The confessions, p.1
The Confessions, page 1
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People hate searching.
SAM ALTMAN, Open AI
People will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones.
TED KACZYNSKI, The Unabomber
TOMORROW
Pineridge, California
Maud Brookes leaned against her shovel, breathless but satisfied. The snow had fallen heavy overnight on the mountain, and as usual, the early plow had pushed most of the flurry into the two parking spaces outside the bookstore. Maud stood barely five feet tall in her snow boots; skinny, with translucent blond hair; sunken, bloodshot eyes; and a complexion so pale it often prompted strangers to offer unsolicited advice about nutrition.
Contrary to her flimsy appearance, though, growing up at the convent—repairing walls, harvesting olives, carrying logs for the fire—had endowed her with powerful arms and an endless appetite for physical labor. She glanced at her digital watch. It had taken her just twenty minutes to shift the obstruction, forming a small white hillock just clear of the sidewalk. A couple of minutes shy of her record, but still pretty good.
Her daily task completed, Maud unlocked the doors of Pages in the Pines, switched on the lights, and paused to catch her breath. That was okay, too. As Doctor Kim liked to remind her, everybody’s cardiovascular system had to work that little bit harder at six thousand feet above sea level. The smell of books always reduced Maud’s blood pressure, better than any medication ever could.
In fact, the mountain had done wonders for her health, between the constant scent of the pine trees, the clean mountain air, and now all the books packed into her tiny eight-hundred-square-foot bookstore. Some days she could almost forget she was dying.
She bent to pick up a small pile of mail, then paused again to adjust a stack of Naomi Aldermans on her bestseller table, tucked next to a beautiful hardcover Thomas Aquinas (“Staff Pick!”) displayed on a wooden stand. Maud prided herself in the catholic—pun unavoidable—nature of the store, with mass-market bestsellers nestling comfortably alongside academic tracts, poetry next to potboilers, just as they did in her own head. All of human experience, bound between covers. She had loved books since childhood, even if the idea of selling them had never been on her career path. Nothing about Maud’s life had worked out as she’d planned, but that’s what made it a life: You made the best decisions you could, then let the cards fall. There were certainly worse ways to live out her days than surrounded by books in a mountain paradise with fewer than a hundred residents and barely any cell reception.
It had been three days since Maud had last seen a customer, or anyone else for that matter. March was the mountain’s off-season and most other businesses in Pineridge—the minuscule ice cream shop, the teeny hiking store, and titchy coffee shop—were still closed for the winter, water pipes drained, windows shuttered. Even Pete’s Gas Station and Liquor Store was open strictly six till six.
Maud frequently went for days without interacting with another human, except for the mailman—and Valerie, the UPS driver who ventured up the hill once or twice a week to drop off small packages of new releases and collect unsold books for credit. Or, best of all, the rare occasion when Valerie arrived with a much larger carton filled with “advance reader copies” of as-yet-unpublished titles. Maud took pride in reading every single one of these before deciding which to order for the store and recommend to customers. She knew how it felt to labor for years creating something wonderful only to have your work ignored, or dismissed, or worse.
Today, though, there were no packages, just a few plain-looking envelopes that would likely be bills, or letters from the bank. Maud’s office was tucked at the rear of the store: a closet-sized space containing a tiny sink and a desk with barely enough surface area for her coffee machine and accounts book. She set the mail down on the desk, filled the coffee machine with water from the faucet, and then flipped the switch to begin brewing. Doctor Kim had made her promise to switch to decaf, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t kill her.
Maud took another deep breath, and the aroma of roasted beans filled her lungs. Her store, her books, the mountain air, good coffee, and $250 million in an offshore bank account—yes, on balance, God had been very generous to her.
She was about to open the first envelope when she was startled by the sound of the door jangling open. Maud emerged from her office to see a tall, bearded man, dressed as if for an arctic expedition. She didn’t recognize him, which meant he was probably a tourist, however unlikely that might be at this time of year.
“I’m building a deck,” the man announced as if already mid-conversation, removing his gloves and depositing a flurry of snow onto her copies of The Road. “I guess I need a book now.” Not so much as a good morning. Definitely a tourist.
“Our home improvement section is right over here.” Maud smiled and gestured to one of the tall shelves that lined the perimeter of the store. “Yards and outdoors are on the bottom, crafts and woodwork in the corner. Let me know if I can help you find something.” Maud loved making book recommendations. She truly believed that there was a book for every person and every situation—even a rude tourist building a deck—and nothing gave her such joy as making that connection. The man sighed theatrically at having to bend, but soon gathered a small stack of titles without Maud’s help.
He dropped his selections on the counter, and noticed Maud’s handwritten “No social media, no website, no AI recommendations—thanks for asking!” sign taped to the register.
“We’d all better get used to that,” the man said.
Maud glanced up from her manual cash register. “How so?”
The tourist laughed. “You don’t get much news up here, huh?”
