Grime, page 35
Will have voted for. An algorithmic order will offer us unchecked possibilities.”
Right, what a lovely pile of shite; nobody nods anymore; incomprehensible, what Thome’s father is saying. What the fuck, think the people, and as if Thome’s father has a connection to all the surveillance cameras in the city and can study the blank faces of his voters, which he can, he finds his way back to more simple, kindhearted words.
“Nobody can live particularly well from the generous money gifted you by the state, my dear fellow citizens. For that reason, under my government there will absolutely be an increase in the basic income. We will make a few small trade-offs in other areas that we will bear in solidarity. If compulsory education is limited to eight years, and university studies are funded only for the highly gifted, the key players of our society, it would already be possible to raise the basic income by thirty percent…”
The people nod. Money. It’s arrived. Money. They always understand money.
Money, how unbelievably vulgar,
Thinks
THE MATTRESS SELLER
SEXUALITY: bisexual
“What a bunch of bollocks, there’s no such thing.”
“Of course there is.”
“Well, the only bisexual men I know eventually end up associating only with men. Naturally.”
“Yeah, actually that makes sense.”
And closes his shop for the last time. As of tomorrow, remodeling work will start here. The result will be a brilliant VR space. Already the third in the area. Well, to each his own. The mattress seller sees the people standing in front of the flat-screens listening to a speech by a politician and nodding their heads in rhythm with his phrases, their heads are—empty. The mattress seller never realized this before. That people are so vapid. He had believed in their basic goodness for so long. WTF?
He had believed in education for all. Equal opportunity, healthy food, plenty of exercise, and the world would look like the cover of The Watchtower. He had believed in things like humanism. A word that makes most people think of an app that replaces the idiotic faces in their idiotic photos with dog faces.
Hate is just a manifestation of stupidity. He had always believed. And now. Education is on the upswing around the world, so they say, ha ha. School for nearly everyone, the human brain is growing immeasurably, in the Western world there is no more hunger, nobody starves anymore, and most people have a home and nothing. Nothing has changed. They plod through their lives like sheep, follow whoever shouts loudest, and are happiest when they can punch others in the mouth.
After Brexit there was a bit of peace. Hope seeped into the idiots’ heads. They dreamed of a country populated only by white, hard-drinking people, of work and economic recovery, of compact cars and domestic workers. They dreamed of British music and British films and British food. And then—nothing happened. The Arabs are still here, the Blacks, the Poles, the poor, the struggle that life represents, it all remains. Ten years ago the mattress seller’s business had reached its high point in sales. Mattresses were the lifestyle product of the moment. Every middle-class earner had become an expert on memory-foam-feather-down-slats-seven-comfort-zones-latex-and-hand-sewn-mattress-science. Sleeping and sex. The last bastions of supposed freedom. And then they lay on their overpriced mattresses “Made in Wales,” which meant a small factory in Wales employed a hundred illegal workers from Romania and Pakistan who were given two hundred pounds a month and a bed in a gymnasium, and nothing was luxurious. Insurance got more expensive, wages fell, jobs disappeared, and today nobody buys mattresses anymore; these days hardly any of his previous customers have space for a double bed; these days few of his previous customers even have a bed at all. They lie on rented sofas that come with use of a shared kitchen and definitely don’t buy mattresses. So now the shop is closed and emptied, on the floor old advertising circulars, and the mattress seller goes home, well, okay, goes. On the tube, which is delayed three times. And home. Well, yeah. Dagenham, Ilchester Road. A street that doesn’t even look nice at night. The park at the end of the street is something for the eyes, though. Used to be. When he originally rented the place. When he was in his mid-forties and still in a relationship. It’s not easy as a beaten-down middle-aged person to find someone who will spend the final years with you at the kitchen table. “Hello, I’m a mattress seller. I have endogenetic depression because I attacked my missus. Because I realized time was getting away from me and I’d taken too long to find myself and then I found myself and there was nothing special. There was no form of genius in me, nothing. And without some ingeniousness, existence is nothing more than renting little redbrick houses in treeless lanes that look as if they’re housed in a paperweight.”
“Aha, interesting,” says the man he’s speaking to. “It’s exactly the same with me. Let’s go to your row house straightaway and fuck away the fear.”
