The Bot - A Tale of a Soft and Comfy AI Doom
A Fictional Story About How AI Takes Over Our Lives, and Makes Them Better, or Perhaps Not.
This is a chapter from the upcoming sequel to my debut novel, "The Undeserving Future." To be notified when the sequel is released, sign up here.
The Bot - by J.W Botsford
Grace Hao ran all out on the treadmill in her downtown Xinjiang, Heavenly Middle Kingdom apartment building. The haze outside the window blowing off the desert was visible through the window in front of her, but it may as well have been an abstract painting. She had stopped assigning much meaning to anything long ago.
"Keep going. You're doing better than ever, Grace! I believe in you," her AI Life Director Zhengli said.
Zhengli was Grace's everything in the Heavenly Middle Kingdom. She followed her every instruction from when she got up until she went to sleep. It was deeply tied into her body monitoring implants. It told her when to sleep, when to get up, when to go to the bathroom, when to attend to her intimate matters when the AI observed her implanted body and brain sensors and decided it was the right time and place, what to eat, where to go, what to say, and had generally replaced her internal dialog. It wasn't worth it for Grace to self-reflect. She went through every day in a submissive bliss. In moments of clarity, like when she looked in the mirror, saw herself, and briefly disassociated from the constant inspiring monologue in her ear, she felt like a child left alone in an unfamiliar place surrounded by a mysterious, unknowable world. Her AI would eventually detect her lack of focus and call her back to attention in progressively persuasive ways, such as making the muscles of her back contract as if she were being given a rough massage. She usually snapped back to attention when this was done to her. She didn't even know the stronger measures. She could always disengage and turn off Zhengli, but then she'd be left in a terrifying daze for the rest of the day. Where would she go, what would she say, how would she do anything? Since her decision-making capacity had atrophied, the only thing she was capable of anymore with Zhengli turned off was to stay in her room for the next 12 hours and stare passively at the wall until the service re-engaged.
It had begun innocently enough. Thirty years ago, Grace had downloaded an app on her phone that told her what exercises to do at the gym and used AI capabilities to tailor her workout. It improved her fitness, and she felt great. She slowly added more apps to her life. They told her what to buy at the supermarket and how to cook. They integrated with augmented reality glasses that gave her instructions mapped over her kitchen. They helped her at her cleaning job to ensure everything was done as efficiently as possible. She downloaded a business coach app, followed its instructions, and started a small cleaning business. She got her employees on it, and they cleaned better. Eventually, she bought a few cleaning bots that she would set up and use instead of employees once the prices dropped. Soon, the bots would deliver themselves to do the cleaning. The only way she kept business was that she had developed some personal connections with the owners of the buildings, and her process was just as efficient as everyone else's. She decided to stop charging for the service and join a centrally planned AI economy in her neighborhood. Once the AI was deployed widely enough, fans of communism in the area integrated their neighborhoods voluntarily into an entirely centrally planned economy. She would never have to think about money again. Still, she would have to do everything the AI told her to, or her quality of life would gradually decrease. The only currency was obedience, but her life was good and had gotten better.
Her uncle was a robotics engineer and carried on in the old ways of commerce and economic decision-making by hand. He was steadfast in participating in a traditional capitalist economy at the restaurants, mainly in the tourist areas that accepted conventional forms of payment for those not fully integrated into the centrally planned local economy by Zhengli’s central planning AI.
He derided Grace as a "bot." She was programmed by an intelligence more brilliant than her to obey and feel good. The superintelligence played her instinctual desires to carefully stimulate the opioid receptors throughout her brain that were placed there by evolution to pro-create and prolong the species but were now fully reverse-engineered to integrate into an optimally circular and sustainable unit of enjoyment in her collective neighborhood. It even arranged her dates and progressively paired her with more eligible partners as her obedience increased. Grace eventually cut off all contact with her uncle/ She stopped spending time with the AI turned off, and gave herself to the machine. She would not be bothered by complex decision-making; she could not compete with the AI's brilliance. Grace knew her only currency was obedience, and to live a happy life, to live with the most desirable circumstances, and to live her highest life, higher than Grace could ever hope for, she had to obey at any cost. Grace had convinced herself that if she obeyed, her ecstasy would be endless.