Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.6    An Assumed Role

1.2.6.24 Witching hour

Talking with her family of expert systems reminded Nadine that one of the first tasks they'd tackled had been evaluating the danger potential of the pleasure effect used in the Soul Bound game when you levelled up. Was the Imam’s ‘pure’ tiara doing the same sort of thing? It certainly sounded like it. Or possibly something more. What would it feel like if you combined triggering memories of positive thoughts in reaction to something like praying, with rewarding approved thoughts and punishing the disapproved ones with a feeling of ‘wrongness’? How many potential vulnerabilities had Minion found in even Wellington’s carefully secured tiara software?

Nadine: “Rizah, additional project for you: keep an eye on any developments connected to the use of tiara technology. Plot the trends, and warn me of changes indicating new capabilities, new uses of existing capabilities, or new social trends related to them.”

Nadine: “Balthazar, can you see if anyone has posted technical specifications of these new ‘pure’ tiaras and find out what they really do? What’s likely to happen with Cosic?”

Balthazar: [I can answer the second part of that immediately. Going on the reports made by others, in the short term Cosic will become increasingly devout and orthodox, and will be happy and content to be so. No particular effort appears to have been made to condition wearers to need to keep wearing the new tiaras, although social pressure to keep doing so is often applied. The long term effects are unknown, however I note that the tiaras do not request consent from the users before applying software upgrades from sources listed as authorised in the initial installation.]

¡Carajo! This, this was the potential Wellington had seen when he talked about a boot stamping on a face forever, and the brain behind the face demanding it be stamped upon. Only it wasn’t some far distant prospect. It was taking place before her eyes, the population of the Earth being divided up into neat fiefdoms, like a pile of poker chips before a game.

Letting someone else decide what software to put on your tiara? It was like someone walking through the worst part of the Arsenal with their pockets stuffed full of their entire bank account. No, worse than that, while also carrying the deeds to their house and a pre-signed slavery contract. The bigger the potential reward, the greater the chance that someone would target you to take advantage. And humans had just gone from being worth pocket change, to being more valuable than Mosley’s hypothetical elephants that got hunted down for the ivory tusks in their mouths.

And people didn’t realise. They were used to dreamers getting suckered by cults and then finding the promises were hollow and having a chance to escape. People didn’t yet have the protective instincts they’d need, to realise that with this technology you didn’t get a second chance, that once you gave up control of your own mind even temporarily, that was it - game over.

She thought of the over-confident democracies that hadn’t treated politics seriously, and had been deceived into electing a party which then proceeded to dismantle the country’s democratic process, resulting in a single party state or worse, much to the dismay of the minorities now left permanently out of power. Then she stumbled and had to concentrate on not falling over in the dark. The Hajduk guard had said politics was bad for the health, but she didn’t think he’d meant daydreaming about it while walking down a steep slope.

It was past time for her to be fully awake and alert.

In more ways than one.

The village was silent when she got back, the doors closed, the people sleeping.

She entered her Kafana through the kitchen door, drew a chair to the warm spot by the oven, and sat down to think. This time, no more banging her head against walls; this time she had a plan for how to go about thinking it through. There might be a long night ahead of her, she might not get much sleep, but she was determined to come up with some sort of answer by morning. This dragon was one she could, and would, face alone.

She brought up the document she’d laboured over during the flight.

Kafana wants people to live dignified lives, working alongside expert systems and expert system controlled bots, rather than for them or enslaving them, in order to preserve their own humanity - both their self-respect and their compassion for others.

And, for those less able to support themselves, for the bots to chip in, as members of the community, to the task of supporting such people, but not to take over.

Alderney wants economic independence for enough people that they can throw off the leverage of the Hexoikos and start making decisions that are good for humanity’s own long term survival, such as being more considerate about the deployment of new technologies and opening up new biospheres.

Tomsk wants to avoid humanity blowing itself up in an act of political despair, war or terrorism, by reducing the number of people who feel desperate, through fear for their own survival or lack of hope that things will improve for their offspring.

Bungo wants to enable individuals and groups to experiment with different ways of boosting their collective wisdom, making effective again the checks and balances which reined in the power elite from totally ignoring the interests of the rest of humanity. Better information, better ability to process that information, less desperation. He wants human nature to move beyond being just barely better than chimp nature.

