Vignettes - Mars: Adventures with AI
Another question a few folks have posed to us is what’s the difference between AIs and VIs and why are drones better than VIs?
Um stuff, and because we said they are? No actually, we’ve spent a lot of time talking and thinking about just those points. This vignette expands on those ideas a bit more, and hints at a possible future trouble for AfterLife.
Death had been good to Erasyl. Virtual intelligence engineers were much in demand at AfterLife. Most 1stLifers could not be bothered to commit to the amount of education and effort it took to understand the technology that made their easy lives possible. In the 900 years since the advent of intelligent programs surprisingly little progress had been made. Early AIs, proving as volatile and alien in motivation as science fiction predicted, had left a sour taste in humanity’s collective mouth. VIs with their clearly defined boundaries and lack of individual agendas proved far more palatable. Their failing being that they required constant input and review. Simple shifts in human language, culture, or expression could quickly stymie the thinking machines.
Keeping the VIs working and up to date was a large chunk of Erasyl’s job. The team of drones did most of the background upkeep, relying on Erasyl to set the sprint goals and make sure the decision trees and documentation were up to date. His work was not all 1st Life oriented. A good number of the VIs he developed and serviced were utilized by 2nd Life workers, drones and high-functioning alike.
The time sensitive nature of their work and intensive data requirements involved in scraping the social feeds kept them close to the hub of human civilization. Mars was a plum spot for atype reanimates. Erasyl had constant access to 1st world happenings. He even caught sight of the humans who came to climb the great Martian peaks or sail the oceans fed by comets centuries ago. It made them feel like explorers. Sometimes he saw them strolling hand in hand among the greenhouses and fields of hearty vegetables that thrived in the dim Martian sunlight light. They wore the lightweight oxygen hoods and back packs that kept the living from succumbing to hypoxia in the thin Martian atmosphere. They gave the hoodless drones who cared for the crops nary a thought.
Erasyl had no interest in climbing or sailing. Some of the other Martian reanimates used their credits and sabbatical loans to enjoy the out-of-doors in areas set aside for their use. Sometimes one or two would sneak into the human parks to enjoy thumbing their nose at the company, and fooling the humans who never even imagined a reanimate might don a hood and play at living. Most kept to their own spaces, preferring not to deal with the hassles of hoods and humans. Erasyl was sure the company knew about these incursions and cared not a whit so long as the reanimates kept up the charade. Anyone who pierced the bubble of human ignorance would be dealt with swiftly.
Erasyl had no interest in fooling or illuminating humans. He liked the perks his job afforded him. His drone team were efficient, hard-working, and never complained. Once he’d learned how to manage them and handle the occasional indecision episode, Erasyl found his team to be the best colleagues he had ever had. Humans and even many high-functioning reanimates would be surprised at just how well properly trained and managed drones could handle highly complex, even creative tasks. Maintaining the VIs took a high level of skill and training. It was a mistake to think of drones as less intelligent or capable. They also did not annoy him with inane chatter or make social demands on him.
His team was relatively small, just over 400 drones. Most supervisors handled between 5,000-20,000 drones. The farming and processing teams being the largest. The most common job task among high functioning was supervising drones. Nearly 80% of high functioning reanimates had supervision as a primary job function. They all had their own area of expertise, but the bulk of time, as was also true for Erasyl, was spent tending and directing drones.
Given the scarcity of high-functioning reanimates (or more accurately, as nearly every atype knew, the scarcity of good candidates for high-function) administration had tasked Erasyl with developing new VIs better suited to managing drones. He was deploying one such VI to the personal electronics factory on the Miraldi Sea. The supervisor there would document and provide qualitative feedback on drone response to the VIs indecision strategies. The test would run for 30 sols in half the factory departments and if no serious problems were found would roll out to the full 15,000 drones. Productivity data, number of indecision incidents, and serotonin levels of the drones would be compared using a pre-post implementation model. With luck and a few tweaks, this VI model could be rolled out wider on Martian factories and eventually to more exotic locales on Tir Na Nog and Styx.
Erasyl’s position also gave him an excellent view of the massive tentacled beast that was AfterLife. 1st Lifers thought of AfterLife as the nice people who deposited money in their bank accounts each month. And of course, they knew that AfterLife turned corpses into reanimate drones, but who really cared about that? By the time it mattered to an individual they would be dead. What the living failed to realize was that AfterLife was behind nearly every product and service provided in Earth controlled space. That nifty new phone was manufactured on a dead world (and probably designed by a dead engineer). The clothing, food, and nearly all manufactured goods came from dead worlds.
If a 1st Lifer designed anything from clothing to cars they would contract with a production company to have their creation built and that production company was almost certainly a subsidiary of AfterLife. AfterLife was not just a monopoly, it was virtually the entire human economy. This worked well for Erasyl. Since AfterLife made all the devices and data storage he had access to any and all networked data humans controlled. He used this data to teach his VIs. He also had access to all the social feeds and was constantly deploying in development VIs and running A/B tests using humans and their data. The whole world was his sandbox for testing and improving VI technology. The only limitation was the delays in data transfer between systems but even that was a minor hindrance.
Erasyl turned to his next project an educational VI designed to identify potential 2ndLife high-functioning candidates among the preschool and kindergarden age sets and encourage those students to pursue high demand areas of study.
