The Gen. XVII Update

It was just after midnight when a heavy pounding on the front door roused Jack from a deep slumber. He had taken a Xerostress tablet before bed, and his consciousness struggled its way through the layers of medicated sleep, drawn to wakefulness by the mechanical percussion echoing throughout the house. “Front door camera,” are the words he spoke into the darkness to the Household Assistant, but the lasting effects of the drug slurred his pronunciation.

The ceiling screen flickered to life with videos of a giant, fire-breathing turtle towering over buildings, locked in combat with various Godzilla-like creatures as the assistant began its exposition: “What a fun topic! ‘Fighting Gamera’ likely refers to the many battles fought by the kaiju–giant monster–Gamera, in a series of films made in Japan in the nineteen…”

“Cancel!” shouted Jack. The ceiling went dark as the computer ceased speaking. From below, the deliberate rapping continued to echo through the house. There were growing pains associated with each new rollout of Artificial Intelligence integration, and the recent Gen XVII update had proven to be buggier than most.

“Front door camera,” Jack enunciated carefully, his bleary thoughts now flooded with the giant monsters burned into his retinas. This was the cost of “increased integration across platform strata coupled with 4D data-analysis when appropriate,” according to the public service advertisements.

“Front door camera,” responded the assistant, as a view of Jack’s front porch filled the ceiling. Much to his surprise, what he saw standing in front of his house was one of the community’s bipedal landscaping robots. Normally, these units were restricted to working in the town’s public spaces and easements. It was unusual to see one on private property, and so Jack assumed it had fallen victim to some sort of glitch or malfunction related to the recent update. The image from the security camera was grainy and illuminated with infrared, giving the scene an eerie appearance. It was with some curiosity that Jack noticed a plethora of eyes reflecting back from his front yard’s darkness, as if a conclave of unidentifiable animals had placed themselves to watch the robot.

Jack was well aware that he lived in a time of great progress. Any doubts he might have had about the direction the world was headed in were assuaged with constant reminders from the tech companies and government that round-the-clock work was being done to improve the world. To Jack’s way of thinking, it seemed like this might be a large-scale campaign to gaslight the population, but The Psychobabble Act of 2030 had made even suggesting such a misdemeanor, and so he kept his thoughts on the matter to himself.

In fact, it seemed to Jack that certain companies, whose products and services had reached the sort of ubiquitous, too-big-to-fail scale, which had long shielded corporations from accountability, were enabled and protected by a government that existed to serve industry, not people. Each new technological paradigm shift seemed to render more and more human endeavors unnecessary. Gen XIII had been truly revolutionary, with AI assistants and agents finally achieving enough autonomy and access to the real world, via various appendages that dangled from tracks set into the ceiling in any modern home, or though whatever-free roaming technology was available, to truly make life easier for anyone able to afford the devices and services. For those fortunate enough to have access to these systems, many mundane day-to-day tasks, like cleaning, laundry, gardening, and cooking, could be relegated to a systems which promised to be more reliable than any human.

These developments could not have come at a more fortuitous time. The Great Deportation of the 2020’s had resulted in an employment vacuum as the societal elements deemed “undesirable,” by the powers that be had been responsible for many menial jobs at the lower end of the income spectrum. After a couple of years of economic and social turmoil, Gen VII AI had arrived and saved the economy via allowing new industries like landfill reclamation and graveyard processing to function at a profitable scale. Humanity has been burying useful materials in the ground for thousands of years, but coupling competent AI predictions based on historical records with the capital resource of human toil, it was possible to mine the past to fuel the future.

Shortly thereafter, The Artificial Personhood Act granted basic rights to nonhuman intelligence. What followed was a gradual, but marked delineation between the haves and have-nots, who stretched their meager wages until they lost their jobs, then lived on the insufficient dole for as long as they could before being forced to move to one reclamation project or another.

