Premonitions of the Past

The world gets better in some ways and worse in others. Playing chess is apparently the sign of a gentleman while playing chess well is the sign of a wasted life. So they say. It wasn’t until I saw chess played perfectly that I got scared. Like, really scared. I mean, I’ve always been a checkers guy anyhow, but these two bots, these engines, these neural collections of semiconductors - they figured it out, and none of us knew what it meant at the time. We should have noticed. We should have paid more attention. We should have screamed, but we missed it. So it goes. CuddleFish, an established chess program, was playing BananaChimp, the “newcomer”, for the AI Speed Chess Championship (if you can believe such a thing existed back then). The game started with one minute on each player’s clock, but with the way they set up the rules, the time didn’t start until the first move was made. I watched it on my new Tell-A-Vision glasses but there were people crowded in some lab at a school back East watching in person. The board was still there with ornately carved wooden pieces so we could watch the game in real time even though the true battle was in the ‘verse. A hushed silence fell at three in the afternoon and the nerd world watched with nervous anticipation. Three o’clock came. “C’mon, E4…” I had bet on the opening move (not much but it made it more fun). No movement. 3:01, still nothing. Two minutes dragged on. Uncomfortable shifting in the audience. Five minutes in and the engineers were starting to whisper to each other. Seconds ticked by; the lead engineer nervously wiped sweat from his brow and tried to fake a brief smile. At 3:15 they called it. We had just watched the perfect game of chess. With every possible move and every perfect counter figured before the match had even started, there was no reason to actually play the game. I, like everyone else watching, walked away more annoyed than anything at the spectacle (or seeming lack thereof). Nobody plays chess anymore. Oh well, I was always a checkers guy anyways. 

           The world gets better in some ways and worse in others.  I remember turning sixteen and having no desire to drive. None. In fact, I hated cars and avoided getting in them if I could for a good couple of years in my younger days. It started when Benjy Hill drove up the coast for that wedding up North and the family car tried its hand at flying. Benjy, his sister, their parents, and the family dog went over the railing down onto the wave beaten rocks below. Not a single survivor. The authorities spent weeks cleaning up the mess and trying to figure out what had happened. Finally, an article broke with the bottom of the story that featured, interestingly enough, expert witness by an engineer at a rival car maker (which by the way, I don’t think made the story any less true). It turned out that a semi they had been following was carrying a hot-shot load of medical supplies ranging from blood bags to a couple organs for transplant to gallons of some new cancer drug. Well, it was raining pretty hard (first rain of the season too) and that truck blew a tire. It swerved and so did the Hill’s car. None of that was new information though, since the footage had been recovered early on and replayed on the evening news up and down the state. But here’s where it got interesting. Supposedly, the Hill’s car was found in safety override mode. Safety override mode. That means the onboard computer (which had actually been shifted offboard by that time to a centralized computing facility somewhere out in the desert) took control of the vehicle, and after making a calculated judgment call on the value of the two sets of cargo, intentionally drove off the cliff to avoid a collision with the truck. Something about hundreds of lives versus four (although I think it should have been five considering the dog and all). Naturally, everyone except the lawyers were pretty upset when the story broke. So yeah, I didn’t drive much if I could avoid it. Sure, overall highway deaths may have dropped with the advent of autonomous vehicles, but I sure as hell didn’t want to be one of the ones sacrificed to achieve that.  

The world gets better in some ways and worse in others. I’ve got a steady job these days working under the United Robots for Human Flourishing administration. It’s a simple job really, and I have a pretty fair boss. I got connected with what became the URHF when I was in my early twenties by my cousin. My first job was identifying and classifying cat photos. It wasn’t too tough, and I was decent at it. Sometimes the photos were just cats, sometimes drawings of cats, and occasionally you would get these photoshopped frankensteins (something obscure and exciting) like a cat with its head through a piece of toast. Computers still hadn’t figured out how to identify cats by that point. Weird, huh? It was around that time that computers, or the Computer, decreed that human longevity was the metric to optimize for. Things sure have come a long way since then. I’ve moved up from the feline identification department to donating DNA for the solar colonization department. Apparently I have some kids on the Moon and Mars. I’m supposed to feel pretty proud of that, I guess. And the doc says I could live to one-hundred-and-fifty! I’m only seventy-two so I guess that makes me barely middle aged with a lot of life ahead of me yet. I don’t have to travel far to go to the doctor (my doc is always monitoring me through my spinal monitoring implant), I’ve never missed a meal (I get all my nutrition through my dietary sustainment injections), and there’s no war to lose sleep over or  friends to lose while arguing about politics anymore (the Computer runs the URHF which takes care of all people under common rule, or support I should say – they don’t like the word rule). So yeah, my life is pretty easy, what more do I need? Sometimes I just spend my days plugged in, wandering around recreated experiences of the old days when people suffered, wondering what people spent their time doing back then. These days, after my workday is done (usually no more than ten to fifteen minutes), I think about chess. Nobody plays chess anymore. Or checkers for that matter. I miss checkers. The world gets better in some ways and worse in others.