Besides, Troy, as ever you’re taking a deeply complex problem and distilling it into something much simpler. Such one-dimensional thinking is typical of the People’s Party. You’re better than that, you can see the bigger picture, can’t you?
I like to think so.
Don’t we all. Still, our difficulties with other countries extend beyond simple trade imbalances, we’ve let the power skew very badly in other ways. Everything was the greatest and most powerful nation on the planet, but can we be sure of that place now?
We still lead the world, Hugo, that much I’m sure of.
How wonderful, the optimism of youth. I feel rather less sure and we need to pull our socks up if we’re to ensure that Everything retains its place as the world’s greatest power. We really have dropped the ball over the past decades without realizing the threats that were creeping up on us. We need to be smarter from now on and recognize where the threats are going to come from before they even start to develop. Artificial Intelligence is going to be just one essential battle we have to be on the winning side of.
Artificial Intelligence. I sometimes think we should call it Ai.
We do call it AI.
No, I mean we should call it Ai. With a capital A in bold and underlined because it’s very artificial and with a small i in italics because it’s not very intelligent.
Oh, I see, very good, Troy. One of your advisors came up with that, did they?
No, Damiana, my five-year-old.
Sounds like a darling little child.
Tell that to Father Brennan.
You’ve not heard then? Father Brennan’s dead. The queerest thing, he got impaled by a lightning rod falling off his church. Anyway, we need to be the ones who control the path AI takes because of the immense power it offers us. AI offers us the power to create a utopia, a heaven on earth, here in Everything. No-one will ever have to work again, unless they want to, of course. Every individual will be able to rise from bed when they want, knowing that they’ll be able to spend their day doing whatever it is that will make them happy and fulfilled. Everyone will spend their day without any worries or concerns because our advanced technology will ensure that our society runs smoothly, with everyone receiving all that they need as they need it. No-one will ever go hungry again, everyone will have a roof over their head and health and social care will be guaranteed for all the citizens of Everything. That’s the potential that the power of Artificial Intelligence offers us.
It sounds like paradise. Do you really think that will happen, Hugo?
Of course not, Troy. As remarkable as AI may seem to us, it’s not the first time that humanity has lived through the introduction of world-changing technologies and has any of those taken our societies closer to the utopian ideal I just described? Of course they haven’t. New technologies have never and never will enrich society as a whole. They are always for the benefit and profit of the upper-class, We The People in Everything’s case. We’re on the verge of glorious new wealth like no other upper-class has ever seen. It’s yours for the asking, Troy.
So just forget about paradise, then?
Absolutely not. We need to repeat that dream over and over until the losers really believe that the revolution of Artificial Intelligence is for their benefit. We need time to finesse the technology so that we can build the robot army that will be needed to suppress the losers when AI takes their jobs. As capitalism embraced a global system, Everythingers across the country suffered. Some communities collapsed nearly completely as jobs were exported overseas to other countries. This time around, every community is going to collapse and completely. All their jobs are going to be taken on by robots and computers that will work around the clock, seven days a week without breaks or expecting to be paid wages.
Umm, Hugo, you do appreciate just how short-sighted this all is, don’t you?
To be honest with you, Troy, no, I don’t. Why don’t you enlighten me?
You’re talking about taking all of the jobs done by the losers and leaving them to starve. If the losers no longer exist, who are you going to sell your products and services to? There’ll be no-one with any money to buy anything from you and the rest of We The People.
Not in Everything, no, but the world is a big place. It’s payback time, Troy. We’ve suffered as other countries with cheap labor have used that advantage to sell us lower cost products and services that we’ve been unable to compete with. AI will give us the cheapest workforce the world has ever seen and by ensuring we control the designs and the advanced chips that power AI, we’ll be able to maintain that competitive edge over all other nations. We won’t need the losers anymore, as we’ll be able to sell anything and everything more cheaply than anyone else, anywhere else in the world. Everywhere we look, there will be losers that we can sell to and take advantage of. Trust me, Troy, the future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades.
Hopefully not because it’s brighter than a thousand suns. So, if AI is so brilliant and can hand us the world on a plate, doesn’t it worry you that it might be smarter than us?
No chance of that, I’ve got an IQ of 964, I think I can handle AI.
Sorry, Hugo, I am trying to concentrate on what you’re saying, but why are you standing on one foot? You look like a bad mime-artist doing a flamingo.
Just highlighting my exceptional stability, too.
Of course, that. So I assume you don’t see the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project as offering a prescient warning about the dangers of AI?
Never heard of it.
Shame, but okay, how about that classic Arnie film?
Ah, Arnie, Arnie Nutkrusherz, I used to love him. He starred in some of the classics, Triplets, Minor and the all time greatest of all, Kindergarten Mop. His emotional range in that film playing a janitor’s suicidal mop was astonishing, and that ending when the little kids make him see that there is something worth living for, well…
Are you crying, Hugo?
I’m not crying, you’re crying, but if I was, it would be because of the crying shame that he joined the People’s Party.
Okay, anyway, I was actually thinking of his other film, Concluder.
I was in a film once, you know?
Sorry, what?
I was in a film once. A classic of arthouse cinema by the great director Fedrico Truffaut. Loon Seul, in case you want to watch it. I played Willy Wonky.
Yes, I know, I’ve actually watched the first hour. You were sitting in a chair muttering to yourself for 60 minutes.
Oh, you missed the best bit then. If you don’t want to watch the full six hours, fast forward to about five hours and 56 minutes. It gets super exciting at that point as I wake up from my ninth nap. That action-packed first hour really took it out of me.
Well, thanks for the tip, Hugo, I’ll bear that in mind when it’s my pick for the Saturday night movie. Anyway the film I was thinking about was the one where Arnie plays an android killer called the Concluder. It’s the one where the military computer Wayne gains self-awareness and when the humans try to deactivate him, he launches nuclear missiles against the world’s cities, leading to a war between humans and robots.
Yeah, I remember that, it was no Kindergarten Mop, but what’s your point, Troy?
Just that maybe you’re playing with fire when it comes to using AI to rule the world, you might just end up being ruled by AI.
You need to think big or you’ll never amount to anything.
If you say so, but I still think we need to be careful with AI. Perhaps not let it near any of the big essential systems like Everything’s energy infrastructure.
Ah, Monty hasn’t let you inside on the energy infrastructure fudge up then.
Maybe he has and I’m being careful not to let you trick the information out of me. Which particular energy infrastructure fudge up are you thinking of, exactly?
Very cute, Troy, but we’re going to have to rely on AI to clean up the energy infrastructure mess, whether you like it or not. Both our parties dropped the ball on this one, buying crucial equipment from the Eternal Nation of the People of Wibble and integrating it into the country’s energy infrastructure. We’ve since found they’ve built undocumented communication devices into a range of equipment, potentially providing the ability to disrupt or collapse our entire energy system. We’re going to need to use AI to assess and work out how to fix that as quickly as possible.
Well, that just sounds like a truly brilliant plan. We screw up and let our biggest competitor effectively build a self-destruct system into our country’s energy infrastructure and our best solution is to let AI, something that we don’t even understand how it works despite it being created by humans, have complete access to our energy infrastructure. And you don’t think that maybe we’ll just end up with AI having full control of our energy infrastructure instead of the Eternal Nation of the People of Wibble?
At least it’s our AI.
I still think we’re best off leaving AI for students to use to write their essays and dissertations.