Existence

And Next Tuesday Greets the Gullible!

Beyond, for aisle after aisle, eager companies, foundations, and selforg clubs touted “transforming breakthroughs” from smartly decorated booths, augmented by garish VR. Tor found her specs bombarded by eager pitches, offering everything from health enhancements to lifespan folding. From guaranteed rejuvenation supplements to home marrow repair kits.

From “cyborg” prosthetics to remote controlled nanoflits.

From fully-implanted brainlink shunts to servant robots.

Yes, robots. The quaint term was back again, as memory of the Yokohama Yankhend slowly faded, along with a promise that this generation of humanoid automatons would actually prove useful, rather than cantankerous, too cute, or dangerous. Or all three at once.

“Every year, they solve some problem or obstacle, in machine-walking, talking, vision, navigation, or common sense,” she subvocalized for her report, allowing the specs to absorb it all, watching as one aindroid from a Korean chaebol showed off eastasian dance moves and a winning smile. The demonstration was impressive. But demonstrations always were.

“Then, they always wind up bollixed by some simple task. An uneven flight of stairs. A muddled foreground or background. A semantic paradox. Something that wouldn’t bother a five-year-old kid. And every year, the lesson is the same.

“We are already marvels. A three-kilo human brain still combines more amazing things than any computer model can yet emulate.

“It’s been seventy years that ai-builders have promised to surge beyond human ken. Their list of tricks keeps growing. Ai can sift and correlate across all of human knowledge, in seconds. Yet, each decade reveals more layers of unexpected subtlety, that lay hidden in our own packed neuron-clusters all along. Skills we simply took for granted.”

There it was, again. A theme, planted in her mind by Sato. The notion that something strangely spectacular had been wrought-by God or evolution or both-inside the Homo sapiens brain. About the same time as that chert core in her bag was the technological acme.

“If anything, today’s Tower of Babel is flat but incredibly wide. This generation of godmakers isn’t thwarted by language-that barrier is gone forever-but the bewildering complexity of the thing they hope to copy. Our minds.”

Of course, some of the products and services here had more modest goals. One body-sculpting booth offered the latest fat-dissolving technology, using targeted microwaves to melt lipids exactly where-u- want. Their slogan-from Nietzsche-

“The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a deity.”

She wondered what Sato would make of that. Well, one more humility-reminder bites the dust. When everyone can look good in spandex, will conceit know any bounds?

Speaking of the abdomen… dozens of men and women were lined up at a booth for the McCaffrey Foundation, signing waivers in order to join a test study of e-calculi-gut bacteria transformed to function as tiny computers, powered by excess food. Have a problem? Unleash trillions of tiny, parallel processors occupying your own intestine! Speed them up by eating more! And they produce Vitamin C!

At first, Tor thought this must be a hoax. It sounded like a comedy routine from Monty Phytoplankton. She wondered how the computed output finally emerged.

Not everyone could wait patiently for all this progress. Elderly believers in the Singularity grew worried, as it always seemed to glimmer twenty years away, the same horizon promised in the 1980s. And so, Tor passed by the usual booths offering cryonic suspension contracts. For a fee, teams would rush to your deathbed, whether due to accident or age. The moment after a doctor signed-off you were “dead,” skilled teams would swarm over your body-or (for a lower price) just your detached head-pumping special fluids so you could chill in liquid nitrogen, with relished confidence that some future generation would thaw and repair you. Decades ago, cryonics companies eked along with support from a few rich eccentrics. But the safe revival of Guillermo Borriceli changed all that, pushing the number of contracts past thirty million. Some of the offshore “seastead” tax havens even allowed cryonic suspension before legal death, leading to a steady, one-way stream of immigrants who were wealthy, infirm, and-in Tor’s opinion-certifiably crazy.

They never explain why future generations would choose to revive refugees from a more primitive time. Money alone won’t cut it.

Was that why many of today’s rich were converting to fervent environmentalism? Donating big sums toward eco-projects? To bribe their descendants and be recalled as karmic good guys? Or was it an expanded sense of self-interest? If you expect to live on a future Earth, that could make you less willing to treat today’s planet like disposable tissue.

Meanwhile, some offered services aimed at the other end of life. Like new kinds of infant formula guaranteed to enhance early brain development. Or suture-spreaders to enlarge a fetus’s skull capacity, letting its brain expand in the womb-with a coupon for free cesarean section. The brochure showed a happy child with the smile of a Gerber baby and the domed head of some movie alien… bearing a glint of unstoppable intelligence in big, blue eyes.

Fifty-Genes, Inc. offered a service that was legal at just three seastead colonies. Enhancing the few dozen patches of DNA thought to have been crucial in separating the hominid line from other apes. Continuing along the evolutionary trail. All three of the people manning that booth wore dazzle-makeup, hiding their identities from facial recog programs, making them painful to look at. As if the feds didn’t have ten thousand other ways to track a person.

Farther along, she encountered yet another humanoid automaton, under a virt-blare that proclaimed Certified: Turing Level Three-Point-Three! in flashing letters. Proportioned like a body builder, it bowed to her, offering Tor a seat, some zatz-coffee and a game of chess-or any pastime of her choosing. There was a flirtatious glint in the machine’s smile, either cleverly designed… or else…

She was tempted to plunge a pin into that glossy flesh, to see if this one yelped. The old man-in-a-robot-suit trick.

A subvocalized side note, for later: “No cutsie animal or childlike bots, this year? All hunk-style males, so far. Why? A trend aimed at fem demographics?”

She couldn’t help but wonder. Men across the planet had been using robo-brothels for a decade, with hundreds of thousands of Luci, Nunci, Pari, Fruti, and Hilti models purchased for home use. It didn’t exactly require artificial intelligence to mimic crude, servile passion, if that’s what some males wanted. Of course, the trend was bemoaned in the press. Women mostly stayed aloof, contemptuous of the unsubtle artificial lovers they were offered.

Till now? While the hunk-bot flirted with her, Tor recalled Wesley’s onetime proposition-to maintain a cross- continental relationship via dolls. Would it be more palatable to be touched by a machine, if the thoughts propelling it came from someone she cared for? He was coming to D.C. in a few days, flying east to meet her final zeppelin, at this journey’s end. Did that mean he was giving up such nonsense? Ready to talk, at last, about “getting real”? Or would he have a fistful of brochures to show her the latest enhancements? A modern way they both could have cake, and eat it, too?

Oh crap. The subvocal was on high-sensitivity. Her musings about sexbots and Wesley had gone straight into notes. She blink-navigated, deleted, and disciplined her mind to stay on topic. Spinning away from the enticingly handsome android, multi-tasking like a juggler, Tor kept reciting her draft report without breaking stride.

“Oh, few doubt they’ll succeed eventually. With so many versions of AI cresting at once, it seems likely that we’ll finally enter that century-old sci-fi scenario. Machines that help design their successors, and so on, able to converse with us, provide fresh perspectives, challenge us… then surge ahead.

“At that point we’ll discover who was right, the zealots or the worriers. Can you blame some folks for getting nervous?”

Of course, Tor’s aiwear had been tracking her word stream, highlighting for gisted meaning. And, because her filters were kept low on purpose, the convention center mainframe listened in, automatically making goorelations. Helpfully, the building offered, in her low-right peripheral, a list of conference panels and events to match her interests.

My Neighbors Prefer Death: Easing the Public’s Fear of Immortality.

Yes. Out of five hundred program items, that one had good relevance to her “skepticism” phrase. The next one