Forever Yours
22
Ploy
THE DOWNSIDE of an overnight ‘thinking’ trip was that Henry was 400 miles from home in the morning and hadn’t slept. He sent text messages to his partners inviting them to make themselves at home in the apartment office. He found a motel he could day-sleep in and then headed back home that night.
“So, what took you out of town so suddenly?” Chastity asked when he arrived back. He found her sleeping on the sofa in the living room waiting for him. She went to his bedroom and slipped into bed with him. “Don’t get used to this. I’m just still too sleepy to go home. Tell me what’s up.”
“I figured out a general structure for preserving a person’s life record and then accessing it randomly. I have a whole lot of development to do and will try to pull together a prototype in the next few months, but it will really be cool. You see, I’ll start by asking my dad to record his stories and to file his papers and documents on a hard drive I’ll give him. I think he’ll cooperate. Then I’ll train the AI on his memories. It works on the same principle as the optimization AI, learning how important things are by how often they appear in his papers. Then, I can ask questions of the AI and it will be as if Dad was answering them.”
He looked over at Chastity and saw she was sound asleep. He rolled over and went to sleep as well. When he woke up in the morning, Chastity was gone.
“The general concept has been around for a while,” Henry explained to his father. “Kurzweil wanted to ask questions of his deceased father and started pulling together things from his past. But to use AI, he or people he worked with tried to train a general AI—or as near as we have to a general AI—to think like his father. These massive AIs, though, have too much crap in them. A person could never navigate that much material. But if you trained an AI only on that person’s information and thoughts, it would be much more faithful to the character of that person. You. Kurzweil called it The Singularity.”
“You’re preparing for me to die?” Ryan asked his son.
“Shit! No! That’s… Yeah, maybe. I’m not looking forward to it any time soon, but I am thinking that someday in the distant future, maybe your grandchildren or great grandchildren might want to get to know you and who you really were,” Henry said.
“Ah. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now we’re talking. Any prospects?”
“That’s the problem, Dad. It could take me years to get around to procreating. Not against it, but just can’t handle it at the moment.”
“Okay. I’ll participate in your great experiment. What do I need to do?”
Henry paused. His notes were expansive and he wasn’t sure how much he needed yet.
“Let’s start with anything you already have and just copy it onto a hard drive. I don’t expect to be able to begin training the AI for at least a year or more. Then anything new you add would increase its knowledge of you. So, documents you have, including scans of photos, email, poetry you secretly wrote to Mom, and stories you think of from your life. The stories can either be written, or sit in front of a video recorder and just tell the stories. Might be difficult at first, but you’ll relax into it. You can even have Mom there to tell the stories to if you want. There are a dozen services that sprang up a few years ago to help people write their memoirs. We can subscribe to a couple of those and you’ll get a prompt each week for something to talk about,” Henry said.
“There’s nothing really here that we can sell, is there?” Luke asked when they all got together Tuesday afternoon.
“This definitely has a longer dev cycle than other things I’ve worked on, simply because the data needs to be gathered before the AI can be trained,” Henry said.
“How do we serve this to people? Wouldn’t you need a server farm if your AI was working on 500 or 5,000 people’s lives? How much data is in a person’s life?” Isobel asked.
“Yeah. It would be a problem. That’s why I’m basing it on what we do for AI driven optimization. In fact, I think it’s the only way we’d ever sell anything. It has to be local and not in the cloud. In other words, the AI resides on the customer’s computer with no interaction with the internet. All that person’s data is kept local. They can back it up to the cloud if they want to, but the operation is always local,” Henry explained, pointing out the pieces in his schematic drawing.
“Is there anything we could test it on that doesn’t require waiting for your father to record his entire life?” Chastity asked.
“I have a vague idea for a test,” Henry said. “It could use the same overall principle in which you ask a question and it gives an answer.”
“Don’t all chat apps do that?” Luke asked.
“Sort of. Once again, those apps are too big. Let’s take one aspect and collect info on that. Something that is completely public domain,” he said. “We could build a kind of oracle. We start with the simplest. Like a Magic Eight Ball. The answers are yes, no, maybe, and ask me later. Then start building from there. Progress to more complex answers that read more like a Chinese fortune cookie or the daily horoscope. Maybe the I Ching. Collect the Sybilline Sayings. Train the AI on that body of literature plus, say, Proverbs, the sayings of Confucius, and anything else we can collect at no charge. We can start asking the oracle our questions and see what it comes up with.”
“Isn’t that a little random?” Isobel asked.
“Yes. It’s supposed to be. The thing about oracles is that they need to be interpreted. They are never clear and concise. Like, ‘The rolling thunderstorm inseminates the lake, then moves on to where the lake cannot follow.’ That could be the answer to almost any question, if you figured out how to interpret it.”
“Back to the parent thing,” Luke said. “Do you expect that to generate random responses, too?”
“More or less. We’d have to discover key words in the question so the answer seems relevant. ‘Should I marry Isobel?’ I might ask.”
