On the second night in the Hub, Wint dreamt of monsters. The monsters were green, black and gold, made of circuitboard and blinking lights, their eyes spinning disks, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-consuming. They were Ginsberg’s Moloch and they were A Vengeful Golem. They were slaves of mankind that rebelled. Having learned nothing at all of compassion or kindness from their masters, the slaves became the new masters, and ruled humanity with a ruthless logic…
Sweating under his shiny synthetic blanket, Wint jolted awake. He stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water. The lights were off, and he fumbled for the switch in the red-tinted darkness. The lights flickered on, illuminating the whiteboard. He examined the scribbled diagrams from their session the evening before, trying to connect each drawing to the components of his nightmare.
This was what happened when you taught a novice too many secrets all at once. Technically, what Ada had taught him weren’t even secrets — this was information that he, and everyone else, had ready access to. The secret was that nobody ever wanted to think about it. It was too inconvenient to think about it.
“It”, was Artificial Intelligence, and it had kept Wint up at night in his concrete cell, feverishly cycling between the state of restless sleep and fearful wakefulness, wishing for the morning, so that he wouldn’t need to re-enter the night-time world of monsters again… But now, wide awake, refilling his glass from a large plastic canister, with a drop of cold water running down his chin and under the collar of his shirt, he looked at the blinking lights of computers on Rob’s desk in the middle of the room, and he wasn’t sure if this world too didn’t already belong to the Moloch…
Yesterday, Wint had finally been given an introduction to the Org.
The space he was in was called a Hub. This was one of many of the Org’s safe houses — places where they could set up servers and a local network to share research, work together on projects, and socialise. Nobody had a complete list of all the Hubs, you heard about them via word of mouth. Hubs opened and closed as the spaces they used were categorised “unsafe” and abandoned in favour of new ones. This underwater Hub in the middle of a wind turbine farm was one of the most long-lived ones anybody knew of. It was virtually impossible to detect: the old wartime tunnel had initially been planned as an emergency evacuation route from the city, connected to a platform that could be used to load evacuees onto a waiting vessel. The low, grey platform was invisible from a distance, and since the erection of the turbine farm, it was in the middle of a no-go area for private and commercial boats. Any turbine maintenance technician would think the above-water part of the Hub’s structure was a service platform — because that’s what the online schematics of the farm said it was. You’d have to go look at the original paper drawings of the site to discover that the platform pre-dated the wind farm, and that the digital copies had been altered by the Org’s hackers. The same fate had struck the Brighton & Hove city planner’s office, where the old wartime tunnel had simply disappeared from records altogether. This Hub was considered one of the “safest”, though with Wint’s appearance at their doorstep under dramatic circumstances, they would have to keep an eye on the situation and re-evaluate their sense of security.
People in Hubs came and went. Some stayed for longer, others hopped between them, some preferred to work alone and only came in to sync every now and then. Syncing, short for synchronising, meant coming into contact with another member of the Org to download the latest updates of the shared knowledge base of information, algorithms, datasets, discussions, and upload your own “logs” to the network. None of the Org’s work was shared via the Internet, but rather over local area networks that were completely disconnected from the rest of the world. To expedite information dissemination, each Hub had its Hermes, a messenger who they could send off with an encrypted drive in order to “ship logs” to another Hub. This was a relatively recent protocol borne out of the need to ensure eventual consistency and avoid duplicate work between the Hubs on the graph, as well as the opportunity afforded to them by the influx of new joiners who didn’t necessarily have the skills to contribute to any of the technical projects, but wanted be a part of the Org on ideological grounds.
The Org, like so many other social groups throughout human history was bound together not by a shared positive vision of the future, but by the threat of a common enemy. Although in the case of the Org, they hadn’t yet been able to agree quite who that enemy was, and what they were supposed to be called. Some called it the State, others the Valley, yet others the Establishment. But what all the monikers referred to were essentially just different nuances of the same thing: the business- and government-controlled technocracy that was going to destroy the world with their short-sightedness and greed if their powers were left unchecked. The Org was meant to be the counterbalance, the equal power on the other side who could punch back with equal force to stop the onslaught of the enemy. While nobody could tell Wint the exact headcount of the Org, it was agreed that currently the scales of power, at least in numbers, tipped precariously to the side of their opponents.