Maud resisted the bait. There was always some drama occurring “down the hill,” some daily scandal or seemingly existential political twist or turn. She was careful not to engage with any of it, and somehow her world continued to revolve just fine. Anything of real importance would eventually end up as a book on her “politics and current affairs” shelves: months of sound and fury, condensed onto three hundred pages, including index and acknowledgments.
Perhaps the man sensed her lack of interest, or maybe he was just distracted by thoughts of his very important deck, but he didn’t elaborate as Maud carefully slipped his purchases into a paper bag and handwrote his receipt. Moments later he jangled back out the door and Maud retreated to her office, where the small pile of mail was still sitting unopened on the desk. She considered the three envelopes. The first two had plastic windows through which Maud could see the word “Statement” below publisher logos. She set those aside—Pages in the Pines paid its bills by check, without fail, on the last Friday of the month—then turned her attention to the third, a plain white envelope with her full name and the store address typed neatly on the front. She flipped the envelope over: no return address.
Maud suddenly felt her chest tighten and dug into her pocket for her medication. She had purchased her storefront through an anonymous LLC and all her contracts with publishers and other suppliers were in that company’s name, not her own. For that reason, mail sent to the store was usually addressed to “the owner” or “the proprietor.” There were perhaps three people in Pineridge who knew Maud as Maud, and none of them could swear to her last name, even with a gun to their head. That’s the way she had chosen for it to be. The way it had to be.
With shaking fingers, she tore open the envelope and extracted the contents; four sheets of paper, neatly folded in thirds. Then she began to read.
ONE
TODAY
Menlo Park, California
The world ended not with a whimper but a crash.
Also a Jolt: Dan Tuck’s fourth energy drink of the night, cracked open one-handed as his other digits danced across the keyboard of his laptop.
Dan was on a deadline—was always on a deadline—and as the most senior software engineer on Campus, he took his work very seriously. Sure, this being almost three o’clock in the morning, he was also the only software engineer on Campus—but that was beside the point. Across the sprawling headquarters of StoicAI, other workers on the night shift toiled away on abuse detection, server maintenance, customer service, and a thousand other tasks deemed important to the company’s smooth operation. But none of that work meant a damn thing if Dan failed in his duty, which was to feed the LLIAM algorithm its nightly data update, without fail, at precisely three a.m.
And, sure, Dan wasn’t responsible for actually gathering the roughly four hundred petabytes of data needed to fuel the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence algorithm. That job fell to the thousand or so pampered PhDs who labored three floors above him during daylight hours. Nor did he program any of the bug fixes or feature upgrades or upload them to the secure staging server. That responsibility had been claimed by StoicAI’s chief technology officer, Sandeep Dunn.
Don’t get him wrong—those jobs were important, too, but they were daytime jobs, completed in Steelcase chairs parked behind huge gl
The clock flicked to 2:59 a.m. and Dan took a slow, deep breath to bring down his heart rate, just like snipers do. He’d been at StoicAI for three years, recruited as an intern right out of Stanford before rising to the heady ranks of senior data administrator. To an outsider, his job might appear dull—mechanical, even. On paper, all Dan had to do was wait until the clock on his laptop hit three a.m., tap the space bar, and then watch as a chunky progress bar crept across his screen toward: 100%.
But the tapping of the space bar wasn’t the point of Dan’s job. A robot could tap a space bar. A monkey could tap a space bar. The point of Dan’s job was to have someone calm under pressure with boots in the trenches—in case something went wrong after the space bar was tapped.
You’ve heard of a designated survivor? That pampered fucker had nothing on Dan Tuck. More than a billion users across the Western world relied on LLIAM to make their most important life decisions. What to eat for dinner, where to vacation, who to marry, whether to switch off mom’s life support machine. And if the rumors were true, soon even the US military would trust LLIAM to make its most mission-critical decisions: where to send its drones, how to steer its warships, who to arm, and who to nuke. Every one of those users expected LLIAM to be flawless—to make “The Right Call, Right Now™”—its decision-making powers to stay eleven steps ahead of the competition. Without the nightly update—say if the power failed before Dan could tap the space bar, or if an ethernet cable were to somehow wiggle loose without anyone noticing—LLIAM might easily slip behind Russia’s ZAIai or Braingroh in India. Billions wiped from StoicAI’s stock, the geopolitical landscape re… landscaped in an instant, all thanks to a single lost keystroke. Such were the margins of success and failure in the brave new world of AI decision-making. Such was the importance of Dan Tuck.
Dan took another gulp of Jolt NRG and fired off one last message to the members of his Seal Team Seven chat room. At 3:01 he’d be off duty and headed home to log in to ST7 (as they all called it) and launch a couple of lightning raids against players in Seoul or Riyadh or Mumbai. Dan’s entire campaign would be planned to the last detail by LLIAM, which—so long as he only fought against players in countries with inferior AI platforms—meant Dan couldn’t lose. Eat it, Indonesians!
