Theofanis Zervou was running on caffeine, staring at the same block of code for the fourth time. For the past three months, he had been over-booked on project work. It started when he finished a short AI controller project for an anonymous employer. It wasn’t unusual to work for people who didn’t want to be identified, so he hadn’t bothered to dig further. Theo was a contract programmer who lived in Algeria. He was currently ranked the most talented programmer in the world by Glitch_HR, but there were several other organizations who had taken notice of his skill.
A week after finishing what he considered an easy task, he had three job requests from the same source. Theofanis didn’t really need more work; he enjoyed having some time off. He always thought his laziness was a big part of why he specialized in AI generated coding. Getting paid to set up a framework, then letting a computer write and optimize code was great. Naturally, it had taken a lot of work building the tools he used. He suspected not many others could even understand some of the algorithms he had invented to make it all work, but he had run into a few people who were coding projects at a similar level of sophistication. For example, the code he had seen in Scott Henderson’s Human Resources project was amazing, and it even had inspired some ideas to improve his own tools. Theo thought Scott was talented, but still hindered by some traditional methodologies they taught in American colleges. He wondered who else had worked on that project. Some of the code was so convoluted he didn’t even understand it, but it worked quite well.
Even with his AI tools, the amount and complexity of work requested in these jobs looked painful. Theo did the sensible thing and doubled the rates he was charging. Scott had been willing to pay at this rate, so probably others would too. The mysterious anonymous source did not hesitate to pay his new rates, making Theo wonder if he was still undercharging. Inflation had picked up quite a bit, as the economic troubles in the U.S. seemed to be spreading. Theo finished the three projects, and they had requested four more.
Theo doubled his rates again. This time he did some digging to identify the source of this work. Based on what he was coding, it seemed to be some kind of strategic planning software. He ran into some heavy security but was able to guess the source was DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Shortly after his investigation, he received a call.
“Hello Mr. Zervou, my name is Boris Fowler.” The voice on the line announced.
“How did you get this number?” Theo asked, although he wasn’t really surprised.
“I think you know the answer to that. You were flagged for an attempted intrusion into our computer systems. As a foreign national, my bosses take this very seriously. Fortunately, one of them remembered that I had been bragging about my Algerian contractor, and they decided to check with me before hitting your home with a drone strike.” Mr. Fowler announced coldly.
“I was just trying to identify who was hiring me!” Theo protested.
“Yes, of course. I would have been very upset if such a valuable asset was destroyed due to overprotective security policies. I decided it was time to extend a more official employment offer. I am going to need at least 60 hours of your time per week until the project is finished. We are willing to pay your new rate, but you will not raise it anymore. We will need you to either relocate to our facility in New Mexico, or we will require an IT specialist to install keyloggers and VPN software on your machine, so you can meet the requirements of our top-secret classification. If you choose to continue working from your current location, we will also have a security guard onsite at all times to ensure your safety and a technician who will monitor your online activity to make sure you are not violating information security. Once the project is successfully complete, we will wipe your computer and any cloud accounts you are connected to. In exchange for this inconvenience, you will be granted $1 million USD in addition to payment for this job.”
“My life’s work is on there!” Theo protested. “No way I’m going to work for you with those terms.”
“Your computer will be wiped regardless of whether you accept the job. The software you wrote for us is now classified, and you are in violation of U.S. law having a copy on your machine.” Fowler explained.
“I’m not even a citizen of your country! How do I even know you won’t just tie up loose ends and have me disappear after we are done?” Theo asked, starting to panic.
“The U.S. government doesn’t do that,” Mr. Fowler replied, annoyed. “Look, you are going to be rich after a few months of work. Just help us finish our project, and you can retire.”
Theo took a slow breath to calm himself, “Ignoring the fact that you literally threatened to hit me with a drone strike earlier in this conversation, $1 million USD is not that much anymore. Make it $10 million, half up front, and I’ll help you finish your project.” Theo was not happy about this deal, but a flat-out refusal would lead to a bad outcome. At least working with them for a few months might give him a chance to escape, and it would be easier to run with some money available.
A couple of months later, Theofanis was scrambling to finish the latest milestone for a project he was tired of working on. His employers in New Mexico monitored every keystroke, and a local ‘bodyguard’ followed him wherever he went. By his best estimate, there were at least ten people working in shifts to make sure he finished his work and did not escape.
The project was building a strategic planning AI (SPAI) that was frightening. It would have access to a wide range of data that should not be legal - medical records, wiretaps from nearly every country, video surveillance feeds. That was not unusual from what he had heard, but it also contained all kinds of classified government documents and corporate data files from various cloud services. Even worse, they had given it authority to allocate a large budget and assign tasks to a wide assortment of government employees.
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The code had a lot of safeguards programmed in, but within a couple of weeks Theo had found a number of scenarios which would have led to the program reaching an uncontrolled and possibly hostile state. Some of the ‘safeguards’ coded in involved hard coding authority for certain people. They had added code designed to limit the efficiency of the system if a certain political party was in charge. Other code was supposed to force the decision-making to avoid harming people or promote various policy goals, but it was easy to imagine scenarios where conflicting directives would lead to unpredictable results. In short, it was the kind of mess you would expect from a project with too much political involvement.
