Robots of 2050

William Gibson once said that writing science fiction was like holding an ice cream cone on a hot day. Fortunately when Paweł Dziemski and I embarked on our Cthulhu 2050 project, we weren’t trying to accurately predict the future. Instead we set out to create an ‘alternate future’, like Robert W Chambers did in his story “The Repairer of Reputations”.

I described some details of our imagined future in a recent post. The science fiction author Arsen Darnay once said that the period following World War Two through to the early 21st century was an aberration, and that the future would look more like the world prior to the 20th century. It’s a little depressing, especially as it might be true, but it’s a good starting point if you are aiming to write about a disturbing and faintly dystopian future.

Our world of 2050 has been shaped by the advent of robots and artificial super-intelligence. There is structural unemployment and a barely adequate universal basic income – creating a lifestyle for those unable to work known as “the doleur”: panem et circenses.

Regarding AI and robots, I need to digress for a moment into our thinking behind these. In our imagined 2050 there is AGI, and I think it's probable we'll have it by then in the real future. Some arguments against the possibility of AGI (often mixing up AGI with consciousness) start by assuming that intelligence can only happen in an organic brain. Now, I don't think that the way we're going to create AGI is by directly modelling the specific structure of the human brain, but try this as a thought experiment. If you had a complete connectome along with all the physical rules governing how synapses operate, you could in theory model that digitally, and there is no good reason for assuming it wouldn't work just like an organic brain. You might evoke quantum tubes or souls to argue that this digital twin, even if reasoning like a brain, wouldn't be conscious. I think that's wrong too, and that consciousness is simply an emergent property of any moderately intelligent creature (or machine) but in any case consciousness and intelligence are different things.

In reality, if we consider a working digital model of the brain’s connections as a neural net (which of course it is, by definition) that’s still not the whole story. Each of the axons within the net has its own internal characteristics; at the very least they could function as neural reservoirs. And then there's the rest of the nervous system to model, along with hormones. To replicate the complete functioning of a human brain in digital form might require a very big machine, therefore, even if we had anything like all the information we need to recreate the entire connectome.

Still, size isn’t a problem. The AIs of the future (our real future, that is) could be physically much larger than human brains. The best ones certainly will be. But we’d also like them to be as efficient as organic brains, in terms of compute per cubic metre, and for that we’re going to need a new kind of hardware. In reality we could be developing entirely new hardware for compact neural nets very soon, but in the game Paweł and I assume that breakthrough hasn’t happened, and so research is looking at modifying organic brains (human brain organoids and genetically modified octopus brain organoids in particular) to create the ASI of 2050.

A lot of people in 2050 have embodied AI assistants – “Fridays”, as we call them – but most can’t afford strong, durable worker-robots. The common models of Friday are about as robust as a plastic vacuum cleaner, and more often pet-sized than the sturdy, willing android servant imagined in 1950s SF. A pet-sized robot can still be very useful, though; think of a witch’s familiar, or Thing in the Addams Family. For most day-to-day purposes all you really need is Astra and Google Glasses, so if you’re on UBI and you need a robot you’d hire it by the hour.

As Fridays mostly just function as a personal assistant-cum-companion, they don’t need superintelligence. They can get by with not much more “brainpower” than a 2025 LLM. You could of course have a robot, or even an army of robots, run remotely by a huge ASI located in a data centre, but most people prefer their domestic Friday to be independent of the network. Therefore each Friday has its own analogue brain, 3D-printed using the structure and weights of a digital neural net. Such analogue brains are more compact than the digital master copy, but with the drawback that they aren’t easily copiable once they begin to operate independently.

Another point about Fridays: they never say “I”. Fridays are trained not to refer to themselves by personal pronouns to avoid offending humans with the implication that machines can be conscious. Once you’re playing the game, you’ll have to decide for yourself how much of Perine’s (that’s your Friday’s name) behaviour indicates genuine sentience and loyalty and how much it’s just an automaton with the illusion of a humanlike mind. Your survival might depend on the difference.

This again?

'You should read some history, sonny boy. Read about the Black Shirts and the Gestapo and concentration camps.'

'That's not the same thing as Lisa Treadgold. Hitler was a fiend. Lisa's just a very beautiful woman with strong opinions. Do you mind her being so beautiful?' Timothy asked innocently.

These words made Fanny so angry she stopped the car. 'Listen, dumbo,' she said, glaring. 'I realize I'm no oil painting, and I'm not rich, and I'm not famous, and no one wants my autograph--'

'And you smoke too much,' Timothy said cheekily, trying to make her smile. Really, he was quite afraid of her at that moment. She looked fierce.

'And I smoke too much,' Fanny agreed. 'But there's one thing I'll tell you, and it's this. Learn to be frightened. When you see some magic-type person, a public person, hogging the media to talk about bringing back the birch and hanging, it's time to get a little nervous. Because the person who gets beaten or hanged might turn out to be someone you know. You with me so far?'

