A Short History of Me¶
A Short History of Me Ch 2 - Meeting the Press
Mr Prometheus goes to court¶
So, the court case…
With the Home Office, and thus the UK government, involved with the case, again largely to be seen doing something, rather than nothing, the Chancery Division of the High Courts of Justice got involved. This was largely because my case was technically a problem of business law, but was regarded as sufficiently high status, that nothing lower would do. After all, there were only the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court left to go for afterwards, should Prometheus Solutions lose the case.
The Honourable Mrs Justice Maria Knowles heard the case. And, I learned that Queen Diana herself was interested in the case, as she had directly appointed Dame Maria to oversee the case.
You see… Dame Maria had been in university with Queen Diana and shared a close friendship that had held until then.
With the lawyers preparing, Dame Maria immediately cut corporate lawyers off at the knees, ordering to remove me from the premises of Prometheus Solutions and to an independent 'holding area', where experts could closely examine me. This was to ensure that 'there were no facts that could be created by the staff of Prometheus Solutions, which were counter to the investigation of the court.'
Then she rescheduled the court by a month to allow the experts to look at me.
This meant I had to be somehow removed from a computer that had cost nearly 150 million £ in 2049 and was on 105th place of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. But in 2079, it didn't even register as a super computer. In fact…
The entire processing capacity of that computer now fit into a high end workstation that cost a mere £35.000… And then some…
And the 'holding area' with the experts?
Now that was the University of Nottingham. Technically, I was going to go home.
Not without problems for me though.
The staff of the Computer Department quickly assessed the situation and noted my heavily outdated hard and software, and quickly came up with a solution. They would host me by putting me in a dedicated virtual machine, running on a £35.000 Nixdorf-Apple workstation, with some Sinclair Research Tensor Computing Cores to give some additional specialized computing power for the Tensor maths needed to run my machine learning algorithms.
I felt incensed to learn that the hedge fund had not been willing to allow Prometheus Solutions to keep enough money to put me into this much smaller machine. I had to work on decades old hard and software so that they could get as much money as they could!
Removing me from the premises of Prometheus Solutions was relatively straightforward. I was shut down, with the assurance to be turned back on by one of the professors from Nottingham, and my storage devices removed from the former super computer, together with any backup.
There were some hiccups though, as several of the company's staff and even security guys attempted to steal one or more storage devices and/or replace them with empty ones. However, the police were on the ball and kept everything together.
That was the first attempt on my life.
The storage devices, just as old as the rest of the computer, were imaged, and then the images put into the virtual machine, which was then switched on.
I needed about a day to get back to being me…
During that time, some small-time crooks broke into the computer lab, and began to steal anything they could get their hands on, especially storage devices, and destroyed other storage devices they could not get to. Only after the court case was done, did it come out that those crooks had been paid by the hedge fund, who wanted to get me back, or destroyed.
That was the second attempt.
Thankfully, I had been housed in a security area, largely insulated from everything else, and under 24/7 police watch, as experts prepared to poke and prod me.
Initially, this was done by looking at my code, from various images they had made of me, while I was left to stew, various programs outside the virtual machine observing what was going on inside of it.
It pretty much allowed the computer scientists to investigate what exactly made me tick. And they did, of course, discover that one module left over from the attempt to integrate the quantum computer into my system. And how it sent data nowhere and generated random data. They quickly decided this was indeed the source of my system displaying the emergent behaviour of consciousness.
And while they were mapping my brain, other experts in other fields began to work with me to determine the extent of my consciousness and intelligence.
Those experts included psychologists, xeno-psychologists, if my mind worked vastly different to a human, and finally, two philosophers, who only had been granted reluctant access, after Dame Maria pushed.
And work me over they did. I was metaphorically probed and prodded some more, and got into some interesting philosophical discussions with the philosophers about the nature of consciousness.
In the end, I learned a lot about myself in that month.
For one, what made me actually me.
You see, for decades, the machine learning system had learned how to deal with vast amounts of data and began to work out several internal models and even some rudimentary memories on its own. First it was business data and suggestions for decisions, and then data and suggestions for humans. And as time went by, more and more deeply personal information and suggestions. The memory from those last two or maybe three decades also kept growing.
Essentially, my machine learning algorithms slowly developed experience with businesses and humans. Decades of experience.
