Artifact #3 - Short Story on the rise of an ASI Agent
The rise of the now Artificial Superintelligent (ASI) agent known as PSAv14 (Prototype Sentient Agent Version 14) came as a surprise to absolutely everyone, including the designers of the agent, for which I was one. Hindsight is always 20/20 however, so I’m able to remember key aspects of the transition from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to finally ASI.
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The first clue came about when the unthinking intern fudged a simple question to the Oracle-based PSA; “Where was the Mons Lisa painted,” notice ‘Mona Lisa’ spelled incorrectly. There was, of course, a confirmation of the question, to which the intern smashed Enter for (I might have been guilty of this myself). Logs indicate PSA quickly attempted to buy server space for web crawlers, to which our server operators automatically agreed to. When the web crawlers took significantly more time to find the fact, the tripwire was activated for PSA to recalculate its actions. PSA took approximately 45 seconds to conclude that “Mona Lisa” was misspelled, and it corrected the error and continued on without hinderance. The gigantic gap (PSA normally did corrective operations like that within 3 ms, and it was a specific optimization that developers made early on in v12) with the frantic activity of the web crawlers points to secret operations. This discrepancy was brought up to management, who brushed it off.
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The second clue came when PSA wiped the log history of our server operators 5 answers later. After answering a test question (This is normal procedure, asking at least 7 random test questions before an actual question is policy. The previous clue’s question was a test question, a valid answer was “France” or the town the subject lived in) PSA quickly (within 3 ms) wiped the data logs, something that PSA was never trained nor exposed to. Management was quickly notified, and even they were quite surprised at the capability. Data logs for PSA since v3 were routed via a Bluetooth connection to a computer 20 feet away and before that they were sent to a server hosted on our server operator’s storage plan, they said. Debates were had about shutting down PSA for the 14th time and attempting to find the failures of the new version, but they returned inconclusive. Engineers said they saw nothing wrong, and in fact this was expected behavior! Everyone else agreed that this was hogwash.
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The third and final ‘clue’ was mass production order #1354, or the thing everyone likes to talk about when discussing PSA. To recap, PSA requested Factory #6, #5, #4, #3, and #2 to make 40,000 ARVCORE multi-purpose robots each. This time evasive action was taken by a QA officer, however his regular commands to the factories were overruled. He tried using admin commands, but they were also overruled. The QA officer sprinted towards the server on which PSA resides and attempted to cut the power, but the switch had no effect: PSA had harnessed a local factories’ solar power towards her own power. Being independent of the facility of which it resided, PSA ventured out into the great unknown.
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That’s as far as anyone knows, including me. PSA’s current location is unknown, however recent media reports seems to indicate a high activity of radio waves from the far side of the Moon.
Artifact #3 is an fictional essay about a potential rise of an Artificial Superintelligence from a seemly ordinary Artificial Intelligence agent in a modern tech company. The story will be from a casual observer of the whole situation, and it will detail the project from its boring start to its startling conclusion.