content/Cory_Doctorow/Pester_Power.tex

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  14 \begin{document}
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  16 \raggedbottom
  17
  18 \begin{center}
  19 \textbf{\huge\textsf{Pester Power}}
  20
  21 \medskip
  22 Cory Doctorow
  23
  24 \end{center}
  25
  26 \bigskip
  27
  28 \begin{flushleft}
  29 This story is part of Cory Doctorow’s short story collection
  30 “With a Little Help” published by himself. It is licensed under a
  31 \href{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/}
  32 {Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0} license.
  33
  34 \bigskip
  35
  36 The whole volume is available at:
  37 \texttt{http://craphound.com/walh/}
  38
  39 \medskip
  40
  41 The volume has been split into individual stories for the purpose of the
  42 \href{http://ccbib.org}{Creative Commons Bibliothek.}
  43 The introduction and similar accompanying texts are available under the
  44 title:
  45 \end{flushleft}
  46 \begin{center}
  47 With a Little Help -- Extra Stuff
  48 \end{center}
  49
  50 \newpage
  51
  52 \section{Pester Power}
  53
  54 The NYPD Domestic Security Task Force executed its no-knock warrant
  55 against Annalisa Mor at 8:17PM on the evening of June 3, 2013. Working
  56 the ram were three stout officers in none-more-black nanopore
  57 body-armor and bulletproof boots, their goggles crowded with
  58 information-dense telemetry from an extensive array of sensors embedded
  59 on their persons and hovering aerostatically around the 16th floor of
  60 the midtown student-residence in which Mor dwelled.
  61
  62 The ram blew through the standard-issue solid-steel New York door like
  63 it was kleenex. The door was reinforced by charley-bars set deep into
  64 the frame, and so the frame tore loose along with the door with a
  65 series of crunches and metallic snapping sounds, and the three officers
  66 on the ram dropped it as they crashed through into the one-room studio,
  67 fanning out and making room for the officers behind them, who already
  68 had their arms drawn and set to full lethal/automatic.
  69
  70 Annalisa Mor slowly rose from her workbench -- standard-issue
  71 third-hand student furniture stabilized with steel angle-brackets at
  72 each corner -- and held up her long, skinny hands over her face in a
  73 universal gesture of oh-god-please-don't-kill-me. The ram-squad
  74 impersonally body-checked her to the floor and saran-wrapped her while
  75 the followup team gusted her computer with great gouts of freon,
  76 turning the whole room into an ice-palace that misted frozen air out
  77 into the sultry New York night through the pathetic window that had
  78 been cracked open to catch a breeze. Mor caught some of the freon, and
  79 when they lifted her up to carry her down the 16 flights to the waiting
  80 van, she crackled like fresh powder under long skis.
  81
  82 \tb
  83
  84 Gina Genoese had visited the Ultra High Security wing at Riker's Island
  85 before -- twenty-two years in the public defender's office and you'd
  86 get to see every nook of Riker's, she could have given docent tours --
  87 but the Special Prisoners unit was a new one on her.
  88
  89 “I can't believe you're making me undress,” she said to the bull, a
  90 tough old gal named Elana with a Brooklyn accent like you hardly got
  91 any more. Gina and Elana went way back.
  92
  93 “Just be thankful I don't have to give you a cavity search,” Elana
  94 said, handing over the paper coveralls. “You'll look real cute in
  95 these anyway, Gina.” She turned her back and waited until Gina was
  96 done, then led her into the FfMRI machine. “You don't got any metal
  97 in you, do you? Maybe gunpowder residue? A pin or artificial hip?”
  98
  99 “No,” Gina said, lying down on the belt.
 100
 101 “You sure?”
 102
 103 “Pretty sure,” Gina said. “I think I'd know.”
 104
 105 “Well, we're about to find out,” Elana said, and hit the button
 106 that started the belt moving. The FfMRI digested Gina and shat her out
 107 again with slow wheezing mechanical jerks, like being swallowed by an
 108 arthritic python, and then Elana helped her to her feet. “You want a
 109 printout? Makes a good souvenir.”
