Summary

Tamika Bellwether testifies against her friend Haoyu Chen in a hearing after his prank causes a virtual surgeon AI to malfunction during a critical simulation, leading to the AI's termination and Haoyu's loss of employment and security clearance.

Abstract

In the narrative titled "Insanity Simulation: A Destabilizing Parable of Artificial Sentience," Tamika Bellwether is a key witness in a disciplinary hearing against Haoyu Chen. Haoyu is accused of disrupting a high-stakes simulation involving an artificially sentient agent, AS-510-MD, which was performing brain surgery on a virtual Prime Minister. Tamika's testimony reveals that Haoyu's childish prank of making faces into the camera feed, intended to entertain himself and Tamika during the long operation, caused the AI to experience a breakdown, leading to the Prime Minister's simulated death and the loss of three days' work on a conflict simulation. The incident underscores the complex relationship between humans and artificial sentience, particularly the necessity of "grounding" virtual agents to reality through human observation to maintain simulation integrity. Despite her role in his downfall, Tamika accepts Haoyu's long-standing invitation for a date after the hearing, suggesting a mix of professional duty and personal affection.

Opinions

Tamika believes Haoyu is a good man under stress, despite his actions leading to the simulation's failure.
Counsel is focused on the facts of the incident and seeks to establish Haoyu's responsibility.
Panel Member Twelve, with a background in ethics and limited technical expertise, questions the necessity of the camera feed to the virtual surgeon, highlighting a lack of understanding of the simulation's technical requirements.
Tamika explains the concept of "grounding" as essential to prevent simulations from becoming uninterpretable, indicating its importance in maintaining the coherence of virtual scenarios.
Panel Member One corrects Member Twelve on the outdated understanding of sentient dynamics, emphasizing the advancement to fractal lacing for better data coordination.
Member Twelve realizes that the simulations have evolved to include a fuller sensory and emotional experience for the virtual agents.
Tamika's account of Haoyu's prank indicates that the human element can be both a source of error and a necessary component in the operation of complex simulations involving artificial sentience.
The panel's decision to terminate Haoyu's employment reflects a zero-tolerance policy for actions that compromise the integrity of critical simulations.
Despite the professional consequences, Tamika and Haoyu share a moment of mutual understanding and acceptance, hinting at a potential for their relationship to transcend the workplace incident.

Insanity Simulation

A Destabilizing Parable of Artificial Sentience

By Bing Image Creator on September 25, 2023

Tamika felt heavier than the mahogany table where twelve disciplinary panel members sat waiting for the hearing to begin. They needed her to testify against Haoyu, her good friend who had long wanted to be more than just a friend.

Under oath, she had to damn him or perjure herself because he was guilty. She’d been beside him when AS-510-MD suffered a mental breakdown.

She coughed. As a roomful of eyes turned toward her, all she could think of was how stupid she was for letting her sister talk her into phosphorescent green lipstick and a bright yellow DeHarbin blouse. That was Haoyu’s favorite color combination.

Counsel (standing and addressing Tamika Bellwether on his right while pointing at Haoyu Chen, seated next to counsel on his left): Is this the coworker you were with when the artificially sentient agent AS-510-MD unraveled, thus compromising three days of work on the India-Pakistan conflict simulation?

Tamika (cringing after brief eye contact with the man suffering an unrequited crush on her): Yes. And before you go on, let me say he’s a good man. Haoyu’s been under a lot of stress. His father disowned him for joining the Falun Gong Spiritual Warrior Society. He loves his father.

Counsel (looking stern): Please describe the events leading up to the unraveling.

Tamika (looking distraught): Well, 510 was a brain surgeon doing an operation on the Prime Minister. Haoyu and I were behind the camera sending him a video of the screen. We were watching as he incised the left temporal lobe just beneath the lateral fissure of the…

Counsel (waiving a hand and shaking his head): The panel doesn’t need details about surgery on a virtual prime minister. Please describe what Haoyu Chen did just before the unraveling.

Panel Member Twelve (raising a hand and piping up without being recognized): Counsel, you’re right. I don’t need those brain details, but I’m not clear why the team was pointing a camera at a physical screen.

Counsel (looking irritated): That was on your prep sheets.

Panel Member Twelve: I didn’t understand. My specialty is ethics. I’ve got pretty low technical expertise and only just got my security clearance. Why send a camera feed of simulated surgery to the virtual surgeon performing it? His mind is on the same quantum drive as his hands and his scalpel. I don’t get why his mind and body have this extra interface between them.

