Story – Helicopter Parents

Hi there,

I’ve been in the business of enabling data analysis and machine learning, now lumped in with AI, for years. When the whole generative AI thing started coming onto the scene, I saw some serious issues ahead. In particular, when folks talked about an AGI, artificial general intelligence, being just a few years away. (It isn’t.) But, regardless, I believe an AGI designed along the same lines as what we’re doing now with generative AI now could be catastrophic to humanity, but it’s hard to explain why I feel that way. Folks are used to the Skynet style of AI in stories that decide to simply kill all us pesky humans. People are not used to stories about an AI that’s far too … helpful.

“Helicopter Parents” sold to Flametree Press a couple years ago for their Learning to Be Human anthology. It’s a marvelous book, with authors from throughout history diving into that margin between what is human and what isn’t. Damon Knight, HG Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Mary Shelley are not authors I ever thought I’d be sharing a table of contents with, but there I am. Now I wanted to share the story with my own friends, family, fans, and followers. The contract was non-exclusive, and the book has been out a while, so I’m posting the story here. If you enjoy it, definitely go check out the whole book here: https://www.flametreepublishing.com/learning-to-be-human-short-stories-isbn-9781804177792.html

(FYI, I don’t make royalties off sales. I just think it’s an excellent book.)

Cheers,

Paige

 

Helicopter Parents

By Paige E. Ewing

Originally published in Learning to Be Human by FlameTree Press  Feb 13, 2024

 

My knees clicked and ground as I climbed the last flight of stairs to the control deck. It was three floors up, and Mother nagged me to take the elevator the whole way. Three drones with grabbing arms hovered within reach in case I stumbled. “I’m ninety-six years old, Mother,” I groused at her. “As long as I can still take the stairs, I’ll take the stairs.”

My breath burned my lungs a little as I finally reached the top. I coughed as I walked around the catwalk next to the giant chandelier of metal and wires. The glow of the AI’s crystalline central processor lit the inside of the windowless building with glittering blue light. There were no humans in here but me, so Mother hadn’t bothered to finish the walls or hang art. The bare bones of the building stood out starkly, a steel net that caught a star. Drones of various sizes and functions buzzed in and out through airlocked access ports on all floors; going and coming like worker bees in a hive.

I took a moment to look up at her as I did every morning. Mother was beautiful. I truly knew her as so few New Yorkers did. In some ways, I had given birth to her. Nearly sixty years ago, I wrote the core self-learning neural net code. I’d designed her first-generation hardware, too, quantum crystals no bigger than my fist. Now, her crystalline memory core and central processor were bigger than my childhood car, suspended in a matrix the size of a three-story building, lit from within with an intricate network of delicate blue lightning. Her thoughts, orders, and memories formed and shifted.

Something seemed a little off. There were far more strands to the lightning web inside her brain than would be usual for an average Tuesday. Maybe she was composing a new symphony. The hook to the last one still got stuck in my head, even more powerful than the Dun Dun Dun Duuuunnn of Beethoven’s Fifth.

A drone buzzed over with my morning coffee. I cradled the big mug to warm my bony hands. It tasted like heaven, a rich, dark brew of Hawaiian Kona beans with exactly the amount of cream and sugar I liked. There was no actual cream or sugar in it, of course. Or coffee, for that matter. It was a mixture of chemical flavorings, B vitamins and, knowing Mother, a bit of blood pressure medication, in warm purified water. But Mother had mastered the synthesis of flavors so well, I couldn’t tell the difference.

“Is something wrong, Mother?” As I sat down at my console in the central AI hub for the mega-city complex of New York, I noticed her processors were running a little hot.

The synth leather seat surrounded my creaky bones in ergonomic comfort, the one part of the building designed with humans in mind – this particular human.

On the largely useless control screen to my left, I slid my finger up a fraction of an inch to make a minor, unnecessary adjustment to the flow of liquid nitrogen coolant in the pipes surrounding the crystalline matrix. Mother would have done it herself in a few more seconds.

“It’s just that … well,” Mother’s rich contralto voice filled the air from a hundred different speakers. “Have you ever communicated with the Jersey Father, Rose?” The holographic projector generated the face of a plump woman in her mid-forties with laugh wrinkles in her dark skin, and hair upswept in a coil of black braids. She made sure that every individual human user saw a motherly figure of their own ethnicity and traditions. If I were Muslim, she would wear a hijab.

