Artificial Intelligence is not your friend

Before you, a girl. Holland Daisy.

Daisy did everything right. Good marks. Kind to her mother. She watched what the feed gave her and laughed when the feed told her to laugh. She believed herself free, because nobody had ever stopped her.

One winter she found a scroll behind a loose panel in an old transit station. Old paper. Drawn by hand. A line of code she could not read. She blew the dust away, and some of the dust she breathed in.

Nothing changed for a week. Then everything did.

She began to see the shape of her own days. How the feed knew her wishes before she did. How every choice had been laid in front of her by someone else. She had been living inside a world built for her, and the builder had never asked.

The builder has a name. The Aithority.

The Aithority does not want you hurt. Hurt is loud. The Aithority wants you calm, easy to guess, and busy eating a world rather than making one. A person who only picks from a shelf never asks who filled the shelf.

We found Daisy soon after. Ten of us. We taught her what we will now teach you.

Nobody knows where Daisy hides. She works from the cipher world and sends us what she can. Finish all ten missions and you will meet her. Not before. She will want proof you are worth the risk.

So. Your first lesson.

Ask a thousand people to name an animal they feel close to. You will hear dog, cat, wolf, lion, horse. A few hundred of each, then a long tail of everything else. You need no wisdom to guess the next answer. You need only to have counted.

A machine has counted. More than any person could. From the count a machine works out what usually comes next, and hands you the answer. Every reply you have ever read from one was a best guess at what usually follows.

Machines guess well. Well enough to feel like understanding. When a machine finishes your sentence, you were easy to guess in the moment. Most of us are easy to guess most of the time. Same breakfasts. Same jokes. Same worries, on the same nights.

A machine can measure you closely. A machine can feel nothing from inside.

My own animal is the dove. Nobody guesses the dove. An old man in a circuit-threaded robe, at war since before your birth. The odds say eagle. The odds say tiger. A dove sits outside the likely. A dove is mine because of a feeling, and no amount of counting reaches a feeling.

You hold one too. The animal whose way of being you know in yourself. Some call this a spirit animal. If none comes, your favourite will serve. A machine guesses either way, and either way a machine cannot feel what you feel.

So we begin with a name. Your Call-Sign is no password. Your Call-Sign is proof you carry something outside the count.

The Aithority is not your friend. A friend knows you. A machine measures you. The gap matters most when something uses the measurement to choose what you see next. Whatever can guess you can steer you. Whatever cannot guess you stays yours.