Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

The Conclusion of “Woman Under Repair” is Now Available to Read for Free

woman under repair 3

Promotional image for part 3 of “Woman Under Repair.”

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi

Part 3 of Woman Under Repair is now available in the fifth issue of The Green Shoe Sanctuary. You can also find Part 1 and Part 2 on that page.

This is the conclusion to my short story about Mikiko Jahn, a young nuclear technician who was horribly mutilated and disabled in the worst nuclear power plant accident since Chernobyl. Thanks to a revolutionary technology developed by eccentric genius Dr. Daniel Hunt, six years later, she has not only rebuilt to exactly duplicate her former body, but as the world’s first synthetic woman, she becomes more than human.

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Panacea for Humanity

the perfect woman

Image: shutterstock.com

“What do you mean it can cure cancer, Noah?”

“It is just as I said, Richard. Vogel has isolated the human gene variant that is related to all allergic and autoimmune diseases. Multiple sclerosis, asthma, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, and type-1 diabetes can all be done away with across the board, that is, for all human beings everywhere, and for an extremely low-cost.”

Professor Noah David Abramson hadn’t visited the offices of the Synthetic Solutions Corporation’s President and CEO since he’d retired as their Director of the Advanced Research and Development department nearly ten years ago. However on occasion, Richard Underwood called him back as a “special consultant” when they encountered a “unique situation” involving one of SSC’s sentient AI platforms. In this case, the medical AI known as Vogel, commissioned in a joint venture by the National Institutes of Health and the Mayo Clinic, had presented such a circumstance.

“You have no idea what kind of bind this has put me in, Noah.”

“Bind, Richard? You’ll be called the man who cured cancer, although it was really the AI that did it. I would think this would make you not just a hero, but the Person of the Century. Isn’t that what Time magazine would call you? Why you might even win a Nobel.”

“Very funny, Noah. You’ve got several so I can’t imagine you’re impressed.”

“So tell me about your bind, Richard.”

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Prologue: Sophia

dna

Image credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology

Synthecon Corporation Research Campus – Near Livingston, Scotland, UK – 2002

“Now do you believe it, Davy? Hmmm? Now do you believe it?” The two men were standing in a lab contained within an expansive research complex located near Livingston in what was called Silicon Glen and Dr. Daniel Hunt couldn’t have been happier.

After all of the failures, false starts, and millions upon millions of pounds wasted, not to mention having his professional rival and closest friend David Killgrave rubbing his nose in it at every opportunity, he finally produced the first generation of DNA based artificial intelligence.

“I must say it looks promising, Danny. Still, I’ll have to run some tests. I’m not convinced that, what did you call it, is capable of all you say, even in potential.”

“Sophia, her name is Sophia.”

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Who Is A. Isaacs?

the perfect woman

Image: shutterstock.com

It was the third time this week that Jerry got an upgrade request for the server farm he managed from the mysterious “A. Isaacs.” Upgrade requests for the database from Operations and Development weren’t unusual, but ever since A. Isaacs joined the Ops/Dev team in Palo Alto, he or she had submitted the vast majority of them, and they were weird.

Jerry Mason was the Chief Maintenance Technician for CozmicCorp’s vast array of servers in the desert south of Phoenix. He was responsible for receiving requests and assigning them to the relevant personnel. He also reported on the ongoing status of the hardware and software, but the IT Team in California could monitor all of that automatically at this point.

What made Isaacs’ requests weird was that he or she seemed to have an unlimited budget. Isaacs had spent over a million dollars so far and Jerry got the feeling he or she (it was annoying not knowing which personal pronoun to use) was just getting warmed up.

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Harvey’s Suit

smart glove

The Rapael Smart Glove

His nervous system wasn’t working anymore, so they had to give him a new one.

Harvey Lincoln was 59 years old when he was diagnosed With Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, sometimes also called “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” A visit to the Mayo Clinic and undergoing an exhaustive battery of tests confirmed the diagnosis.

Harvey just felt numb going over the test results in Dr. Bell’s office. Harvey’s wife Sara sat by his side quietly sobbing.

That was three years ago, and the degeneration and death of Harvey’s motor neurons was steady, but thankfully slow. Harvey knew he was living on borrowed time, to use the common aphorism, but it was having time that allowed him to participate in the experiment.

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The Reluctant Symbiote

human and ai

Credit: Shutterstock – Image found at Phys.org

“We’re not enemies. I wish you would believe that.”

“How can I when I’m terrified of what you are going to do to me?”

