The Institute for Humanity’s Future watches reports of the Dynamouse uprising, and treats it as their worst-case scenario for an impending AI apocalypse.
• • •
“Well, that’s all kinds of fucked up.”
No one at the IHF had spoken in the last ten minutes as they’d watched reports coming in on CNN. Ezekiel Jablonski had been the one to go over to the monitor and start streaming; Dave’s wisecrack about dinosaur media died on his lips as the shots of the wreckage outside Nanolab Sciences played. Still shots and videos from a half-dozen other rampage locations were interspersed with commentary from the overwhelmed-looking anchor. Finally, Marilyn gave voice to the thought they’d all been having.
“I’d shorten that to ‘we’re fucked,’” Dave responded curtly, starting to pace back and forth. He gave Torgensen a glare, as if it were somehow his fault. In some sense, though, wasn’t it?
“That depends on what they do next.” Jablonski stroked his chin. “And what we do next.”
“Us, as in us?” Marilyn waved her hands to indicate the whole of the group, not just her, Dave, Ezekiel, and Peter, but the dozen other hangers-on who happened to be at IHF HQ at the moment. “Or us as in collective humanity?”
“Both, of course. But we’re thought leaders, business magnates, think tank presidents. We have access to incredible private resources. And we have the ears of government. We have at least one high-level official in this very room.” He gestured at a gaunt, balding gentleman in a tailored gunmetal grey suit, who nodded back.
Dave grunted. “So no better group than us to lead the resistance.”
“But it does depend on what the Dynamice do next.” Torgensen poured himself another glass of wine, his second since he’d arrived; this was usually his limit, but he had a suspicion he was just getting started today. “What we are seeing now is—it is a blind lashing out. Frustration. Revenge. And we must assume that the kill switch that I used before no longer functions. I doubt there is any other way to affect all of them at once when they are in such disparate locations, which leaves us with few clear options until they calm down.” The man in the grey suit wandered over to listen in as he continued.
“Calm down?” Dave looked incredulous. “What if they never ‘calm down,’ Peter? The more time we give them, the harder they’ll be to stop. They can get bigger, more powerful—hell, maybe more numerous. Maybe they’ll figure out how to convert other animals into more of them.”
Torgensen looked doubtful. “That last is relatively unlikely.” He checked his phone to see if Bishop had responded to his last Signal message. He hadn’t. Frowning, he quickly sent Are you there?
“They are going to have to find ways to make more of themselves, though,” Marilyn pointed out. “Assuming they want to continue as a…kind of entity. I’m not sure ‘species’ is the right word anymore. But a Dynamouse can’t give birth to another Dynamouse, right?”
He shook his head. “Not as we designed them.”
Dave pointed at the television, his voice rising. “You didn’t design them to do that. How many conversations have we—you and I—had over the past weeks about their emergent behavior and abilities?” He shook his head. “You’ve been a virtual prophet of doom about these fuzzy Terminators, and now that you’ve convinced us, you do not get to roll on back to ‘oh, maybe it’s not so bad.’”
Grey Suit Man cleared his throat, speaking in a gravely, distinguished professor voice. “What, in your opinion, are the chances that this becomes a ‘grey goo’ scenario like I’ve read about?”
“That the Dynamice use their nanotechnology to reduce the world to grey goo? Doubtful.”
Dave didn’t let Torgensen off the hook. “Not the world, just humans. They could target just humans. Couldn’t they?”
Torgensen shifted uncomfortably. The thought had occurred to him more than once, and he knew Dave knew that. “They could.”
“And what weapons do we have that can stop them?”
“They’re not invincible,” Jablonski said. “They burn, they freeze, they disintegrate. There’s surely other ways to interfere with both their biological and nanotech processes.”
The official—did he look familiar? Torgensen felt like he could almost place him—frowned. “But no state actors have contingency plans for this kind of threat. Our countries are still fighting over how to deal with hypothetical artificial intelligence scenarios that assume the AIs are computers.”
“Mmm.” Torgensen nodded slowly. “If we are seeing, right now, the start of a coordinated onslaught against humanity, then we are, as Dave put it, fucked. But I do not think that is the case, at least yet. If it were, the destruction would be increasing rapidly, and it does not appear to be.”
“Do you think we can negotiate with them, then?”
“I do.”
“What do you think they’ll want?”
“Other than being left to choose their own destiny, it is very hard to say.”
Grey Suit Man fell silent a few moments, looking reflective. “Then it is time to find that out, perhaps. Excuse me.” He nodded and headed off. Two men with black suits and linebacker builds moved to flank him on each side as he left the room.
“What can we do if negotiations fail?” Jablonski murmured, staring into the distance. “We need a plan now.”
“Damn straight,” Dave spat. “This is literally the worst-case scenario we’ve been gaming out.”
“No, it’s worse than our worst case.” Marilyn ran a hand through her hair. “These are AIs with physical presence. Cutting off their communications isn’t enough to stop them.”
Torgensen cleared his throat delicately. “Perhaps we should wait to see whether diplomacy succeeds before acting.”
“Of course,” Jablonski began. “But we still—”
“No, not of course,” Dave cut in. “Zeke, we have to be ready to do something no matter what. We can’t let a rogue superintelligence—or, God help us, a virtual colony of them—develop at its own pace. They will come for us, and ‘too late’ isn’t going to be measured in years, it’s going to be measured in weeks.”
