Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #032

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #032 – The Atrium – Chapter 11 – The Atrium

As promised, I’m releasing some of my upcoming book bi-weekly as part of the Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday series here at SBS.  I don’t expect it to make sense…at least, not at the moment…but that’s okay.  Putting it out here publicly is intended to be motivation to keep me writing it, and that’s all the purpose any of it needs to serve.  Hopefully, if I get lucky, you’ll enjoy it in the process…that’s the best case scenario.  At the moment, I’d predict that things will likely change with the order I put these things out in…and what reads as “chapters” now, might end up becoming pure prologue, if it even ends up making the final cut for the whole story at all.  Regardless, if you find yourself being one of the few that wanna follow along and see where this goes, I can at least promise you that reading what is posted up here at the homepage will provide you with extra insight, details, and ideas that probably won’t even end up being in the book…so perhaps, by reading these postings at the start of each month, you might very well know more about what I’m writing than the publisher will by the time things are all finished. 

I truly hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading.

– Jer @ SBS

The Atrium – Chapter 11 – The Atrium

December 17^th, 2040

Julian stood at the mirror, looked at himself curiously, and straightened his tie.  Then he straightened it back the other way.  Then he left the mirror frame, came back to look, and realigned it all over again.  He must have already done this twenty times, but he couldn’t help it.  Nerves were getting the best of him.

After building an impressive case for the anti-AI movement that exploded in 2038, a coalition of the willing, including representatives from governments found all around the world, had finally agreed to join forces to ensure the control of artificial intelligence, and build a headquarters right where he lived, in British Columbia.  It was by no means any kind of small achievement.  Getting anyone to agree on anything after the post-truth era was next to impossible, but many citizens around the world in every region were continually voicing their opposition to the further advancement of AI, and it seemed to come to a tipping point, whereby if the elected officials had chosen to do nothing, there would be a full-on rebellion from the people.  Even though it had only been a tool on the surface for the past twenty years or so, it was already perceptibly dangerous, and only seemed to become more pervasive by the day.  Even as it stood, with the agreement to build The Atrium, multiple experts had already cited that their efforts were likely already too late, while others derided them as misguided, and still others also advocated for AI to be expanded even further.  There were so many aspects of everyday life that now counted on artificial intelligence to lend its assistance.  From self-driving cars, to daily planners, to business avatars, all the way to the most mundane tasks now being fully automated and scheduled, it was like the decision-making process of human life was excused from its existence.  The problem was, at least from Julian’s perspective, that it kept on creeping into new territory.  AI kept on claiming new parts of humanity that were crucial to global functionality.  When the first planes smashed into each other in the sky above Kiev three years ago, after all air traffic control became automated, they knew they had a major problem brewing.  When a series of self-driving vehicles drove straight down the famed Las Vegas strip, right into a conference happening at The Wynn in that same year, with nothing to stop them – dozens upon dozens of cars becoming twisted metal in a scrapheap of mayhem and mechanical malice – the world started to worry even more.  When it was discovered that the President of France was at home and ill, while a lifelike robot was sent in his stead to the security summit last year, and no one noticed until it was long over and the information was leaked to what remained of the press, the panic continued to grow.  It was clear that something had to be done, and there really was no better time to start the process than now.  The USA just had their latest election, and President Nichols would take over in January, as per their tradition.  While much of the country’s influence had been shattered in the 2020s, the Americans were still regarded to be as necessary as anyone else in major world decisions.

In what started as a fairly modest role as a consultant for small businesses long ago, Julian eventually moved his way up to corporate work, and then decided to switch up his entire career to philanthropy & advocacy.  Taking a hardline stance against artificial intelligence replacing any human for even the most menial tasks, his tireless efforts helped the world begin to recognize the dangers of AI in the smallest of places.  How it could hurt families, the economy, countries and so on – he studied it all like life on Earth depended on him making a case for its safety, because deep down, he believed it did.  When AI was first introduced on a more widespread basis, somewhere around 2028, it seemed fairly harmless, if not somewhat laughable for all the mistakes it continually made.  Where someone’s automated cappuccino maker would serve up an iced tea, or someone’s replacement underwear was ordered in a size too small, these tiny little fractures in the development process seemed to be more of an inconvenience than a threat.  So what if some AI singer got the words backwards?  Big deal if your automated taxi service took a route that was slightly longer than expected as long as you got there.  Everything seemed so trivial, and so understandably forgivable.  After all, the promise of all the things that AI could to do lessen the full burden of being human, seemed to be worth it for so many.  In particular, the people that didn’t quite understand the reach of its scope – the replaceable folks – who generally seemed to have no problem voting against their own interests by being kept from the information they needed to make informed decisions.  Some of that was by choice, and the rest was naturally taken care of in the post-truth era of the digital realm.  Any fact of any kind required a visit to at least eight-to-ten different sources in order to confirm its validity, and the people were so burned out by that point that they rarely followed through on their due diligence in that regard.  As a result, corporations and the elite class continued to wreak havoc on society, replacing human life with AI robotics and technology in every place that they could.