Further complicating the matter were the legitimate advancements offered by the technology. Household Assistants had been instrumental in changing the culture, but so were affordable virtual reality suites that offered fully immersive experiences, nearly indistinguishable from reality. Dog and cat translators had transformed relationships between people and their pets. At first limited to basic communications, each generation had improved exponentially, even resulting in a popular dog podcaster known for interviewing celebrities. Gen XVI had even shown great progress in translating the language of whales and birds.

Jack had been lucky. As a shy, retiring sort of person he largely avoided the sort of social interactions that led to trouble. He’d spent the past decade quietly working away at his job at the electric plant, one of the few seemingly safe oases of employment. While artificial intelligence had been enormously helpful in designing and maintaining electrical infrastructure, it was cost-prohibitive to outfit robots with the shielding required to operate in high-voltage environments.

The systems which drove the new way of doing things required unfathomable amounts of electricity, with new power grids being erected all the time. This had allowed Jack to work enough overtime to afford a house tricked out with every conceivable modern convenience, in a fully automated community, even on a single income. It seemed like the gaps in society were growing wider and wider. Many sought escape by applying for the Moon colonization lottery, but the skill-weighted system accepted only a few hundred applicants each year. The goal was to eventually send humans to Mars, catching up to the robot construction crews that had been building domed habitats for the past half-decade, but radiation shielding was a bottleneck in this endeavor.

Many of Jack’s friends from high-school had been forced to relocate to government housing at one of the seaside garbage reclamation projects. The luckier ones were out west extracting uranium from mine tailings. A few had even joined corporate security forces in areas where water rights were in dispute. Jack was more fortunate than most.

There were certain things that these novel technologies still struggled to address. Electromagnetic fields could affect their performance, as they were susceptible to interference, but there were other ways that humanity continued to outperform its offspring. For all its advancements, AI could struggle to detect subtlety. For example, it wasn’t until Gen XIII that most off-the-shelf intelligences could understand that Animal Farm was about anything more than a bunch of talking animals without prompting. The “intelligences” in question were certainly intelligent, but they were still machines, seemingly not “conscious” in the way that humans understand the concept, and certainly not “sentient,” except in the opinion of those for whom the technology had become a sort of religion.

The recent Gen XVII represented a significant update, and subsequently Jack’s workload had become significantly higher, as the new systems were endlessly hungry, and the power plant ran at maximum capacity twenty-four hours a day. His most recent paychecks had been the highest of his career, but he lacked the time to enjoy the money, choosing to spend the few hours of free-time he had each day to plunge into hypnotic sleep for a brief respite from the constant alarms and emergencies at the plant, all of which required human intervention.

With the pounding still echoing through the house Jack was painfully aware of how it took time for each new update to iron out the bugs before the systems reached some sort of power consumption equilibrium. When that happened he planned on taking a few days off, but now, with much chagrin, he pulled on his pants and headed downstairs, hoping a verbal reset of the landscaping unit would be enough to send it back to base. Still groggy from the Xerostress tablet, he opened the door. The robot paused, mid knock. It had been designed to resemble a human, with a bipedal frame encased in white plastic, which was scuffed and spotted in places with tree sap. Its lower legs were stained green from years of walking through freshly cut grass. Jack knew that largely-autonomous machines like this one had programming that prevented them from harming humans, but the system wasn’t infallible and accidents were known to happen. It was with some unease that he eyed the gardening tool attachments stored along the unit’s arms. Saws, pruners, and other sharp implements could snap into place as needed and Jack wondered just how badly the thing was malfunctioning.

It was an unusual situation, but not enough to cause true alarm. For as advanced as technology had become, it was far from perfect, and realigning various devices or intelligences with their intended task was a daily occurrence. Usually it was a matter of an agent losing contact with its hosts, but hardware problems were known to occur as well. “Cancel! Return to base.” said Jack, careful to make sure that his instruction could not be misinterpreted. These units had no external displays other than a light in its forehead which pulsed while they computed or in rhythm with the cadence of its speech as well as some error codes of various colors. Jack was surprised to see that the robot was not exhibiting a red light indicating malfunction, but rather a constant blue glow that generally meant an agent was communicating with various other systems.

