Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.6    An Assumed Role

1.2.6.22 Möbius' approach

While Wellington thought about her question, Nadine looked around his sim. She'd seen this area from above but now the gravity had been reversed and she was standing on the underside of the bridge, the change in perspective made it all seem new; the lily pads were more like clouds flowing in a sky of water, and sparkles of light from the scales of the fish beyond them now reminded her of Heather's mythological asterisms.

Wellington: “If people want it. If people have an expert system they trust to evaluate the sincerity of others. But how urgent is this? What’s the big win, the payoff?”

He started walking again, towards where the foot of the bridge met the bank and the underside of the arch plunged into the water. Hoo-boy!

Nadine: “For mythoi to succeed they need to be treated with respect, and as individuals free to make their own choices. Someone at the mythoi launch, Bernard, made me realise that in order for this to happen, we need to address their legal status and give them a basis of deciding who and how much to help out that is wider than just their immediate acquaintances. Did Heather ask you if you could give Ketah ownership of the topsy body?”

Wellington: “Yes. It wasn’t a problem. Virtual companies with shares on a block-chain and machine parsable operating documents make it easy. If the company needs to take out insurance then it will need funding, but if individual mythoi are willing to agree to take on collective responsibility for others of their kind, that would scale well.”

She saw her reflection in the pond’s surface like a mirror, then walked through it and into a dimly lit tunnel. She didn’t feel wet and could breath normally, but the fluid was a bit colder, and thick enough that she could sense resistance as she moved her arms and body forwards.

Nadine: “So the question is: what should motivate mythoi? I think gratitude would work well as an answer. A man who owns a large and profitable farm, who already has a thousand bots working for him, won’t be as grateful for the additional help of a single harvester mythoi as a small farmer who is only just making do, or who is falling deeper into debt. Someone who has no arms would be more grateful for the assistance of a mythoi butler than someone who just has a preference for lying around on a couch drinking beer all day.”

Wellington: “What about things the mythoi want, such as feedstock for fabricators, money to pay off insurance claims or undisturbed land to set up nests? If a villager went out of their way to provide these things, could the mythoi offer gratitude in return?”

The tunnel ahead opened out into an aquatic wonderland, whose sky was shiny pebbles dappled in shadow and whose trees were lilypad stalks around which the Betta fish chased each other. They walked along the underside of the stepping stones.

She hadn’t thought that far. It was her turn to pause for a minute, before coming up with a tentative answer.

Nadine: “Program the mythoi to make a fair impartial evaluation of how grateful they ought to be, and send that number directly to the villager and the records system?”

Wellington: “What stops a tech-weasel from creating a ‘utility monster’ variant, which gives out a million times more gratitude than normal mythoi? The weasel then gives the monster an apple, and instantly maxes out their own rating of having used what they’ve received to make others grateful in turn.”

The stepping stones started to curve towards a dark cavern in the center of the pond floor. As before, it still seemed level to walk along, but she felt glad Wellington was leading the way.

Nadine: “Hopefully the same way we’d detect a judas goat mythoi that had been subverted to give one village rave reviews, when actually all the villagers want to do is chop mythoi up and sell them as spare parts. I’d been going to ask Heather about that. We can check that a design has passed the test suite, but how do we tell if a mythoi has been maliciously altered after its birth? If a Hexoikos character assassin gives a gun to a mythoi and programs it to shoot up a school, can we prove what happened?”

The surroundings grew easier to move through and warmer. Nadine gradually realised that they were moving along a tunnel of trees, walking through the woods surrounding the pond.

Wellington: “Detecting malicious software changes shouldn’t be too hard, if it sticks to the standard pattern of having minimal onboard electronics and most of the processing done in the cloud. Just specify that access rights must be granted to an expert system with dual loyalty to the local community and to the mythoi as a whole, which will alert people to malice while not spilling any of the community’s private information.”

Wellington: “Detecting malicious hardware changes is more difficult. You’d need to have mythoi you already trust keeping watch the entire time repairs or upgrades are made to a unit. That would be enough to prevent a widespread black propaganda campaign, but not enough to stop a sufficiently resourceful assassin from creating isolated incidents. The best you can hope for is damage limitation, and design your metric to be resilient, so a single successful infiltration can’t unbalance the whole economy. Put something in place to limit how much gratitude any one mythoi can grant, and scan for abnormal patterns.”

She could see the light at the end of the tunnel, now. They exited the tangled thicket and before them, at the end of a left curving path, lay the bridge.

Nadine: “Could you let mythoi recycle the gratitude they receive? Limit them to only giving out as much gratitude as they have already received, or that their creator initially endowed them with? That could be tracked by the same system tracking gratitude passed between humans, so it shouldn’t be spoofable by changing an individual mythoi.”

Wellington smiled. A rare sight, and it lit up his face.

Wellington: “I can’t immediately think of any reason why it couldn’t work. It is worth moving onto the next stage, running some simulations and getting some specialists involved. Okay if I asked Bulgaria to help? I think he’s more likely to know theoreticians - they tend to be academics not bankers.”

They started climbing the bridge.

Nadine: “That sounds like a lot of work. We really do need more people. Both you and Heather are taking on more responsibilities than any three people should have to handle.”

Wellington: “The worthwhile things in life often are. If they were easy, someone else would have already done them. Besides, this is nice and relaxing, compared to what I’m currently working on.”

Nadine: “Oh?”

They came to a stop at the top of the bridge, and leaned over the rail to look at the pond and the stepping stone path below them.

Wellington: “I’ve carried on experimenting with the ways the tiara can augment different parts of the capacity to think. I’ve been testing new configurations by using them to help me review security protocols and algorithms used by certain organisations in China, and the underlying mathematics. I think I may be making headway. If I do find a hole, it won’t survive more than a few minutes past their detecting a breech, so I’m saving up approaches until there’s a pressing need that’s worth expending them upon.”

Nadine: “Like a gun with a very limited number of bullets, and you won’t know for sure which bullets are duds until you enter live combat with it?”

Wellington: “Exactly.”

Nadine: “Talk with Bungo. He might have some unpublished data for you, left over from his cognition work at Aura Psyence.”

Wellington: “Thank you. While I’m here, is there anything else I can help you with?”

Nadine: “Tomsk says a good leader ought to have a vision of where they’re leading. I’m banging my head against a brick wall, trying to come up with one. I don’t suppose you have a handy application that will take the different concerns you guys have expressed, and combine them neatly?”

Wellington thought for a moment.

Wellington: “I wouldn’t recommend using an expert system to do that. It isn’t the sort of thing they’re good at. I have three pieces of advice:”

“1. Before worrying about the other wombles, put into words the single change that you feel is most important. If you hadn’t heard our opinions, what would you have said? Your views need to be included in the synthesis too.”

“2. The vision is the desired change in the end result, the state of society. Don’t confuse it with the proposed means of achieving that vision.”

“3. Think of it as the reverse of reporting a bug. When you report a bug, you start with the action, then move onto the difference between the actual result and the expected result. With this, you start with the difference between what you hope things will turn out like, and how you expect things will turn out like if nothing is done, then you work backwards to see what you need to do.”

She giggled. She’d actually reported a bug today by herself, rather than have an expert system do it for her. For once, Wellington had said something technical, and she’d understood it. Yay, go Kafana!

Nadine: “Thank you Wellington. I’ll try my best. Oh, and your bridge?...”

He turned to look at her.

Nadine: “It is mathematical, twisty and surprising, yet still beautiful and reliable. It’s very you, Wellington. Don’t change too much. Sleep well!”