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Artificial Intelligence Series - 3 books:  What if you built a cell-phone sized AI? What governments would try to take it from you? Personnal Assistant: The Chinese want the AI before Bart has even built it. Bart Sullivan has sold a large tech company and is now a billionaire - on paper.  He recently started a small company to perform research into AI systems.  The goal is to create an AI-based personal assistant.  Unlike other AI systems that use generative AI and are ignorant of the existence of the real world and its properties, this system will be able to access information about the real world and create solutions that are valid.  He has put together a small team of AI experts (Andrea Churchill, Roger French, Eric Sowell, and Sylvia Tucker) to develop such a system.  Jerry Clements, the rector of Bart's church, is a good friend and a widower.  Bart and Jerry muse about Bart's unmarried state and the fact that Bart really should get married.  A Chinese intelligence officer, Kai Chin, has been following Bart's successes and decides to obtain the fruits of Bart's research, causing trouble for Bart's company and his search for a wife. Hawaii: While Bart and his team are worried about AI systems deciding to kill off humans, the Chinese are still after Bart's AI system. Bart's team realizes that if they build a successful AI system, it might one day decide that humans are superfluous and need to be killed off.  Accordingly, they research ways to prevent this.  After analyzing the design of AI systems, they realize that they have the key in their construction of a super-existential statement of the absolute existence of reality: they must include God in the statement and the theological underpinnings of a "do not kill" commandment.  Therefore, they enlist Jerry in creating the theological logic.  Kai Chin has decided that his previous failures were due to Bart being supported by some US government agency.  Hence, Chin determines to sever this connection. Pirates: The Chinese are determined to obtain Bart's AI system and competing AI companies are worried. Kai Chin has concluded that the FBI is having Bart develop a spy-detector AI system and has created a plan to obtain it.  Meanwhile, one of the other companies that sell AI systems is worried that Bart's system will cut into its business and is determined to stop it. Spies: ?. ?. Sciences used and abused:  Computer science.

Bart                                    Kai Chin

Addendum:

These novels are science fiction. That means they are stories with some connection to science, particularly speculative science.

Computer Science

As this series is being written, generative AI is the new thing.  It uses machine learning to supply the data for text, images and audio and creates new text, images and audio by interpolating and extrapolating from a starting point - a prompt.  The outputs are generated using the equivalent of grammatical rules to ensure that the text looks like human text and the images look like images of real things.  These outputs can be very realistic or fabulations with a realistic gloss.  However, they suffer from biases introduced by the data on which they were trained.  More importantly, however, generative AI suffers from a disconnect from reality.  The AI system has no way of checking its outputs against reality because it has no concept that there is a reality to check against.  Creating this reality-concept is a driver for these stories.  One implication of this problem is that if such an AI system were to be connected to effectors that controlled real hardware, the system would not have adequate constraints to prevent unwanted actions.  Ultimately, there would be no constraint to prevent the AI system from deciding to do away with humanity or to kill any given person.  The need for such a constraint is another driver for these stories.

I used the current recommended maximum hardware for AI development.  That hardware should be sufficient to begin the development of the system that I describe in the books.  Naturally, the hardware recommendations will change over time, but readers probably don't care about the actual details, just the assurance that the hardware is reasonable.  Each system has a Xeon CPU with 56 cores, clocked at 1.9 GHz - turbo to 4.8 GHz, and 512 GB of RAM.  And each one has four high-end 48 GB GPU cards.  Each system has four 8 TB SSD drives, dual power supply, CPU cooling and a quad-cooling kit for the GPUs.  At the time the book was written, they were $48,000 each, not including the racks to mount them.  They also come with software needed to operate them at that price.  They also each draw over two kilowatts of power, so they won’t be cheap to operate.

From the basis of known science, the books leap into fiction by supposing hardware improvements that currently are not possible.  The timing of the improvements is also fictional.

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