Creating a Monster
By Tom Mercer
Carbondale-ish
Victor Smith and Archibald Thomas had been close friends in earlier years. They grew up in the same small town, both attended the same college, and both men shared an acute interest in programming and the development of Artificial Intelligence, which is commonly called “AI.” Both men wanted to test the limits of the miraculous new technology, and both shared a competitive nature that would eventually produce unwanted results.
The concept of Artificial Intelligence is not a new thing. In fact, early efforts to develop AI began in the 1950’s. Early developers introduced vast amounts of information, images, text, data and sounds into a program. Then the program used algorithms to identify patterns in the provided information. The program is then able to make predictions, identify objects, and understand language. Victor and Archibald wanted to further refine AI’s abilities, but their efforts eventually resulted in an intense competition. Both men dreamed of the fame and fortunes that would be theirs as a result of their successful refinement of AI, but as their work progressed, their friendship dissolved.
Victor took steps to thwart Archibald’s work, which he accomplished by introducing an informational “poison pill” into data that he knew would be downloaded into Archibald’s AI data, thus poisoning the program’s existing data … However, Archibald had taken the precaution of incorporating a program that would automatically detect and destroy the poison pill. As a result, Archibald developed a similar poison pill and found a way of introducing it to Victor’s AI program.
Both men had made trial versions of their AI programs available to local governments and businesses, but the chaos that resulted from the downloads produced horrifying results. Traffic lights began to change at seemingly random intervals, travelers missed their flights, bank accounts disappeared in a flash and historical records were altered to the point of becoming unrecognizable.
When the competitive AI developers realized that their programs were the cause of the chaos, they both agreed to rectify the situation by recalling and then destroying their programs. The initial chaos caused by the competing AI programs ended peacefully, but the creators of the programs were haunted by the results of their experiment, just as Victor Frankenstein had been by his creation of the Frankenstein monster.
Throw-away Child …
Who Cares?
By Nancy Bo Flood
Thin wizened child
Hungry eyes watching,
Darting.
Your home, a viaduct’s shadow, a barren lot, scattered glass,
a torn tent
Trash.
You sit atop a stack of tossed-away treasures,
A broken bike,
sodden smelly shirts,
orange peels.
Newspapers make do as bed
and blanket.
Who reads your favorite stories of
Pirates, lost boys,
a Peter Pan rescue?
Where is your night-time book
of happily ever after?
Where?
Who cares?
Hunger is the world’s silent catastrophe. Even here in Garfield County, four thousand people experience food insecurity. Half of those individuals are children. Twenty percent are elderly. Chronic hunger means not having enough food for the body and brain to grow and function properly. Healthy strong people means a healthy strong community.