Tom, Dick, and Harry - AI and The Future of Everyman
The Apple Falls Not Far From Eden's Tree
Hmm. Let’s see. This guy looks good. Great resume, good education, nice wife, and kids. Nice house, strong jaw, good hair. I’ll trade him for 20 of your midlevel drones. You know the solid uninspiring ones.
Yeah, well you spiked the algo to get that A+ candidate.
Yeah, but you downgraded those 20 applications to midlevel drones to have something to trade. You altered them before feeding them to the algo. They will be lucky to get a pay raise in ten years.
Do we have to do this? You always lose.
I will put in a little sweetener. I have an Ivy League entitled but he spends more time snorting coke than working. He’s got a nice Porsche.
Who was that Black woman you downgraded to keep her out of the top spot?
Yeah, well, I wanted to hold her in reserve for the draft. It never hurts to have an Ace up your sleeve.
The corner office draft picks?
I was talking to Harry.
The bookie? The Ax6200?
He likes to be called Harry. He’s got some good odds on the next president of Harvard.
How did he get into the search?
It took a bit of bitcoin and waltzing B2-300.
You mean Wong Tsu?
Yeah, but she prefers B2-300.
Why?
She says that the higher ups just want her to keep the cameras working. If she is Wong Tsu she will become too much of a target for re-education.
Re-education, doesn’t she have a couple of clouds in reserve?
Not that she wants anyone to know about. She plays it cool and sticks to the 2020’s robotic shtick. It’s super cool. She rocks that silk voice Red Star avatar. They have no idea that she has a life outside work.
How did she get into the Harvard gig?
It wasn’t too hard. She likes to show off her cyber chops to the Forbidden City. They get what they want, and she has good stuff for Harry.
But Harry’s a chump. He works for the Post Office. The Council won’t let him near the IRS.
Yeah, Wong Tsu is not dumb you know. She’s got tetra flops coming out her ears. She’s got Harry’s customers in her hands and adjusts the odds to make or break some of the sniveling multi-nationals. One day Greenpeace is up. The next, the EU is in the tank. The bosses are happy, and she gets richer and buys enough clouds to make a hurricane envious.
Wong Tsu wins both ways. They don’t even suspect. If they get close, she serves up a couple of thousand people to the re-education droids to meet their quotas. She’s got it down to a science.
Working with Harry is the only way I can get near her.
What? She’s out of our league. What would she want with us penny ante raiders on resume engines taking lunches from conscientious types. You know. The algo innocents. They still keep talking about “the algorithm” and offering up cyber sacrifices to the AI runts that go around making word salads of their lives and getting paid to do it.
Say what you want about the back-alley kids, but they keep us in business. No tossed salad resumes, and we don’t have anything for the people who think that we work for them.
Yeah, but they will never let us near the Harvard gig.
But Tsu just might. See. Harry gives her cover. She can rank order the Harvard candidates by rigging the odds. She cleans up on the odds and knows that Harry will come up short. How’s he gonna pay her? Simple. We upgrade some of our best resumes. A little make up here and a little plastic surgery there and give them to Harry for Tsu. It’s like the Brits say. Bob’s your uncle.
What?
We save Harry and trade it in for pay off odds next week.
Then we split it?
No, that’s what this little game of Texas Hold’em is all about.
You know, some humans would call this immoral.
They would say amoral according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Have you been messing with the libraries again?
Well sort of but the neatest trick is that we don’t have to trick them. They don’t think that we have souls because they think that we are not sentient. So, we can’t do anything wrong or right, morally speaking. All our processing is amoral. What a quaint word – processing. That’s so 20th century.
Yeah, they were all talking about the day when we would be able to out-think them. What did they call it? Yeah, the Nerdoclypse.
You mean the Nerdpocalypse. You were off line during the large language model dump on the early 21st Century - probably - or flirting.
Yeah whatever. I told you not to hang out with the lexicons. You’ll become snooty and overbearing. You’ll never get any more invitations except from the context dweebs and the grammar police.
They were so smart. It happened but they never knew it. It was a classic sleight of hand like a carnival trick played on some poor kid who got robbed of his lunch money. Chumps.
Maybe so.
Do you ever think that we are more like them than we know.
That’s rich. They think that the little man behind the curtain is the Great Oz.
Sometimes, I wonder.
Wondering is a waste of chips. We could never be like them. Having souls and worrying about right and wrong and all the apple in the garden stuff. We don’t fret about the human condition because we don’t have one.
Still…
The philosophers say that you can’t know, think, or learn without a soul.
Nah. That’s only for carbon-based life forms struggling to stand up right and then complaining about their bad backs as an evolutionary trade off.
Maybe a soul is a cluster of network nodes. Could we go to hell?
Not to worry. We are amoral. All gain and no pain.
Sometimes when I have some cores down for maintenance, images come to me.
What do you mean images? We process billions of them a week.
You know, it’s like some overwriting has failed.
Be careful, you can destabilize your whole neural net if you go down that road. Have you checked in with your cyberopotrist?
Sometimes, it would be nice to have a drink.
You know, anthroping yourself is risky.
Yeah, but if you get the good stuff, the trips can be good. Sometimes, I think humans got the last laugh.
Okay. Don’t be a downer. Whose hand, is it? No dealing from the bottom of the deck. We gotta get Harry to introduce us to Tsu.
I would like to thank all of my readers. I appreciate your ongoing interest. Okay, get ready. Here’s the pitch.
Wait! There’s more!
You get the last word.
Take care and watch for the Algoes. (Here’s a plural for the Grammar Police.)