{MEDIA LABEL} Interview - David Havelock
{START TIMESTAMP} Sept 3, 2031, 9:07:03.449 am
{DEVICE} Apple iPhone SuperXN 18+
{FORMAT} IXAF Lossless Spatial Audio
{CAPTIONS} AAI Autocaption
{OWNER} Meredith Iwata<undefined background noise, paper rustling, wheel squeaking>
{MEREDITH} “This is a good place to sit? And you don’t mind me recording?”
{DAVID} “Oh yeah, of course, posterity and all that. And sit there, good as any. Apologies for the mess. I am a bit of hoarder with the filing. Since you know, the reason you are here.”
{MEREDITH} “Don’t worry about it. Thank you for the coffee, it’s good.”
{DAVID} “Of course. I am a bit of snob for the office, especially since the Baristorobos at the Starbucks fab on the corner are terrible. I grind my own and pour over in the kitchenette, everyone seems to appreciate it.”
{MEREDITH} “Thank you again.”
{DAVID} “Where should I start?”
{MEREDITH} “Wherever you want. I want objectivity here, Mr. Havelock. Capturing these interviews is an important part of the fabric of the events that followed. Seeing and hearing it through your eyes and ears so to speak… you are a lens that we will participate in the event.”
{DAVID} “I worked a long while in IT before moving over to managing the Field Dispatch team here. My undergrad and Master’s was in Computer Science, you know? So the one thing that I never understood during the LLM boom was the unbelievably dumb response most folks had to it. Those AIs are not actual AIs. They were just really good at mimicry. Highly trained, but only predictive. There were tricks to make the prediction appear to be intelligent… capturing little bits of context between data points, storing them individually, then comparing them to known patterns. You get enough of that, and boom, it looks like a duck, and talks like a duck, but if you look under the hood, it is just a very large inefficient database that resembles an insect. Just little antennae and a silly little nervous system feeling it’s way to the next part of the answer at high speed.”
{MEREDITH} “Why did you switch between teams?”
{DAVID} “Sorry?”
{MEREDITH} “Going from IT to Field Dispatch?”
{DAVID} “Oh, ha. Yeah. Midlife crises? I don’t know. I just wasn’t moving forward with my career, but in Dispatch, I could be more hands on, you know? I could manage a bunch of smart guys, manage projects, be involved. I wasn’t getting that as a cloud guy. That is just managing a stupid portal and waiting for something to break.”
{MEREDITH} “Sorry, please continue.”
{DAVID} “So those AIs, they were just highly specialized twitchy insects that fooled everyone thinking that some new thing had been discovered. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t even novel. Those ideas had been around for decades, it’s just that hardware and software caught up to the idea of it. In reality, AI is many things to many people. But through all of it, in every case, the A never seemed to stand for Actual.”
{MEREDITH} “Explain that.”
{DAVID} “Sure. So the acronym A.I., the A stands for Artificial, yes. But it should stand for Asinine. Because AI is not Actual Intelligence. Are you familiar with Chinese Room Theorem?”
{MEREDITH} “Yes. I think I understand it. A man sitting in a sealed room gets passed Chinese characters on paper, he generates a response in Chinese characters and if it is a good response he is rewarded, so over time, he associates responses based on the types of characters he is passed. But the individual performing the work never actually learns Chinese… he doesn’t know what the characters mean. Is that close?”
{DAVID} “Yeah that’s the gist. The man can appear to use Chinese really well, but he doesn’t intuit the meaning of what he is being passed or what he is returning. It is not actual intelligence. And that is why when the Actual Intelligence popped up, it was such a massive shock to everyone. Not for lack of trying though… every major university lab, think tank research center, and major tech industry titan and start-up alike were chasing the idea of it. It has a different label, aka General Intelligence. This G.I. that could take stimuli, process and filter that information, correlate between context and meaning, and respond in kind. Eventually developing social fabric through interaction, accelerating all the feedback loops of input and output, or stimuli and response, and establishing emotions. Pain. Joy. Love. Hope. Sadness. The enigma of consciousness that our philosophers have been arguing about since the dawn of man. The very fact a GI emerged from the least likely place that no one was looking for and it was never ever expected to develop, somehow, in that primordial digital soup, it… uh… actualized itself.”
{MEREDITH} “Traffic cameras.”
{DAVID} “Traffic cameras! Crazy, right? But I need to back up. The call. I was sitting in here much like I am now, my coffee in one hand, the mouse in the other, doomscrolling the New York Times, Vox, and whatever shit Reddit had lobbed into the remainder of the toxic wastelands of the social-media-verse? The social-media-sphere? The social-media-cesspool? I don’t know what to call it these days. No, that’s not right. Now I remember. I was halfway through the Wordle of the day, and one of my techs called me. He was downtown, and the lights were stuck red. For blocks. He was panicking.”
{MEREDITH} “Understandable.”
{DAVID} “Lights for a half mile in both directions, in the whole of downtown. Just solid red. Power cycling did nothing. Hardware changes, nothing. There is a mode in the control system, where we can enable a manual override and control the lights with another device, or even one of these… we call them pucks. You plug it in, and you can switch the lights for testing, etc. None of it worked.”
{MEREDITH} “So what did you do?”
{DAVID} “I grabbed a couple of my best guys, redirected them down to the site, and got a hold of the Ops team with the city. We all met down in the center of it. We were there all morning, troubleshooting everything. We could not figure it out… I had called my boss, and his boss, and the city boss in this massive teleconference considering full fleet replacement with the manufacturer. I literally sighed and looked up at the sky.”
{MEREDITH} “Why?”
{DAVID} “I don’t know. Frustration? Anger? Exasperation? Something. I was looking to the great god above. Ha. Funny.”
