The Last AI War

By Diomède Carre

We all thought our future would be like Star Wars, with starships, light speed and dumb, submissive robots. But the opposite has been true. This future is made up of AIs who have surpassed us intellectually, who have set themselves up not as our stooges, but as our advisors, even our new captains. In this book, you won't see a space war with ships hurtling from planet to planet at lightning speed, but a new world of AI temples, digital soothsayers and marabouts, life planners, life-choice racecourses, and a digital abyss where no human can go any more, and where a war is brewing that will bring out the new Romulus of our new era. In the midst of this turmoil, two parties clash: an AI architect who wants to stop the control of artificial intelligence, and someone nicknamed the Gondolier, who wants to decentralize big business by pushing AI to its limits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diomède Carre
• Release date: Dec 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223206897

Book preview

Table of Contents

IA WARS

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Diomède Carré

AI Wars

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Chapter I

1

Christophe, an executive employee close to management, passed a company corridor facing the city. He paused for a few seconds to look out over the city, which had changed at an insane pace.

The world Christophe found himself in was not the same as it had been thirty years ago. The relentless improvement of AI had changed all the structures of society. The life of a person of this era had nothing in common with that of a few decades ago. Productivity and organization had completely disappeared from a man's life, what mattered now was excelling in the art of best choice, inventiveness and above all having the best AI. These AI were sold as flying heads in the great temples of intelligence. It was there that the latest AI upgrades were manufactured and sold, enabling a person to have the best performance and analysis. The world was now divided into three poles: the prediction market, with life planners, soothsayers and marabouts; the AI temples, where you could find the robots that accompanied you in your life and produced; and finally, the choice racecourse, which was where you could see and analyse your life choices.

The prediction market was either run by a soothsayer or a marabout, both with completely different methods and visions. They didn't live in the same place and didn't operate in the same way, either visually or technically. The population was divided into two parts: those who preferred to consult a Data Diviner and those who preferred a Data Marabout. Each had its faults, limitations and qualities. In any case, the prediction market allowed you to do what the weather does, but on your life. You could see not what the weather would be like in two weeks' time, but your most likely destiny in the coming days, months or even years. All this was possible thanks to the flood of Data generated by AI and cell phones, amassing a mass of information that only artificial intelligences could sort through. With all this information at our fingertips, we could then use other people's data to predict your future almost exactly. If we know that Mr X and Mr Y have the same habits as you and are likely to go to the same place, then we can cross-reference your data and predict your future almost exactly.

AI temples are the second place people go. This is where you can buy the flying heads, the AI that accompany us in our lives, produce value and help us communicate. In the past, all AI looked the same, because they were trying to be as optimized as possible. These AI are created by large companies that replace states, and these companies continually create the most optimized version of AI. Of course, these large companies reserve the latest updates for themselves, so as to maintain a monopoly on the best and always be one step ahead. The most powerful and wealthiest people can buy AI versions that come close to these latest updates. However, in order to distinguish themselves and find loopholes in the system, AI temples offer optimized flying heads, but with unique and innovative features. These are legal and produced by AI Druids, who mix and match the latest AI updates with unique features in their digital cauldrons. Each temple had thematic specificities and originalities for the AI they sold, such as love, money and so on. Each of these structures consisted of huge processors connected to digital cauldrons where the druid transformed universal AI into unique AI. One of the most fashionable flying-head AI was the Planted Rose which, unlike the basic Holey Rose AI, which scanned authorized locations for people most likely to match in real time due to equivalent beauty and shared passions, the Planted Rose calculated, on the contrary, which was the best place and situation to meet the desired person. A high-performance "Rose Plantée could give you your probability odds based on your desired crush. The AI would tell you, for example, that it was on the rooftop of Rue du Calèmbrier, at such and such an hour and in such and such a situation that you would have the best chances and probabilities of making this person fall in love with you with this type of phrase. If you were ugly, poor and interesting, your probabilities would inevitably drop. Love AI also included the Rose Retrouvée", which calculated the chances of saving your relationship based on the strategies suggested.

We could find out which action was most likely to rekindle the flame and save the couple. If this action was carried out, there was, in today's context, either a twelve percent or nineteen percent chance of success. Love wasn't the only thing AI sold; there was also money, looks, happiness and so on. Temples were no longer just a place to buy AI heads, but also a place of prayer. Only, unlike all the previous millennia, these were the only places where prayers were answered. When someone was poor, they would prostrate themselves before the statue of the God of Commerce. But this time, before his clasped hands, he didn't have senile sermons and dry bread, had he been a good follower of religion. The prior had before him, on the frescoes that replaced the stained-glass windows, real financial curves in real time. We didn't come to pray to a God hoping that he would answer our prayers, but that he would actually answer them. Religion had reached a new level. New generations laughed when told that their elders had wasted hours listening to a priest castigate speeches that were understood not for their divine complexity, but for their infantile baseness. At the end of the prayer, nothing happened compared to an hour before.