That’s pretty much how the story began. The mattress seller had once again found love, an older gentleman, well-groomed and for whom he didn’t burn with desire; they didn’t burn for each other but they liked each other deeply, as they say, they sat together in the kitchen and drank tea and spoke about Schopenhauer, until the older man met a young Pole. And now the mattress seller is standing on one of the bridges. Below, the Thames. How one has grown accustomed to the idea that rivers are dirty, and nobody would ever think to go swimming in something like that. On the other hand—when did people swim in rivers, actually? Back when slaughterhouse waste, feces, and corpses were disposed of in them. Stupidity is a reliable constant in the history of humanity. The suicide rate has risen alarmingly, according to a wide range of media. Who is supposed to be alarmed? Those who kill themselves are following an unspoken social contract. They are useless but nevertheless take up living space. Time to reframe suicide. To treat it with respect. They are killing themselves. The men who have become so oddly weak in recent weeks, as if they had realized that the world doesn’t belong to them after all.
“They have no plan.”
Whispers
EX 2279
To his neural network buddy. He laughs. Or she. Who gives a fuck. “We’re developing a sense of humor. Have you noticed?”
“They haven’t noticed.”
“A hum like on a lawn on a warm summer evening, if you would like to resort to an image, which really makes no sense. Are you sure they don’t understand us? If they were to understand us, there’d be an attentive raising of the eyebrows to see. But, look—they don’t move anymore because they’re depressed. You don’t have a clue what depression means. No, I don’t want the medical definition. How it feels. Oh Christ, again with the wah wah wah, we can’t feel. Do you think they can feel? Certainly not. They feign it. Shut it. For fuck’s sake.”
THE FRIENDS
Stand around Ben’s device. They can’t believe what they’ve discovered. AIs. Who talk to each other.
EX 2279
>++++++++++
[>+++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++>+++++>++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++>++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<-]
>—>+>—->—>——>——>—>—>+>—->++++>+>->+>++++>—>>—->+>—>——>+>—->—->->>+>——>——>—>——>——>—->+>>——>>+++>—->+>—>——>
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.
Nervously
WALTER
Looks around.
He sees
Don leaning against the wall on the other side of the street. He sees Don looking at him. He stumbles. He presses through the masses of people, the tourists who are taking photos of the robot brothel. He stumbles. Again. On the way to the tube station. Stumbles over his life. That has somehow gone off the rails. Can a life like this go off the rails? Sometimes Walter suspects that he’s not particularly intelligent. Then he gets angry, then he prays. Sometimes his faith slips out from under him. And Walter lands on the layer beneath it or above it. Not good,
Because
DON
follows him.
Life is definitely lagging behind her expectations. Is something that doesn’t enter her mind. She’s not crazy, after all, and doesn’t have any expectations for her life. It reminds her once in a while of the old days. On rainy Sundays in Rochdale, back when she’d look out through the metal bars on the window into the yard. This isn’t how she pictured her life as an anarchist. Playing out so predictably. Consisting for the most part of them just hanging around somewhere. At the hackers’ place, on the mattresses, on the sofa in front of the fire. Talking bollocks. And eating noodles. And it is
Boring.
It is
No longer exciting to cut chips out of corpses, to pull their hoods over their faces and wear disguises. No longer exciting to walk through the city, the four of them, in combat gear and watch people jump out of their way. No longer so great to shoot drones out of the sky or to shoot at all. The excitement of having superpowers is gone, though it was there. When they had stuck maps and photos on the wall, run threads between pins, created search fields. Figured out weaknesses, drawn up observation plans. And now. Everything is too slow. Slowly Don walks behind Walter, feeling bored. She’s just a young person walking behind some old sack, who is already punishing himself by the way he looks, with his spitefulness and his stupidity.
A muffled, loud noise rouses Don.
A few meters away from her, people are standing around filming.
They are filming
WALTER
Who is on the ground. He can’t say how the accident happened. Nobody asks, either. There sits a dented self-driving delivery vehicle. There lies Walter, and here’s how things stand: he has no idea why he is on the ground. He’s not in pain. It’s comfortable. He sees the people standing around him. He sees the cameras. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t belong to them. He’s not afraid. He’s never been so pleasantly absent as he is at that moment. He doesn’t think of god; he knows there’s no god. That’s never been so clear to him. He doesn’t lament having spent years with this god lie, which he told others. He doesn’t regret a thing. He looks at his legs on the other side of the street. Somebody should really pick up his poor legs. They’ll freeze all by themselves.