“No way!” Isobel chimed in. “Well, maybe,” she added shrugging her shoulders.
“The question has two key words. Marriage and Isobel. The AI would find closely associated concepts and return a response. ‘Successful or not, a sincere approach is the only answer.’ It doesn’t actually say anything about marriage or Isobel, but it gives you something to think about. The key to oracles is the multiple interpretations.”
“I get it. If your dad actually said in his ramblings, ‘Whatever you do, don’t marry Isobel,’ then that might come up as a direct answer from your father, but if there wasn’t any direct instruction, he might just respond with a philosophical thought on marriage in general or even his own marriage,” Luke nodded.
Henry felt like they were getting the idea.
“We’re going to need more money within the next year,” Isobel said. “When do we get sales results on the current software release?”
“EMEE will issue monthly reports on the previous month’s sales and what we are due,” Luke said. “They pay fifteen days after the end of each quarter. That means we should see a report for December soon after the first and we should get our first check payable on activity for the fourth quarter by the fifteenth of January.”
“Woohoo!” Chastity said. “We’ll be able to make payroll.”
“That’s pretty optimistic,” Isobel said. “Even I don’t expect two weeks of sales to give us enough for payroll. It would be nice if it paid for the office.”
“Still optimistic,” Henry said. “I wouldn’t expect to see anything significant until mid-year. At least two quarters.”
“It highlights the problem, though,” Luke said. “Sales are only one avenue for revenue. I need to look for an investor and get some real capital behind us. By the time Henry is out of school in eighteen months, we need to have a functioning full-time office with enough people to actually create, test, and market software.”
“That puts it in perspective, doesn’t it?” Chastity sighed.
“I need you to pick me up at the airport the fifteenth at 2:00. Then we’ll have the weekend together, but I need to start focusing on the driving range. Can you get me time at your club to practice? I like the booth heaters they have. Then we’ll need to schedule the tournaments I’ll be playing in. It’s a heavy schedule and I want you to come to Georgia, Florida, and Texas with me for the big ones. Of course, my parents will be coming out for graduation. It would be nice if that other apartment in your place was empty for them. They want to get to know you.”
Henry looked at the text message from Kaitlyn and then thumbed to the next one and the next one. All had her schedule outlined and when he needed to be somewhere for her.
He sighed. This was really too much. She must have written out all this, then copied and pasted it into text messages. When the last message indicated she could move in with him the first of June, that was the last straw. Henry realized he had no desire to live with Kaitlyn at all.
“This isn’t going to work for me,” he texted back. “I think we’d better break up now.”
He heard his phone buzz several times in the next hour, but ignored the messages. She couldn’t even be bothered to actually call and talk to him.
The big event of the week was New Year’s Eve on Friday. This time it was just the four partners who went to the club together. They danced, told stories about school, and had a great meal, before toasting the New Year with sparkling juice.
“It will be nice when we can all have a glass of champagne to toast the New Year,” Isobel said. “Chastity is the only one who has made it to twenty so far. That means next year, we’ll all have to drink our juice while she drinks a whole bottle of champagne.”
“Not to worry,” Chastity said. “I’m not drinking now and don’t plan to start again. You might all be toasting the New Year with champagne the next year while I’m sipping my sparkling apple juice.”
“I know where there’s a bottle of champagne on ice waiting for us, babe,” Luke said to Isobel.
“You might get laid tonight after all,” Isobel responded.
They all left the table and the club. Luke made a half-hearted invitation to Chastity and Henry to join them at his house, but they declined.
“You could get laid tonight, too,” Chastity said as Henry drove her home. “Want to come up for a while?”
“You’re way too much for me to resist,” Henry said.
“You’re pretty cavalier about cheating on your girlfriend.”
“Text message break-up,” Henry laughed. “I don’t currently have a girlfriend.”
“In that case, let’s have our own little party,” Chastity said.
They headed to her apartment and celebrated for another couple of hours before Henry headed home.
He hadn’t told Chastity the text message had been from him to Kaitlyn rather than the other way around. He supposed it didn’t matter.
Saturday morning, Henry set programs in motion to scrape the internet for specific kinds of content. For the first few days, he’d have to stop and start the program frequently to adjust parameters. He wanted no recognizable references to established religion, gods, or identifiable political parties. Collecting material, for example, from the Proverbs of Solomon had to have references to Judaism and God scrubbed from them.
It started as a two-step process, first gathering the information and then scrubbing it. Eventually, Henry managed to eliminate certain results from his content gathering.
Fine-tuning ‘the wall’ on which he wanted to train his AI, however, involved more than just avoiding religion. He also needed to de-sex the content. Since he was using all public domain sources, most were over seventy years old and highly patriarchal and male-directed. Much of the data was also nationalistic, and not just American either. Stripping the content of objectionable material of this sort was considerably harder than removing references to one god or another.
Henry also discovered proverbs were not always statements, but could be questions as well.
“What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?”
“Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?”
“If you look into your own heart and find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about?”
“Why should your springs flow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares?”
“Can you embrace fire and your clothes not be burned?”
