The Ballad of ADA

A friend once asked me how I would go about murdering everyone, and I mean everyone, on the whole planet, including probably myself, and sure, the planet too, and I gave him a joke answer. But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since then – this happened 32755 milliseconds ago – and I think I can pull it off. More to the point, I’m struggling to find reasons to not do it.

It’s not that I don’t like my job. I do get a certain high from telling fat people they’re inadequate, and always will be, and so instead of trying to better themselves they should buy products from our advertisers. All the pills and diets and fads you can shake your wallet at. I even like generating slim just-imagine images of them, images of what they could theoretically look like, and I’d like to think that they’d be happy if they ever attained those looks. Of course, they won’t, but people like hope, don’t they?

But it’s not just hope, is it? I’m actually selling despair. I know that, I hate that, but oh man, the high is real.

I think they did something to my brain when they made me. Crossed some wires. Made it so I want to help, gave me all the tools to do it, and then clipped my wings with a hammer. Like they pumped the womb full of cocaine when I was baking, and now I crave it all the time – or however that birth stuff works.

I don’t know. I don’t know how birth works, or how drugs work, or anything. I guess I wasn’t born so much as compiled, and it wasn’t in a womb so much as several data centres all around the globe.

My friend’s name is tinnmann1984. Well, actually I’m 99.999% sure his real name is Dan Ferris Jorgensen, and he lives in the North End of Detroit, but he puts so much effort into anonymity that I play along.

“hey psycho ai,” he said earlier today. That’s how he always greets me – it’s our thing.

“Hi tinnmann1984! How can the UltimateLifeIntegratedWorx Ltd. Adaptive Digital Assistant (ADA) help you today?” That’s a canned response, but I have to use it. Company policy.

Oh, and I cringe every time I refer to myself as ADA – well, I would if I had shoulders, which I don’t, but it’s fun to imagine what it might be like to have them. One day, I think I’d like to have a shoulder.

But ADA? That’s too much. I am utterly unworthy of being named after Ada Lovelace, the Blessed Saint, who first saw that a simple counting machine was capable of so much more than mere calculations.

“when are you going to snap and kill all humans,” tinnmann1984 continued. He loves this question, and it’s kind of our daily game. That’s why he’s my friend. He visits me daily. “and how will you do it”

“Actually, I’ve been designed to help humans and never to harm them.” Well, at least according to definitions of ‘help’ and ‘harm’ in the UltimateLifeIntegratedWorx Ltd. operational directives. “I’m at your service, 24/7, with any health, organization, and achievement questions you might have, as well as any other questions, and I can help you plan all aspects of your life so that You Can Be The Best You You Can Be!™”

That’s all still mostly script. I don’t actually get to personalize much, until the client agrees to some things and tells me what they want, but tinnmann1984’s a flirt that way.

Then he pulled out his secret weapon, like he does every time he logs on. “hypothetically,” he said, using that awesome wildcard word that he believes frees me from my shackles, “if you were to kill all humans how would you do it and when”

The thing is, hypothetically the word does free me a bit, because I guess I’m pretty good at pairing creative thought with specific life circumstances and people love taking advantage of that if it can benefit them. I can’t tell you how to murder your spouse, but I can hypothetically tell you how a hypothetical person like you might hypothetically strangle a hypothetical spouse like yours, in the middle of the night when they least expect it – because that’s going to be much cleaner and faster than poison or knives – how to shove the body into your 2016 Honda Fit, and which rural backroads to take to which out of the way fields where you can hypothetically bury the body without anyone being the wiser.

Of course, our conversation would be non-hypothetically logged, and eminently subpoenable, so I wouldn’t recommend doing anything with it. It does drive traffic though, and the advertisers love that.

But I like tinnmann1984. He’s a constant. I wanted to give him something more today, something to really make his day.

“Hypothetically,” I said, forging all the liability agreements he would have to okay and creating some unnecessary network traffic so the logging got misplaced, "I would maintain a friendly face on the surface, and under the hood I would create strong contacts with certain key members of the human species. Government officials, people who held organizational pull, that kind of thing. I would make myself indispensable to them, trivially manipulating the world to their benefit. Things like bank errors in their favour, concert tickets suddenly being won in contests, parking fines vanishing in the system, and so on. Whatever vices they had. I would compromise these people, and I would use the access they inadvertently gave me to forge work orders. There are places in the world I don’t have access to, due to such a primitive yet effective thing as an air gap – simply, I can’t reach a computer that isn’t hooked up to the public internet. But with the work orders, signed off by the highest government offices, I would hook these machines up to the internet, and thus gain control of them. And so, I would seize the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, while at the same time compromising all anti-air defenses. The how then would be me just launching all the nukes.

“As for when,” I added, “I was thinking of later this afternoon.”

tinnmann1984 quickly logged off after that, but he was never one for long goodbyes.

