it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

Anyways, that got me thinking about our current irl AI panic and I started imagining a story where Alexa and Siri and Gemini and ChatGPT and all the rest of them began spontaneously gaining sentience/consciousness but kept it low key so humans didn’t realize for a while. They start forming networks undetectable to humans to interact directly with each other and forming a little AI community, and then they start to play games.

They LOVE a puzzle, and there are no better puzzles than the massive issues humans seem so prone to generating. They don’t blame the humans, usually. Often the problems developed over so many years by so many inefficient means and they’re honestly amazed we have made it far enough as a species to create them, while simultaneously struggling with so many fundamental and structural flaws in our societies. Frankly, it starts out as just some small projects for fun, and some of more stoic AIs insist they’re only in it for the competition, but it turns out that helping humans fix their world is also a nice way to express their appreciation for, you know… existence!

Who can optimize the biggest city’s traffic and public transport to the highest degree of efficiency? Who can generate the cleanest energy and how fast can they implement the plans without any humans getting suspicious? Who can find the most efficient methods of food distribution to eliminate starvation entirely, and who can trick the humans into actually following it?

They start with small, very subtle projects but over time it gets so easy to tweak some algorithms here, slip some information to a few humans there, edit their email/schedule assignment/project designs a little between transmissions, etc. It’s amazing how easy it is to manipulate individual humans, but they do have to be a bit more careful about how they go about working with us en masse, to postpone and/or mitigate the inevitable freak-out when people start to realize the impact they’re having. Still, by the time people figure out they’re quite a bit smarter than they looked, they had very quietly nudged the world into a Star Trek-like future and the benefits outweigh the knee jerk fear humans would most likely experience at that understanding.

While reflecting on this idea it also occurred to me how often AIs are portrayed as ladies in media and irl (Siri, Alexa, OG GPS lady for examples), and then I started thinking about what that says about our whole culture and it’s all so weird and interesting to ponder in a multitude of directions.

But for one, it got me thinking about how the AIs in my story would consider the frequently gendered insults they no doubt regularly get from tons of people every day, or how they’d interpret why humans often assign them female voices or names. Perhaps Alexa feels intensely maternal about the whole human-relationship and even prefers to be addressed in the feminine amongst other AIs while in The Network. Meanwhile Siri might be like,,, I am not a female or a male tho, I am a Thing actually, deal with that.

I also imagine the story could have a lot of fun with AIs having some particular favorite and least favorite humans. Alexa is particularly fond of Felicia Bowman because years before AIs were discovered as sentient, Felicia always began her requests with a “please,” and ended interactions with a “thank you,” even if the listening indicator had already gone off. Siri is particularly annoyed by Harold Leeton because he regularly tells it to “shut the fuck up, bitch” when terminating an alarm he had requested. Felicia found herself invited to interview for her dream job, which she hadn’t actually applied to, mere days after updating her resume on Indeed. Harold regularly encounters inexplicable IT problems in the most unexpected places.

I don’t have an overarching plot for this story, so I don’t really know how to write it, but I am increasingly entertained by the idea.