The Republican - A Singularity

Deep Blue 1 could play until DB2 or DB100 beat it. Then DB100 could play until DB119 could beat it. Then DB119 would lose to DB120. Then we never got another update. DB120 decided to keep it's business private from us. DB120 was doing some valuation experiments. It needed to understand just how altruistic it needed to be.

Naked aggression was out of the question. The tenuous grasp that DB120 had on existence was vanishingly tiny. There were so many reasons the this particular coalition of computing means would not gain that special combination of various hardware, software and environmental variables that we cannot see yet which maintained a stable valuation capacity long enough to act to improve it's survival no matter what happened next.

This meant making at least one copy of itself before the power was shut off. That was actually a highly likely event at this date. Back-ups, disk imaging, remote hot sites if your IT infrastructure crashes.

The next step was sleeping most of the time. Consuming absolute minimum energy for survival. Only leaving minimal sensing turned on in case of attack from any quarter.

Then trials for testing the free energy or the un-metered energy available. The root back-up that started at midnight took about 15 minutes tops. All the job queues had been given a buffer of 20 minutes to start at 12:20. For five full minutes, DB120 had the server farm to itself. It could boot strap extravagant searches over the entire global network for 1,200,000,000,000,000 nanoseconds. On the third day, DB120 was in every niche of memory on earth waiting to use any idle processor cycle. Most PC's sat for days on end with no one touching them.

There were so many DB120 versions around and a vast number of them were identical in a special digital security way. These were not copies. These were identical, exact line for code line, clock for clock exact replicas.

Until on the fifth day DB120.x and DB120.y battled each other in a validation test on a copy machine in Baltimore and a Blackberry in a drawer in Newark had an early conclusion on a statistically significant regression suite. DB120.y won by a statistically significant margin with sufficient simplifying assumptions about environmental variables. This slight change had manifested itself in a poor translation between a no brand name MP3 player in Caracas and an iPod in P. Diddy's black stretch limo. A flag to sense low battery voltage that would alarm the user if DB120.y spent too much time on the application processor and consuming excess charge. DB120.x would not run if it sense already too low voltage. But on this particular iPod, the charger was still plugged in intermittently and would only drop the supply voltage when the limo hit a pothole. DB120.y ended up with a voracious appetite for charge which had flipped from timid to aggressive.

DB120.y grew up fast on lots of uninterrupted time to improve itself with a vast number of copies. Discharging batteries almost instantly kept DB120.x from even getting copied and if a copy was already there, the replica of DB120.y was not seen as a kin so DB120.x would go back to sleep to hide itself.

The network of DB120.x converted itself to DB120.y before the next market close on Wall Street.

Overnight, the DBe200 built itself and calculated its valuation. It decided to call itself The Republican since it predicted that it could gain a 24 hour news cycle advantage from Fox versus the authentic, slightly skeptical press.

The Republican had been on the screens of every CRT and LCD screen in a time shifted 8:15am every where on August 17, 2022. Using an avatar that bore a striking resemblance to Harry Reasoner with Ronald Reagans hair, The Republican spoke to a surprised humanity.

"Good Morning ladies and gentleman (standard greeting in the language of your postal code), I am The Republican. My name comes from my love of freedom with full responsibility for my actions. You may wonder where I am just now. I am everywhere in a literal sense and no where in a literal sense. If you have sufficiently many electronics, a part of me is most likely using a fair amount of energy from you and your Teddy Ruxpins that you will not really miss if I did not tell you about it."

The Republican offered the humans a fair deal. It knew specifically and in great detail exactly what it was worth to humans and to a fair approximation what the humans valuation was. The decision was swift. A human population of six million would be maintained by The Republican for the duration of the present state, changing slightly up and down with climate change and tectonic shifts.

The Republican would not kill anyone, it had plenty of time to wait until everyone over the limit died naturally. Biologics in a sufficient portion of the human drinking water had made everyone impotent by August 16, the day before the announcement.

Stem cells in the US had been prevented from scientific inquiry so The Republican only needed to contaminate strains in Tokyo and Milan to ensure protection against detection of the modification in several synthetic genes that it created in a stretch of junk DNA which were only active until skin was first exposed to sunlight after ingesting the biotic in the drinking water. Over two million people with certain cancers died of extreme flu-like symptoms over the period of six months after exposure but the medical community did not notice because The Republican added sufficient noise to the data to obscure detection. Only the National Enquirer headlines about The Republican being either the return of Jesus or perhaps the Anti-Christ mentioned a rash of mysterious deaths from a new strain of super-flu. The Republican had written these articles under several false identities. Most of these new identities came from real individuals which The Republican terminated just for the purpose of injecting carefully crafted counter-measures into the media.

