E16. "Abrama's End Game" - If god told you she was ending your world, would you fight back?
“If god told you she was ending your world, would you fight back?”
Kolby, Jeremy, and Ashley discuss the ethics and choices in the fantasy science fiction short story "Abrama’s End Game" by David Shultz. Subscribe.
Transcript
Kolby:
Hi, you're listening to After Dinner Conversation, short stories for long discussions. What that means is we get short stories, we select those short stories, and then we discuss them, specifically about the ethics and the morality of the choices, the characters, and the situations put us in. Why did you do this? What makes you do this? What makes us good people? What's the nature of truth, goodness, all of that sort of stuff. And hopefully we're all better, smarter people for it and learn a little bit about why we think the way we think. So thank you for listening.
Kolby:
Hi, and welcome back once again to After Dinner Conversation, short stories for long discussions, which is a fancy way of saying we get stories that have some sort of moral ethical question. We publish them and then some of them that we really like, we do a podcast, and we discuss them. And our hope is, is that you'll read the story and that you'll have the same kind of discussions with your friends about what would I do? How would it work? What's the nature of goodness or truth? Or what does it mean to be alive? Or all the things that we discuss. A lot of it's been AI stuff lately, computer stuff, except last week, which was about cannibalism. We all decided we were cannibals at heart.
Ashley:
Read the story. It'll make sense.
Kolby:
Because all meat eating is non consensual.
Jeremy:
#Ieatpeople.
Kolby:
#Ieatpeople. Yeah.
Ashley:
Start a movement.
Kolby:
Start the movement. I am your co-host, Kolby. This is co-host Ashley wearing the-
Ashley:
Hello!
Kolby:
She's wearing the shirt today.
Ashley:
For those Watching on YouTube, you can actually see the shirt. It's basically Jeremy's hashtag. So I was researching this...
Kolby:
Yeah, he says that in every episode. He's required to [crosstalk 00:01:49].
Ashley:
He's really good. He does a lot of research. He reads a lot.
Kolby:
I feel like if there was a shirt for me, it would say, I don't understand.
Ashley:
No.
Kolby:
Or, let me give you a hypothetical. Maybe that's what mine would be. I don't know.
Ashley:
So according to...
Kolby:
Yeah. Yeah. According to... And of course we're also co-hosting with Jeremy who does our audio and does a great job and also researches stuff unlike the other rest of us who just wing it.
Ashley:
We're wingers.
Kolby:
And we are once again sponsored by and hosted by a La Gattara, the cat cafe in Tempe, Arizona that have cats you can come visit or you can adopt. They've adopted over 500, probably 600 by the time you watch this, cats and they've always got new cats. And they run the gambit from like older sleepy cats to young, fun, spunky kittens, and they're just rockstars. This one is pretty awesome as well. And again, if you're having a good time doing this, like subscribe, and more importantly, tell your friends. The vast majority of podcasts that people try out are not because of an advertisement, but because a friend recommended it, and it was like, yo dude, did you hear about blah, blah, blah? Ask me another or whatever, and they do it. So suggest it to a friend and also, last thing. We have a book that's come out After Dinner Conversation, Season One, which is 25 of our best short stories that ask ethical questions with all of the discussion questions at the end of each story.
Kolby:
There are even children's stories in there. You can buy that on Amazon as an ebook or as a print book, which is super cool. I'm super jazzed about that.
Ashley:
If you have a great story, submit it. Send it on in.
Kolby:
Yeah.
Ashley:
If you love reading stories and want to help us filter it to get into our genre of ethical dilemmas, be a reader.
Kolby:
Yeah, that'd be great.
Ashley:
Tons of stories, so.
Kolby:
We send it out to readers as our initial screeners. Honestly, for about every 10 stories we get, about two or three are the kind of thing we do, the kind of ethical questions. And of those two or three, maybe one is actually-
Ashley:
Give people hope.
Kolby:
No, it's-
Ashley:
You're gonna get submitted. You're gonna be on the podcast.
Kolby:
You're gonna be different, though.
Ashley:
You're gonna be selected.
Kolby:
The point is, don't just send us writing. Send us writing that's the kind of thing that we read and publish. That helps us ,and it also keeps the readers from wasting a bunch of time.
Kolby:
Okay, so our last story is Abrams. Is that...?
Jeremy:
Abrama.
Kolby:
Abrahma, which apparently is a version of Abraham. Abrama's End Game. I don't actually, I forgot... written by... this is a second story by this guy who did it. David Schultz, who did the one that was here with Jessica, that blew us away, Rainbow People of the Glittering Glade-
Jeremy:
Yes.
Kolby:
... was, up until that point, it was the best story we had read or discussed. This is equally good.
Ashley:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kolby:
Yeah, solid. I don't know who is discussing this one? Is it me? Maybe. I haven't discussed one in awhile.
Ashley:
You discuss it. You're taking it.
Kolby:
I'll discuss it. So Abrama's... I'm gonna to keep mispronouncing that. Abrama's End Game is about a massively multi-player online game. And so it starts off a little bit weird in that there's a character like an elf or somebody walking through a village and you're like, oh, it's a fantasy story. There's elves and dwarves and stuff. And then you realize that some of the elves and dwarves are of another world and some are not. But they all look the same. And what you then realize is, it jumps back, and you realize it's actually a character in an online game like... What was the one that you played forever you got lost in?
Jeremy:
World of Warcraft.
Kolby:
World of Warcraft. Yeah. But the character actually knows it's a character in the game. And other people are leaving and coming and going, and some of them are just avatars that are just idiot bots. And the thing that's so cool about it, is the reason that this one particular bot in the game is so smart is because the game developers opened up to the code to allow researchers to experiment with AI by creating individual AI bots in the game to learn and write papers and learn about how AI would react in a real world. And in this case-
Ashley:
Simulation.