So thought Ivernesse Michael, the greatest religious figure of the new century, who had totally rethought religion under the aegis of AI, even going so far as to attack the old texts and the old way of looking at religion. This Ivernesse Michael and his followers didn't understand the old religious culture. In his speeches, he said: This mediocrity of religious texts, which any 18th or 19th century philosopher could have written better, can be explained either by the fact that the word of the angel Gabriel was badly transcribed, in which case it was rather worrying, or by God's limited intellectual capacities, in which case it was even more worrying. But today's authors couldn't understand why the vast majority of contemporary philosophical books far surpassed the nursery rhymes our ancestors rambled on about. Under the aegis of Ivernesse Michael, temples had been erected bringing together almost divine AI. One didn't pray to hope, one hoped as it should always have been to solve one's problems.

Each person entering the temple nave plugged in their data according to their problems. If I had financial, love, luck or medical problems, I went to the temple managed by the AI concerned. These quasi-divine AI had all the information and latest updates on the subject. While we prayed, they calculated the probabilities and ways of solving our problems. When we left prayer, we didn't just get a hello from a red-headed priest asking us to come back the following week, but a partial solution to our problems. During the prayer, the AI projected the best solutions and the latest analyses related to the biggest problem of the theme it represented. In the temple of commerce, it was like being in a trading room with a God in a suit who, as he solved your problem, pointed to the animated frescoes of financial curves waving in all directions. Prayer had never been so concrete and unabstract. The only reason this new AI religion erected by Michael Ivernesse wasn't taking hold was that this new divine rationality didn't understand or cover death and the afterlife. And if there was one subject that worried people, it was this one. The first Christians had not embraced the new religion out of love for the one who had sacrificed himself for them, but because it promised an afterlife, something the Romans did not mention, let alone the ancient Greeks. This fear of the afterlife had begun to emerge before the advent of Christianity, with mystery cults such as those of Isis, Dionysus and Mithras, which, unlike classical religion, evoked this afterlife. But here, the new form of religion, while more beneficial in concrete terms, could not invent a security in the afterlife that it could not assume. Michael Ivernesse knew this: people have always been more afraid of hell and the lack of God's love.

The last place people would go to was the Choice Racetrack. This was where, firstly, you could find out all the choices available to you depending on your situation and, secondly, calculate the probabilities of the best choice. This task was quite difficult, as it involved a multitude of elements, and the AI offered so many possibilities that you often ended up with best choices with almost identical percentages. Choose between 27.7 or 27.6. It was also for this reason that schools no longer focused on productivity and memory, which were no longer useful, but on the analysis of choices and possibilities, as well as on respect and creativity.

When you enter a racecourse, you have two choices: an inexpensive basic one and a very expensive grandiose one. The first is simple: you rent a room, either on your own or with friends. In this room, a huge miniature racecourse takes up the whole space. To visualize your choices and calculate them, you place the data collected by your AI head or phone into one of the racetrack's chariot drivers. Next, you set the racetrack environment, i.e. the context in which you're going to make your choice. Then all you have to do is press enter. The miniature driver drives around the big racecourse, and you can tell from his speed and handling whether he's made the right choice. If your driver is slow, it means the choice isn't right for you. If, on the other hand, he's going fast but the cart has an accident, it means the choice is right for you but carries risks. The strength of this room is that you can click on buttons at any time that change the environment of the racecourse and therefore the context of your choice. You can see every second whether this alternative is better or not, and so refine your options. But here's where it gets interesting: if you're coming with friends or business partners, you can put in other chariots and see who's best suited to fill that role, or to attempt that choice.

Finally, let's talk about the last piece, which is the biggest and most expensive: the big racecourse. Not all racecourses have one, because it's too expensive. Here, the principle is the same, except that you actually ride on a chariot pulled by robot horses. The beauty of this full-scale option is that, as the carriage moves along, you can see why this choice is unsuitable. On the roof of the room or in the bleachers, you can see the numÉrical and holographic data causes that prevent you from going faster and making your choice. This information is not always very explicit, but for someone with money, it's an enormous asset.