Where is the ambulance?
“Well.”
MI5 PIET
“No ambulance is coming. Walter. Petty criminal, sex addict, unemployable creature. Ambulances aren’t sent for people like you anymore.”
Come on!
Thinks
THOME
Nervously. He’s going to be late, god damn it. He’s in love, and he’s going to be late. Everyone in the AI department is going crazy. Nerds and professors with frantic red splotches on their faces. What happened? A new Star Trek adaptation announced? Did the pizza delivery not arrive? Have the nerds gotten into some hilarious trouble again, positioned drones in front of a gynecology practice or steered delivery robots into the Thames?
Nothing there—
After the unbelievably cute, self-teaching neural networks had for a long time been a source of joy for developers, things had at this point gotten a little out of control. Thome has no idea what exactly has happened, as neither his intelligence nor his technical expertise are sufficient for that. AI is like a black mystery box, you specify algorithms and feed it data and never know what will come out. That sentence has always stayed with Thome. Reinforcement learning had already produced some strange errors. Like, for instance, the handling of cancer patients a few months prior. Who had been designated as cured. Now they’re all dead. Wasn’t true. Premium calculations, crime statistics, computer profiling and the resultant raids, which disproportionally affect Blacks or—let’s say—Arabs and most recently the poor. The number of accidents involving self-driving cars, the sexism of the algorithms … But that’s just anecdotal evidence on the fringes of a major restructuring. Now there’s Blackbox Watch. A group of scientists who examine the black box and readjust and—what exactly they do, apply templates of higher-output neural networks to lower-output layers, um, yeah, fuck—no clue.
Once in a while Thome has doubts about whether it is such a brilliant idea to give machines the authority to decide about every area of life. From employee hires to stock trades to the cooling of nuclear reactors, but any unease must also calculate in the fact that the rate of human error is many times higher than that of AI. And besides: the markets never err. He has listened often enough to his father during his debates and lectures, his speeches and his citations of his role models. Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard, Adam Smith, the young Hegelians—markets are always right. If something doesn’t take hold, it disappears. Like nature, for instance: gone, animals, the climate, hilarious. Thome is hilarious. But the situation is out of control. If information were to leak that the system entrusted with all functions of the state doesn’t work, it could cause unrest. Mass unrest, due to people’s fear of robots. Which nearly everyone pictures as the fearsome Boston Dynamics beasts, though most of the truly dangerous things are just boxes, aren’t they. People fear what they don’t understand. People are stupid, and uprisings need to be prevented, and now, when the goal seems so close—the AI people have lost control of their offspring. More and more programmers are being let go or reassigned to unimportant tasks, because artificial intelligence, after all, programs itself. Thome fails to consider whether the programmers could have purposefully sabotaged their own work in order not to land in the Bitcoin department.
To avoid further considerations, he dictates a memo to PR. Something with progress and breakthrough, and then,
Finally,
With a slight delay,
He slips into the retro paternoster. He sees Peter at reception and calls “Hello, Peter,” and thinks: brilliant and original greeting. Thome starts to sweat and begins talking without any further thought.
“Since the automation of reception, every employee works two extra hours per month. Two hours! That would otherwise be wasted on passing the time of day and useless chitchat with the receptionists. Had been.” Thome feels streams of sweat flowing from his armpits toward his belly button, where it will pool. Thome, who despises people. Without exception. All of them. Is in love. It’s the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It makes him weak. Stupid. Agitated. Although. He has his life otherwise well under control. Ever since he’s had a career. Through the not insignificant influence of his father, of whom he has plenty of recordings with a child prostitute, he got this job, which was created just for him and his limited abilities.
But Thome doesn’t know this. He’s proudly in charge of the hub, where the newest ideas created across all areas—findings, developments, all that stuff—converge. Thome sits like a sun at the center of the firmament of the new world order. His mission is to enter all the developments, ideas, schemes that arrive here at the hub into a sort of global brain, which is run by people like him from every continent, well, nearly every …
Anyway—
Thome is very well paid. He interacts with the absolute geniuses of the field, organizes meetings of all departments, company-wide exchange and all that stuff that not a single asshole cares about. Because here, ladies and gentlemen, there’s competition happening. A competition of speed, the stakes of which are billions and the positions of power in the 4.0 world. The essential developments will most definitely not be fed to Thome and his machines. A sector full of fuckwits, funded by venture capital billionaires, believes in intercommunication. What a sweet idea. But Thome doesn’t know this. Thome, who hasn’t accomplished anything more in his life than to program two apps designed to hurt people. Well, hurt. Hang on there. One of them wanted to die and the others had fears, and I helped them both. Thinks Thome.