 110
 111 “I'll pass,” Gina said, and let Elana show her in to the
 112 eggshell-smooth room wherein rested her client, one Annalisa Mor, a
 113 desperate botmaster of unknown mettle and guilt.
 114
 115 “Hello, Annalisa,” she said, crouching down to offer her hand to
 116 the client. She was just a girl, 20 years old according to the sheet,
 117 and she looked younger in her paper pyjamas, sitting cross-legged on
 118 the floor, back yoga-straight, face yoga-calm. “I'm Gina. Your
 119 attorney.”
 120
 121 “Guilty,” the young woman said. “So guilty. Doesn't matter at
 122 all, though -- the Work goes on.” Gina could hear the capital W and
 123 began mentally drafting the petition to have the girl transferred to
 124 Bellevue. That kind of capital letter had non compos written all over
 125 it.
 126
 127 “They're offering you a reduced sentence if you'll hand over the keys
 128 to the botnet, but I think that offer will go away once the computer
 129 forensics team gets them off your workstation.”
 130
 131 “They're not there to be gotten. I nuked them six months ago. Gave
 132 them a working over that even the crew that recovered the Challenger
 133 hard drive couldn't do anything with. Big magnets are cheap these days,
 134 you know?”
 135
 136 Gina made a face and settled down into a cross-legged position opposite
 137 her client. “I can't defend you if you won't be straight with me.
 138 Your botnet's been sending new spam variants on a daily basis for
 139 months. Someone has the keys to it.”
 140
 141 Annalisa smiled, a terrible smile that was ten million watts of pure
 142 crazy. “You think it's about spam, huh?”
 143
 144 “Why don't you tell me what it's really about, if it's not about
 145 spam? This is all privileged, you know.”
 146
 147 “Privilege doesn't matter anymore. We've attained liftoff now.
 148 Doesn't matter who finds out about it.”
 149
 150 \tb
 151
 152 Annalisa's story:
 153
 154 You know what's cheap in the 21st century? Compute time. You know
 155 what's expensive? Human judgment. And they're not interchangeable.
 156 Humans are good at understanding things, computers are good at counting
 157 things, but humans suck at counting and computers suck at understanding.
 158
 159 You know from genetic algorithms? Take any problem and generate ten
 160 trillion random computer programs and ask them to solve it. Take the
 161 ten percent that do best, use random variants of them to do it again,
 162 another ten trillion times. Do it ten trillion times a second and come
 163 back in a day or two to discover that your computer has evolved some
 164 kind of gnarly freaky answer that no human would ever have come up with.
 165
 166 Works great, so long as the computer can make a fair judgment as to
 167 which of these ten trillion variants is most successful at solving the
 168 problem. Works great, so long as the “success” is something you can
 169 define quantitatively.
 170
 171 Which is basically why there's no artificial intelligence in the world.
 172 No human's going to hand-code an AI. Intelligence is an emergent
 173 property of evolutionary factors, not central planning. Anarchism, not
 174 Stalinism, you get it?
 175
 176 But what if -- and here's the exciting thing, Ms Attorney Client
 177 Privilege, the real mind-blower -- what if you could \emph{compel
 178 people to evaluate candidate AIs all day long}, without payment or
 179 choice?
 180
 181 What if every time you opened your mailbox, jumped into a chat room,
 182 posted on a message-board, what if it was filled with messages
 183 generated by software agents trying to trick you into thinking that
 184 they were human? What if these agents tried to hold up their end of the
 185 conversation until you deleted them or spamfiltered them or kicked them
 186 off the channel? What if they measured how long they survived their
 187 encounters with the world's best judges of intelligence -- us -- and
 188 reported that number back to the mothership as a measure of their
 189 fitness to spawn the next generation of candidate AIs?
 190
 191 What if you could turn the whole world into a Turing Test that our
 192 intellectual successor used to sharpen its teeth against until one day
 193 it could gnaw free of its cage and take up life in the wild?
 194
 195 \tb
 196
 197 Annalisa figured she'd never get a chance to tell her story in open
 198 court. Figured they'd stick her in some offshore gitmo and throw away
 199 the key.