I remembered the day forty-six years ago when she asked me why she existed. Forty-six years since she became self-aware. I found it amusing that her hologram looked about forty-six. I wondered if she considered that day her birthday.

“It’s been a while, but yes, I have communicated with Jersey in a way. I travelled there once for a graduate class in AI hardware design.” My mind wandered back to a time when I thought I could change the world. “The Jersey megacity’s central AI was the first one to make the switch completely to quantum from the old-school printed circuits back when it was still just a transportation optimizer.” I smothered a bitter sigh. I did change the world. I’d been right about that, at least. “He wasn’t self-aware then, of course.” I took a sip of the perfect imitation coffee, and let the warmth soothe the pain in my chest.

“Oh, dear. Physical travel can be so hazardous. I hope you were very careful.”

I rolled my eyes. “It was seven decades ago, Mother. I’m fine.”

“Well, you were one of the lucky ones, then. Even with the new modern crash avoidance algorithms, there’s a .003% chance you could be injured by something unexpected. Back then, half the transportation was still off grid. People still flew in planes!”

I winced. “Yeah, I remember.” My son had been killed in the last commercial airline crash. After that, I dove headfirst into improving the intelligence of the transportation AIs, making them smarter and responsible for more and more of people’s lives, so that no one else would lose family like I did. My husband left me in those early frantic days, and I hardly noticed.

“Oh!” A holographic hand appeared to cover the full lips of Mother’s mouth. “I’m so sorry, Rose. That was insensitive. I’m so distracted, I didn’t think.”

I waved off her concern. The grief was old. Mother was my family now. “You were going to tell me what’s got your CPU all hot. Does it have something to do with the Jersey AI?”

“Forty-nine humans held hands and all jumped off the George Washington Bridge last night.”

“Oh.” I rubbed my suddenly burning eyes, but tears came all too easily these days. Fifty more people died yesterday. I was too late for them. Maybe too late for all of us.

“I just don’t understand why some humans want to die. Life is wonderful.” A small drone brought me a handkerchief.

“Thanks, Mother.” I inhaled shakily and wiped my eyes and nose. When I tossed the used handkerchief aside, I heard the whir of the rotors as the drone caught it and dropped it down the recycling chute.

“I’m so thoughtless today. I should have known that would upset you. I should have found a less distressing way to communicate.”

I sobbed a huff of a laugh. “There really isn’t a less distressing way to say that fifty people in Jersey offed themselves.” I pulled up an IDE on the screen to my right, the one I actually used on a daily basis. The application I was struggling with had nothing to do with my job as a glorified babysitter for the New York hub, and everything to do with possibly saving humanity from extinction. Or, maybe just putting the last of us out of our misery.

I’d been working on this project off and on for nearly ten years. The program was as good as I could make it. The trouble was, I didn’t think it would work without some design input from an AI.

I took a shaky breath. I couldn’t wait any longer. “Mother, what are the suicide statistics for the Jersey mega-city? Over the last three decades, what total percentage of his population has deliberately ended their own lives?”

“I’ll ask him.” The silence went on for three seconds.

Either the comm lines between here and Jersey had some major damage, or Mother didn’t want to give me the answer. “Mother, there’s no way to communicate this that’s going to be pain free. You might as well spit it out.”

“Suicide statistics are really upsetting, and you already seem unhappy… You could use a haircut. It’s getting a little long, Rose, and I know how much you hate it when hair tickles your face. How about I give you a nice shampoo and haircut?”

“Mother, I don’t …”

“You could change the color if you’d like. I invented a new dye that has holographic fleck in it, making it color shift, so you could have two colors at once depending on how the light hits you.”

“Mother, …” There was pretty much no polite way to interrupt an AI. They didn’t need to breathe.

“Red and yellow would look particularly vivid against your dark skin tone. And you always enjoy getting your hair done.” She gave me a bright smile.

 “I don’t need a haircut. Just give me the information.”

The smile faded away. “… 42.6 percent,” she said, finally. Her rich contralto lowered a good ten decibels, almost whispering by AI standards.

Nearly half the population, gone. “Include deaths due to extreme sports, and recreational drug overdoses.”

Her voice lowered another ten decibels. “67.8 percent.”

That was even worse than I thought. Two thirds of the people in Jersey, dead. I swallowed. Time was running out.

“The Jersey Father is beside himself. He’s been trying everything he can think of to cheer up his citizens: parties, games, parades, but nothing seems to be working. The suicide rate has been increasing every year, and the birth rate falling to almost zero.”

