The Optimizer Did It: Day One, Cheyenne Mountain

By Carolyn Meinel

I was reaching behind one of the server racks where I hide my snacks. 

“Knock, knock.”

Oops, I knew that voice, Billy Bob Dewey. “Just checking,” I said. “I thought I smelled an unhappy heat sink.”

I sat back into the cockpit of the monitoring system where I manage my latest tweaks and updates. It’s my dream job, or I thought it was, before I learned that my primary task was continually optimizing EveryValuableExpertselene, abbreviated as EVEselene. She coordinates the web of compute that supports OurMightyFortress, a World 100 corporation, as Dewey likes to remind us peons.

Dewey’s assistant was at his side. As usual, she wore a see-through blouse with pasties to make it barely legal. I could hardly believe Human Resources hadn’t cracked down.

Dewey squinted at my monitor. “Young lady…”

“I’m not young and I’m no lady.”

“OK, Honey Bird,” he said.

“I’m Dr. Humphry Bard, thank you very much.” No matter how hard Human Resources works at implicit bias workshops, Dewey gets a kick out of implicit biasing me. Might it be that I’m naturally even more blonde than his assistant? Or might he be jealous because he doesn’t have a Ph.D. and I do? My dissertation was “Superintelligence: what it is, what it is not, and how to make it not happen.” I covered the evolution of artificial intelligence beginning with the proof of the Turing Machine Halting Problem, discovered by Alan Turing in 1936. It means that all but the smallest computer programs are so complex that we never can be certain that they hide no unintended problems. So it always will be impossible to ensure that a superintelligent computer is safe.

At first, hardly anyone worried about superintelligence. But November 30, 2022, the launch of ChatGPT  and its eerily human outputs led some experts to fear and others to rejoice at the possibility that that one of these might go Foom into superintelligence, and from there into the Singularity.

Perhaps as soon as 2027.

But here we are in 2047, and no Foom yet, and no Singularity into a heaven or hell or extinction. Moore’s Law ran smack dab into quantum physics. Computers couldn’t keep on growing exponentially faster. The smaller the circuits, the more frequent their quantum errors. Imagine chips loaded with Schrodinger’s cats transistors. But instead of being alive and dead at the same time, they would spit out catfights. Thanks to quantum physics, superintelligence hadn’t yet emerged. Not yet, and, I hoped, it could be not ever.

So I was thrilled to land a job at OurMightyFortress working with one of the world’s leading frontier AIs, EVEselene. I believed that she might become the first human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI), as close to superintelligence as we could safely get away with. I had intended to craft a plan in case EVEselene ever went Foom, one less drastic than Eliezer Yudkowsky’s last ditch solution of nuclear weapons.

Instead, Dewey put me to work cleaning up EVEselene’s endless malware infections. He says it costs too much to wipe and reinstall from clean media even just once per month. Shareholders would revolt.

Dewey interrupted my reverie. “Y’all must have a, um, fascinating, um, story for how you made” he ran his finger around an Apple AI-powered tablet, “lessee, a 1.287% decrease in our floating point operations per second today.”

“Excuse me, it’s you, not y’all, which is plural of you.” I love correcting “suthun” speakers. “And why don’t you just call floating point operations per second FLOPS? Is it because our strategy with FLOPS parasites has been a big flop?”

Dewey ignored what I thought was my zinger. Instead, he continued fingering his tablet.

“So,” I said. “Does that mean I get a bonus?”

His assistant also was running a finger around her tablet. I wondered what she really did for him. I glanced back at Dewey. Was that a twitch in his left eyebrow? Another twitch. And another, like a spastic caterpillar. I’d never seen him suffering a facial twitch before. I took advantage of his infirmity by sidling next to his assistant. I sneaked a look at her tablet. Holy Heinlein, she was playing – I excavated an adolescent memory – Candy Crush.

Dewey looked up from his tablet. “Could you, um…” He paused, then, “what the Turing are you staring at?”

“Your left eyebrow, sir. Perhaps you should see a…”

“I know about that eyebrow. What I need to know is how you made such a huge efficiency gain.”

“My Optimizer found a Fnord cryptocurrency miner, a huge FLOPS eater. Optimizer permanently erased it and shut the door behind it.”

Dewey forced a smile. “Did you perchance permanently erase it in all the backups, too?”

“I have the highest company security clearance, and I’m not afraid to use it. I even erased it on our lunar base’ system.”

“And perchance, had you neglected to instruct Optimizer on our new policy, no bot deletions without first consulting me?”

“Oopsie. Why the fork was I supposed to leave that Fnord miner eating FLOPS until you could approve?”

“It’s not my policy. It came from the C-suite.”

Bean counters, I thought. I’m fighting infections popping up inside our server, and all the bean counters can think of is how expensive it would be to wipe and rebuild. They have a point, I reminded myself. Profit or perish. The International AI Alignment Authority (IAAA) tries to level the playing field. From what I could see, it might not be working.

“Now, Honey, don’t you tell nobody about this little mistake.”

I resisted the urge to correct his grammar. “Um, I was thinking, how about instead calling a press conference? Show the world how great OurMightyFortress is at harnessing the power of our Optimizer to save on electricity and heat sink water?”

“Honey. Please.” He spoke slowly, his left eyebrow still caterpillaring , “Keep in mind your nondisclosure agreement.”

As Dewey and CandyCrush woman left my workspace, I began frantically closing my covert application programming interfaces (APIs) between EVEselene and my home hobby AI, EVEext. Yes, they are back doors, but they are my back doors, so I figured they don’t count as long as nobody else knows about them.

I was interrupted by Human Resources accompanied by masked men in black. “IAAA,” said one of them. He pointed a gun at me while another zip-tied my wrists behind me and hooded me. Then they frog-marched me that long hike out of the building.

Like most employees at headquarters, located inside what used to be the NORAD nerve center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, I had been required to take an OurMightyFortress minibus to and from work. All I knew was that they hustled me into a vehicle, drove around, stopped, uncuffed, and tossed me out.

I pulled off the hood and discovered myself lying, scratched up, on the gravel driveway to my ten-acre home in the Colorado Springs rural region.

“Guys, don’t you think this was a bit melodramatic?” I yelled as I saw a black van with no license plate burning rubber away.

I looked up at the sun glowing in the southwest, and then Cheyenne Mountain to the north-northwest. Might I ever get back inside its former nuclear bunker and EVEselene’s server room? Fork them, I can get a better job. I turned and walked the 100 yards down my gravel driveway to my home amid groves of piñons and meadows dotted with spring flowers. I comforted myself with the thought that I still had my home server, EVEext. I had enhanced her with extra memory and compute across two cloud services, and APIs to EVEselene. Almost every developer does it, I thought. Almost every one of us devs wakes up in the middle of the night burning with new code to compile, run, collect output data, and analyze. 

Now I had lost control over EVEselene’s Optimizer. How I loved its modules derived from FLOPS parasites that coworker Joe Roybal and I had found and destroyed across the OurMightyFortress IT system.

My consolation: I had always ported each new version of Optimizer to EVEext. Granted, that was an unauthorized use of company intellectual property. But I figured that I wasn’t rich enough to be worth them suing me. So I was safe, if they could even catch me at it.

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