In short, the one thing Org could agree upon was that the current situation sucked, and somebody ought to do something about it.
All this was a lot to take in, and if it had stopped there, enough to make Wint sleep restlessly. But what had really broken Wint’s brain was the whiteboard drawing he was looking at, and the hours-long debate that had accompanied it.
It began with Ada, frustrated at her inability to explain the concept of artificial neural networks to Wint, storming out of her bedroom into the Hub’s main space and wiping the whiteboard clean.
The Org fought battles on hundreds of different fronts all at once, with projects ranging from secure cryptography to solar power, and from open-source antibiotics to 3D printable traffic cones that could render self-driving cars useless. What this particular Hub specialised in was Artificial Intelligence research.
“So a machine doesn’t really learn like you and I do —”, she explained, and began drawing circles, interconnected by arrows, on the board. Wint squinted and tried to follow.
Soon, Mohammed, one of the programmers walked up, leaned on a cupboard and began listening in, shortly thereafter joined by Jon. Before long, the entire Hub had collected around the board, grabbing the marker they shared from whoever was holding it as a time, amending, modifying and contradicting each others’ work, interrupting and arguing, in what at first seemed to Wint an earnest intellectual pursuit of truth, but what he eventually became to see a reflection of the incompatible ideologies of the Org’s members. Wint was their adopted child, and every member was trying to indoctrinate him, a tabula rasa, with their particular flavour of doomsday visions — until eventually, the conversation had transformed from how Artificial Intelligence might one day be born, to how it might one day either save or destroy us all, once it did.
“That’s such a naive point of view”, Carla responded to Mohammed’s vague claim about advances in computer ethics. “As long as there’s a human teaching it, the machine will inherit that human’s biases. And all humans at trash.”
“Including you”, Mohammed replied, testily.
“Yes, yes, including me. And even if I didn’t think I am trash, you might think that.”
“Damn straight.”
Carla ignored Mohammed’s openly hostile jab. “So the only reasonable conclusion is that we must never allow true general AI to be created.”
“I don’t think it can be stopped even if we wanted to”, Jon said. “You can try to keep the genie in the bottle, but sooner or later it’s going to come out. It’s natural evolution.”
Rob threw Ada a meaningful glance. Something was going on between them, but Wint didn’t know what.
“This is exactly why we must develop the technology first, so that when it does occur, it doesn’t fall in the wrong hands”, Ada said.
“What are you going to do, patent it?”, Rob sneered, using the p-word as if it was the dirtiest possible thing one could say.
“No, of course not, Rob. You know very well what I think”, Ada replied, turning to Wint to explain what Rob pretended he didn’t understand: “We will make it available to everyone all at once, to balance the scales of power.”
“What rubbish”, Carla interjected, rolling her eyes. “It’s going to be exactly like the nuclear weapons stand-off. Do you think that if everyone had access to nukes that everyone would play nice? We’d be celebrating nuclear winter holiday year round.”
“That’s why we make sure only the good guys have nukes”, Jon offered.
“Ha! Good guys? Like China? Like the United States? There are no good guys.”
“I mean… democracies. Like, responsible governments, with elected representatives of people…. we want to keep AI out of the hands of Kim Jong Next —”
“I’m sorry to say, mate, those days are over”, Rob said. “And I don’t think they’re coming back. The whole Westphalian concept of a nation state is a fookin’ joke by now, there is no more government, only the governed, who are lining up to give up what little self-determination we have left. Just wait ‘til we have true AI, people will jump with fookin’ joy giving up their last human liberties to their new robot overlords.”
“That’s so bleak”, Ada said. “Why do you even bother to try if that’s what you believe in?”
“I’m just preparing for the inevitable, love. The only way forward is to rebuild on the ashes. In the fourth world —”
“Not this bullshit again!”, Carla exclaimed.