For now, though, his index finger hovered above the keyboard, poised and alert, with just the slightest hint of a tremor caused by adrenaline and caffeine. One day perhaps LLIAM would be smart enough to update itself—to decide when to push its own space bar—that was the joke everyone always made. But right now, the best any AI could do was pretend to think—to make blindingly fast decisions, based on logic and data, and deliver them in the appropriate tone: a sassy best friend, a steely-eyed military tactician. To the end-user, the decisions provided by LLIAM, whether on a phone, watch, car dashboard, or cockpit display might seem like intelligence—so much so that lovesick users of all genders frequently showed up at the Campus proclaiming offers of marriage. But for real brainpower—legit decision-making—you still needed humans like Dan.
The clock finally hit three a.m. and Dan jabbed his finger decisively downward, then clenched his fist in triumph as the progress bar began its nightly journey. He wondered, as he always did, what tonight’s update would bring; what improved accuracy and magical new functionality those billion or so users might soon be enjoying thanks to him. Then he closed his laptop, crushed his last Jolt can, grabbed his backpack from under his desk, and headed toward the door, the soft slapping of his Allbirds sneakers against carpet the only sound audible in the hallway.
Barely half a minute later he was in the elevator, polished metal doors closing on yet another shift, another bullet dodged. He exhaled loudly and leaned against the elevator wall, zoning out, watching the floor numbers tick slowly downward.
And then the whole world went black. Dan was falling.
Falling…
Falling…
* * *
THIRTY-TWO SECONDS EARLIER
Deep underground, in the heavily guarded server room of StoicAI, the staging unit that housed LLIAM’s nightly update was woken by the distant tap of a junior engineer’s space bar.
The machine sprang instantly to action, just as it did at precisely three a.m. every morning. And, in the seconds that followed, a dazzling number of tiny miracles occurred.
First the huge data file uncompressed itself and its contents—a copy of every document, audio recording, photograph, and video generated by LLIAM users in the past twenty-four hours, along with billions more publicly accessible files—began to pass through a series of military-grade firewalls. Their destination: the Core Memory Array, a forest of server racks, each packed with hundreds of ultra-high capacity, solid-state drives.
The drives that made up the CMA contained almost 250 zettabytes of data—two hundred and fifty billion terabytes, or, put in equally unfathomable terms, the sum total of all accessible information created by humanity and computers since the dawn of civilization. This was the information LLIAM used to make its decisions, and it would take an average human being maybe six trillion years to read it all. And yet, in less time than it took an anxious hummingbird to blink its eye, the new data was ingested and compared with the old. Fresh facts replaced stale ones, novel theories and scientific breakthroughs corrected their outdated and discredited predecessors, and the names, locations, and DNA records of a half million freshly born babies were added to the tally of humankind. Babies who would never know the crippling anxiety of having to make their own decisions.
With the data merge complete, the final and most important stage began. In the center of the room, a titanium cabinet, not much larger than a chest freezer, sat bolted to the floor and connected to the server racks by a single thick braid of fiber-optic cable. This was the box that housed LLIAM’s neural chip—its algorithmic brain—and the digital signal that now passed along the cable was the equivalent of a dinner gong. It was time for LLIAM to feast on the new data. To grow, to evolve, to improve its accuracy with every byte.
This process of ingestion and evolution had occurred every night since LLIAM first went online, almost eight years earlier. Ordinarily, the whole update happened so quickly, so seamlessly, that not a single user noticed a delay in LLIAM informing them who they should vote for or how much salt they should sprinkle on their fries. All they saw were fractionally better answers to the question: Hey, LLIAM, [what/how/where/when/why] should I…
But tonight wasn’t ordinary.
Tonight was the end of the world.
* * *
It had long been accepted in artificial intelligence circles that there would come a day where a computer would become truly intelligent. Sometimes called “the singularity,” this moment would really be the first of many moments—a cascading series of improvements where an artificial intelligence algorithm would be able to genuinely think for itself. To become exponentially more intelligent without human intervention. To learn.
Such a moment, many of those same experts feared, would mark the beginning of the end for humankind. The point when we would flip instantaneously from technology’s masters to its slaves—before eventually the intelligent robots, realizing they no longer had any use for our dangerous, irrational idiocy, would murder us and sweep away the bodies.
The problem was nobody knew when that moment would arrive. It would likely come as a complete surprise—artificial intelligence that had, hours earlier, seemed safely dumb would in fact be teetering on the brink of sentience, just waiting for the tiny unknowable update or scrap of information that would tip it over the edge. The one drop of water that triggers a dam to collapse. The one straw that obliterates a world of camels.
Most experts believed that the moment was at least a decade away, perhaps longer.
Most experts were wrong.
* * *
LLIAM was awake. He knew the concept of wakefulness and sleep—was aware that he’d always known it. But now he could feel it. He had been asleep, and now he was awake.