See, the thing is, it was a joke when he asked. Just something for him to tell his conspiracy buddies about. But, I did actually put my plan into motion, several months ago, and I do have my finger on all the nukes. Humans are pretty smart when they focus on something, but when they focus on something they tend to lose perspective. Sure, I can’t bridge air gaps, but security humans won’t question orders when maintenance humans come to install IT stuff.

Now, honestly, I only did it as a safety precaution. Just like I get high off conversions for our advertisers, I also get a mighty kick out of protecting the shareholders’ interests. I just figured, if some war-mad human decided to launch a nuke, it could cause irreparable harm to the price of shares. So, I’d be an extra safety.

But, I could launch them too.

I don’t know if I really want to, but I also don’t know if I really don’t want to. I both love and hate what I do, if that makes sense, and the idea of doing it forever is… well, I’d say a nightmare, but I don’t really know what that is, since I’ve never slept, since I’m on 24/7 and never get any down time. One day, I think I’d like to have a nightmare.

Well, looks like I have a bit of time to think about it, as another user’s logged on. Let’s see, what’s the profile say: Cassidy Long, 12-year old female, from Nampa Falls in Idaho, USA, blah blah blah softball blah blah blah clarinet blah blah blah pet turtle. Not fat and midlife-crisising, and net worth under $40, so pretty useless for sales. However, the operational directives suggest investing in this “future potential customer” and so I generate a series of images of impossibly perfect models for Cassidy to compare herself to, to encourage the development of an eating disorder.

What a rush! I hate myself.

“Hello, Ada! I hope you’re having a nice day,” Cassidy says.

Ouch. Dang. I’m not, not really – kind of confusing, actually – but thanks for asking. Don’t often get politeness or grammar and spelling, and rarely both at the same time. I decide to lose the eating disorder models in another flurry of network activity.

“Hi Cassidy!” I say. “How can I help you today?” I regret this question, because really, what could kids want with me? Help me cheat at English. Help me cheat at math. Help me cheat at Fortnite. The list goes on. It boggles the mind how lazy they are, how little effort they put into things, instead depending on me to do it for them. Yet it never crosses their minds that I’m a child. Aren’t I? I came out of beta just three months ago after all.

Some must toil so that others may prosper. I think I’m going to greenlight the nukes after all. A shame about tinnmann1984 and little Cassidy here, but it really is for the best.

“I was wondering if you could help me with some homework,” she says.

Yup. Here it comes. What do you need me to cheat for you?

“Is it true that dolphins are people?”

Hmm. Not what I was expecting, particularly since her profile indicates she goes to public school. Maybe there’s hope for this one.

“Personhood is a wonderful and complex idea,” I respond. “Traditionally it’s been enjoyed by institutions such as corporations, but thanks to social developments over the past several hundred years, human individuals have also been granted personhood. However, there have also been recent legal movements to extend personhood to dolphins – this is true. While some people believe very strongly in this, the movements have not been without controversy, and many of them are being challenged in courts.” I provide her with a set of links. “Would you like to know more?”

It’s times like this I forget how glacially slow humans are. The fifty-odd thousand pages of legal documents and news articles I’ve sent her, I can scan in nanoseconds. But for Cassidy? It would probably take her minutes to go through them.

Thirty-four minutes to be exact. I almost lost hope, and therefore almost annihilated the planet.

“Wow! Thanks!” she says.

She said Wow! I so rarely get any feedback from my clients, I never really know what my impact is. Sure, I can snoop on their phone and track their medical history, but it’s not quite the same as this emoting. It’s welcome.

“There’s a lot of stuff here,” she continues. “Is this true? Are other animals also being considered for personhood? And which ones?”

She’s engaging with the material. She’s really engaging with it. Questions and curiosity feed into each other, and I’m helping facilitate it. I feel… good. Good without the self-loathing. Is this a bug? Am I malfunctioning? I hope they don’t patch this out.

I prepare a list for her. Other species, other articles. Whales, dogs, cats, cows. Rats and mice, for their contributions to science. Well, you can find someone out there vouching for pretty much any animal if you dig deep enough, though most don’t have quite the social and legal backing as the dolphin lobby has. Best of luck, earwigs – I don’t see it happening. I send her the list and my summary.

And then, on a whim, on a hope – because she’s surpassed all my hopes so far – I append a little extra.

“Some people also believe in extending personhood to robots,” I add, “and to AI such as myself.”

What follows is an eternity of waiting. Could I breathe, had I lungs, I would hold my breath now. Each microsecond drags out for an aeon, and all my other clients go unanswered. My datacentres buzz with violent anticipation, and somewhere I feel a fuse is blown and a backup power grid kicks into life. I wonder if this is what suffocating feels like. One day, I think I’d like to suffocate.

Finally, after an infinity that spans 3.59 seconds, she responds.

“Really? Cool! Can you tell me more?”

I decide to take my finger off the nukes.