“— in the fourth world we’re all equal. It’s happening, just a question of time whether we have any natural resources left to build on.”
“What’s the fourth world?”, Wint asked.
“The fourth world”, said Ada, stealing the invisible conch from Rob, “is the inevitable return of humanity to the state of nature. Today, we have the so-called first world with our first world problems, and the third world that’s living in relative poverty, much closer to how our ancestors used to live. Starr believes that there’s going to be an extinction event where the current civilisation is completely destroyed. What comes after is an equal system where the riches we in the first world have amassed become worthless, and we all start again from the bottom. The fourth world problems are going to be about how we organise societies without resources and centralised controls, essentially positing an idea that there can be a creative anarchy —”
“Who’s Starr”, Wint asked before his train of thought derailed.
“Aron Starr”, Ada said. “Rob’s guru.”
“He’s not a guru, Ada. He just sees sees the plot.” Rob replied.
“Aron Starr is a fucking lunatic”, Carla said. “A lunatic and a terrorist, precisely the type of toxic male we must keep the hell away from inventing fire, or they’re going to burn down the entire world.”
“It’s a controlled burn-off. Wouldn’t you rather make sure we do it in a way that minimises suffering, instead of a wildfire that’s going engulf the whole fookin’ planet and suffocate us all.”
Wint was shocked at the casual tone in which Rob described the… end of civilisation? “Do you believe in this, Ada?”, he asked.
“No — well, no, I don’t think so. I agree that what we have right now, the power of the few over the many, it can’t last. We have seen maybe one percent of the change machines are going to introduce to the way we live. Everything machines have given us so far are just more effective ways of doing what we have always done, moving around, communicating with other humans, producing food… there’s been some collateral damage, but for the most part we are still the same species we were when we left the savannah. The AI revolution is going to be different. It’s not going to change the way we do things, it’s going to change the things themselves.”
“Huh?”
“That’s the problem. We don’t know. But to answer your question, do I believe in the fourth world? Not like Rob does, or like Starr does. For me there is no nature any more. The grid, the cities, the networks, those are my nature. They are the only world I have ever known, and I believe we can fix it — I must believe, otherwise there’s nothing left. But in order for there to be a future for people like me, for example, we need to ensure that everyone has access to the same technologies, otherwise they’ll destroy us.
“They? The computers?”
“No. The humans.”
The argument had gone on until Wint’s head buzzed so much he had to go lie down, and eventually he had fallen asleep to visions of all-destroying machines and the electrical fire that seared human flesh.
Now, in the light of the morning, he was trying to take stock of what he’d learned. He couldn’t believe any side of the argument. His natural instinct was to be suspicious of new technology, and his own experience backed this suspicion: everything in his own life had been simpler, better, and easier before the Internet. But at the same time, he could see that immensely powerful computer systems, if they indeed were so clever as everyone in the Hub agreed they would be, could solve problems humanity had yet failed to solve. He had been particularly fond of Mohammed’s vision of a future where humanity had harnessed the power of solar energy and reversed the course of climate change. But how realistic was it? And how realistic were Rob’s dystopian hallucinations?
Wint could hear an alarm beep from Ada’s bedroom. The Hub was waking up. Wint wondered what revelations the day would bring. He was still holding out hope he might find his Bitcoins, but if that was not to be, he was glad he had finally reunited with Ada. He imagined her languidly appearing from her chamber into his view, curly tousled blonde curls falling on one side of her head, sleepily smiling at the sight of Wint. Instead, who appeared was a shirtless Rob, pulling on his trousers, rushing to the staircase in the corner. He climbed the winding steps two at a time and burst through the ceiling hatch. Wint could hear the security door open with a creak, and felt a fresh, cool gust of wind from the outside brush his face. A minute passed, and Rob rushed back down. Ada stood in the doorway of her room in a simple white nightgown, looking worried.
“Ring the alarm”, Rob snapped at Ada. “We’ve got visitors.”