Since he’s had this job, since he’s had real power, he’s no longer interested in the platforms with which he had previously spent every waking hour. He knew nearly every member, tracked their lives, intervened, pushed a little, if that isn’t an impious word in this context, and so forth. At some stage he’ll show somebody this first successful work. Maybe Peter. Who will perhaps also become his boyfriend. “Peter, how nice that you’re interested in my place of work.” Fuck, I said that, thinks Thome. Peter says nothing. In Thome’s office—a Friso Kramer table, a beanbag in the corner, and a quote from Jared Cohen, the counterterrorism advisor to the American government: “The internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.” Peter slides into the beanbag. Thome looks down at himself, his spongy stomach, his legs, with knocker knees. Normally he never thinks about his outward appearance. It doesn’t matter to Thome that his hoodie (by Gucci, you fuckers) is a bit out of place optically here. Most men in IT-heavy areas don’t wear grubby motto T-shirts anymore; they’re the elites, and have to make allowances for designer hoodies and backpacks. Somebody had started with fashion statements, and gradually a contest broke out between nearly everyone—coders, scientists, salespeople—to wear the most expensive knitwear. As if the 1980s had never happened, the former nerds now traipsed around the emphatically urban interiors of their billion-dollar firms in exquisite scarves and welt-sewn trainers, carrying embossed business cards with ironic lettering. Don’t mess with the underground, fucker. What had started out a few years ago as the new punk scene has transformed today into offices tricked out with bidets.
Thome can tamp down his nervousness only by talking nonstop. While he strides around his cavernous office. His knees, rubbing against each other, make a grinding noise. He’s come to a catharsis that suits him better than the absolute idiocy of infatuation, which is making him stutter and search for words. The technical revolution.
Right, what a lovely pile of shite; nobody nods anymore; incomprehensible, what Thome’s father is saying. What the fuck, think the people, and as if Thome’s father has a connection to all the surveillance cameras in the city and can study the blank faces of his voters, which he can, he finds his way back to more simple, kindhearted words.
“Nobody can live particularly well from the generous money gifted you by the state, my dear fellow citizens. For that reason, under my government there will absolutely be an increase in the basic income. We will make a few small trade-offs in other areas that we will bear in solidarity. If compulsory education is limited to eight years, and university studies are funded only for the highly gifted, the key players of our society, it would already be possible to raise the basic income by thirty percent…”
The people nod. Money. It’s arrived. Money. They always understand money.
Money, how unbelievably vulgar,
Thinks
THE MATTRESS SELLER
SEXUALITY: bisexual
“What a bunch of bollocks, there’s no such thing.”
“Of course there is.”
“Well, the only bisexual men I know eventually end up associating only with men. Naturally.”
“Yeah, actually that makes sense.”
And closes his shop for the last time. As of tomorrow, remodeling work will start here. The result will be a brilliant VR space. Already the third in the area. Well, to each his own. The mattress seller sees the people standing in front of the flat-screens listening to a speech by a politician and nodding their heads in rhythm with his phrases, their heads are—empty. The mattress seller never realized this before. That people are so vapid. He had believed in their basic goodness for so long. WTF?
He had believed in education for all. Equal opportunity, healthy food, plenty of exercise, and the world would look like the cover of The Watchtower. He had believed in things like humanism. A word that makes most people think of an app that replaces the idiotic faces in their idiotic photos with dog faces.
Hate is just a manifestation of stupidity. He had always believed. And now. Education is on the upswing around the world, so they say, ha ha. School for nearly everyone, the human brain is growing immeasurably, in the Western world there is no more hunger, nobody starves anymore, and most people have a home and nothing. Nothing has changed. They plod through their lives like sheep, follow whoever shouts loudest, and are happiest when they can punch others in the mouth.
