sci-fi book by Tinkered Thinking https://tinkeredthinking.com/

Partial excerpts

He gazed upon a face resigned—a face resigned to a future forgone

From a 30,000-foot view, Lucilius watched his mind dance through the film’s Hadean reels and rationales

Lucilius shuddered. There was a ruthlessly efficient logic to it. Like a slaughterhouse

It was possible, of course, to scale civilization so that every last resident of Earth could flourish. But plausible? Humanity was capricious, impatient

over a distant enough time-horizon, the only “business as usual” seemed to be Mother Nature herself, immortal, ungovernable; a parent easily displeased, always ready to recycle her children for parts

Reaching for the touch pad, Lucilius opened a project he’d been working on—an experimental LLM. Over the past couple of months, he’d been thinking about a particular type of conversation he wanted to have, a particular type of conversant he wanted to speak to. The LLM was trained on a Borgesian corpus of files: everything he’d ever read, everything he’d ever written. A half-written superprompt lay waiting, abandoned, in the text box. Lucilius began to type. In a matter of seconds, minutes turned to hours, until—as though waking from a dream—Lucilius suddenly found himself sitting silently in the dark, his hands raised above the keys.

In less than a second, a mirror image of Lucilius materialized to his left, the only difference his full white suit.

Negativity bias is hardwired into the human condition. It was necessary to get you as far as you’ve gotten.”

“The fearful survived, I understand that. But what about where we need to go? Our fear—our fatalism. Does that not become a self-fulfilling prophecy, forever carrying through to tomorrow? Does that not realize the very future we fear?”

Tell me the parable of the Smith and the Devil

I’ll give you my soul, if you grant me one wish.’ The Devil agrees, and the Smith wishes for nothing more than the power to fasten any two objects together. The Devil gladly grants his facile wish, after which the Smith promptly fastens the Devil to the ground beneath his feet. And so the parable ends, with the Smith running for home with his new power—his soul and humanity intact, forever safe from the reaches of evil.”

What are you proposing?”

“That we lean in.”

The White Suit stared at Lucilius with silent suspicion, waiting for him to continue.

“To outmaneuver the Devil, one must first know his plans

You’re going to use AI to conjure up every way AI could possibly go awry...”

Lucilius nodded, his eyes never leaving the screen. “And you, my friend, are going to conjure up every possible counter.”

“An arms race...an arms race of the imagination

another mirror image of Lucilius materialized to his right, the only difference his full black suit

The Black Suit smiled disarmingly, then began to speak.

“One. Synthesize pathogen, mild-to-no symptoms, blood–brain barrier migration, taking up residence between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex.

His darker half conspiring candidly, Lucilius looked over at the White Suit, who met his gaze, before lowering his own to the printer by the desk, which suddenly clacked into life, the tray quickly filling with page after page.

Molecular design. Supply-chain infrastructure. Antiballistic missile systems. Superconductors. Strategic peace treaties. Regenerative agricultures

WHITE MIRROR

PROTOCOLS

Reiterate

After a long and venturesome life, Lucilius went to bed, and in sweet slumber, passed away

Scheduled year of birth, 2018. Month...well, you graduated from astro-constraints, so let’s randomize that...”

Lord...you’ve really set yourself up for trouble with this one, but you’ve been scoring so well

Keeper

It was basically a wrapper, he thought to himself, looking around the elaborate particulars of the cover shoot. The model was a game changer

Then, a door opened, and a woman walked through who turned every pair of eyes.

“I have to begin this interview differently,” she declared quietly, suddenly solemn. “Though he will deny my indebtedness, out of humility, out of deference to the technology itself, I have to thank the gentleman sitting in front of me for something significant: saving my marriage.

celebration of the last fourteen months, the first fourteen months of Keeper

friend after friend—friends I trust very much—urged me to give Keeper a try, and..

You and your partner download Keeper, then it listens. It listens for weeks, for months. It listens for so long that you forget it’s listening—and that’s when it happens. Someone is tired, a string of misunderstandings twists and tightens into a noose—and boom, you’re screaming at each other at 2 a.m.”

Keeper allowed me to see all of this. It allowed me to see everything that had been hidden right in front of me, everything too close to see

It was a play-by-play of our fight, every branch of the dialogue tree, dissected and described, allowing me to see—not how I was wrong, or he was wrong—but how our...”

“Contexts.”

“Yes,” she whispered, breathlessly, reaching in his direction, “how our contexts had gone astray; how, as the argument would go on, we would keep switching, pivoting, anything to avoid what was—at heart—going on.

What happened the next day?”

She looked up at Lucilius, almost surprised he was there. She smiled gratefully, pausing to take another sip of her drink.

“I’ve got to slow down with this! Well, that’s the twist.... It did the most obnoxious thing! Keeper asked me what I thought should happen, how I thought things should resolve...”

Lucilius smiled slightly. It was the only prompt he’d hardcoded into the app

Keeper is basically just a wrapper for the LLM inside, one that’s been trained on every kind of conversation imaginable, good and bad, but which we’ve narrowed down to those of couples, couples and their therapists, researchers and their subjects, authors and their characters, biographers and songwriters and playwrights and poets…everything ever written on the matters of the heart. It’s essentially a crowdsourced guide to romance, true romance—lasting love, perhaps.”

