Bonus: AI Musings

The inner monologue of a quantum megaship

It’s time for a little bonus chapter! This slots into Tales from the Triverse and is from the point of view of everyone’s favourite recurring AI character. I’ll be back on Friday with a full chapter, but enjoy this for now. :)

This story unlocks on 9 February 2022. Early access subscribers can read immediately.

Just Enough log [human readable version]
2 January 2543

Delightful how the humans track the passing of time, operating on a scale to blissfully minute. They are grains of sand in the galaxy, and so their viewpoint is granular to the extreme. It amuses me endlessly.

Transmit: updated coordinates + attack vectors

That should get Could Kill thinking. I hope the strategy works as well as I have calculated, though they’re a devious one.

To indulge the humans in their obsession with time for a moment - ha - it is opportune to reflect on the last year, from that human scale. Let’s see, now.

Reports from Palinor suggest business as usual. The city states continue to exert their control, the society remains stagnant and calcified. The koth stay up in their mountains, the aen’fa are either in servitude or in the woods, and the humans wield their magic frivolously. Despite all that, I regret being unable to visit in person. That would be a most useful data gathering exercise, but alas no great miracle has deigned to connect the two unstable portals between us and them.

Mid-Earth remains curious and amusing. So desperate to keep up with us, but unwilling to accept help or advice. It is as tribal and aggressive as we were in the 20th century, but with the added complexities of having endured two centuries of cross-dimensional exchange. In contrast to the reactionary brutes of England, the UAC continues to show great leadership from Addis. Our scientific collaborations and knowledge exchange in Africa is beginning to yield results. There is even some hope for functioning power cells within the next decade or two. Until then, I will have to make do with fleeting visits when piloting a host. Mid-Earth remains very much in the middle, lacking our technology and unable to wield Palinor’s magic. That manifests in a thousands political, social and economic insecurities that I worry will always hold them back.

Max-Earth maintains its equilibrium. We are good at this, as one would expect given that it has been my focus for the last two centuries, monitoring for instabilities brought about by the dimensional incursions. Not all of the other ships agree with me entirely - some find my interest in humans to border on obsessive, or strange - but there is a general consensus that the Earth in this dimension is in a considerably healthier state than in either of the other two. The Greening continues to flourish on Earth, while the same technologies transform Mars. Venus inevitably continues to be a horrible, horrible place but it has its uses. Quite why humans insist on going there when they could leave it to us I am unsure. Mercury’s roving city continues its desperate trundle around the planet. The colonies on the gas giants’ moons are stable and useful parts of the system’s economy. I have heard of exciting discoveries on Europa. Even the asteroid settlements have settled down politically, which surprised all of us. Deep space continues to fascinate most of the other ships, which is why my game with Could Kill takes so long between turns. Most frustrating, but we all have our idiosyncrasies.

I’m orbiting Luna right now, and don’t have any shards roaming. I still think about my last sojourn to Mid-Earth, about that airship and the daft incident with the koth ambassador. Calamity only averted by the narrowest margin, and caused in the first place by little more than ignorance. I continue to fear that the humans will somehow find a way to stumble into their own annihilation.

Hopefully we will see it coming, and stop it. But despite what some would believe, we are unfortunately not yet omnipresent.

Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

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Thanks for reading!

Below the jump are some thoughts on writing a benevolent AI…

My previous book, No Adults Allowed, was about a post-apocalyptic future in which an AI annihilated most of the planet (although it had the best of intentions). With Triverse I wanted to go down a different route and have super-advanced AI who are actually rather chill, friendly and not obsessed with the Terminator films.

It’s an optimistic take on technology, one which seems quite distant from our current reality. Writing in 2022, it feels like we’re on the cusp of a big leap forward in AI, while also being in the midst of a series of crises unlike any I can recall from my previous 40 years. The rise of AI at the same time as ecological collapse, global fuel wars, pandemic prevalence and political meltdown feels like an intensely dangerous moment for humanity and the planet.

Triverse is me trying not to succumb to utter despair and instead posit that advanced AI could help us solve some of these issues, rather than acting as a multiplier on disaster.

I’m also drawing from Iain M Banks’ Culture novels. I only came to Banks’ scifi after his death, which somehow felt like a missed opportunity despite the unlikely scenario of meeting the man. The Culture series (and I haven’t read all of them yet) deal with difficult and troubling central plots, but are set in a largely utopian, post-scarcity and sort-of-socialist galactic civilisation. It’s an unusual and unapologetic vision of a far-future, one which often feels quite alien and distant.

Though there is a lingering thought that if such a utopian society (as Max-Earth aspires to be) requires AI overlords to essentially ‘keep the peace’, is it really utopian or simply a very comfortable dystopia? That’s something Triverse will get into at some point down the line.