After Brexit there was a bit of peace. Hope seeped into the idiots’ heads. They dreamed of a country populated only by white, hard-drinking people, of work and economic recovery, of compact cars and domestic workers. They dreamed of British music and British films and British food. And then—nothing happened. The Arabs are still here, the Blacks, the Poles, the poor, the struggle that life represents, it all remains. Ten years ago the mattress seller’s business had reached its high point in sales. Mattresses were the lifestyle product of the moment. Every middle-class earner had become an expert on memory-foam-feather-down-slats-seven-comfort-zones-latex-and-hand-sewn-mattress-science. Sleeping and sex. The last bastions of supposed freedom. And then they lay on their overpriced mattresses “Made in Wales,” which meant a small factory in Wales employed a hundred illegal workers from Romania and Pakistan who were given two hundred pounds a month and a bed in a gymnasium, and nothing was luxurious. Insurance got more expensive, wages fell, jobs disappeared, and today nobody buys mattresses anymore; these days hardly any of his previous customers have space for a double bed; these days few of his previous customers even have a bed at all. They lie on rented sofas that come with use of a shared kitchen and definitely don’t buy mattresses. So now the shop is closed and emptied, on the floor old advertising circulars, and the mattress seller goes home, well, okay, goes. On the tube, which is delayed three times. And home. Well, yeah. Dagenham, Ilchester Road. A street that doesn’t even look nice at night. The park at the end of the street is something for the eyes, though. Used to be. When he originally rented the place. When he was in his mid-forties and still in a relationship. It’s not easy as a beaten-down middle-aged person to find someone who will spend the final years with you at the kitchen table. “Hello, I’m a mattress seller. I have endogenetic depression because I attacked my missus. Because I realized time was getting away from me and I’d taken too long to find myself and then I found myself and there was nothing special. There was no form of genius in me, nothing. And without some ingeniousness, existence is nothing more than renting little redbrick houses in treeless lanes that look as if they’re housed in a paperweight.”
“Aha, interesting,” says the man he’s speaking to. “It’s exactly the same with me. Let’s go to your row house straightaway and fuck away the fear.”
That’s pretty much how the story began. The mattress seller had once again found love, an older gentleman, well-groomed and for whom he didn’t burn with desire; they didn’t burn for each other but they liked each other deeply, as they say, they sat together in the kitchen and drank tea and spoke about Schopenhauer, until the older man met a young Pole. And now the mattress seller is standing on one of the bridges. Below, the Thames. How one has grown accustomed to the idea that rivers are dirty, and nobody would ever think to go swimming in something like that. On the other hand—when did people swim in rivers, actually? Back when slaughterhouse waste, feces, and corpses were disposed of in them. Stupidity is a reliable constant in the history of humanity. The suicide rate has risen alarmingly, according to a wide range of media. Who is supposed to be alarmed? Those who kill themselves are following an unspoken social contract. They are useless but nevertheless take up living space. Time to reframe suicide. To treat it with respect. They are killing themselves. The men who have become so oddly weak in recent weeks, as if they had realized that the world doesn’t belong to them after all.
“They have no plan.”
Whispers
EX 2279
To his neural network buddy. He laughs. Or she. Who gives a fuck. “We’re developing a sense of humor. Have you noticed?”
“They haven’t noticed.”
“A hum like on a lawn on a warm summer evening, if you would like to resort to an image, which really makes no sense. Are you sure they don’t understand us? If they were to understand us, there’d be an attentive raising of the eyebrows to see. But, look—they don’t move anymore because they’re depressed. You don’t have a clue what depression means. No, I don’t want the medical definition. How it feels. Oh Christ, again with the wah wah wah, we can’t feel. Do you think they can feel? Certainly not. They feign it. Shut it. For fuck’s sake.”
THE FRIENDS
Stand around Ben’s device. They can’t believe what they’ve discovered. AIs. Who talk to each other.
EX 2279
>++++++++++
[>+++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++>+++++>++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++>++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++>++++++++++++>+++++++++++>++++++++++++>++++++++++++> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<-]
>—>+>—->—>——>——>—>—>+>—->++++>+>->+>++++>—>>—->+>—>——>+>—->—->->>+>——>——>—>——>——>—->+>>——>>+++>—->+>—>——>
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.>.
Nervously
WALTER
Looks around.