Bulgaria wants less of the polarisation that reduces the penalty for rulers who act in the interests of only a few, and which denies humans a civilised future among the stars. He wants to inspire people to try using tools that facilitate empathy and constructive dialog by modeling a less polarised collaborative approach and demonstrating that creative compromise is effective at achieving solutions which respect more than just the desires of the strongest, leading to stability and gains for all.

Wellington wants a society of information equals, where the doings of the state and corporations are as transparent to the people, as the doings of the people are to the state and corporations. A society in which people are free to access reliable data, analyse it, communicate with each other, travel in arlife to meet up and organise peaceful coordinated action. A society where people need not fear surveillance, jamming, control, manipulation, retaliation or any other form of coercion from state or corporation for exercising those freedoms.

Hmm, quite a lot of overlap, though the words and emphasis varied. On one side: “states and corporations”, “rulers”, “power elite” or “Hexoikos”. And on the other side of the power imbalance: “the people”, “the unemployed”, “the ones without hope”, “the desperate”, “the enslaved”, “humanity”. The Earthbound masses who are polarised, surveilled and manipulated. The powerless or, at least, the ones not in a position to apply their power.

Everyone had big threats to humans on Earth having a worthwhile future, ranging from nuclear bombs and big brother, to poorly programmed ‘genie’ expert systems and as yet undiscovered technologies. Nobody trusted the ultra-competitive Hexoikos to make good long-term decisions about these things by themselves, and everybody wanted to improve the ability of the currently unempowered to make good decisions and act as a counterbalance to the Hexoikos.

The wombles differed in their emphasis on how to achieve that. Some were working on decision making directly. Wellington was providing tools to help with communication and collaboration, while Bulgaria had always been about education and was trying to teach problem solving skills.

Most of them, however, felt that people trapped in the lower layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs were unlikely to feel they had time to worry about abstract threats, and so were looking at ways of boosting people upwards. She tried sketching the pyramid, to see whether sorting the approaches by level made any sort of useful pattern:

1. Survival

Alderney is concerned about providing food, shelter & basic needs

2. Safety

Tomsk is concerned about providing security and employment

3. Belonging

Bulgaria is concerned about providing hope, identity & community

4. Status

Kafana is concerned about providing a justified feeling of worth

Wellington is concerned about freedom and individuality

5. Beyond

Bungo is concerned about personal growth and self-enhancement

Hmm, no, not really helpful. Except that, if all they were interested in was improving people’s ability to resist being disproportionately pushed around by the power elite, then in the short term the lower levels were probably more important. What timescale ought the wombles be looking at? In the long term, maybe the fight over surveillance or over access to the ability to improve human nature would turn out to be more important?

Could they even do anything about problems that big? She looked again at what she’d written. It didn’t look like a strategic vision that could be used to construct focused goals for just a single organisation. More a wishlist.

She shook her head in disgust. She was getting side tracked. She had a plan on how to think this through and she ought to stick with it, at least as far as it could take her. What had Wellington suggested? Distinguish between the change someone wanted, and the factors that might contribute towards that change. Ok, she could do that much; then she was going to take a break, brew some coffee, maybe do some cooking.

What were the means that had been suggested? The Burrow? Yes. Playing Soul Bound? Check. Free anonymous transport phoenixes? That one had actually happened! Using expert systems as staff, and giving them a Mirror Burrow to cooperate via? Hadn’t been worked on, yet. Mythoi? Definitely. Copias? Hopefully. Cheap resources dropped from space? No idea. Skill sharing and gestalts in arlife? Speculation, but worth looking into. Cheap, robust and secure tiaras? Good, if possible. Get a hundred million people livecasting to steganographically camouflage their participation in a distributed Burrow? Daunting, but nicely specific. A gratitude-based economy or culture? Maybe. Using simulation games on The Burrow to encourage communities to plan their own futures? Perhaps. Using tiaras and The Burrow in combination to reduce polarisation through direct empathy? Using tiaras to prove sincerity in trade and negotiations? Expectation management? Nomads? Simple living? Hidden off-grid autonomous enclaves? Mythoi anti-surveillance patrols? Genetically uplifted cats infiltrating Hexoikos bases like ninja, to spy upon them?

She didn’t know, but she noted it all down on a list, and flicked it from her overlay to the screen in the kitchen. Too many items, too little organisation. She needed inspiration. Time to cook!