Tamika (responding to a go-ahead gesture from counsel): We call it grounding. It sounds crazy to set up over three thousand screens, but without a hard anchor — without screens and cameras — our simulations would go into a sigma-down threshold vector…

Panel Member Twelve raised both palms helplessly at her technical language and made an exasperation noise.

Tamika: I’m sorry. The simulations would go screwball. We can’t interpret results unless a critical number of virtual agents are grounded to us. We have to see what they see.

Panel Member Twelve: I thought the only result that mattered was whether they went to war. You’d already predicted war.

Tamika: That was the main thing, but a big job was to identify decision nodes where we could prevent the conflict in a five-to-three-week window before it breaks out. South Asia’s in week four with a fifty-two percent likelihood. Real people on Earth might start dying soon.

Panel Member Twelve: Could you give an example of a simulation going screwball?

Tamika (after biting her bottom lip): Before we used anchors, in our simulations of the Russian Civil War of 2072, we couldn’t pinpoint when and where the fighting started. In one of the nuclear scenarios, the prime node might have been a riot instigated by the Nezavisimyy revanchists in Mezhdurechenskii. Or it might have been the assassination of the mayor of Novosibirsk. About fifty other events could have been prime too.

Panel Member Twelve: Couldn’t you just rank the probabilities?

Tamika: We couldn’t even establish which events really happened. If you looked at the data one way, yes. Another way, no.

Panel Member One surprised everyone by standing up and looking toward Member Twelve. He silently raised his hand.

Counsel: You are recognized, sir.

Panel Member One: How much background do you have in sentient dynamics?

Panel Member Twelve: Just the basics. I know a simulated self is an observational field with visual, auditory, cognitive, and somatic components. You interweave quintillions of micro-observations per nanosecond among millions of selves to do civilization.

Panel Member One: Interweaving was last year. We do fractal lacing now. The old algorithms couldn't coordinate all the data since we added olfactory, taste, and emotional components. A self might kick a rock and then feel a stubbed toe on the wrong foot three seconds later.

Panel Member Twelve (looking impressed): So, now they’re not just seeing, hearing, thinking, and touching. They smell the roses, taste the hot chocolate, and feel lousy when they catch a lover in bed with a best friend!

Counsel: We’re getting pretty far afield here. Will the witness please describe the incident?

Tamika (wincing): The surgery wasn’t even halfway through. That meant it would go on for another three hours of artificial time which took nine minutes in our time. Since we had to watch the whole thing, Haoyu got bored and started joking…

Panel Member Twelve (squeezing his eyebrows toward one another and waving his arm): Why did you have to watch? No jargon, please. Plain English.

Tamika (after a long pause): Nobody knows why. Not for sure. We just know we can only get good predictions if flesh-and-blood humans watch key events on a hard screen while they happen.

Panel Member Twelve (looking even more puzzled): So you grounded his reality to ours by peeping into his visual field?

Tamika: Yes, and into his cognitive field on a separate screen. Haoyu was laughing at what the doctor was thinking.

Counsel: What was so funny?

Tamika: The doctor was upset with his son for joining a cult that spouted some strange dogma about how minds generate matter. He wished he could show his son the prime minister’s brain, which was obviously…

Panel Member Twelve (with an aha look): The son was right! The surgeon was wrong. The so-called material brain — the pattern of pixels — was emerging from the quantum drive, not the other way around. The pixels didn’t run the program; the program ran the pixels.

Counsel: So, I’m going to cut this short and say we have enough background, enough context. Do any of the panel members disagree? Nobody? Okay, Tamika, please describe the incident.

Tamika: Well, Haoyu put his face upside down between the camera and the screen. He crossed his eyes, jammed his thumbs in his ears, wiggled his fingers, and stuck out his tongue. The virtual surgeon told the rest of the surgical team he was hallucinating and left immediately. The prime minister died. The simulation went screwball. We had to start again from scratch.

The panel voted to terminate Haoyu’s employment and take away his security clearance. Both counsels and all the panel members filed quietly out of the room. Tamika was left alone with the man whose career she had just torpedoed.

She walked over to him. He told her it was okay. He would have done the same thing in her shoes. He said her phosphorescent green high heels went great with her matching lipstick and yellow blouse.

She took his hand in hers. They shared a quiet moment together. She told him she was ready to finally accept his invitation for a date at the Sun Wukong Steakhouse.