President Nichols was seen as a beacon of hope that might possibly be able to unify the globe and get the leaders of the world to really start regulating how pervasive artificial intelligence had become.  It would still be a while before she was sworn in, but she had pulled in a staggering 73% of the electorate that voted, though notably, the number of people that chose to participate and exercise their democratic right was at a record low.  Inexplicably low, according to the talking heads on television.  They were still convinced that their elections were as secure as ever, but turnout seemed to be a looming problem for each party.  With incumbent President Dire seeming to be almost uninterested in serving a second term, and a staunch advocate on behalf of AI, Jennifer Nichols became the obvious choice almost by default.  Still, even with that being the case, her humanity was radiantly apparent, and the country seemed to understand it was at a crossroads once again like it had been so many times in the history of its past.  Where they usually seemed to decline to stand up for what was right and go in the wrong direction for many of their elections, something seemed different this time around.  The people were awake, they were ready for action, and they were informed.  They were still scared as hell about the future ahead, but those that voted in the most recent election were said to be battling for the sake of humanity itself.

In Julian’s view, they weren’t wrong.  That was why he and a group of rich investors from around the world began to build The Atrium three years ago, without any expectation of an ROI.  This massive new structure was going to have a staff that could potentially range into the thousands, but would be filled only with people that understood how imperative it was to stop AI from expanding its reach too far, if it indeed hadn’t already.  From legislation to demonstrations, The Atrium would be the very foundation for change, and the people that worked within it would form its heartbeat.  With multiple floors and offices that would house some of the greatest minds the world had ever known, The Atrium represented the tangible possibility of wrestling back control of the planet in favor of the people before it was too late.  Most crucially, they planned a series of what they called ‘Clean Parallel Technology’ that would be programmed much the same as modern-day AI, but strictly in an offline setting so that none of it could be tainted with misinformation, or disinformation, as so much artificial intelligence seemed to be taking in.  Long ago, when Julian received his first Nintendo Gameboy as a gift, he recognized how quickly digitalized intelligence could be corrupted beyond repair, and as the main consultant for the design of The Atrium, he argued that a clean laboratory for creating Parallel Tech was absolutely essential.  Giant successful AI companies dismissed his advocacy as outright lunacy, and in particular, went after him for his concept of the clean lab, continually reminding the public that any AI robot or societal enhancement always came with a reset button.  Julian never wavered in his argument.  Even with a reset button, he claimed that the corrupted information was still embedded somewhere in the system of most artificial intelligence, and therefore, a clean laboratory for creating CPT would be crucial in understanding the full scope of dangers of what was currently being offered to the world on a global scale, and knowing how to reign it in.  Big corporations hated just about everything Julian stood for, and considered him to be a way bigger threat to their bottom line than anything that could possibly go wrong with their creations.  It wasn’t like he didn’t understand where they were coming from in how they felt about him – how could they not?  To corporations, he symbolized an expense.  Either they would have to pay to combat his anti-AI movement, or they would have go back to paying actual people to do the work their machines were currently doing.  Either way, as far as he understood, businesses didn’t like to spend money under the best of circumstances, so he didn’t mind being a constant target of their universal ire.  He didn’t revel in it either – it would all be so much easier to achieve the goals with everybody playing on the same team, but corporations had long shed their humanity in favor of profits and padding their financial portfolios.

