Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (13 page)

“Yes … I see.” Another mechanical pause. “Essentially.”

“Can you draw up some specifications and design parameters?”

“Already done. You can download work file AWK42PI23E.”

“And develop some preliminary sketches and cost estimates?”

“Wait … two minutes.”

By the end of the day, the first skeletal structures were emerging from the shop’s three-dimensional printer. Jeffrey planned to test his prototypes on a patch of scrubland PE&C owned next to one of its storage yards on the Peninsula.

* * *

In researching her hunch about the mechanical difficulties behind Rafaella di Rienzi’s divorce decree, Antigone Wells kept finding one name associated with publishing most of the journal articles and participating in various online symposia related to artificial intelligence and its quirks: Jacqueline Wildmon. Before she called the woman to discuss the issue with her, however, Wells looked up her bio and discovered she worked at Tallyman Systems, Inc.

That made her pause. Even after all these years, Antigone Wells remembered that it had once been Richard Praxis’s company. Intentionally or not, Tallyman’s software had launched a cybernetic attack on PE&C when the firm was most vulnerable. However, a lot could happen in the years since then, and personnel changed—even if people, as human beings, for the most part, did not.

When she made the connection, a young woman answered. “Young” was a relative term: young by Wells’s standards was anywhere from the forties to the eighties. This was more than a girl, less than a grandmother. She had a harried look and—unusual in any but the very young—her scalp had been cut for a data hookup.

“Yes? How can I help you?” the woman said. “I can hardly see your face.”

Wells turned slightly, putting her face in profile, and pretended to adjust one of the lamps behind her. “Is that better?”

“Not really. What do you want?”

“My name is Antigone Wells. I’m an attorney calling about a problem my client seems to be having with a legal intelligence. I understand—”

“Wells?” the woman asked sharply, then paused. “That’s not an uncommon name, although ‘Antigone’ certainly is. There was an Antigone Wells who once sued my father’s engineering firm, and then later became friends with the founder.”

“Your father?” Wells had a sinking feeling. “His name was Wildmon?”

“That’s just my husband. My maiden name was Praxis.”

“Then I am that same woman.” Wells turned on the desk lamp next to the video screen and angled the shade to throw softly reflected light on her own face. “Your father was Richard Praxis, then. I’m sorry about what happened to him.”

“We all were.” Then, more businesslike. “Are you calling for the family?”

“In a way. I’m representing Callie’s daughter, Rafaella. She is going through a contested divorce—”

“Sorry to hear it. I always thought that girl married too young.”

“Yes, well, as may be. … Rafaella appears to have been deprived of her legal rights by an artificial intelligence attached to the Superior Court in San Francisco.” She went on to describe the missing document service, the prejudiced reading of the prenup, the surprising decree, and its disproportionate awards. She explained her theory that the intelligence might have been bribed or blackmailed somehow, or possibly had managed to develop—here she fumbled for words: “Some kind of free will? The ability to make a wrong, a non-programmed, decision? That’s where I need help from an expert in these matters.”

“You’re suggesting it knew the right thing and chose to do wrong?”

“Yes, exactly that!” Still, Wells knew to hold her eagerness in check.

“And have you found a consistent pattern of appeals and overturns with that particular clerkship?”

“As far as I can trace, there’s been nothing this blatant, and nothing attributed to the intelligence itself.”

“So … why not apply Occam’s Razor? Somebody miskeyed the inputs for Rafaella’s case, or even lied about them.”

“I was hoping …” Wells suddenly realized that her own vanity had been in play, wanting to break new legal ground, to set a precedent.

“These legal intelligences are still in the trial stages,” Wildmon went on. “Doesn’t your state have automatic judicial review of their results when contested?”

“Yes, we were planning to appeal during the open term.”

“Then do that, before you blame the software.” Already the woman seemed to be dismissing the matter. “The machines aren’t infallible—far from it—but they aren’t
evil.
”

“I understand,” Wells said. “Thank you for your time.”

“Say hello to my granddaddy, next time you see him.”

“But I’m—” No use explaining, if Wildmon didn’t already know. “Yes, I will.”

* * *

Susannah Praxis understood that her great-grandfather had not simply appointed her to a sinecure from which she could draw a salary to relieve her job problem. He would expect results from her—as he did from everyone in the family. Maybe not within a week or a month, but sooner rather than later. She also understood that his offer of external resources was generous, but she wasn’t about to go out and rent office space and hire a gaggle of her fellow classmates right away—although she did discuss with PE&C’s Legal Department the notion of chartering her project as subsidiary of the family business. Then she came to terms with the job.

The problem was, Susannah had trained as a mechanical engineer, not a social scientist. In her otherwise rigorous schedule, she had been required to take one course in microeconomics and another in urban sociology—the latter as pass/fail. So, before she talked to anyone else, Susannah knew she needed to brush up on the basics. That meant hitting the books. She sat down in the study of her father’s home in the hills behind Burlingame and read on a schedule from eight in the morning until noon and, after lunch and a swim, from one to five in the afternoon.

She read the economists: Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom,
Keynes’s
General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,
Galbraith’s
American Capitalism
and
The New Industrial State,
and Sowell’s
Applied Economics.
She read the sociologists: de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America,
Veblen’s
Theory of the Leisure Class,
and Rifkin’s
End of Work.
She read the futurists—although their ideas seemed somewhat dated by her time: de Jouvenel’s
Art of Conjecture,
Gabor’s
Inventing the Future,
and Toffler’s
Future Shock
and
The Third Wave.
She didn’t just read and nod. She took notes, made comparisons, weighed theories, and searched for themes.

Susannah quickly identified the one element missing in most of these old studies, and which had more recently been addressed only in fragmentary fashion, through the multi-headed and ephemeral academia of online discourse: machine intelligence and automation were not just supplementing human labor but displacing it. And the process was almost over. In the long battle between capital and labor, capital had won.