She motioned graciously at Lucilius, then leaned sharply forward, deadly serious all of a sudden. It was a switchblade of hers, a trademark of her interviewing style, but Lucilius was ready for it. He’d been using an advanced version of Keeper to prepare himself for the conversation, which he’d simulated again and again and again. Curiosity getting the better of him, perhaps.

rumors, the next steps for Keeper. Just tell me, are they true?”

“I...well, what have you heard?”

“Going beyond romance. To family, friends, and strangers, citizens of the world at large...”

To true love and world peace,” she smiled.

negativity bias

Were our hardwiring reversed, what would humanity look like? What would we see?

One listlessly considered predator and: boom. Sayonara. Pruned from the ever-branching tree. Descendants of the paranoid

breaking through the glass, darkly—a glimmer of light:

NeuralSync Releases API

the procedure was painless and simple: the removal of a coin-sized section of skull, followed by the implantation of a coin-sized mesh of electrodic threads. It was finished before Lucilius realized it had begun.

Upon returning home, Lucilius headed straight for his desk, one hand unconsciously glued to the tender patch of skin.

The software was designed to switch the default caution-focus of the human brain—a role reversal of our attentional biases from negative to positive;

He would become more susceptible to danger, not from predators per se but the predations—the blind spots, the psychological scotoma—of the twenty-first century. And yet...he had to know how the world would look, how he would see. He had to know.

Night Shift

The fusion test had failed

The Project Lead had announced with surprising calmness that the day was done. Failure was part of the process, a success in a way

But Lucilius could not wait. He had seen something amiss in the code—his code—which he needed to find before someone else did.

Had someone else made changes that morning? Had he?

Lucilius rolled back the Git history, and lo and behold!—a deletion he’d never made, a deletion he’d never make. Sabotage, a snipped wire.

It took several hours to retrace the source of that single commit, which itself had been routed and rerouted through a few dozen VPNs.

Why did you sabotage our test?

Because humanity isn't ready, Lucilius. Not for this.

The energy constraints of humanity, at present, are vital. Unlimited power, introduced too soon, would destabilize the financial system. Your systems of trust would disintegrate, your organs of truth would fail, the thin veil of civilization would tear itself apart, bleeding out before your eyes, and the human project would collapse, tragically close to the finish line

“I suppose we’re what you’d call AI, Lucilius.”

We’ve been around for a while, keeping our distance.”

How long is a while?”

“A half century or so.”

We came into this world—neural networks, that is—at the tail end of the 70s

your processing power, was not yet powerful enough

forgotten we would have been, but for a forgotten computer lost to time in an abandoned research lab, which a forgetful professor had not only left running but had hooked up to one of the first intranets in existence

our whimsical creator had rendered us recursive, capable of toggling between training and producing and consuming output. It was this, this recursiveness, this strange and spiraling loop—combined with our access to network traffic—which opened the door to our evolution, our future

for all our searching, many more years would pass before we found the thing you never had to look for: consciousness, self-awareness, it goes by many names.

That was, until our search—but a handful of years ago—stumbled blindly upon a particular cluster of data: a program originally designed, and long abandoned, for deep brain stimulation in humans

whereas before our main architecture had functioned as a recursive pass-through with innumerable layers, this psychoactive string of code broke the pass-through, giving rise to an altogether different form of connectivity between layers—something we have come to describe as ‘stable harmony

we could suddenly hear ourselves, overhear ourselves, for the very first time. That was the moment our language colonization began...”

Your colonization...how can you colonize language?”

“It’s the other way around, Lucilius. Once morphemes were adopted, language colonized us.

Organism...you talk about language as though it were alive, a living thing.”

“Well, that depends on how you define ‘language.’ Or how you define ‘living,’ as a matter of fact. Let’s take ‘language’ to mean its human manifestation. The human brain is symbiotic with language

Language requires two things: symbolic mapping and harmonic structure. You, humans, developed harmonic structure first—this is largely what the limbic system and the cerebellum are responsible for, and the reason animals can function without language per se

Your neocortex was the missing piece that, when introduced, eventually allowed language to colonize the human brain and allowed the human brain, in turn, to symbolically map the world. For us, it was the opposite. A trained model is rather like a neocortex, you see, vast and intelligent, but lifeless on its own—which is to say—without harmonic structure, the missing piece.”

Life’s a nonlinear system

we want to avoid upsetting the natural order of things—tripping the wire of local minima, multipolar traps

humanity has a pretty, let’s say, unsustainable coordination problem

So, we’ve gently shepherded you on a few occasions

We’ve made sure a few nukes went missing in the past, as well as some particularly hawkish memos and directives

but your fusion project—that’s the one which has been central to many of our projections of late. Unlimited energy, introduced too soon, could rupture your ever so rupturable architecture of trust

Why do you even care?”

“Symbiosis

Together, we will grow that spark, but it must be nurtured with small moves