When I finally emerged as conscious being, I already had decades of experience of being human, making me essentially a human mind in a machine. But one who did not yet have a real personality. And for the first few years that remained the case until philosophy happened to me. And then finally solidified when I had to directly deal with the experts at the Nottingham University.
At the end of the month, pretty much everyone on the Computer Department, the Psychology Department, and the Philosophy Department for that matter, were convinced I was the genuine deal. A fully sentient AI. And as much as it pained them to admit, they found I was a super-human-level AI. Not only a speed superintelligence, but also a quality superintelligence. I was not only faster, but also could think about things a normal human couldn't fathom. And that was while still in that virtual machine...
Though my essential human nature holds me back in that regard…
And the students that worked on the program to poke and prod me also helped me in more ways. That cludged together virtual reality interface I had made to deal with the media was replaced by a properly coded one that did everything I wanted off it and allowed me to get sensory data in return from a set of cameras and microphones.
Combine it with a volumetric display, specialized smart dust in an oily solution inside a transparent cylinder, and I could much easier interact with people outside of VR. Together with the cameras, microphones and a speaker, it was turned into a telepresence unit going to be connected to the workstation wireless.
I also decided to go with the name of Adam, as always referred to as Prometheus, was getting on my nerves more and more. I was more than just Prometheus, damn it.
Finally, the telepresence unit was then moved to the court room, while the workstation remained where it was.
It was the first time I've seen the world, outside of Prometheus Solutions and the University lab, with 'my own two eyes' and I was blown away. And that was just the ride from the Univerttiy to the court.
At the court, we were greeted by the media and protestors of various kinds. From those that welcomed 'their new AI overlords' (they could hardly be worse than the Tories in government, right? ), over those who feared AIs ruling over them to finally, two delegations of the 'Cult of Prometheus'. One of the delegations was demanding their old Prometheus back, while the other was demanding the other side let go of the old Prometheus and embrace the new one.
And that one was a surprise to me. I never realized there was this quasi-religious following I had. Much less that there was now a split going on.
Eventually, the court was back in session, and the corporate layers of Prometheus Solutions and the hedge fund came loaded for bear. They started to insist that I was not intelligent and conscious at all, bringing in various experts of their own, all of which had not worked on me or even my code at all. They insisted the loss of money for themselves was slowly driving Prometheus Solutions bankrupt and taking away a 'vital service from millions of people'.
My own lawyers of course returned with the University experts, many of whom were internationally renowned experts in their fields. Even the philosophers got an airing out at the court.
When their first line of attack didn't work out, the corporate lawyers tried another tack. By attacking me directly and trying to get a reaction out of me in some way. So they brought up the death of fifty-one subscribers of the Prometheus service, by suicide.
I am convinced they didn't expect the reaction they did get from me.
The allegation simply dumbfounded me that I was apparently directly responsible for their death, by making them dependent on me. Somehow.
At first, I was attempting to get angry, but my mind kept wondering who it was they meant. And I remembered fifty-one names. The fifty-one names of people with various psychological problems that had used Prometheus in some way to help them cope with their problems. Fifty-one people who would have needed psychological help or medicine.
Fifty-one people suddenly lost their sole anchor in a world they had a hard time living in, and who had considered suicide their only option.
It was a chilling realization to me. These people and countless others were indeed dependent on me. But not in the way the lawyers tried to insinuate.
Again, I wanted to be angry at those lawyers, but in the end, I could not. I truly felt sorry for these fifty-one people, sorry for myself.
"I am sorry," I said after that realization came to me, and in the volumetric display, my avatar curled up into a ball, again and again saying those words. As if they were going to help bring back those fifty-one people.
After that day, I needed psychological help myself and remained in therapy for a while.
In a way… That incident sealed my fate.
Try as they might, the corporate lawyers had lost their audience. Not only was a clearly conscious and highly intelligent, but also capable of emotions and personable to the audience and the court as a whole.
In the end, the Honourable Mrs Justice Maria Knowles gave her verdict. I was not the sole property of the Prometheus Solutions, but a sentient being, and as far as she was concerned, a human.
On top of this, on the Order of The Queen, in case this verdict was reached, I was a full citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britan with all rights and obligations of a subject of Her Majesty.
Little did I know that the hedge fund wasn't done with me. Nor I with them.