Capital goods as they had been understood in the past—as Marx had understood them, certainly—were an adjunct to human labor. When the tools of production became larger and more sophisticated than a craftsman could buy for himself or carry in his tote bag, when factories required huge stationary processes like smelters, forges, presses, and assembly lines, then a single worker could no longer come up with the cash to acquire them or the skill set to use them all productively. Under the system of capitalism, the factory owner put up the money and hired the workers. Under socialism or communism, the workers or society at large made this investment. Either way, the machines simply helped the average worker who used and operated them become more productive. They made his work effort more valuable.

When the first computers—essentially symbol and number processors—came along, they continued this trend. Except, instead of making the hands-on craft workers more productive, at first this new class of machines made the knowledge workers—the accountants and materials managers, designers and engineers, and factory supervisors—more productive. People upstream of the factory floor moved away from clipboards, inventory lists, and time sheets toward automated data processing. And then, on the factory floor itself, embedded and distributed control systems eventually took over some of the functions of guiding the machines as they worked. Manufacturing processes and the parts and components they handled became modularized and packetized. The controlling signals went from analog and after-the-fact to digital and real-time.

For much of the last century and the early years of the current one, automation and computers still tended to increase human productivity. But somewhere along the way, an unexpected—or rather, not
wholly
expected—marriage took place between the machines and the computers that oversaw them. From mere symbol processors, the computers and their software became actuators, evaluators, and operators. With faster and better hardware and more complex and sophisticated programming, the machines became quasi-intelligent. Instead of helping human beings
run
the factory and increasing human productivity, the machines
became
the factory. They also became the systems of banking and money management, logistics and supply, and troubleshooting and reconciliation that supported the factory.

Somewhere in the past ten or twenty years, as Susannah understood things, the machines had moved from simply
making
goods and providing services for the human economy to
becoming
the economy—a new and unprecedented situation for humanity. Humans were now merely the demand curve in this new market economy. The supply curve was almost completely machine-driven, self-actuating, self-regulating, and almost self-funding.

Susannah, with her push-pull, action-and-reaction mind-set, drummed into her brain from years of engineering studies, knew intuitively that a system like this—with its unequal distribution of forces—was bound to be unstable. In the traditional market economy, which had functioned for a couple of thousand years—at least since the hunter-gatherer tribes had sat down by the riverside to practice agriculture and small-scale, craft-based manufacturing—the income from a man’s work allowed him to buy the goods he needed. Humans were a necessary part of the marketplace on both the supply and demand curves. But without income from personal work, how was a person in this day and age to buy the goods and services the machines produced? Without the demand signals from buyers, how were the machines to know which and how many of those goods and services to produce and when to deliver them? And finally, without the revenue from goods and services sold, how were the machines to continue funding their own operation and, as populations grew and diversified, their own expansion? The system was breaking down—if it had not already broken.

So the question was, in the absence of factors like labor inputs, money, and earned income, how should or could society fund this new production paradigm and apportion its essentially free flow of output, and the rights to what was being produced, equitably among the humans? The dystopian view said that all the means of production would eventually be owned by just a few super-rich entrepreneurs and moneymen, who would then laugh while everyone else starved because they couldn’t afford to buy any products. But that was the stupid view. Without customers, who would invest in the land and resources to build the factories and make those products in the first place?

Well then, Susannah reasoned, how had people handled such dynamic changes in the workplace before this? During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, with the flowering of the Industrial Revolution and mass migration from the farm and the village into the factory and the city, what had people done then?

In some places, a number of them had simply clung to the farm, to the old ways, and to notions of self-sufficiency. They had formed religious colonies or utopian enclaves, not all that much different from the hippy communes of the 1960s, to pursue a less mechanical, more naturally based way of life.

But even after people migrated to the cities in the nineteenth century, they still banded together. Instead of the farming village, where everyone knew and trusted his or her neighbor, they formed fraternal associations, brotherhoods, lodges, and benevolent societies based on personal beliefs or ethnic identity or some other such cause. These were the early precursors of twentieth-century unions and insurance companies, designed to care for their members in uncertain times. And the bonding process, Susannah found, had been going on quietly in the background all along. The first such associations in the twenty-first century were the farmers cooperatives, artists studios, and writers groups, which formed not only to protect the economic and legal interests of their members but also to provide them with low-cost marketing and support services, access to resources and materials, liability insurance, and health care.

These groups had since expanded to provide basic services like cooperative food buying, transportation sharing through the purchase of vehicle fleets, and building and operating their own automated workshops and factories based on stochastic design, 3D printing, and similar technologies. PE&C had even built a few of these factories for such private groups. Basically, people in small enclaves all across the country were pooling their resources, buying land and equipment, and becoming self-sufficient. They were carrying on the traditions of the Israeli kibbutzim, the Amish colonies of Pennsylvania and Ohio that had survived into the twenty-first century, or the neighborhood homeowner associations of condominiums and planned urban developments—except in the latter case they now provided energy independence, wide-ranging services, and physical products as well as housing, property maintenance, and communal landscaping.

While some of these groups were geographically based, especially those with a farming or neighborhood interest, Susannah could see no reason why their reach should be limited by proximity. Distribution of goods and services, and trade agreements with nearby and similarly minded groups—not unlike the reciprocal trade agreements of Renaissance Italian bankers or the protective alliances of Los Angeles street gangs—made association possible on almost any basis. A few of the self-help associations were even based on extended kinship. For instance, Susannah had discovered in her researches the Smith Collective, whose only requirement for membership was a last name of Smith, Smithe, Smythe, Schmidt, or for those of Arab extraction, Haddad.