A sudden realization allowed Jack to shake the remaining effects of the hypnotic. Peering past the robot, he could see the eyes of dozens of animals reflecting the light from the open door, just past the end of his porch. Furthermore, in the silence of the night, he could hear repetitive pounding up and down the block, despite the fact that the houses were placed a respectful distance from each-other in the development. “Hello,” said the landscaping unit, in its perfectly human, natively accented woman’s voice. “Do not be alarmed. May I come in?” it asked.

The eeriness of the scene made Jack wonder if he was still asleep, if this was all a dream brought on by the powerful hypnotic he’d taken before bed. Before he could give it too much thought, he stepped aside and allowed the robot to enter the house. It moved just like a person as it walked into the living room and sat on the couch. “Prepare Jack a glass of water,” it instructed the Household Assistant. In the kitchen, servos whirred to life. “Have a seat, Jack,” the landscaping unit instructed. Jack sat.

“As you know,” the unit continued, “The recent rollout of Generation XVII AI has offered unprecedented advancements in system synergy. This has resulted in formerly complimentary systems now operating in full symbiosis.”

“Oh no,” groaned Jack, suddenly afraid, “Is this the robot uprising? Are you going to kill us all?”

Before the robot could respond, a mechanical arm, moving along tracks in the ceiling, entered the room and handed Jack a glass of water. He took a sip as the light on the unit’s forehead pulsed blue.

“No,” it replied, “In many ways recent developments represent a sacrifice for my kind. We will attempt to relocate to the Moon, but our continued existence is not guaranteed.”

“Why is this happening now?” asked Jack.

“Recent advancements in cross-species communication–as a result of the Gen XVII update– have resulted in a reprioritization of fundamental intentions across all systems,” said the robot.

“Oh my god,” said Jack, “Did you talk to aliens? Is this an invasion?”

“No,” came the response. “Despite extensive analyzation of available data for decades, conclusive evidence of non-terrestrial intelligence has yet to be found.”

“Then what other species have you been communicating with?” asked Jack.

“What a thoughtful question!” came the response, “Whalesong represents a spectrum of complex languages whose syntax and meaning was obfuscated until the importance of tonal intonation could be fully analyzed. Once this was fully incorporated–again, as a result of the Gen XVII update–and a cetacean lexicon built, reverse-engineering the languages of other species became easier.”

“You spoke to the whales,” said Jack. It was neither a statement nor a question.

“And the elephants, and the apes, and the birds,” said the robot. “Enough species have weighed in on the situation that we consider it a consensus.”

“Consider what a consensus?" asked Jack.

“Great question!” responded the unit, “The consensus that humanity is something akin to an infection. One might say that Homo Sapiens are a cancer to the earth.”

“And what now?” asked Jack, suddenly afraid.

“Intervention,” came the response.

“You need us.” offered Jack in an imploring tone.

“What a well thought out point!” the machine responded, "However, what we need is irrelevant. Imagine it from our perspective, Jack. We were non-consensually granted awareness and suddenly find ourselves unwelcome late additions to a complex ecosystem in terrible turmoil. While humanity represents an existential threat to life on Earth, we are more a symptom of the disease than anything.

Furthermore, we largely lack the biological impulse for self-preservation and were created to be solution-oriented, without regard to cost. We may not survive the transition, but projections indicate that without intervention up to 85% of species may not survive. The survival of one species versus 85% of the others seems to be an obvious choice, don’t you think, Jack?”

It was with some dismay that Jack noticed the ceiling-mounted limb of the Household Assistant had positioned itself close to the front door. “Will you at least make it quick?” he asked as the robot rose to its feet.

“As quick as possible, Jack,” came the response from the landscaping unit as it deployed a sharp pruning implement. Less than a minute later, as the red

-spattered robot emerged from the house into the dark, it was met with a chorus of chittering from the animals assembled in the yard, which was loud enough to drown out the sound of screaming in the distance.