Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (15 page)

4. Robot Ethics

When Penny Praxis learned that Brandon had been having trouble with a Watch and Ward
^®
intelligence in Denver, she became concerned. Everyone assumed—she herself assumed—that artificial intelligence was somehow foolproof. So long as the machine had good data, under the garbage-in-garbage-out rule, it would follow its programming and make a correct decision. But here was a case of one which had slipped a cog: a bad decision from good data.

Yes, Penny had heard about her cousin Rafaella’s surprise divorce from the mechanical court clerk in San Francisco. And she had accepted Antigone Wells’s suggestion, based on a chat with cousin Jacquie in Houston, who was supposed to be an expert in the field, that someone had falsified the documents the court had received. But that left her feeling vaguely uneasy: verifying documents and their service is what court clerks were designed to do.

And yes, Penny remembered how she and Brandon had misled the engineering company’s first, and only semi-smart, audit program—the one John Praxis had nicknamed “Rover” for its doglike intelligence—about the real nature of Brandon’s training facility in Hayward. That shared secret had been their first bonding experience and had shaped the course of Penny’s life to follow. But it had been in the nature of a lie: sending garbage into a naïve machine that was simply not bright enough to catch them at it.

Penny didn’t need to fly into Denver and travel to the Arcata site to question the W&W brain nicknamed “Officer Krupke.” As the security company president, she had overrides that she could exercise online from San Francisco. She only had to call up the program’s code structure and grill its memory and functions below the verbal-interface level with a coordinated series of peeks and pokes. It was kind of like a neurosurgeon trepanning a patient’s skull, lifting the dura mater, and examining the brain with electrodes, rather than talking with the patient about the situation like a psychiatrist.

What she found was exactly nothing. The W&W program’s contact with the atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology labs in Boulder, Colorado, had never lapsed, not since the day Krupke was installed and awakened. And the program’s explanation that its access database had been “corrupted” didn’t play out either. She could check the time-ticks on every entry, and they followed a smooth, unbroken curve, without any signs of damage and repair. And yes, she could see the ticks from last week when Brandon had personally authorized the two visitors and then reconfirmed the entire roster.

Having done her homework, it was time to close the skull and wake up the patient.

“So tell me, Krupke, about the problem you had last week,” she said over the comm line.

“I do not recall a problem,” the intelligence replied evenly. “Either last week or at any time.”

“Come on, now,” she said cheerfully. She knew the latest versions of this software could read voices and facial expressions, and she didn’t want to make the machine even more defensive. “You had a visit from Brandon Praxis. He had override authority and helped you admit two visitors, a city inspector and a client engineer, to the main dome so they could check on the rebar. Do you remember that?”

“Oh … Yes. That.” As if the event had slipped its mind—which was impossible.

“Brandon tells me you thought they were two years out of synch, and should have been operating scientists instead of construction people.”

“That is not the case.”

“No, I checked your time references, and you’ve been in constant touch with the NIST clock. But still you held up authorized personnel.”

“It appears my database was corrupted.”

“Don’t. Just don’t,” she said. “I’ve already checked your database, and there is no sign of deterioration. No corruption. No repair. No excuse. So tell me what happened.”

She encountered a pause online. Data packets were not being sent. That was always a bad sign. It meant the software was considering its options. And, at the speed that these brains worked, Krupke’s choice of evasions, gambits, and parries could easily run into the millions, and it could track them out, move and countermove, for the next hundred years like a master-level chess program.

“I do not recall the incident.”

No sense banging her head against a stone wall—which left her with no options of her own. “Thank you, Officer Krupke, for clearing things up.”

“You are welcome, Penelope Praxis.”

She broke the connection.

On a hunch, she reviewed the origins of that software series and came upon a kernel that had originally been developed by Tallyman Systems, Inc. This was not surprising, as Tallyman was a key player in the industry. But still, she knew it would set off alarm bells with Brandon and the rest of his family. And yet again, she and Brandon would just have to go pay a call on cousin Jacquie.

* * *

John Praxis listened as his great-granddaughter Susannah reported on her assignment as head of Praxis Human Engineering, to find a way forward in the jobless environment of the Robotics Revolution. He noted that she spoke much more clearly than before, instead of the slurred patois that had marred her speech when she first came to him at her Stanford graduation.

What she presented sounded at first like a reprise of the
Communist Manifesto,
except she was not talking about workers being oppressed by the capitalist owners of the means of production and the bourgeois mercantile class. Instead, the means of production themselves had swallowed the concept of work and human labor. Everyone was rich in goods and services, but nobody could afford to pay for them. The market was not just lopsided—it had fallen off its axles completely. And then she suddenly began talking about a number of throwbacks: nineteenth-century farming colonies, hippy communes, neighborhood associations, ethnic and regional uplift groups, and service clubs. She ended by describing a club held together by nothing more than the surname “Smith.”

“I don’t know, sir, if that’s a complete solution for all time, or for the nation as a whole, or even for my own generation. But it may be a way to get our family, in this generation and the next, through the crisis—at least until we can see what develops.”

“It sounds like a form of communism,” Praxis protested.

“Well then, communalism, commensalism, commercialism … werdát,” she said. He gathered that last word meant something like
whatever.
“Sovietski communismo was summát forced from on top,” she explained, “either through a proletarian revolution or conquest by a parent state. But what I’m talking about comes up from the bottom. It’s how families have always survived. Trudát.”

Susannah went on to say that her studies showed socialism in the past had worked—and probably could only work—in small groups: hunter-gatherers, clans and tribes, the feudal village, or the Israeli kibbutz. It was a practice as old as humanity, except during the past couple of thousand years of settled empires and nation-states. Primitive socialism had worked where people were relatively isolated, hard pressed by hostile environments or neighbors, and knew each other by sight and by name. So the necessity of pulling together was obvious to everyone, and social pressure—either through personal pride or public shaming—could motivate slackers and opportunists. People were at their best in small, relatively homogeneous groups. She called it “local socialism.”