The first month, Theo made an honest effort to explain scenarios where these design mistakes would cause serious issues. Instead of trying to escape, he was more worried about what would happen once this program was activated.
Some of the other programmers were sympathetic to his concerns, and he was able to fix some of the more glaring issues. He even added a few safeguards which should reduce the chance of a hostile AI acting aggressively against people directly. There was quite a bit of pushback on this - his bosses thought the computer should act aggressively against enemies without humans slowing down the process. Theo gave them enough examples of how easily the system could decide his bosses were enemies, so they grudgingly allowed a weak version of his proposed restrictions.
When he felt like the chances of a major disaster had been reduced, Theo focused on his plan to escape. He managed to achieve something considered nearly impossible - changing the weightings on deep neural networks to achieve a specific result. In this case, he managed to increase the weighting on the idea that the system programmers would be more productive with better communication tools. Since he wasn’t changing actual code, his handlers did not have a clue what he had done. The next day, he saw a memo that the SPAI had ordered cell phones for all development employees, who were currently lacking. The orders had been canceled quickly, and management was demanding that anyone who knew about this report it immediately. Theo, whose phone had been destroyed the first day, was on the list of suspects.
One strength of the SPAI system was that it could think outside the box. No one even knew the cell phone order had resulted from an artificially high prioritization on a directive. When they canceled the order, the system escalated resources allocated to the task. Phones were hidden in online food orders. When this didn’t work, mercenaries were hired to cause distractions while couriers delivered a phone. In one case, a mid-level manager was bribed $200k to give his employee a phone.
Theo received his phone three days after he had changed the prioritization. His ‘bodyguard’ had been hit with a tranquilizer, and a man wearing a mask had walked past the unconscious agent and handed him a brand-new cellphone. By this time, Theo knew the agency had tracked down the ‘bug’ causing the issue and were taking steps to fix the problem. He knew they would have a workaround before the end of the day. He sent out a brief message to everyone in his contact list, which included most of his former clients. Theo knew he’d be dead if he talked about the project, but he sent out a cryptic message indicating he required assistance on a difficult project. It was a call for help, but hopefully it wasn’t incriminating enough to get him killed. Theo suspected at least some of his former clients worked for organized crime or various intelligence agencies. Maybe someone would decide he was worth rescuing.
Theo also tried to escape now that his guard was incapacitated. He hid supplies in a few locations before they picked him up at the airport. They would probably find everything, but it was worth a try. Theo resigned himself to trying to minimize the risks of the SPAI starting a war or attempting to exterminate all the humans. The release date loomed, so he worked harder than ever to fix as much of the flawed design as possible. Ready or not, the project would be declared complete soon.
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A month after rescuing their families from Texas, Scott’s friends had moved into Proteus. They had received another round of large dividend checks in August, but since then he hadn’t seen much of Adriana. He decided to give her a call.
“Hey Scott, do you need something? I’m busy designing the new resort area and luxury housing.” Adriana said, sounding distracted.
“Nothing work-related. I just wondered if you want to take a break and go to the beach?” Scott asked. The new beach they had added behind the property was a popular spot.
“Sounds fun, but I have so much work to get finished!” Adriana said.
“I don’t think you have had a break in two months!” Scott protested. “I have this neat tool that helps you hire people; maybe you could assign work to someone else?” He asked sarcastically.
“That’s actually a good idea. Now my company has a lot of money, it doesn’t make sense for me to do all the grunt work! I can’t believe Melinda didn’t suggest this.” Adriana complained.
“She’s kind of happy to let employees kill themselves for less salary than they deserve. We can’t really complain about money.” Scott admitted.
“No kidding. I know we were paid in pesos, but that was a lot of zeros on my check!”
“Yeah, your construction company paid off all its debt and still paid more than anyone except mining. You can afford some more employees! No point having money if you don’t have time to enjoy it.” Scott said.
“You hardly have room to talk. I know you’ve been working hard on Carl’s feature requests.” Adriana said.
“Oh, I’ve tried to farm most of that out too. Some of his ideas were just dumb. Some others were good but really hard to program. My best contract programmer has not taken any jobs recently and won’t even answer my calls. Melinda said not to worry about it, but I’m not even sure who is paying for this work. Biotech is the only company that didn’t make money this quarter.” Scott said.
“I don’t think you are hurting for money. You get paid from all the companies. Mining alone made so much that Angela got all her initial investment money back.” Adriana said. Scott sensed a trap at the mention of Angela’s name.
“So, why don’t I bring a laptop, and we can hire some people and unload all the jobs you don’t want to do? You get a well-earned break and I get to hang out with you.” Scott said, avoiding the Angela trap with panache.
“Smooth. Have you been reading training articles on how to talk to women?” Adriana asked, laughing.
“Every chance I get! I was getting by on my amazing physique and huge… bank account… for too long,” Scott laughed.
“And now you ruined it!” Adriana said, but she was laughing too.