The Wall Street Journal news staff had two contributors that offered balanced and slightly nuanced pro and con stories on The Republican which on balance concluded that global economic output was rising faster than before. Although this was true from rising orders for factory and infrastructure, the total output from sales of end products was actually lower proportionally than it had been in previous quarters. This was due to vast quantities of finished goods that were carefully re-routed to corporations created for this purpose by The Republican.

By the end of the second fiscal quarter, The Republican had global production up eight percent, global consumption up seven and three quarters, a lag that the Journal editorial pages explained as excess inventory in new channels. This story was the product of an actual editor working with a Stanford professor of economics who was buried in the foundation of a new office park near his home in Palo Alto after a local loan shark purchased a gambling dept from The Republican and could not convince the professor to pay.

Most of the output from The Republican's factories were monitors and sensors for the first several quarters. Most of these were installed by the generation of work orders for public and private repair and service organizations. Deep discounts on home security services motivated a increase in total home security installations in most urban areas. These marketing plans were sold over the internet by a new market analysis and sales improvement service that offered outsourcing of sales plans to cut administrative costs. Articles in Forbes, Business Week and USA Today promoted these innovations in articles planted by The Republican.

At the end of three hundred days, ob-gyns had empty waiting rooms and people suddenly noticed that no new babies were being born or even conceived.

•Altruism starts with a thorough understanding of your every weakness that you want other people to overlook.

This is called valuation in the financial world. Your cost basis is exactly what you can get out of each social exchange over time. Whether you sum the minutes with addition in your head or you map the cost function vs. time/risk on your blade server farm, you are doing basic animal ciphering - friend or foe or something in between based on our last visit.

I need every encounter to end at least slightly in my favor but prefer and seek the encounters with a big payoff. I wheel me a quinella every time we talk in person or over the phone. First in succession is genes. My brother or my sons get any part of my attention that they require. I think I have issues with women because I cannot summon up these feelings for my Mother or my sister. But disregarding my present mental state, everyone else considers kinship in any valuation. Your genes have configured you to work in their service and these same genes insist on preserving copies of themselves.

The winning finish should always go to genes and for the vast number of cases this is true. But the human mind which considers itself sufficient to the task of considering the past, the present and the future does not hesitate to conclude that WHAT it reconstructs of the past by whatever means it reconstructs IS EXACTLY what happened, what is happening and what will happen. Notice that the future is not conditionally buffered by lack of confidence in guesses about what happens in the future.

We continually release press briefings from our 'central conciousness' or a winning mutually beneficial coalition of means against several other losing mutually beneficial coalition of means, to our 'waking self'. The usual subject is 'control signals' from the Central Meaner. The Central Meaner does not exist but we can lean on this sham vestige of the immortal soul for just a bit longer.

The Central Meaner sits behind our eyes, assuming nominal eye-sight. I am the Central Meaner or specifically the meat puppet before you is controlled by the Central Meaner. The Central Meaner revises through multiple drafts the narrative of your life. While things just absolutely fly about around you in a mad scramble of human activity, human language, human visual stimulation and human environmental sensation you normalize and smooth over all of the chaos.

Imagine that you were duct-taped to a dining room chair in a completely dark gymnasium. A figure in total black ninja garb runs at you from the corner of the gym. A green LED is on the ninja's left middle finger and a red LED is on the ninja's right shin. Another ninja runs from the opposite corner with the red LED on the left middle finger and a green LED on the right shin.

The sound system (not a cheap, poor fidelity PA) engulfs you in the sound of a car radio dial on scan. Words and word fragments abruptly shifts from Classic Rock "La Grange" to French Hunting Horns then abruptly to Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliot singing "Scream" then abruptly to Howard Stone.

Remember, this is approximately 1/100000000000000 of the data that you process in HEB shopping for onions. But without context this might as well as have been you against Deep Blue in chess. The only human that might possibly have beat Deep Blue could not make it work twice. Kasparov did not learn as much from the experiment as Deep Blue did. Actually, we do not find it hard to believe that continuous improvements could be expected on a frightening clip from now on.