With the Atrium set to officially open after all this time, Julian could hardly contain his excitement.  This was such a massive step forward in what seemed like a never-ending marathon, that it practically made the final goals feel within reach for the first time in a long time.  As he hopped into an automated Air-Cab and it made its merge into the sky, he felt pleased with his progress.  With leaders like President Nichols from the USA, President Joly of France, Chancellor Stern of Germany, Prime Minister Deckland of the UK, Prime Minister Randall of Australia, and his own Prime Minister Carl of Canada all set to meet up at the doors of the Atrium this morning to go in for the very first time, they and their delegations were vital to the project’s success.  As far as Julian had planned, there would be more countries involved as they were able to demonstrate results, which would be achieved by consensus through factual information.  If they were able to make sense of creating legislation that would limit the reach of AI and stop its spread from harming everyday human life, he was confident they could in turn make it make sense to the world at-large.  It would not be an easy task.  There is no putting the toothpaste back into the tube, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle – AI would not be interested in surrendering the position it had taken in society, and there would be many opposed to limiting its functionality in the midst of still exploring it.

The building itself would have never been created without everybody as onboard as they could be.  Even some, like Chancellor Stern and Prime Minister Randall, had gone to great lengths to back the concept of the Atrium, to what appeared to be great expense of their own political capital.  Their rivals in each of their respective countries had used the creation of the Atrium as a cudgel to power their campaigns, and in Germany & Australia, so far it seemed to be working.  The very opportunity for the Atrium to exist was short.  The window to explain it and justify its existence would be even shorter.  It was an all-hands-on deck scenario, and yet its purpose still wasn’t clear enough to the common working class.  From their perspective, aside from the occasional hiccup that occurred with the majority of technologies they’d grown up with, artificial intelligence was much more of a help to them than it was a threat.  Julian felt like he already knew the ending of this story and had practically seen the future while he pondered what would happen next when AI reached its full potential.  At best, it would be the horrors of movies he had grown up watching like The Terminator series, but the possibility that it could even become worse loomed large.  To him, there was an extremely real chance that we’d essentially invented the demise of the human race, and then willingly handed over the keys for the machines to make that happen.  He would think back to all the efforts various groups and advocates made on behalf of climate change, only for that whole entire movement to be dissolved in order to increase the power of AI.  From the moment that we traded in the values of a green culture, to exchanging our water and land resources so that we could accommodate the exponential growth of AI data centers, Julian felt the walls of technology closing in.  With no choice but to watch as the world pushed forward without a second thought about the possible repercussions or consequences, he had to wonder if they had already lost the battle to AI by that point.  If we were so willing to trade the environment and the protections for Mother Earth, the very vessel that had provided life to each and every human being on the planet without a second thought about it, wasn’t it fair to conclude that we’d already be enslaved to the machines?  We didn’t seem half as interested in the fight for our own humanity as we were with being able to generate quick dopamine hits in the form of memes and AI-generated videos.  We became lazy.  We became dormant as a species.  We had opened Pandora’s proverbial box, looked inside, and decided to simply change the channel instead.

Thankfully, the threat of AI hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed.  There were still a handful of people in every community that took it more than seriously, but of course, like so many issues that had come up through our history beforehand, it ended up being intensely divisive.  For a moment or two, it seemed like even broaching the subject of our own security in a public space would quickly get some lunatic coming at you with a pair of crazy eyes and fists cocked & loaded, ready to physically finish the conversation.  Those that understood the growing threat to our existence took a more underground route, meeting each other at irregular times, trading handwritten notes with new information that they had discovered that might be of some use.  Even as The Atrium was being built with its smooth, sonically impenetrable walls capable of withstanding the harshest of EMP bombs, the world was undergoing such rapid changes that there were many times where Jules wondered if the building would even be built in time before our own version of judgement day came.  There were too many days where he was certain that it wouldn’t even be built at all, yet he continued to push forward like a man possessed, because he genuinely felt the importance of this project was unlike anything else.  Every shovelful of dirt, every new concrete layer, every new floor built, all meant something.  It mattered.  If there was to be one last bastion of hope for the human race, Jules wanted it found inside the walls of The Atrium.  It would be one massive building unlike any other, built to withstand a full-on nuclear blast, earthquakes & more – and if Julian’s vision came to fruition, it would at least be the one building able to provide a safe haven for the rebuilding of society if everything went to shit.  In that respect, even though the full scale of the Atrium spanned over three city blocks, it would still be relatively tiny overall, especially if things were to get as out of hand as he had predicted.