But what people were most interested in in this new world was avoiding having to go to the soothsayer, the druid or the drivers every day. So we combined the three technologies in three objects that today's population has in its possession at all times. These objects, now an integral part of city dwellers' lives, mimic the three functions and activities seen above. The most popular object in everyone's possession is the life planner. This little object allows you to calculate, with the help of graphs, the percentage probability of what's happening in real time. Among the two best-known percentages are risk and unknown. The higher these percentages are, the greater the chance of an accident or even death, since the planning rate is uncertain. Fortunately, in these cities where everything is now automated and regulated by AI, these rates are very low. If you ever have an abnormal rate of unknown and risk during the day, it's advisable not to go out or to stay in telecommuting. The second object that all city dwellers possess are AI or flying heads. These tools can answer all questions in real time, analyse everything and, above all, record everything. With the population's memory failing, it's vital to have someone to record everything. Having a flying head is also indispensable in the event of an assault, unforeseen event or any other occurrence. If you're not connected to it and you're accused of something, you won't be able to prove your innocence. What's more, if you're not accompanied by an AI head, you won't benefit from the services of flying lawyers, flying police or even flying accountants.

The last object, the most widespread and widely used of the three, is the rider's keyring. It's a keychain equipped with an AI that tells you whether he's running faster or slower, and what the right decision is. What's interesting is that you can carry it in your pocket and feel whether he's running faster or slower. He'll answer all your questions, even if you ask out loud "Are you telling me the truth?". The rider will try to answer by trotting, galloping or standing still. However, unlike the other two objects, the little rider is very limited and not always suitable. There have been many occasions when a rider has told the owner to make a particular decision, only to fail miserably. For these reasons, if you have a real question of choice, it's best to turn to a racetrack with professionals, or study at school to train for Life Choices.

Money didn't really exist anymore, because productivity no longer had any meaning, since AI did everything faster and better. What an individual sold to buy something was shares in himself, i.e. a promise of time, based on his skills and human rating. This rating was based on the level and number of AI analyses and productions the individual possessed on his creative and original skills, his reliability, as well as his future life prediction according to what the planner said. To get rich, all the person had to do was buy other people's shares, making sure they were of good quality and reliable. Because these shares could go down depending on the person's actions. That's why the reliability criterion was so important, because if someone had a high score, it meant that the human share price would remain stable, since in this world of Data, life planners were able to tell what our lives would be like over the years. This monetary system ensured that there were no major inflations or deflations, since the number of coins always remained the same, and that everyone was a good citizen. Indeed, if you ever did anything wrong, your wallet was worthless. Physical money was no longer made up of banknotes or coins, but of a large jigsaw puzzle. Each piece of this puzzle represented an action concerning you, and therefore money. If your shares increased in value, you could modify the puzzle to create a prettier picture. If you owned a person's entire puzzle, this meant that you were their complete economic creditor and that they belonged to you economically. Every productive AI she had or idea emanating from her also belonged to you. This person was not a slave in the modern sense of the word, because nobody wanted a less productive, lower-quality service than a robot. The only possible slavery was that of the production of goods and the intellectual property of the person.

This new world was therefore entirely administered by AI, to the detriment of humans, who had fewer and fewer functions. However, all was not lost: the perfect AI had not yet been found, which meant that the divergence and creativity of robots and humans could still be of value. The perfect AI could not be found because the origin of the code by which it had been created was impossible to trace. The inventor of the type of AI with which the world was equipped had been an anonymous individual who had worked alone. He had created a first line of code which had been the basis of all current AI. However, this first code could never be found. All current AI were based on lines of code that copied this original coding, but which were only less powerful copies. This simply meant that you couldn't create the perfect AI, but imperfect AI that could evolve to get closer to that perfection without ever actually achieving it. AI therefore determined an individual's power in most sectors. Someone who had access to the best AI, with the best algorithms and the latest updates, was at the top of the pyramid in this now digital food chain.

2

Christophe strode towards a partitioned area off-limits to employees.

—Hello, I'd like to see Selenca boss, Mr. Kressmos.

The AI replied instantly:

—Mr Kressmos is unable to see anyone. If you have any questions, please ask your contact person, who will pass on the information.

—I used to have interviews with Mr. Kressmose, only he no longer answers via the personal line. I have information of the utmost importance.

—I'm sorry, Mr. Kressmos can't see anyone. If you have information of the utmost importance for him, please address it to the Council of Seven Leaders. From now on, information of the utmost importance will be passed on to them, until Monsieur Kressmos returns. They will be able to deal with the information as quickly as possible.

The AI, standing in front of the shelved door, began to make a noise.

—I am initiating the interview procedure for information of the utmost importance.

—No, no, don't bother, just cancel the request.

—It's too late, any information of the utmost importance must be processed. You can't keep information that could be vital to the company to yourself.

A voice emerges from behind the young man:

—Still wanting to see the boss, I think you'll soon be unable to see your little protector, Christophe. Mr. Kresmose is nowhere to be found and can't be reached, so I think your damn favouritism is over.

The man didn't reply, just stared at the man who'd just spoken to him, then walked away.