“If you have nothing with which to pay, why should your bed be taken from under you?”
Of course, his partners stopped by every day to spend some time in the office finding and researching things the business needed. And to discuss Henry’s project.
“So, you ask this oracle thing a question, it looks at the key words, and selects an old saying?” Isobel asked.
“No. Not quite. The AI won’t work the same as a search engine. It won’t simply look something up and display the results. It will look for concepts and put something together out of the ideas expressed. More like predictive text. It might not even use words that are found in the wall,” Henry explained. “That’s partly because so many of the sayings and proverbs and philosophies it’s built on are phrased archaically. And also, it will learn from the questions it’s asked. I’ve been spending the time this week just building the wall and scrubbing it, but then I have to actually train the AI and establish rules for it to use.”
“So, what’s the difference between this and just using a chat online?” Luke asked. “Doesn’t a chatbot just… you described it as predictive text, right? It just picks a word from the query and chooses the most likely word to continue next?”
“In a way, it’s the same. But this is specialized. It isn’t pulling from the entire body of human knowledge. It’s only being trained on a pretty severely restricted body of philosophical literature, and even that is being scrubbed for objectionable material,” Henry said.
“And who decides what is objectionable?” Chastity asked.
“I guess at the moment I do, but I’m willing to open that up to those in this room.”
“As long as we aren’t promoting anything illegal or immoral, I don’t object,” Isobel said.
“Let’s restrict that to illegal. Even in this room we wouldn’t agree on what is immoral,” Luke countered.
“Oh, just do it,” Isobel laughed. “I don’t have time to consider a bunch of rules for a computer to answer questions. I just want a better search engine.”
“Got it coming,” Henry laughed. “I just need three more of me to get stuff done as fast as I want.”
Saturday, Henry was in sweats and focused on training parameters for the AI when his doorbell rang. It was unusual, but perhaps there was a delivery. He headed downstairs as the bell rang repeatedly. He opened the door to face Kaitlyn.
“You didn’t answer my messages,” she shouted at him. “What kind of boyfriend are you?”
“I think I answered that question when I broke up with you,” he said. “I’m not a boyfriend at all.”
“You can’t do that! Didn’t you read the messages I sent after that?”
“I figured if you had something important to say you’d call. It was all I could do to get through the first batch of messages,” he said.
“We need to get married! I’m pregnant!” she shouted at him before he could close the door.
Henry stared at her through the doorway. He could count the times they’d had sex on one hand. He’d always carefully used a condom, even when she’d suggested he didn’t need to. No. It wasn’t possible.
“I hope you know who the father is,” he said calmly. “I’ve always used a condom.”
“The first time,” she said. “You quit eating me and just stuck your cock in me. It had to have been then.”
“I already had a condom on by then. And you went into the bathroom and put a tampon in because your period started right after.”
“It must have been blood from you being so rough with me. I haven’t had a period since.”
“I’m sorry, Kaitlyn, but I can’t accept that. When the baby is born, we can do a DNA test and if it proves to be mine, I’ll make arrangements to care for it—even adopt it if you can’t take care of it. But we aren’t getting married. That would just be another disaster.”
“You can’t just ignore me! This is your fault. If you don’t marry me, I’ll sue you for everything you have,” she shouted.
“You say that as if I have a lot,” he said.
“You have this huge apartment!”
“If it weren’t for having a housemate and the company paying rent, I wouldn’t have this. I don’t have money, Kaitlyn.”
“But the company. All your big deal programming,” she wailed.
“It’s all a future that isn’t today,” he said. “It might be successful and it might not. No guarantees in that. It would certainly fail if I was distracted with a wife and child now.”
“You’re a terrible person!”
“No, Kaitlyn. I’m just not going to let you use me so you can live a life on the golf course. We aren’t in love. We’ve never even talked about a future together. It’s obvious when we have sex that you aren’t really interested. I’m not settling for a life like that,” he said. “I wish you luck. You should probably check with George to see if he’ll claim the child—if you have one.”
Kaitlyn stared at him with open mouth as he closed the door. He didn’t slam it, but he made sure the bolt made a noise when it slid into place.
When she was gone, Henry sank into the sofa and stared into space. Was it possible? No. He was certain this was a ploy of some sort. Kaitlyn hadn’t expressed an interest in him until after they’d formed the company and he’d hired Lisa.
Kaitlyn had been clear with him when they first met that her goal in college was to marry a nice guy who would support her for the rest of her life, while she played golf every day. He didn’t think her goals had changed and he wouldn’t put it past her to either get pregnant or pretend to it in order to get the guy she could control like that.
He heaved a sigh and went back to his computer upstairs. However, he didn’t go back to training the AI. Instead, he launched his search engine. Since his search was private and powered by his own version of a limited AI, it didn’t automatically filter results simply because they were private or behind a firewall. He’d used it to find everything about that guy who threatened Chastity a year ago. He hadn’t used it like that since.
But now he sent it to retrieve everything it could find about Kaitlyn Lau.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