There were other, less tangible signs of the Atrium’s importance in relation to how quickly AI was making its advancement.  There were strange, previously inconceivable and outright unexplainable things that seemed to be happening in pockets all around the globe.  Sometimes micro level, sometimes on a much more macro scale, Julian felt like he couldn’t rule out the possibility that he was already way too late.  Take the green initiatives for example – the ones that scientists had continually explained we needed to pay attention to and heed their warnings on…things like climate change.  For years and years and years, the data clearly showed that the temperature of planet Earth was consistently rising towards perilous levels, until finally, one day out of nowhere, it finally began to back off.  It had somehow reached a peak, which did certainly cause its own level of destruction from rising sea levels and ice caps melting in the process, but then it just seemed to stop moving in that direction and began to inexplicably cool down.  At first, it occurred in barely measurable increments, then larger, then eventually it seemed to level off to a reliable number – to the point where the panic over further damage to the environment all but subsided completely.  What made the past decade’s cooling even stranger though, was that it wasn’t like the people of earth had adopted any radically different habits than the same planet-destroying natural impulses that they’d happily obeyed for years.  It simply made no sense in actuality, not even on a theoretical level; if nothing changes, then how does anything ever change?  Yet the climate change deniers had their day and continued to be even more intolerable than they already were.  With no hard data or facts or any clue as to what caused the climate to shift back to cooler temperatures, science could only shrug its shoulders as the average concerned citizen was now mercilessly mocked for believing that the planet was ever on its way to being doomed.  As a natural phenomenon, the cooling of Earth was by far one of the most tangible things that everyone understood was occurring, because it was a genuinely collective experience that all people were going through at the same time.  With the ability to use a more closed-circuit stream of government data, Julian knew there were other extremely quirky examples of how life on Earth seemed to be changing at a fairly alarming pace, then leveling right off like it had somehow found the balance that worked best for it.  Things like wait times at hospitals, and how they basically just disappeared, replaced by floors upon floors that were completely emptying out of their patients.  It wasn’t like people were making better life choices or had developed better eating habits, but the inexplicable drop in the sick definitely gave the impression that the planet was getting healthier.  Perhaps even more astonishing, was the fact that less sick people meant less dead people.  It seems like that should be a forgone conclusion, but this was different.  There were so many less dead people.  An incredible amount of people that were not just biologically refusing to die, but that seemed to decide to continue living and not show the typical signs of wear & tear that a lifetime puts onto a body.  Even stranger, the birth rate began to drop off significantly, replaced by only a trickle of a few that continued to decide to make that choice here and there, but to raise a child at all was becoming increasingly uncommon.  It somewhat made sense to Julian, given that if you had to assume the data on living longer and being healthier was real, that maybe it made sense to not have so many kids in the mix, but even in thinking that way it was still tough to disconnect from the reality of how he’d grown up.  Everyone was still having kids like every generation that came before it, until one day when they just weren’t anymore, and that was the way that it was ever since.  This situation also accounted for lessening the traffic in the hospitals, but it wasn’t like the public was as keenly aware to all of these things as they likely should have been.  Blame it on technology, or the weakened attention spans that were passed onto the next generation from their parents, the human race was largely asleep at the wheel and practically begging for its own extinction.  There was data all around them that they could have physically seen with their eyes if they weren’t so constantly attached to their screens like a fly to a bug zapper.  If there was a reason to have a celebratory opening of The Atrium at all, it was to be able to broadcast into their space for a moment on their devices of choice, which would at least provide some awareness of the work that would be done within its walls.  Building the building was one thing, but that was merely the beginning stages of the staggering amount of work there was to follow.  Every journey requires a first step, a second, and so on.  Julian flooded his mind with patience and grace.  He was unbelievably excited to the point where he could feel his heart racing for all the right reasons.  He was terrified of failure to the point where he could feel the thump so strong it felt like it was going to burst out of his chest.  His natural calmness in all situations had been affected by this project in profound ways beyond his comprehension.  Only the work mattered now, and every minute that ticked off the clock felt like time he couldn’t spare, making the waste of mere seconds immediately feel like wasting full hours.

Once he arrived at his destination, he beheld the sight of The Atrium and its enormity in full view, which consistently left him in awe every single time that he looked at it.  Every shovelful of dirt led to this.

“It never gets old,” he said to himself in amazement of the building and the accomplishments it already symbolized.  Ever the optimist he scanned his security badge, went through the scanner, into The Atrium.