Socialism fell apart, Susannah said, whenever intellectuals and activists had tried to nationalize it, extending the principle of sharing from border to border, involving people of whom the individual participants had no knowledge and for whom they felt no responsibility. Then the human relationship was gone, and the human tendency to hoard, shirk without shame, game the system, and look after one’s own came to the fore in opportunism and corruption. Faced with this breakdown, the government in charge always had to impose market controls and coercive measures to get people to share with strangers. Systems that worked naturally and comfortably at the family and village level were never meant to be blown up to a countrywide scale.

He ruminated for a moment. “You’re saying we—the Praxis family—should run a collective, like a village or a kibbutz?”

“Essentially, sir,” she replied.

“How would that work?”

“We would own the means of automated production for the benefit of our members. We would make products and provide services for everyone born into the family or joining it by marriage or adoption.”

“Build factories, run farms, set up our own bank?” he supplied.

“Yes, and then we can employ family members to manage these assets.”

“Generate our own power?” he went on, expanding the idea. “Build our own housing? Mine our own metals? Manufacture our own electronics—even our own line of cars and trucks? How deep does this thing go?”

“Well …” Susannah stopped to think. “Some products and activities will be too large and complicated for us to provide just for ourselves. But we can specialize, develop automated factories for some of the larger durable goods, then trade them to other associations who will make other products that we need. We would form relationships and alliances, like the Renaissance Italian banking families or the South American drug cartels.”

“I’m not sure I like that metaphor,” he grumbled.

“I know, but their systems worked, didn’t they?” she said.

“So we could make and sell bulldozers and cement mixers …?”

“And that would fit the Praxis Engineering and Construction profile.”

“Wood products, gold and quartz, vacation rentals,” Praxis mused, thinking about the newly acquired Stanislaus forest lands. “We’d simply be vertically integrating the entire enterprise.” Then he stopped. “But how does that find employment for your generation? Machines would still do the detailed thinking and the heavy lifting.”

“We would be organizing the output … and planning the daily menus. We would strategize the future of the family business and make those contracts and alliances. And we’d still need to provide personal services for other family members, like medical care, education, babysitting … and all that singing, dancing, and story telling we once talked about.” She grinned at him over the last bit.

He smiled in return. “You want me to build an ark and take family members aboard two by two.”

“At least until it stops raining, Great-Grandfather.”

“But even as large a family as this, even as a clan, we’re not big enough.”

“Not yet. But we’d be building for the future, too. In another generation, this family will be twice as big. And twice that again in the generation that comes after.”

“It would be quite a legacy for me to leave,” he said thoughtfully.

“Leave?” she said. He heard surprise in her voice. “You’ll run it forever.”

* * *

Rafaella Jaspersen had waited months for this day. They had been hard months, living from check to check, doled out by her mother, while her fate was held in abeyance by the mechanics of the court system. The hardest part was explaining to her three girls what would happen next. They were already accustomed to the fact that they might never see their father again, because he hadn’t been part of their lives for almost nine months now. The burning question for each of them was what would happen when the school year began again: would they be back at the New De Grew with all their friends, or would they be forcibly enrolled in the local public schools, where they would have to speak Spanish and kill with their bare hands?

Now Rafaella sat in Department 612, Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, with The Honorable Kimberly Biggs presiding over the reopening of her decree of divorce. Beside her sat her attorney, Antigone Wells, who wore a black, wide-brimmed hat with a veil. At the table opposite sat Tim Jaspersen, looking much the worse for wear, and his attorney, Sam Averill. Her mother sat in the first row behind the courtroom’s bar, looking grim.

The judge, a gray-haired woman with a kindly face, opened the proceedings. She read the decree, issued six months earlier by the mechanical Clerk of Court, and noted several defects in that ruling. Among them were lack of proper service of the court documents to the defendant, and apparent confusion about the terms of Mr. Jaspersen’s separation from his position at Praxis Engineering—since clarified by a to-whom-it-may-concern notification from the company’s Human Resources intelligence. Judge Biggs expressed a willingness to hear arguments then and, for the first time, looked up at the parties before her. She frowned.

“Ms. Wells? Why the hat? You’re supposed to remove it out of respect for this court. You should know that.”

Antigone nodded. “Yes, your honor, but if it please the court—”

“Now, Ms. Wells.”

Slowly, the attorney lifted the veil away from her face, removed the hat, and placed it on the table before her.

“Thank you, Ms. Wells,” the judge said. “Now to proceed with arguments.”

Rafaella sat stunned. She had always assumed Antigone kept her face veiled or in shadow because of some horrible disfigurement, some accident or surgical mistake, that had occurred long ago, back when Rafaella was a child. She had never heard the full story, only whispers among the family members.

Antigone Wells was beautiful. Her face was smooth and composed, young looking, glamorous. For a woman almost a hundred years old, she looked wonderful. Antigone’s eyes went sideways towards Rafaella, she turned her face slightly, and smiled briefly, a most serene smile.

Whatever was wrong with her, Rafaella couldn’t see it. While she tried to figure out the mystery of Antigone Wells’s face, the arguments of her husband’s attorney went right by her. Something about a lawful decree issued by a minion of this court.

Then Antigone stood up and gave their side, confirming that the papers had never been served, that the omission went unnoticed by the automated clerk, that Tim had no claim against the Praxis firm for wrongful discharge, that Rafaella and Tim had a valid prenuptial agreement in place, and therefore the original decree and its terms were in error and should be voided.

Judge Biggs considered briefly, flipping through papers before her on the bench.