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Artificial Intelligence Series - 5 books:  What if you built a complete AI-development system into a package the size of a cell-phone? And what if that system really understood reality? What governments would try to take it from you? Personal Assistant: [Published August 2024] 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: [Published September 2024] 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: [Published October 2024] The Chinese are determined to obtain Bart's AI system and competing AI companies are worried. Bart Sullivan’s team has figured out how to keep their AI from deciding to kill people and will need to go to Hawaii to complete the AI system’s education, showing that the Earth is really round. Once they have completed the education, they will be able to start selling the Mark I desktop AI system to the public. Because of the violent attacks on him and his team, Bart has encouraged all of his people to obtain carry-permits and carry handguns at all times. And after the attacks, they had become very serious about practicing with their weapons. The Chinese are determined to obtain Bart's AI system. Kai Chin’s operatives have successfully assaulted the Knoxville FBI office and taken the files concerning Bart and his company to China. Kai Chin wanted the files to figure out how to get Bart’s spy-detector application that Chin is convinced is the reason the FBI is supporting Bart. After Bart’s desktop AI has been released, 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: [Published December 2024] Bart and his team are building a spy-detector app for the AI system. Kai Chin’s operatives had stolen the prototype of the desktop system, the Mark I; however, it refused to work for them. Then they had purchased a commercial system when it came out; however, it had no spy-detector functionality. When Kai Chin learned that the FBI had a system with a spy-detector function, he had it stolen from FBI Headquarters. What he didn’t know was that this was a rudimentary and untested version of the spy detector. Despite its unfinished nature, Kai Chin set out to use the system’s functions to gain greater personal power in China. In the meantime, Bart’s team was working on perfecting a spy-detector app. The CEO of Radical Tech, a moderate-sized player in the AI world, is worried that Bart will put her company out of business - and her with it. She devises a plan to destroy Bart's company. Meanwhile, hardliners in China have overridden Kai Chin's advice and plan an attack on the US. Pocket AI: Bart and his team are working toward a wearable AI system. The war with China had left China as a continental power, not a world power. However, Kai Chin was not done. He was setting up links with North Korea for future activities. In the meantime, Iran was annoyed with the US stymying its ambition for hegemony within the Middle East and, in particular, Iran’s nuclear plans. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG) was set in motion to do something about that. Meanwhile Bart’s company was creating and dominating the market for small, general-purpose AI systems. The team continued to produce new applications and was working toward a third-generation system, a system that was wearable. Fusion: While Bart and his team are dealing with telepathic AI systems, Iran is plotting to recover from its losses at the hands of the US and North Korea is continuing its efforts to be important to the world. Bart’s company, Personal AI, has just introduced their new, wearable AI system, the Mark III. This relegates the processing to a cell-phone sized device to be kept in the pocket or purse. That device does the external communicating, cell-phone operations, reception of various external data feeds, and so forth. It also passes information to the user audibly through earbuds and visibly through laser devices in a pair of glasses that paint images onto the user’s retinas. The glasses also contain sensors that capture video and audio data and send those to the processor. And the glasses and bracelets send pictures of the user’s face to the processor which interprets the subvocal utterances of the user. However, Bart’s team has discovered that the processor is interpreting the subvocal utterances of others within its view and performing a mechanical mind-reading function. Sciences used and abused:  Computer science, artificial intelligence.

Bart                                    Kai Chin Hawaii                                             Pirate Ship IRG Attack                                    Harvard Glacier                   Jordan-Iraq Border

Addendum:

These novels are science fiction. That means they are stories with some connection to science, particularly speculative science.  I published these now because the reality of AI might overtake the fiction.

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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