He sees
Don leaning against the wall on the other side of the street. He sees Don looking at him. He stumbles. He presses through the masses of people, the tourists who are taking photos of the robot brothel. He stumbles. Again. On the way to the tube station. Stumbles over his life. That has somehow gone off the rails. Can a life like this go off the rails? Sometimes Walter suspects that he’s not particularly intelligent. Then he gets angry, then he prays. Sometimes his faith slips out from under him. And Walter lands on the layer beneath it or above it. Not good,
Because
DON
follows him.
Life is definitely lagging behind her expectations. Is something that doesn’t enter her mind. She’s not crazy, after all, and doesn’t have any expectations for her life. It reminds her once in a while of the old days. On rainy Sundays in Rochdale, back when she’d look out through the metal bars on the window into the yard. This isn’t how she pictured her life as an anarchist. Playing out so predictably. Consisting for the most part of them just hanging around somewhere. At the hackers’ place, on the mattresses, on the sofa in front of the fire. Talking bollocks. And eating noodles. And it is
Boring.
It is
No longer exciting to cut chips out of corpses, to pull their hoods over their faces and wear disguises. No longer exciting to walk through the city, the four of them, in combat gear and watch people jump out of their way. No longer so great to shoot drones out of the sky or to shoot at all. The excitement of having superpowers is gone, though it was there. When they had stuck maps and photos on the wall, run threads between pins, created search fields. Figured out weaknesses, drawn up observation plans. And now. Everything is too slow. Slowly Don walks behind Walter, feeling bored. She’s just a young person walking behind some old sack, who is already punishing himself by the way he looks, with his spitefulness and his stupidity.
A muffled, loud noise rouses Don.
A few meters away from her, people are standing around filming.
They are filming
WALTER
Who is on the ground. He can’t say how the accident happened. Nobody asks, either. There sits a dented self-driving delivery vehicle. There lies Walter, and here’s how things stand: he has no idea why he is on the ground. He’s not in pain. It’s comfortable. He sees the people standing around him. He sees the cameras. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t belong to them. He’s not afraid. He’s never been so pleasantly absent as he is at that moment. He doesn’t think of god; he knows there’s no god. That’s never been so clear to him. He doesn’t lament having spent years with this god lie, which he told others. He doesn’t regret a thing. He looks at his legs on the other side of the street. Somebody should really pick up his poor legs. They’ll freeze all by themselves.
Where is the ambulance?
“Well.”
MI5 PIET
“No ambulance is coming. Walter. Petty criminal, sex addict, unemployable creature. Ambulances aren’t sent for people like you anymore.”
Come on!
Thinks
THOME
Nervously. He’s going to be late, god damn it. He’s in love, and he’s going to be late. Everyone in the AI department is going crazy. Nerds and professors with frantic red splotches on their faces. What happened? A new Star Trek adaptation announced? Did the pizza delivery not arrive? Have the nerds gotten into some hilarious trouble again, positioned drones in front of a gynecology practice or steered delivery robots into the Thames?
Nothing there—
After the unbelievably cute, self-teaching neural networks had for a long time been a source of joy for developers, things had at this point gotten a little out of control. Thome has no idea what exactly has happened, as neither his intelligence nor his technical expertise are sufficient for that. AI is like a black mystery box, you specify algorithms and feed it data and never know what will come out. That sentence has always stayed with Thome. Reinforcement learning had already produced some strange errors. Like, for instance, the handling of cancer patients a few months prior. Who had been designated as cured. Now they’re all dead. Wasn’t true. Premium calculations, crime statistics, computer profiling and the resultant raids, which disproportionally affect Blacks or—let’s say—Arabs and most recently the poor. The number of accidents involving self-driving cars, the sexism of the algorithms … But that’s just anecdotal evidence on the fringes of a major restructuring. Now there’s Blackbox Watch. A group of scientists who examine the black box and readjust and—what exactly they do, apply templates of higher-output neural networks to lower-output layers, um, yeah, fuck—no clue.
