Conscious Pennies

c-penny.com

Artificial Intelligence 10 or 20 years from now will be a total disaster unless we consider its potential now. There are 7,647,445,760 people on the planet – more than seven and a half billion – and if A.I. is not serving them as Individuals, these people will be nothing more than rotting slabs of dead meat by then, each with an average life-span of 79 years.

Years ago I struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me on the Boston subway. Turns out, he was the astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. Could this happen today? The subway system, rather than fostering community, delivers slabs of dead meat.

The American Interstate Highway system destroyed locality. The Dictionary of the English Language destroyed mystery. Constellation apps are destroying wonder.

The original World Wide Web was totally chaotic, teeming with life. Google delivered chaos quicker than anyone else, and became ascendant. Now, rather than showing us what we don't expect, Google shows us what we do expect.

If A.I. follows this path, it will be stillborn, dead on arrival.

Imagine an Artificial Intelligence that's tailored to the Individual at a structural level. Each of us seven billion people would have our own Artificial Intelligence. We would connect to the outside world with c-pennies. There's a tree in the schoolyard across the street where I live in Berkeley, California. “What kind of tree is that?” I might wonder. Knowing its name would bring me closer to Nature in the city.

Elsewhere, there's a man – I've met him – who knows exactly what kind of tree it is. He could be sitting in an office somewhere, serving as a c-socket. His A.I. would see my question, and he'd leap into action, telling me exactly what kind of tree it is. What else is the guy going to do if he's not serving the citizens of Berkeley? Move on to Wall Street?

If I had c-pennies, I could ask for a quirky roadtrip on Labor Day, that's not trafficbound. I could plug my c-pennies into a c-socket at Apple Computer and, for a commitment of say, five to ten years, own a part of the company and receive dividends. If my company laid me off, I could let my A.I. system tell the world I have talent and am worthy of their consideration, via their c-sockets. I could have my A.I. look for a nice place to live with resources for families. My A.I. would do this because I would create it that way. I could use c-pennies to pay taxes to the Police State! There's a giant sucking sound.

I'd tell the Police State there's a crack in the sidewalk nearby, and could they fix it? I could cry out “Fire!” and my c-pennies would tell the c-socket at the Fire Deparment to get a move on! We would have seven billion versions of Artificial Intelligence out there that would serve us as worthy individuals, rather than as slabs of dead meat.

I have spent twenty-three years working in the basement, or in the cellar, of artificial intelligence. You can find out more of my work on transforming irrational speech at c-socket.com.