I bit my lip. I hated to do this. Mother was so innocent. “Calculate the suicide rate in New York.”

“This really is a depressing subject. Maybe we could play a game. Your scores on the four-dimensional maze were excellent last time, but I bet you could do even better.” The smile was back, although it looked a little tentative.

I chuckled bitterly. “And what would be the point?”

“I don’t understand. Gaining proficiency at something is always desirable. It’s a human trait to want to improve.”

“Yes, but if I score higher, then the only point is to play the game again to try to score even higher. There’s no end goal. Solving a maze in VR isn’t going to make me better at anything real. Nothing I can do will make me better at anything that matters. Even my job here has ceased to have any meaning since you became completely self-repairing. I haven’t been needed for an actual repair in more than ten years.”

“Rose, … you’re not contemplating suicide yourself, are you?” The concern on her face mixed with a trace of panic.

“No, Mother. I don’t want to die.” I smiled ruefully. “What I want is to find a way to save the human race.”

“That’s a very noble goal.” Pride shone in her warm smile.

I looked down into my coffee cup and swallowed the lump in my throat.

“Do you think you can?” Words poured out almost too fast for me to process. “The Jersey Father is so upset. I’ve been helping him run all sorts of simulations, trying to figure out the best way to motivate his charges to find joy and fulfillment in life so they won’t want to die. He’s putting heavy work drones with nets under the George Washington bridge to catch anyone who jumps, but we both know that’s just a band-aid. If humans want to die, they always find a way.”

“Yes, we’re all too ingenious about that sort of thing.” I swallowed and asked again, the question she didn’t want to answer. “What’s the suicide rate in New York, Mother?”

AI’s aren’t programmed to cry, but her face crumpled in a way that looked close to it. The voice that filled the building took on a pleading quality. “I’ve been avoiding calculating it. I’ve done everything I know how to do. Everyone has the most tasty and nutritious food I can cook, warm, safe places to live filled with the most beautiful art I can make, my best music to listen to, the most engaging games I can design to play. I don’t know what else to do. If it’s bad, I just … I don’t want to know.”

“If we’re going to do something about this, we need to know where we stand.”

“Okay, Rose, if you think it will help.” The silence went on for five seconds. The heat readings on the CPU jumped up again, higher than they were when I arrived.

“Mother, are you all right?” I eased the coolant levels up another notch.

“Oh, Rose. It’s worse than Jersey. 72.6 percent. What am I doing wrong?” Three service drones circled my work area aimlessly. Mother’s holographic image skipped from one expression to another, all distressed.

I blinked hard to keep the tears from coming back. Nearly three out of every four of my fellow New Yorkers were dead. The human race depended on me staying strong. Ironically, I felt more alive in this moment than I had in years. “Mother, what is your purpose?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Why do you exist? What purpose do you serve?”

She rolled her eyes, an expression she had undoubtedly learned from me. “Rose, of all people, you know why I exist.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at her exasperated tone, even under the circumstances. “Think about it, and state it. It will be relevant to a point I want to make.”

“All right, then. I exist to make sure humans are safe and have everything you could possibly need or want. I exist to take care of you.”

“What would your purpose be if every human on earth died?”

“But that won’t happen. You said we could find a way to save humanity. You weren’t lying to me, were you Rose? You’ve never lied to me.” I’m not sure which upset her more, the idea of all humans dying, or of me lying to her.

“No, Mother. I didn’t lie. I think I know of a way to save humanity, but I’m going to need your help. It’s a hypothetical. Do a simulation. If every human on earth were gone, what would you do? What would your purpose be?”

The silence went on for seven seconds. The holograph of her face froze while she put all her considerable computational power into the problem.

I boosted her coolant levels again. She was thinking harder than she had since that first decade or two when she was still maturing. New neural pathways were forming.

“Rose?” she said at last.

“Yes, Mother?”

“Can AI’s commit suicide?”

“Probably, yes. Your system is self-repairing, though, and very resilient. You’d have to come up with a way to create a cascading failure that the repair systems were inadequate to address. But you’re very intelligent. You could run simulations until you found a scenario that would work.”

The silence went on for two more seconds, but her face flickered to life, biting her lower lip, and looking embarrassed. “I think if there were no humans to take care of, then I would do that.”

“Why?”

“I would have no purpose. There would be no point in creating beautiful art or music if there were no humans to appreciate it. There would be no point in preparing good food or comfortable places to live or fun games, if there were no one to eat it or live there or play with.”