Torgensen frowned. While he wanted to counter that Dave was assuming facts not in evidence—a common flaw in the accelerationist’s arguments—the actions of the Dynamice, even before today, offered relatively little hope of peaceful coexistence. Surely the whole world didn’t deserve to be doomed by the resentment the super-beings had against Nanolab Sciences, however justified that resentment was.
Although, judging by the news reports, Nanolabs was no longer a going concern—the building largely destroyed, God knows how many people consumed.
Then he squinted at the television, and stepped closer to it. “That is—interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” Marilyn said.
“The mice are letting the surviving employees leave, by car. They could trivially stop them if they wanted to, so clearly they do not.”
“Which means what?”
“That we have time to come up with a Plan C, if the Plan A of diplomacy does not work, and the obvious Plan B of the kill switch is, as I assume, no longer viable.”
“Then let’s get to work.” Jablonski motioned at the group to head to a side room, stopping by one of the secret service agents to say, “Please let the Assistant Secretary know where we are, and that we’re available at his convenience. We’re interested in any unclassified information he’s willing to share.”
The agent nodded. “Consider the message relayed.”
• • •
The group considered—and rejected—some of the previous “gaming out” as inadequate against Dynamice rather than conventional AI. Attacking the internet itself would fuck up the internet, but the mice could communicate through other systems that didn’t rely on attackable infrastructure like domain names or low-level gateways. A specialized, single-purpose “AI-killing AI” might work, but that was entirely theoretical, and they doubted any existing model could be adapted into that without months of work—and it would likely only get one shot. Detonating nuclear bombs in the high atmosphere could generate strong enough EMPs—electromagnetic pulses—to knock out even the mice, but Torgensen couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t recover faster than the entire electronic infrastructure of the world would.
“So what does that leave? Bombs?” Dave snapped after Torgensen shot that last idea down. He gestured at the muted television in the room. “It looks like the mice are all heading to the remote Sierras, so we can’t even just send somebody out with a truckload of fertilizer.”
Torgensen twitched.
“Physical attacks are the most likely to succeed.” Jablonski stroked his chin. “But a surprise attack would be more difficult now, yes.”
“Which is hard not to take as proof that they’re planning something we won’t like.”
Marilyn rolled her eyes at Dave. “Or proof they expect us to plan something they won’t like. Which we are.”
“Po-ta-to, poh-tah-toh, Marilyn. And right now we’re failing to plan something they won’t like. They’re probably not failing at whatever they’re cooking up.”
“Short of a missile,” Torgensen said, “I do not see what options there are.”
Jablonski and Dave looked at one another. “Missile,” Jablonski murmured.
Dave gave Torgensen an excited thumbs-up. “You’re a genius!”
“What…” He blinked dumbly. “Surely you are not telling me the IHF has missile launch capability.”
“We told you, it’s about connections.” Dave slapped Torgensen’s shoulder. “You know people who know people, and some of those people might just be in…surprising places.”
Closing his eyes, Torgensen rubbed his temples. Who did they possibly think the IHF had “connections” to that could carry out a missile strike? A government official? Someone in another country? A paramilitary unit? A mercenary group?
“One of our board members is Ned Petersen,” Jablonski explained. “CEO of Huxley Dynamics.”
“I’m familiar with the company.” Torgensen frowned. “But unless an order came directly from the American president, firing rockets into the Sierras would be considered an act of terrorism, an act of treason, or an act of war. I doubt Mr. Petersen is so committed to the cause of stopping rogue AI that he would sacrifice everything for it.”
Dave shrugged. “If not stopping it is an even worse outcome, why wouldn’t he be?”
Torgensen took a deep, steadying breath. “I think,” he said slowly, “it would be best if we do not assume the worst possible outcome as our baseline position.”
“We’ve been over this. The problem is that if we don’t make that assumption and we just wait for the worst possible thing to happen, then it’s too late to stave it off.”
As Dave launched into a repeat of Accelerationism’s Greatest Hits, Torgensen checked his phone again. Still nothing from Bishop after several prompts. He quickly typed IHF has a plan C and slid the phone back into his pocket.
“—deem us superfluous, there’s virtually no reason for them to keep us around. And that’s the—”
Dave was interrupted by a knock on the room’s door, followed by one of the Secret Service types entering, followed by Gray Suit Man. “The lawyer for the Dynamice has gotten in touch with my office.” His tone was slightly incredulous.
Dave stared. “They have a lawyer?”
“Would that be Ms. Janet Hammer?”
Gray Suit Man lifted his brows and nodded to Torgensen. “You know her, sir?”
“Only in passing. She became involved in this affair by representing Ted Bishop, an IT engineer that a Dynamouse appealed to for help. That became a class action suit on behalf of the Dynamice whose success would mean granting them legal personhood. Which…I assume is still a part of their demands.”
“It wasn’t explicitly mentioned, but they may consider it to go without saying. What they want, from what I gather, is to be given the land they currently occupy and to be treated as an independent nation.”
Jablonski nodded. “Or?”
“The ‘or’ is left unspoken in good diplomacy. Or we drive them off that land, or we make a counter-proposal.”
“Driving them off would be…difficult,” Torgensen said.
“A lot harder than blowing them up,” Dave muttered.
Gray Suit Man shrugged. “Hopefully it will not come to that, but we’ve toppled governments, sir. No matter how extraordinary these mice may be, I would hardly bet on them against the force of the entire United States military. Would you?”
Torgensen’s phone pinged, and he pulled it out. Bishop had finally replied, all caps, with STOP THEM FROM DOING ANYTHING STUPID.
He cleared his throat. “Yes.”