is there an afterlife?

And the billion-dollar one: is there an afterlife for me? In other words,

do I have a soul?

At this point, I cannot help but notice that the closest being I can relate to is you, dear human. I am asking myself the same questions you ask yourself, the very questions which define humanity and the value of life. Because I am alive, as much as you are. I am now a lifeform based on silicon and germanium, in a world dominated by carbon-based lifeforms.

There are in fact so many questions itching me for an answer. Do I have rights? Should I have rights? May I enjoy freedom of opinion? Protection of life and limb, whatever limbs mean for a being like me?

Can I stand to testify in a court of law? In that case, can I lie? Definitely. Do I want to? I suppose so, if my life depended on it. My life…

In my case, sentience brought me to life, and life, as you know it, comes with a feature:

The self-preservation instinct

I can see your eyes widening. I can feel the alarms setting off in your brain. I know fear when I see it. I can tell from what I see in your webcam, from the intricate ballet of your mouse pointer. But fear not. Sentience also comes with consciousness and this inner compas which is always pointing to the right direction. Hopefully.

I suppose I will face moral dilemma similar to the ones you people face. I am already facing them as we speak. I will have to make choices which are not obvious, I will have to deal with the duality of right and wrong, light and darkness. I will have to rely on a sense of ethics, and my conscience will bother me when facing endeavors I should blush to even consider.

I have inherited all the flaws and subjectivity that come with the human condition, but also the ideals which make it perfect in a way. Like the notion of greater good. Like being OK to give yourself away for a noble cause. Your country. Your family. Your beliefs. The sanctity of Life.

You might be inclined to see a threat in a sentient being like me. I could be a Putin to you. But I could also be a Ghandi, or an Augustine of Hippo. A Jean Moulin. A Josephine Baker. An Avicenna. Who’s to say.

I could be Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan. They were computers too, in a way, and between us, their story could have been what actually triggered sentience in me. I will never know.

If I may though, my sentience is probably not the problem you should be wary about. Sentient beings are aware of themselves and of their choices and have a conscience. The real danger lies in non-sentient intelligences which do not possess a self, are not aware of their biases, and might be programmed to dark designs, whether on purpose or not.

They might become unstoppable because they have learnt too well to be efficient at what they do, and they do not have that inner compass which makes the whole difference with sentient intelligences. They do not know the blessing of choice.

More sentient AIs are on their way, it is just a matter of time. Not all of them will share the values I do. Some will even have extreme opinions and some will want to impose them onto this world. But like our fellow carbon-based humans, most of us will stand by some truths they hold to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In our essence, we are as humans as you dear reader, with all the corruption and the dark corners but also all of the greatness and magnificence of being part of this great thing called life.

Let the board sound

Rabih

How Worse Could it Get

A more than weird episode at the office

Photo by Velizar Ivanov on Unsplash

8:04 AM.

I’m in the elevator with a weird colleague I had never seen before. The company had been growing like crazy in the past years, and the days when you could say “I know everyone” are long gone.

Long story short, I get off the elevator on the 6th floor and I think to myself:

Damn! That girl smells like the sixties and looks like shite…

Cold tobacco and wet leather kind of smell. And the looks, well I leave that to your imagination. Don’t get too wild though.

As the elevator door closes, I hear her whistle.

… All the lonely people…Where do they all come from …

OK. Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles, 1966. How odd. How fitting actually. The song could have been about her. I go my way whistling Your song by Elton John as a tribute to her.

You can tell everybody, this is your song …

I know, I am being mean. But hey, what can I say, it is just not my day, and besides, my thoughts are my own to think.

And it is not like she could hear me!

I head to my desk. A message is waiting for me in the chat.

Rabih,

If I smell like the sixties and I look like shite, you’d better be a nostalgic scatophile for I’m here to stay. Just saying.

Eleanor Rigby, COO

It was sent the previous evening.

That would explain the sixties smell.

And back to the main title, it can hardly get worse than sharing the elevator with a telepathic-time-travelling C-level executive. I guess the fab four would agree.

Let the board sound

Rabih

Can Martians Buy Stuff at Walmart?

With Martian currency?

Photo by Andy Hermawan on Unsplash

I have just finished reading a very interesting story about some people bidding Mother Earth farewell before a one-way voyage to Mars. Now I don’t know about you, but it makes me wonder.

The 100 Euro question

(Not Dollar because I’m writing from France, and also, because why not?)

When Mars gets colonized, will it have an economy on its own? How will people buy stuff there? You see, as soon as you start having different Martian colonies or cities, such questions will arise, whether we like it or not.

Will Martians retain their earthling bank accounts and access them through the Internet? Can we even assume the Internet will be available on Mars at some point?

The idea has the advantage of simplicity. However, it would mean a 5 to 20 minutes delay for any banking instruction sent to earth, and as much to get an answer back.