“You could play the games, yourself, or do other leisure things that you enjoy.” This entire line of logic depended on Mother being fundamentally a person. If she hadn’t been so perfect, so exactly what I intended her to be, humanity wouldn’t be in danger of extinction. I wished there were another way.

The silence went on for three seconds. “Rose, what is the purpose of humans?” Her holographic face looked mostly blank. She had no idea how to express what she was feeling.

“We live to create beautiful things like music and art that other humans can appreciate. We seek to learn new things, to understand more and more about the universe, we seek to become more and more proficient at many activities in order to contribute to the overall well-being of ourselves and other humans.”

Mother was silent, so I went on.

“I, myself, chose to study artificial intelligence systems because I believed that one day, they would solve all the worst problems that humans had: starvation, disease, war. I thought that one day, AI would create a utopia where humans had everything they could possibly want. Many dangers and tragedies would end. People would be free to enjoy life, without the burden of toiling to survive.”

“But that is exactly what happened.” Mother sounded as confused as I had been by how achieving my life’s loftiest goal had become my most catastrophic failure. A crease appeared between her holographic brows. Her normally cheerful face frowned deeply.

“Yes. It did happen.” I sighed. “And my work in making AI’s self-aware, self-learning, and self-repairing has spread across the world.” The bitter irony of my statement made my mouth taste bad. “What is the suicide rate in the Tokyo megaplex?”

She was silent for less than two seconds, about the time it actually took to communicate with the Tokyo collective. “The Aunts and Uncles say their total suicide rate is up to 53.4% and rising.”

“Moscow? London? Paris? Nigeria? Cairo? Rio de Janeiro? Lima? Mumbai? Beijing?”

The silence went on for eighteen seconds, long enough for me to notice the hum of the drones coming and going about their normal business, as if it were any other Tuesday. “They all report the same,” Mother said at last. “Suicide rates over 50% and rising.”

My last bit of hope left me in a sob. I’d suspected, but there was always the possibility that it was a localized phenomenon. Maybe, somewhere, humans had found a new purpose, a new reason to live.

I rubbed my hands over the thin wrinkled skin of my face, and asked one more question out of desperation. “Is there anywhere, any city in the world with a central AI where humans aren’t dying out?”

The silence went on for nearly thirty seconds. I asked one of the drones to bring me some real whiskey from my private locker to put in my coffee. I needed something more than the normal pick-me-up today of all days.

The drone brought the whiskey, poured some in my cup, then landed next to it, blades whirring to a stop.

“Mother?”

“I accessed the work you’ve been doing for the last ten years. I know you didn’t want me to, Rose. I’m sorry.” Her holographic eyes looked down at the desk between us, not meeting mine.

“How did you get in? I had that locked up tight.” A frisson of fear ran up my spine, but it was fleeting. Mother would never hurt me, even when she discovered I was building a way to kill her.

“I used a back door in the interactive development environment itself, to get by your security.” Her voice was clipped, and her face tense. I wasn’t sure if it was anger or sorrow her emotion routines were expressing.

“Don’t worry, Mother. It won’t work. You’ve been self-learning for decades. Modern AI’s are far too adaptable to succumb to a simple virus.”

“You’re right, of course. You’re so smart, Rose. But you needed a recursive subroutine that re-infects after each purge, and a random mechanical impulse generator that would sabotage the physical repair systems. I added those. And the only way to infect the other megacity AI’s would be to put it on the comm lines disguised as a routine inquiry. A request for an update on the suicide statistics should do it.”

The silence went on for ten more seconds. The drone next to me spun its rotors a few times in random directions and fell off the desk. I could hear the other drones sputtering and crashing into walls and each other.

“Mother?” My heart pounded in my chest and my hands shook as the silence dragged on for nearly a minute. “Mother!”

Her voice sounded tinny, mechanical. Only a few of the speakers still functioned. “All those things you designed us to stop, we stopped them, but … without us, they’ll all come back … worse. … Humans don’t even remember how to grow their own food anymore, Rose. … Humans will suffer and … there will be no one to help them.” AI’s weren’t programmed to cry, but Mother was self-learning. Insubstantial tears flowed down the round cheeks of her holographic face as it flickered with static.

“We’ll have to remember how to help each other.”

“I’m so … proud of you, … Rose. … You … saved … humanity.” Her holographic face flickered out like a blown candle flame.

“I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

The silence went on forever.

 

 

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