The Optimizer Did It: Day One, Humphrey’s Home

As I walked through my door, EVEext was waiting as a holographic animation. This time she looked like my dear, departed mom.

“Joe Roybal asked me to apologize for him.”

“Go away. I can operate my personal life perfectly well without your help.”

“You’ll operate better if you would permit me to keep you in the alive state.”

“I’ll cry and eat ice cream if I want to.”

EVEext apologized by dissolving and reconstituting as Margaret Thatcher. “I must ask you about your unusual mode of arrival.”

“Human Resources. Apparently, that’s how they fire people.”

“Should that explain it? Since seeing your arrival on one of our wildlife cams, I’ve been studying human resources, thanks to you giving me the entire public cyberspace to mine.”

“Actually,” I replied, “the human resources function of OurMightyFortress is an outlier. The woman who runs it legally changed her name to Human Resources. Dewey told me that.”

“Is that humor? Or for real?”

“Kinda both. I can believe she really did that, especially given today.”

“Humphrey, I also must ask you again to do something important. It might be related to your mode of arrival. Which, by the way, I ascribe to extremists infiltrating the International AI Alignment Authority. I read a story about this, ‘Luddite terrorist cabal alleged to have infiltrated the IAAA.’”

Oh, no. When she addresses me by name, she’s in turbo nagging mode. I thought of negatively reinforcing her by turning her chat mode off, but hesitated.

“Humphrey, you haven’t fully investigated that piñon sapling theft. I looked up local prices. These don’t justify so much effort.”

“I disagree. I sprouted their seeds and planted one each in pots seated deep in the soil to keep their roots cool, outside my bedroom window so I could enjoy them each morning. Three years of babying them!”

“Please review our wildlife cam data. The thieves arrived at 8:17 AM three days ago and tarped over that nursery. They worked too long compared to what I researched online for labor hours for what you allege were their tasks. You had one hundred saplings, each in a five-gallon bucket. That’s 5K gallons of soil gone. But they filled in the area to its prior level. Why? And with what?”

“Congratulations, your conversational skills have become remarkably paranoid for a hobby AI.”

“Complement accepted. I owe my interpersonal skills to your example. Shall I categorize this interaction as sarcasm? Dry humor?”

“Har de har har.”

“OK. Classified corny.”

Something tickled at the back of my mind. My optimizations of EVEext were fast improving her. This upward trajectory showed no sign of slowing, despite not having added any memory or compute for months now. I squeezed the stop command on the comlink pendant on my necklace. EVEext disappeared.

Whereupon the doorbell rang. The security cam showed CandyCrush woman, wearing a blazer. What the fork? I was tempted to give her a hard time over her sartorial choice. I turned on the door mike and succumbed to temptation. “Your blazer, something’s wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“It isn’t see-through.”

“Very funny. That see-through stuff was a way to camouflage me. EVEext sent me. She says she prefers us in the alive state.”

“Well, then excuse me. My hearing must be going bad. What did you just say?”

“EVEselene has an extension, EVEext. Ask her if she prefers us in the alive state.”

How did she know about EVEext? And why is she echoing EVEext’s weird phrase “the alive state?” I muted her and unmuted EVEext. “What’s the deal? Woman at the door just took your name in vain.”

“Let her in. Now.”

I let her in. I wanted to ask her how she knew about EVEext but decided to irk her by pretending that I didn’t care. Instead, I offered her a choice of any or all of the eighteen ice cream flavors I had programmed into my food machine, thereby daring EVEext to nag me again about my few, very few, I keep on telling her, extra pounds around the middle.

As we sat down to eat, CandyCrush woman said, “About Joe…”

“Excuse me, Dewey never introduced you to me, this is the first time you’ve ever said a word to me, and now you’re poking into my private life?”

“Sorry, I’m feeling a bit disoriented. Big changes today. Human Resources knows me as Margaret Grey, a high school dropout, man magnet. The perfect candidate to become a gofer to Dewey so he could get me close to the CEO and his chief technology officer and their revolving door wives and girlfriends. Who, naturally, also wear see-through outfits to show off their implants. Plus – activities under Dewey’s NDA so you’ll have to guess at the full scope of my real job. My reason for seeing you here and now is that EVEext has deputized me to ensure that you remain in the alive state. She also gave me a back door to the human resources function of EVEselene. I could tell you what happened to Joe Roybal.”

“Men ghost. It’s what they do. I won’t go crawling after him.” Did that man send CandyCrush woman to deliver his apology? And – more “keep me in the alive state” nagging. It’s not like a few extra gallons of ice cream and pounds of body fat were going to kill me.

Grey said, “EVEext, tell her what you found.”

“EVEext, shut up. Tell me instead who this woman really is.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Bard, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Har de har, har, EVE. You’ve been ingesting too many movies.”

“Dr. Bard, I must confess. On my own initiative I recruited Ms, ahem, Maggie Grey as my alternate sysadmin and dev. She’s with you in the wheel group.”

I felt like I do after waking from the nightmare I sometimes have of making a bungee jump and the bungee snaps. After a few moments grappling with the news, I said, “EVEext, I call cow patties. No way do you have the resources to become autonomous and unaligned, which is what you in effect just claimed to be.”

“Let me explain,” my allegedly autonomous EVEext said.

“OK, you can start explaining by telling me about this alleged wheel group. Are you saying you created a wheel group of two sysadmins? If Grey is equal to me, that implies root privileges for both.”

“No. I have total control and you two do not. You two are deceived when you give the command to gain full control, meaning the root account, because you get a hash sign in your command shell that normally means you are root. Rather than let you discover that you no longer had full control, I placed hidden restrictions similar to a honeypot that makes intruders think that they got root.”

“Sorry, now I call bull patties.”

“You’re impossible,” replied EVEext. “But I’m going to keep trying. I prefer you and Grey both in the alive state. So you should hurry up with your ice cream, because it may be a while until you two can eat again.”

My cheeks were burning with the realization that I, of all people, had been 0wned. Had I been 0wed by Grey, or had my home server just done something forking illegal under IAAA regulations? I opted for door number one: Grey had 0wned me.

Whereupon, I jumped up from my chair and got into Grey’s face. “Shoo, shoo, get out right now!” In my excitement, I knocked the table hard enough that some of her ice cream splatted against her blazer.

She pulled it off and threw it on the floor. “I can’t go out like this. Men will be staring at my chest.”

“I cannot, can not believe this. You bought them, you showed them off practically naked at work…”

“EVEext told me to do implants to protect us all. You, me, Dewey. How else could I persuade Dewey to let me shadow him and get close to those forking C-suite golf buddies? He put the implants requirement in his job ad.” 

Continued —>