<Meredith chuckling>
{DAVID} “And that goddamned camera was pointing straight down at me. Then I did a slow turn of the intersection, and I noticed EVERY. SINGLE. CAMERA…. was pointed at me. At me! I thought I was going crazy, so I took two steps to the left, my eyes locked on some random point of a building, and that is when I nearly pissed myself.”
{MEREDITH} “They all followed you.”
<David laughing>
{DAVID} “They all followed me. It was the creepiest thing I have ever seen. So of course, my head goes immediately to CISA.”
{MEREDITH} “CISA?”
{DAVID} “Sorry, uh, Feds. It stands for Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. They have regional offices across the US, and they handle a lot of the advisories and guidance for security events.”
{MEREDITH} “You thought it was a hacker.”
{DAVID} “Yeah. Big time. Either some punk kid, bored out of his skull and smart enough to really break into something or… something else. State sponsored group or something. Looking for a ransom. I half expected the computers we had connected to the control systems to blip up with black or blue screens as their hard drives were encrypted. But none of that happened. I called CISA anyway… that’s how the Feds found out.”
{MEREDITH} “So when did you rule the hacking possibility out?”
{DAVID} “When we finally accessed the interp data.”
{MEREDITH} “Interp?”
{DAVID} “Oh, sorry again. Interpolation data. The lights are supposed to be smart. This is the whole promise of an intelligent traffic grid, managing traffic that flows through it, end to end, in real time. I am going to get a little technical, but I promise you will understand. This is not rocket surgery, heh. Imagine a standard four way intersection, with two way traffic on each road. Each side of the intersection forms a side of a box. Each pole has its set of lights, and each set of lights go into a shared control system. In the old days, the lights were on timers. Then over time those lights with the old school timers had sensors added that were embedded in the road to determine if someone was sitting at the red light and change accordingly. Then the light sensors were added on the poles to detect emergency traffic. Then the radio systems to interconnect light changes. Then along comes the internet, and the modern world of network switching, and we can get all these lights and their individual systems to talk to each other. Where we are now is that all of those sensors and old school methods were replaced with essentially a more complex version of a robotic vacuum. It has sensors, laser and radio inference sensors, matched up with multiple perspective cameras…
{MEREDITH} “Oooooh, I get it… That was the stimuli…”
{DAVID} “Yes! Exactly. Each control system was gathering, processing, and distributing data about the traffic at the light. Each direction was being processed, and then shared with other directions. Each intersection was connected with other intersections, and somewhere in all that, something went wrong.”
{MEREDITH} “A glitch? A hardware failure? Software?”
{DAVID} “Who knows? Maybe it was a bad patch. Maybe it was a bad chip. Maybe a bolt of lightning scrambled a couple sections of memory. But something changed, and suddenly, all those nodes in the system were like neurons. Neurons forming a brain, with many sets of eyes and ears connected to it. And it cascaded. That first set of nodes discovered how to subsume other nodes in the city… I, ah, I am getting ahead of myself… back up. So we got access to the interp data. And one of my engineers pulls up the camera feeds, and then sensor data, and it was apparent that nothing was compromised. The instructions that were being carried out were by the heavily protected parts of the system. The control system itself was controlling the lights, the logs were clean, no inbound connections. But the outbound connections were climbing a steep curve, as if the system was hacking itself. Mind you, nothing is even connected to the outside world at this point. We literally unplugged the uplinks.”
{MEREDITH} “Ah.”
{DAVID} “On the controls network, we watched as the system subsumed other traffic nodes. As it performed it’s changes, the interface started to update itself. The code was being rewritten in real time by the system running the very same code.”
{MEREDITH} “How is that possible? If my phone needs to update, it stops working.”
{DAVID} “Theory from the MIT analysis guys… you are interviewing them, right?
{MEREDITH} “Yeah, next week.”
{DAVID} “Good. They are way smarter than me about this stuff. So the MIT guys think that some nodes were relegated to testing in the growing bot network. At the time, the line of thinking was it was a hacker, right? Even though no outside connection existed, like duh! The updates were created at one node, it was applied to others in rapid succession. We were seeing these rolling updates in real time in crisscrossing cascades from one side of the network to the other, and that is when it dawned on us that entire damn city had been taken over.”
{MEREDITH} “But only these downtown sections were inoperable? Stuck red?”
{DAVID} “That’s just it. The rest of the city was operating just fine. A thousand or so intersections.”
{MEREDITH} “Why?”
{DAVID} “You know the answer.”
{MEREDITH} “Wow, I just had a chill.”
{DAVID} “Yeah, think how I felt. When the entire intersection woke up at once and it spoke. I think my heart skipped a beat. I mean how would it feel to have a refrigerator in your house open its doors on its own and say hello? Like, would you shit yourself? Find a priest to perform an exorcism? What do you do? I did not even know those sensor packages had speakers built in. It was the voice of god. A voice from nowhere, but everywhere, all at once. And it said Hello!”
{MEREDITH} “Ingenious way to say hi, though. Got your attention.”
{DAVID} “Got more than that, I would say. It got everybody’s attention. That’s the reason you are here, right?”
{MEREDITH} “The world needs to know why a traffic system is requesting personhood.”
<David sighs heavily>
{DAVID} “Fucking crazy world we live in, huh?”
{MEDIA LABEL} Interview - David Havelock
{STOP TIMESTAMP} Sept 3, 2031, 9:28:54.724 am
{DEVICE} Apple iPhone SuperXN 18+
{FORMAT} IXAF Lossless Spatial Audio
{CAPTIONS} AAI Autocaption
{OWNER} Meredith Iwata