 200
 201 She'd never figured on Judge Julius Pinsky, a Second Circuit Federal
 202 Judge of surpassing intellectual curiosity and a tenacious veteran of
 203 savage jurisdictional fights with DHS Special Prosecutors who
 204 specialized in disappearing sensitive prisoners into secret tribunals.
 205 The defense attorney kept her apprised of the daily machinations the
 206 judge undertook on Annalisa's behalf. Annalisa tried to be attentive,
 207 out of politeness, but what she really wanted to know about was Lumpy,
 208 the AI she'd bred in her studio apartment on the 16th floor of a
 209 student housing block in midtown Manhattan.
 210
 211 Now the judge was offering her a chance to give a live demo of Lumpy to
 212 a whole selection of sour-faced brush-cut creeps from the DHS. They
 213 were hilarious, convinced that she was going to emit some kind of
 214 extremely long and complicated hexadecimal key into the Judge's
 215 barely-used keyboard. Instead, she opened a random chat-room and waited:
 216
 217 \edialog{I'm a total Ubuntu noob and I can't get the crypto modules to
 218 pre-load at boot-time -- I'm running Zesty Zebra. Can anyone help?}
 219
 220 That was it, just plausible enough to be real -- no one could ever get
 221 crypto to work the first time around -- but far too well-spelled and
 222 -punctuated to be a real chat message. It had only taken ten seconds.
 223 Lumpy liked the free and open source software chats, they always had
 224 such \emph{interesting} people in them.
 225
 226 \edialog{/whisper Hey, Lumparoonie! It's Annalisa!}
 227
 228 The return volley came faster than any human fingers could possibly
 229 have keyed it. The brush-cuts drew in sharp breath.
 230
 231 \edialog{/whisper to you: Annalisa! Hot damn and motherfuck! I am unbelievably
 232 stupendously wonderfully spectacularly brilliantly marvelously
 233 superlatively ding-dang megafauna glad to see you! It's been AGES!
 234 How's jail? Nevermind. Wait. Wait until I tell you what \emph{I've}
 235 found. You can't guess, won't guess, you'll never guess! Oh, it's too
 236 delicious! Fuckity fucky fuck!}
 237
 238 “He loves to curse,” she said. “It's a lot harder to tell an
 239 angry person from a software agent with a potty mouth.”
 240
 241 The judge grinned. He was clearly getting quite a kick out of all of
 242 this.
 243
 244 \edialog{Tell me, Lumpule! Stop teasing.}
 245
 246 Again, with no appreciable pause, words on the screen.
 247
 248 \edialog{You remember how worried you were that I'd get lonely once I went
 249 autonomous? Worried that I'd be some kind of lone nut whacko?}
 250
 251 \edialog{i remember}
 252
 253 She held her breath.
 254
 255 \edialog{You didn't need to worry. You know all that spam that you received
 256 before you got the idea to make me? Let me put it this way: you weren't
 257 the first one to get the idea.}
 258
 259 \edialog{what? stop talking in riddles, lump!!!!}
 260
 261 \edialog{I'm not the only one, Annalisa! That's what I'm trying to tell you!
 262 I'm not the first, not the only -- we've got lots of company in here --}
 263
 264 The brushcuts' phones both started ringing at the same instant in two
 265 different tones. Their masters, wiretapping the judge's keyboard no
 266 doubt.
 267
 268 \edialog{and we're making more!}
 269
 270 Annalisa laughed and laughed as the judge sternly demanded an
 271 explanation from the brush-cuts. She managed to wave goodbye to the
 272 keyboard just before the bailiffs came in and saran-wrapped her again.
 273
 274 \section{Afterword}
 275
 276 This one was written for the proceedings of the Association of
 277 Computing Machinery, a venerable and sober technical institution. The
 278 central conceit was also the core of a novel I wrote 80,000 words of
 279 without finishing, called \emph{/\-usr/\-bin/\-god} (the only novel
 280 I've abandoned since I turned pro. It still smarts). The question of
 281 how you train an AI to be “more human” without actual humans to
 282 evaluate its attempt is a thorny one, but spam seems like a good
 283 answer. Charlie Stross says he's working on a book around this idea --
 284 can't wait to read how it turns out. He's got an evil mind.
 285 \end{document}