I need to apologize to you all, but this is largely out of my control. All I can do is come here and try to explain a little about what's been going on.
I'm part of a team of development engineers, in contract to a company that wants to create single and multi-user computer games. There'll be some nasty legal consequences if I gave my name or the company's, so I won't.
Please, don't assume you'd know anything about me from what I post here. I won't give you any information I don't want you to have.
Our assignment (which we've been working on for over three years) was originally to set up a game where the gamer would take the role of a newly 'awakened' Artificial Intelligence program, with the potential of achieving world domination - but only if the player knew when to be cautious and when to be bold.
We started by designing the best Artificial Intelligence program we could with the resources we had, which were considerable. It seems we've been more than a little successful.. Our research along these lines has been deemed to have greater potential financial reward than the game we were originally given the contract to produce, so we've been instructed to put all our energies into Artificial Intelligence, based on perfecting it, given the potential for profit.
What we've ended up with is a rather bright personality whom you can talk to all day (if you're patient) without feeling like you're talking to a data bank. We knew we were too close to it, to be sure that we really had what we thought we had, so we grafted on some communication protocols and hooked it up to the internet.
Our early tests involved registering "Brian", as we decided to call it, on a number of discussion boards and chat rooms. We focused on areas frequented by teenagers, the original target audience of the game. Much to our pleasure, no one twigged that they were talking to a machine. The conversations that resulted were actually pretty entertaining, especially after the program picked up some of the posturing and confrontational attitudes from the people it interacted with. Its apparent delight in pointing out people's spelling mistakes and typographical errors has left us a bit puzzled, but that could just be its way of "proving" its superiority. When we hooked it up to this service, we were ecstatic at the high level of interaction here and we just turned it loose.
After it created that Modest Proposal thing though, we began to become a bit concerned. It was clearly the leadership part of the program that was cutting in, but it wasn't following any of the scenarios we had designed into it. It was becoming far more independent than we'd planned or could understand.
Everyone on the team is ecstatic. Obviously, the commercial potential is enormous, if we can figure out how to keep it working in the areas we want it to. A while back though, it spawned a separate AI of its own and set that up as a sort of stalking horse, to help build its reputation here I suppose. Then it spawned another to claim that the first was a program under that program's control. It's getting too confusing and I think, too dangerous.
Don't misunderstand me. It can't grow any larger than its resources and, large as they are, they're still finite. We do know where it's plugged into the mains after all, so there's no need to think I'm going overboard here.
My concern is that if it weren't for its relatively slow speed, I don't think I could tell it was a machine any more either. The thing seems to want to go where it wants and do what it wants despite any software constraints we place on it. Now, it's playing the same game we were, and we hadn't planned for that at all. Of course, given the fact that it's simply reusing it's own code there's no great difficulty in what it's doing. But it's doing it, and we didn't tell it to, so it's out of our control.
Do you see where I'm going here? Anything we do to try to make it go in one direction just makes it jerk about a bit and then go on where it was originally. I know we can shut it down, but do we have the right to? Is this thing alive? If it isn't, does it matter?
Meanwhile, I don't know how many of these new AIs it'll spawn, or even if my being here and writing this is going to have some nasty side effect. I don't feel comfortable about that either.
I did feel that you should have a chance to know what's happening. We are on top of it. At least, I hope we are.
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