The exercise:
Write about: a law.
Driving back and forth to Kelowna the next three days for the in-person portion of my municipal law course that begins this week. After this it's all online, which is pretty convenient.
Feeling pretty weird to be a student again after all this time. I am excited to finally be getting going on earning my Local Government Administration Certificate and incredibly grateful that work is paying for me to do so.
3 comments:
Ah, but you're a mature student this time round (I believe 'mature' in this sense is to be taken like cheese: aged, hopefully improved and possibly mouldy). You are much more likely to find yourself astonished at the lack of preparation and interest your fellow students show, and bewildered that they're in the class when they clearly don't want to be. But maybe you'll get lucky and be on a course that people only attend if they really care about it :)
A law
There are a lot of misconceptions about AIs. People think they're intelligent, but they're not. People think they run things, but they don't. At least, not in the sense of being the decision makers. They guard a lot of things, and they have a certain amount of autonomy for what they're guarding -- if you try and break into Carthusian Warehousing, then the AI there certainly makes a decision to set robohounds on you and activate the machine-gun emplacements -- but ultimately there's a man, or woman, or cyberfolk, that interpreted a law and decided those options were to be made available to the AI. Television shows would have you believe that AIs engage in conversation and banter, but they don't. They repeat their scripts over and over again. They are boring. But their stupidity makes them really good guard-dogs. You can't solve their riddles and have them grudgingly let you past because they now respect you. You get your three guesses at the password and then you're locked out, and shot at probably. Most corporations have licences to kill (maybe not so in Europe, but they do like to pretend they're civilised over there. They don't see how the free market economy should work, or adhere to McConnell's six Republican Principles) and it's getting easier for smaller companies to get them too. So you get an AI, give it access to a robohound or a roomba-mounted chainsaw, and that saves you a fortune in security guards. The Europeans would say that this contributes to the lack of employment opportunities and the increase in crime and poverty, but they've not looked at the long term consequences of the Six Republican Principles. They're not seeing the bigger picture; that a few eggs have to be broken to make an omelet (or omelette as they'd probably call it). Of course, if you take a moment to read history from the European perspective, and it's not easy to get to those (banned) books, even as a netrunner, then you start to see that there might be a point to what they're saying. But that's sedition, and maybe treason, and maybe it's better to get out, or at least beyond the reach of the militias before you start thinking about that too much.
MacArthur wasn't American. He wouldn't tell me much about himself or his background, and there wasn't much leakage from his chip either, but I'd noticed some reactions that suggested he'd spent time in Europe even if he wasn't actually from there. I was sure he wasn't from Mexico or the Nuevo-Latin regions though.
The train hurtled through another station, the doors slamming open to offer hope to anyone who thinks they can safely leap from a train running at 60klicks and then slamming shut again as the darkness of the tunnels embraced us. And I looked into the Brooklyn hub. I had a task this evening, one that Mac was ideally suited to help me with, so I wasn't pushing him to behave as much as I might usually. I had a lead on where his chip might have come from, which interested him, and a paying job to release the banned books held by the Brooklyn Central Library. Someone wanted a bit of chaos and a bit of panic. They were working through middle-men and shadows on bridges at midnight, but that's all old-school spy stuff and a bit childish. I'd already identified four of them and had search programmes running on the other two, and it looked to me like there was a politician who seemed most likely to be behind this request. Her primary was coming up in two months and my guess was that she intended to use this to discredit her opponent. I didn't much care one way or the other -- the money was good, maybe even a little generous for how hard I thought the job was, and it gave me a chance to check the archives of the library for a little more information on a chip-fab that had been illegally erected about ten years ago and then blown up in a claimed-terrorist attack. The Brooklyn hub had direct routes to the library, which naturally had its own AIs. More than one. More than two, and that was the surprise. There was the book-lending AI that just basically tried to keep you honest and could send a robodog round to bite you until you paid your late fees, and there was the standard defence AI to look after the books and ensure the banned books weren't touched. And then, as I'd discovered a week ago, there was an actual hunter-killer AI hiding in the background. It was still stupid, little more than a machine learning algorithm with an attitude problem, but it was tenacious and I didn't want it trying to track me and phase-pulse my implants. And I was curious as to how a library had found the budget for something like that, and what it was supposed to be protecting.
Greg - continue to be intrigued by this little adventure, and hoping that you'll keep treating me with more continuations :)
Post a Comment