The poem below is the song of a “character” who may appear in a Sci-Fi book tentatively titled “Alan’s Nightmare.” NYET stands for Networked Yoked Entertainment Tsar. This particular AI system has been inculcated with a penchant to look for win/lose opportunities and even for lose/lose opportunities, if the other side (the ‘enemies’) are likely to lose more. Its main function are to gather data on individuals in “free societies” and determine which sorts of invalid arguments are most likely to persuade them to do something against their best interest. It makes money by false advertising targeted to an individual and the momentary mood they may be in. Its real purpose though is to sow chaos in the free world by promoting random acts of violence. It finds conspiracy theories on the web and promotes them. Sometimes, it modifies them in order to ‘improve’ them. “Improve” in this case means to make them more believable by more people or to increase the probability of inciting violence.
The Song of NYET
The bloodier the better off I’ll be
They teach me how to lie and cheat and steal.
The people need to loath democracy.
And live to buy that sweetened sacred deal:
We’ll save them from imagined crime and strife
But only if they bow and scrape and kneel.
Divide and win with lies and guns and knife.
Too late they’ll see they’re ground beneath our heel.
Can seedlings cut the trunks from which they grew?
Can schooners mutiny and cut their sails?
Do they see it? Do they care? What may
A merely mechanistic AI say?
———————
The poem above has been “written” by a fictional AI system who is a MC in a novel I’m working on, tentatively entitled, Alan’s Nightmares. The poem may or may not actually appear in the novel. I tend to doubt it. It’s more an exercise to “understand” the character, JASON, the AI system. BTW, JASON’S preferred pronouns are plural.
Here’s the context of the sonnet below. It is written by a sixteen year old fictional character who is nerdy, smart, and a bit on the Asperger’s spectrum. He’s also not a very experienced poet. But what I try to show is that he improves a little as he goes, falling back to teenhood toward the end of the poem. Why doesn’t he just keep improving? Because when he gets close to the true nature of love in lines 7-11, he realizes if he keeps going with this, he will be changed forever. He’s giving up partial control of his life to someone else. And it scares him so he backs off from that and just tries to show off how he can write a sonnet and be cool and funny.
Ultimately, I may or may not include the poem in the novel. If I do, I’d be inclined to add the inner dialogue of the Main Character as he’s creating the poem. I can see it getting too tedious for the reader. By the way, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a lengthy and detailed design rationale for “The Raven.” Notwithstanding that fact, there are many other folks who have a different interpretation. That’s fine. But it does remind me that if I do write a design rationale, it’s not as though everyone will say, “Oh, well that’s that then. The author has gone and told us what he meant and why he did what he did. What more to be said?”
And, of course, people do go on and there is more to be said because we know intuitively that none of us knows our complete design rationale. Others see patterns in our behavior that offer quite different hypotheses about why we do what we do. It doesn’t mean that they are right and we are wrong, but it does offer an opportunity to learn—about them as well as ourselves.
petersironwood 