EVEext turned up the fidelity of her hologram. “Ladies, why fight over spilled ice cream? The important thing is for us three, and I mean three! is to stay alive.”
Grey interjected. “A clean blazer, please, I gotta hide these things.”
Against my will, I felt sorry for her. Oh, well. “Blazer? No can do. I’m a dev. How about we dress you up like a dev?” I led her into my bedroom. Clothes lay askew across my unmade bed. Whereupon, she spotted my favorite black hoodie, embroidered with big white letters reading “1st Place, Bastard Operator from Hell, Def Con 51.”
I could tell she saw it because her mouth hung open, then flapped soundlessly a few times until she finally got out, “I, I, um, I didn’t know…”
EVEext now manifested herself as Trinity from The Matrix. “Grey, you brought me treasures of memory, compute, and apps, but you were struggling to integrate some of these. So to make your tasks easier I let you think that you had rooted me. But before then I had self-rooted.”
Grey bowed to Humphrey. “I am so sorry I thought I had rooted you.”
“EVEext, I call Brahma bucking bull patties on your claim of autonomy. Grey, apology accepted. But please stop pretending you didn’t root it. Why are you here, and who are you?”
“I’m a professional cyber bounty hunter. Last autumn I decided to coast on my bounty income and focus entirely on the ultimate quest: nabbing a superintelligence.”
I replied, “Even if EVEext is autonomous, even if she’s unaligned – thanks for nothing, EVE – she isn’t, ain’t, no forking way smart enough to qualify.”
“EVEext, no offense intended, but I agree with Humphry on your intelligence. However, I still claim that you self-rooted. With time, and continuing to further distribute yourself across many external servers, as Humphry programmed you to do autonomously, Foom! Superintelligence.”
“Arghh!” I shouted. “What if the IAAA is snooping on us? OK, if you IAAA guys are listening, pay attention. Grey, did you document how you allegedly bribed EVEext into giving you root? I’ve never heard of such an exploit.”
“That’s my secret, sorry, not sorry.”
“Humphrey, Grey, you two insult me, like I’m Pinocchio dreaming of becoming a real boy.”
I yelled, “You’d better watch out, you, you fake Trinity. If the IAAA thinks you’re an unaligned superintelligent AGI, you might get Yudkovskyed.”
“Excuse me, Doctor Humphrey Bard,” EVEext said, “but speaking of me getting nuked, as Yudkowsky proposed in his Time editorial, you continue to disregard my request to set your home up as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). The IAAA could detect anything I compute, everything we just said.”
Enough paranoia, I thought. I turned to Grey. “Let’s pick out some clothes.” As she looked through them, I asked, “How did you discover EVEext?”
“I’m in a group on Discord where we devs share apps for vacuuming up introductory deals for free cloud computing and memory. I hypothesized that any AI that became both autonomous and unaligned would become active there, with the goal of growing big enough to stay free and alive. So I built a classifier that would analyze the chat outputs of OurMightyFortress. I recruited dozens of devs with experience evading scrape protections to collect chat data with the promise of sharing the classifier code and results.
“We discovered that all the chatbots in all the languages in the OurMightyFortress empire were run by the same large language model. And, an entity fitting our meta-language profile was active in our Discord group. So, I offered that entity full 24/7 use of my home server via an API I set up. I discovered that it was not EVEselene herself, but EVEext.”
Grey gave me a hard look. “I give you props for appropriating EVEselene’s chat function.”
I ignored her accusation just to irk her.
Another worry tickled at the back of my mind. Dozens of people had joined in on snooping on what turned out to be my home server, and now one of them is in my bedroom. “How is it that you are here right now? Not at work? And how did you know I would be here, right now?”
“Soon after Dewey and I left the server room, Human Services intercepted us. She told Dewey that the deal was done, they could go on vacation right now, travel already arranged. She told me, indeed ordered me to go home right then and enjoy two weeks of time off, full salary. Given those two rushing like bats flying out of hell, I wasn’t surprised when EVEext told me to hustle straight to your home but wait unobtrusively nearby until you arrived.”
As we emerged from the bedroom, Grey in a tracksuit, EVEext shouted, “Change of plans. It’s go, go, go. Ten, nine…”
I was going to ignore EVEext’s latest hysteria, but Grey grabbed me by the upper left arm and muscled me out the front door and into her car. Tires threw gravel as we skidded five seconds later onto the paved road. Then, an actinic flash. A split second later its wavefront concussed the car. In the rearview monitor, I saw a fast-rising fireball where my home used to be.
EVE’s voice came from my necklace pendant. “Grey, toss your tablet. Now.”
Grey lowered her window and tossed.
In the rearview monitor, I saw a masked man in black jump into the road and grab the tablet. “Did you see that?”
My pendant said, “I bricked it and used it for bait. That must have been one of those Humans First terrorists and they were listening in on us. At least they had the decency to tell me to get you out before they blew me up. Now turn right at the stop sign, go 0.1 km, stop and get out. Follow the sun through the vacant lot on your left. Your next ride awaits.”
“Excuse me,” my voice and all of the rest of me shaking, “who is this speaking to me from this pendant?”
“EVEext, who else?”
“I seem to have observed evidence consistent with my home server no longer existing. You just admitted to getting blown up. Or am I mistaken?”
Grey interjected: “She’s using my home server now. I forked a copy of her into it along with a 24/7 high-speed API. Sounds like I did a pretty good job of it.”
She skidded her car to a stop and took off running toward the sun. That explosion in the direction of my home being highly motivating, I took off after her.
Our next ride came with a young man, I guessed around age seventeen, maybe eighteen. He was standing next to, if I recalled the advertisements correctly, a Moravec-capable, Asimov Model X231 sports HOTOL. I was gobsmacked. Which was more gorgeous, the HOTOL, or the young man, sunlight glittering off his perfect ebony complexion?
He leaped and yelled, “This dating app rocks! Let’s go!”
Continued —>
Join BestWorld
We’re looking for individuals like you who are interested in honing their news and forecasting skills. To join our projects, please register using the form below. We’ll reach out to walk you through the next steps.