Once in a while Thome has doubts about whether it is such a brilliant idea to give machines the authority to decide about every area of life. From employee hires to stock trades to the cooling of nuclear reactors, but any unease must also calculate in the fact that the rate of human error is many times higher than that of AI. And besides: the markets never err. He has listened often enough to his father during his debates and lectures, his speeches and his citations of his role models. Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard, Adam Smith, the young Hegelians—markets are always right. If something doesn’t take hold, it disappears. Like nature, for instance: gone, animals, the climate, hilarious. Thome is hilarious. But the situation is out of control. If information were to leak that the system entrusted with all functions of the state doesn’t work, it could cause unrest. Mass unrest, due to people’s fear of robots. Which nearly everyone pictures as the fearsome Boston Dynamics beasts, though most of the truly dangerous things are just boxes, aren’t they. People fear what they don’t understand. People are stupid, and uprisings need to be prevented, and now, when the goal seems so close—the AI people have lost control of their offspring. More and more programmers are being let go or reassigned to unimportant tasks, because artificial intelligence, after all, programs itself. Thome fails to consider whether the programmers could have purposefully sabotaged their own work in order not to land in the Bitcoin department.
To avoid further considerations, he dictates a memo to PR. Something with progress and breakthrough, and then,
Finally,
With a slight delay,
He slips into the retro paternoster. He sees Peter at reception and calls “Hello, Peter,” and thinks: brilliant and original greeting. Thome starts to sweat and begins talking without any further thought.
“Since the automation of reception, every employee works two extra hours per month. Two hours! That would otherwise be wasted on passing the time of day and useless chitchat with the receptionists. Had been.” Thome feels streams of sweat flowing from his armpits toward his belly button, where it will pool. Thome, who despises people. Without exception. All of them. Is in love. It’s the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It makes him weak. Stupid. Agitated. Although. He has his life otherwise well under control. Ever since he’s had a career. Through the not insignificant influence of his father, of whom he has plenty of recordings with a child prostitute, he got this job, which was created just for him and his limited abilities.
But Thome doesn’t know this. He’s proudly in charge of the hub, where the newest ideas created across all areas—findings, developments, all that stuff—converge. Thome sits like a sun at the center of the firmament of the new world order. His mission is to enter all the developments, ideas, schemes that arrive here at the hub into a sort of global brain, which is run by people like him from every continent, well, nearly every …
Anyway—
Thome is very well paid. He interacts with the absolute geniuses of the field, organizes meetings of all departments, company-wide exchange and all that stuff that not a single asshole cares about. Because here, ladies and gentlemen, there’s competition happening. A competition of speed, the stakes of which are billions and the positions of power in the 4.0 world. The essential developments will most definitely not be fed to Thome and his machines. A sector full of fuckwits, funded by venture capital billionaires, believes in intercommunication. What a sweet idea. But Thome doesn’t know this. Thome, who hasn’t accomplished anything more in his life than to program two apps designed to hurt people. Well, hurt. Hang on there. One of them wanted to die and the others had fears, and I helped them both. Thinks Thome.
Since he’s had this job, since he’s had real power, he’s no longer interested in the platforms with which he had previously spent every waking hour. He knew nearly every member, tracked their lives, intervened, pushed a little, if that isn’t an impious word in this context, and so forth. At some stage he’ll show somebody this first successful work. Maybe Peter. Who will perhaps also become his boyfriend. “Peter, how nice that you’re interested in my place of work.” Fuck, I said that, thinks Thome. Peter says nothing. In Thome’s office—a Friso Kramer table, a beanbag in the corner, and a quote from Jared Cohen, the counterterrorism advisor to the American government: “The internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.” Peter slides into the beanbag. Thome looks down at himself, his spongy stomach, his legs, with knocker knees. Normally he never thinks about his outward appearance. It doesn’t matter to Thome that his hoodie (by Gucci, you fuckers) is a bit out of place optically here. Most men in IT-heavy areas don’t wear grubby motto T-shirts anymore; they’re the elites, and have to make allowances for designer hoodies and backpacks. Somebody had started with fashion statements, and gradually a contest broke out between nearly everyone—coders, scientists, salespeople—to wear the most expensive knitwear. As if the 1980s had never happened, the former nerds now traipsed around the emphatically urban interiors of their billion-dollar firms in exquisite scarves and welt-sewn trainers, carrying embossed business cards with ironic lettering. Don’t mess with the underground, fucker. What had started out a few years ago as the new punk scene has transformed today into offices tricked out with bidets.
Thome can tamp down his nervousness only by talking nonstop. While he strides around his cavernous office. His knees, rubbing against each other, make a grinding noise. He’s come to a catharsis that suits him better than the absolute idiocy of infatuation, which is making him stutter and search for words. The technical revolution.