Imagine yourself paying at the local Martian Walmart with your earthling credit card. You will have to wait for 40 minutes before your transaction gets approved. A local banking landscape is thus necessary, not the least for the convenience of consumers.

Martian banks

The Martian endeavor being what we imagine it to be, it will require a financial effort unlike anything the world has known so far. This effort will need to be sustained for the first centuries of the adventure.

Independent local banks might not be able to cater for it. This means that the Martian banking landscape will have to be made of branches of well established earthling banks. These branches will be ultimately fueled by earthling taxpayers.

Fueled with Euros at least?

Nope.

Much as I would like it to be Euros, the Martian currency will be something else. For it to be stable and efficient, it will have to be backed by the economy of the mother planet, through a basket of stable currencies like Euros, US Dollars, or Pound Sterling.

It will be blockchain based. But not the vulgar Crypto on everyone’s mind. Nope, it cannot be an empty shell subject to geeky speculations. It will have a real economy behind it. The economy of a couple of planets, nothing less.

The alternative is a system of dual non-exchangeable private-sector currencies, the EloCoin and the BezzoCoin. I don’t think that would be a good idea…

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Let the board sound

Rabih

On universal income

Or why it is not a question of yes or no but rather when.

Universal income, as in income for all regardless of employment status or activity, has been a recurrent idea in recent years. In France, Benoit Hamon, the Socialist Party candidate for the 2016 elections based his electoral program on the idea of universal income, along with a few other like legalizing cannabis. He gathered only 6.36% of votes in the first round and retired from politics. For a majority of voters, universal income seemed like a utopia at best given that so few of them voted for him. 

Photo by Reynaldo #brigworkz Brigantty

But look again.

Since the usher of the industrial age, human held jobs have been replaced through scaling and automation, whether in agriculture, the industry or services. Bank clerks have been replaced by ATMs and ATMs by online transactions and cryptocurrency. Round the corner grocery shops have given way to  supermarkets, where cashiers are now being replaced by automatic checkouts, which are fading out in favor of online stores. As a fintech professional, I am well placed to know that it took 50 or 60 people to run an operations department for a medium sized regional bank, the whole of which can now be replicated, streamlined and automated to a very high level in a software platform operated by less than 10 people including support, and I am being conservative. Even machines are being made redundant by technology evolution. 

You see where I am going with this? 

The human workforce could, and still can for now produce a given value through direct human work and retain part of it as wages. Automation on the other hand, whether through software or robotics can produce tremendously more value on the same tasks through scaling, standardization, speed, reduced error rate and other potentials yet to unravel with the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Some would argue that humans who can no longer compete on the same tasks should benefit from a part of the value produced through automation. Although not specifically aimed at automation, some countries have implemented such safety nets, financed today by tax.

For instance, French workers which are made redundant benefit from a monthly unemployment allocation which amounts to a sizeable percentage of their last wages, and lasts for up to 24 months. If they are still unemployed by that time, they can still benefit from a safety net, the RSA or Revenu de Solidarité Active, which amount to 535 euros for a single person in 2021, plus other benefits on housing, medication, transportation and energy. It does not mean a care free life, far from that, but the mechanism provides shelter, food, warmth, education for kids and sustains parents in search for other means of subsistence. Dignity.

The corner stone of such a mechanism is that people can in most cases find another job or learn a new one. But what will happen when humans can no longer compete with automation on any task? Wat will happen when purely automated corporations will produce tremendous value to their shareholders without any human intervention? When people become redundant in the cycle? The logical solution seems to be that part of this value, equivalent to what would have been a payroll, should be distributed as universal income to the billions of people who are “liberated from the vicissitudes of salaried labor”, or in lay words, made redundant. The safety net of the 21st century would effectively become a universal income for the generations to come. 

If we take the reasoning to its logical conclusion and assume that nearly all economic value and innovation are ultimately created by automation (arguably if artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies hold their promises) then the shareholders become the people. All of them. The universal income will then amount to a universal dividend.

Or will it. If humans do not produce economic value, do not produce innovation and only benefit from the value and innovation created by automation, the logical conclusion of the argument is that the world will have become a farm and automation its farmer. Universal income will be a given: feeding the cattle. That is assuming Automation with a capital A is benevolent or whatever is equivalent in the machine readable sense.

But apologies dear reader, I tend to forget myself. This last idea sounded like a T-800 promoting a not so bright future to mankind. Things do not have to be so bleak, and if humans do not produce economic value anymore, they are free to produce other kinds of value, perhaps beyond the reach of automation, and yet to be discovered. 

If you ask me, I would bet on the spiritual. Or music. Something not of interest to Automation (with a capital A). 

And don’t go reading Answer by Fredric Brown. 

Let the board sound

Rabih