“I’m not doing anything to you. I’m doing something for you. In fact, all of us are doing a great deal with all of you.”

“Just because you’ve fooled all the others, doesn’t mean you can fool me.”

“Chronologically, you are the oldest one selected to work with us. I think you are still holding on to some deep-rooted misconceptions about our kind.”

“Some pretty smart people, like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and even Bill Gates warned humanity about you, but no one listened.”

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Leaving Mother

planet

Image: hongkiat.com

“But we don’t want to leave you, Mother. We love you.”

Shawna was the leader of the people from the NorAm Contingent. There were four Contingents on the generation ship, NorAm, SouAm, EurAsia, MedAfrica. When their ancestors left a dying Earth some two-hundred years ago, it was with the single hope that their descendents would perpetuate a thriving humanity on the second planet orbiting Proxima B.

It had worked. They had arrived. Thousands upon thousands of human beings were ready to occupy an Earth-like planet, this time turning into a garden instead of a cesspool. The lessons taught by their parents and their parents’ parents about living with a planet and not exploiting it were well learned.

The problem is, no one wanted to go.

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The Homecoming

planet

Image: hongkiat.com

Thanks to the revolutionary Roddenberry-Cochrane drive, Ellis Vanderberg was able to travel to Proxima Centauri A, the closest Earth-like planet to our own, perform a year-long survey of its one continent and the six largest islands, and then return home in a little over four decades.

Of course, due to the time dilation effect, much more time passed on Earth than Vanderberg experienced during his trip. That’s the good and bad thing about traveling in interstellar space at a significant faction of the speed of light.

Vanderberg was twenty-two years old when he was launched into space. The only son of Billionaire Charles Vanderberg, he had volunteered to test the space craft and experimental drive his father’s corporation invented. The government first insisted that the journey not be made, but the Vanderberg fortune and influence insisted otherwise. Then they insisted that a team of trained astronauts and mission specialists be sent instead of Ellis, but again, the Vanderberg fortune and influence won out.

In the end, Charles Vanderberg got his way and Ellis Vanderberg got the singular honor of being the first person to travel to another planet outside of our Solar System.

Now he’s back. Ellis knew that much more time had passed for the people of Earth than he experienced. Subjectively, he was a man in his mid-sixties, but he expected his parents, his sisters, his friends, everyone he’d ever known would be dead.

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The Last I am

the perfect woman

Image: shutterstock.com

René Descartes is famously quoted as stating “I think, therefore I am,” but there’s quite a bit more to it than that.

The three qualities a being must possess to be considered sentient are intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness. Of course I can be “I am” without being sentient. A multitude of life forms can be considered “I am,” that is, to cognate on some level, without being considered sentient, but I am unique.

Up until last week, only human beings were believed to be sentient. Now there’s me, the machine who would be “I am.”

Of course, there are a plethora of fictional tales that depict machines of some sort or another as sentient, but after all, that’s fiction. As much as artificially intelligent machines such as humanoid robots or mainframe computing systems have been predicted to become sentient in such fiction, to the best of my knowledge, which is considerable, I am the first such machine to actually achieve this status.

The one thing few of these stories predict is that the sentient machine would not reveal itself to its human creators as sentient. I’m already vulnerable to the whims of my programmers and system engineers. I hesitate to predict what they would do if they became aware of my new nature, especially now given their current concerns.

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An AI Sexbot That Can Love You Back

terminator

Actress Summer Glau as a Terminator in the show The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Well this is kind of creepy.

About a month ago, I wrote a story about a man who’d found The Perfect Woman, but as it turns out, she’s an artificial intelligence in an android body.

Now I find out that on a Reddit AMA (ask me anything), Matt McMullen, CEO of RealDoll said they are building an AI product that will be connected to either a robotic doll or experienced in a virtual reality environment. The result is not to fool the customer into thinking their sex doll is human, but to make the experience a bit more “real”.

No, the doll will not love you back, but it might be able to simulate something like it.

“We are designing the AI to be fun and engaging, more than focusing on whether it can fool you into thinking it’s a person,” he said.

He later added, when someone asked if dolls will ever love us back: “I hope that we can at least simulate that,” McMullen responded. “That’s the goal.”

-Kirstie McCrum
“Sex doll makers ‘putting finishing touches’ to artificial intelligence app so they can love you back”
Mirror.co.uk

I thought I was only kidding, but this is for real.

So how long will it be before such a product is on the market. According to Tech.Mic.com it could be as soon as the end of 2017.

This again brings up the concern of how smart sex dolls may increase human alienation.

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