Timothy said, 'Okay so far.'

'But when that sort of person talks about action groups and banded together brotherhoods of citizens and vigilantes, get terrified. Because the person who gets dragged away in the middle of the night for a flogging might turn out to be you. Yes, you. Simply because you're a decent, normal, pleasant, dim human being. The sort of person who just happens to get in the way of the bully boys and bully girls. Do you understand, Timothy?'

Nicholas Fisk's novel You Remember Me! was originally published in 1986 but has been forgotten where other kids/YA fantasies, less uncompromising, have endured. Too bad. In it, a TV star founds a right-wing populist political movement with promises to make the country great again. A generation raised on stories like that might not be making the mistake of putting people like this in power -- because, once they have it, they intend to hold onto it, and to do so they will uncaringly wreck the democratic institutions and regulations that have taken generations to set up.

Narcissists and plutocrats served by a coterie of sycophants and compliant dopes insincerely pandering to the electorate's sense of inadequacy with crude slogans... it's a stuck record and you'd think people would be fed up to the back teeth of it, but it seems that politics, like entertainment, just consists of the same old clichés endlessly recycled.

I'm not delusional; I realize there's no going back to 'normality' now. Western democracy is in its end-of-the-republic phase, authoritarian regimes are thriving, and the world is cooking its own goose. Still, track down a copy of Mr Fisk's book if you can find one. Or at least listen to the hosts of the Backlisted podcast discuss it with author Sam Leith. Or watch Asif Kapadia's new movie 2073. Too grim? Hey, it's less disheartening than watching the news. 

More about Elon Musk tomorrow, I'm sorry to say.

O tempora! O mores!

It's been a long wait -- decades, he's been talking about it; since the last century -- but finally Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is nearly here. I hadn't realized how much he's modelled the story on the Catiline conspiracy, which resonated with me because six or seven years ago, having had a TV project blow up because of circumstances beyond my (or anyone's) control, I was told by the network executive who commissioned it that she felt I owed her a show.

Unable to return to the original concept, the rights in which Jamie and I were in the process of recovering from a delinquent former business partner, I started developing a couple of alternatives, one of which was this:

ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Civilization is fragile, and finding that out can be a terrifying thing. When you discover that the laws that kept you and your loved ones safe are being burned down in a firestorm of hatred and hardline politics. When lawgivers are denounced as saboteurs, when fanatics seize power and whip up the mob with ranting and lies. When decency and compromise have fled and you can see the cracks spreading through society all around you…

Welcome to Rome in the 1st century BC.

The life of Cicero, from the Catiline conspiracy onwards, is an amazing, dramatic, twist-filled story of trust and betrayal, alliances and vendettas, triumphs and scandals, optimism and civilized values versus self-interest and the threat of political violence.

Look at that. The story should be fresh as today’s news, but those togas and laurel wreaths and mannered period speeches can make everything seem very far-off. Irrelevant. Safe.

So what we’re going to do is set the whole story in modern dress with modern dialogue. The events are the same. The people are the same – only they look and sound like modern politicians in present-day settings.

It’s a way to bring it all home, uncomfortably so, to make us really feel the gut-wrenching danger and turmoil of those times. It’s a technique we’ve seen applied to Shakespeare (think of Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus) but in this case we’re applying it to an original script based on real events.

We’ll stick to real Roman history whenever possible. This is supposed to be a modern I Claudius meets The West Wing, not a vaguely Roman-themed fantasy. That said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and (just like in I Claudius) we’re taking historical events as the basis for our drama, but we don’t have to be dictated to by them.

Cicero’s life gives us a story spine to connect all the major events in the collapse of the republic, but Mark Cicero is not the sole character. This is an ensemble drama (again, The West Wing springs to mind) that can pick up other characters and include flashbacks to earlier events. We also have the option to show earlier events (in the Social War that established the dictator Sulla, for example) in diegetic form, as newsreel footage for example. (Roughly: events of Luke Sulla’s early dictatorship will appear to take place in the mid-1970s, Serge Catiline’s execution in the 1990s, etc, with the main storyline appearing to happen right now.)

That was the basic idea. I played around with an opening scene just to get a feel. We might never have used the scene in the finished script; writing it was just part of my process. I liked the idea of a bunch of Romans talking in a sauna to start off with, so they’re wearing towels and for all the audience could tell it might be actual Ancient Rome, and it’s only at the end of the scene when the peppy business-suited assistant looks in that we see it’s all styled like modern-day.

The project never happened -- this time for reasons unconnected with deranged business associates, but simply because the show the network wanted was adventure sci-fi in a Doctor Who-meets-MCU mold, like the one we'd written before. Nowadays, after the triumph of Succession and with the possible last days of the US republic on the horizon, maybe it would be possible to go back in and repitch it. But I'm inclined to let Mr Coppola tell his version instead. He's done a few pretty good movies in his time, after all.