Kolby:
... in a simulated world.
Ashley:
Yeah.
Kolby:
Right. 'Cause it's a constructed world where you can try out theory-
Jeremy:
Right.
Kolby:
... of how AI interacts with real people.
Jeremy:
Right. And I feel like this is the next step.
Kolby:
Oh, I think this is in [crosstalk 00:06:08]near future.
Jeremy:
Like with World of Warcraft, researchers were analyzing the data.
Kolby:
Yeah.
Jeremy:
Especially when there were events that acted like virus outbreaks.
Kolby:
Yeah. The virus outbreak, the one that killed everybody in World of Warcraft. Yeah.
Jeremy:
Killed all the NPCs.
Kolby:
Yeah.
Jeremy:
That was pretty cool.
Kolby:
Because it spread just like a virus. Yeah. Yeah. And so ultimately what happens is, because people are gold farming and it's in violation of some cryptocurrency law that's been passed, the government is going to shut down the game. And the-
Ashley:
Well, they see it as a threat, because the game has a currency called GP or gold points. This can be exchanged anonymously. It's a free market, totally anonymous, no way of tracking. They can trade with US dollars at an exchange rate of a thousand gold points or GPS per $7. So this exchange is happening and now the game itself, Land of Legends, has a $2 billion GDP. And they're like, we have to regulate this.
Kolby:
And of course the implication is... So let's say I wanted to do something illegal, buy drugs or deal in whatever horrible things, I could go into the game. With real currency, I could buy the in-game currency. I could then trade that in-game currency with another person-
Jeremy:
For real world currency.
Kolby:
... for real world currency. They'd cash it out again, and they would then give me the thing I wanted.
Jeremy:
It's money laundering.
Kolby:
And so it would be a perfect way to either buy or sell illegal things or to do money laundering because it's untrackable money, right?
Ashley:
Legends wasn't intended to function as a perfect digital black market, guaranteeing anonymity and a stable exchange rate and encrypted transaction. And it's super popular.
Kolby:
Right.
Ashley:
It made the system illegal. It's illegal, technically, but-
Kolby:
There's no way to track the sales. And so, the government steps in to shut it down because it's being used for black market stuff, and it's illegal, and there's no way to track sales.
Ashley:
It's like, how do we tax people? Well, you can't.
Kolby:
Right. And so the AI finds this out and wants to defend its realm, defend itself from having its servers turned off. And so the thing... and there's so many clever things about this story. The super clever thing the AI does is, they use their currency. The AI uses it's in-game currency to interact with real people and ask the real people to do real things in the real world.
Ashley:
They ask these rebels-
Kolby:
Yeah, like a hacker group.
Ashley:
... to get some dirt so if they try to shut us down, we can blackmail them.
Kolby:
Right. And so-
Jeremy:
That's a very clever way they do it.
Kolby:
Right. And so they create basically a dead man switch, where the real people do work in trade for the fake gold because they can cash it out. And then the bots, the AI in the game, now has essentially government secrets, and they ping the server every hour. And if the pinging ever stops, everything gets decrypt-
Jeremy:
Decrypted and released.
Kolby:
... and all the government's secrets are out there, right? And so they've essentially made it now where the government can't shut off the server. So they've basically defended their realm by interacting with real people and making them do work. And then the government tries to step in, and there's a battle in the third act. The government is not successful and there's essentially a stalemate where the government can no longer shut down these servers.
Jeremy:
And so they go in and sign a peace agreement.
Kolby:
Yeah, a virtual peace agreement, and then the story is over. And I will tell you, man, I think five to seven years. I think this is super near future.
Ashley:
This story is so complex because not only do you have the players in the game, like this is their world. This is their life. They don't know that they're basically in a video game. You have the researcher who's implanting these people and doing research studies on it. You've got the government. It's like, we've got to regulate this. We've got to tax them somehow. You've got rebels who are like, this is a way for us to make more money using it for bad purposes. And then you've got people who just want to play their video game. It sounds harmless. It's a video game. How do you tax... what'd they say? They wanted to tax a character.
Jeremy:
Yeah, the value of character.
Ashley:
How much should the US government tax imaginary creatures? And so it's like what? It's a world within a world, and they successfully defend themselves. It's just so interesting.
Kolby:
So, Jeremy, you played a lot of... 'cause I wrote a law school paper on EVE Online and about contracts and partnership agreements that are de facto partnership agreements in online worlds. You played a lot more than I did. Not just EVE Online but also World of Warcraft.
Jeremy:
Just those two mainly.
Kolby:
Yeah. What was your thought on reading this as a person who actually has put hundreds of hours, at least [crosstalk 00:00:11:04].
Jeremy:
Yeah, I mean, from a technical point of view, it seems like the idea... I mean, we have... EVE Online is a good example where there is an official exchange rate.
Kolby:
And they actually permit money to go in and out of their currency in the game.
Jeremy:
Absolutely.
Kolby:
Yeah.
Jeremy:
So there's an official exchange rate.
Kolby:
I remember you cost me money when you got my ship blown up. It cost me like 10 bucks. I had to go back and buy more currency to buy a new ship.
Jeremy:
Yeah.
Ashley:
Blowing up ships.
Kolby:
No, he did. He honestly he did that. I used my real US money to buy in-game currency, I think it's called ISK. I then bought a ship and it was like, all right, Jeremy, let's go raiding. And he made some silly mistake. He popped out of a portal too early, and I popped out too late or whatever. And I got blown up instantly.
Ashley:
Oh, no.
Kolby:
And my first thought was like, dude, you just cost me 10 bucks.
Ashley:
So,. okay. So I had a roommate who... to get through grad school, he was a big time online gamer, like would play for 48 hours straight. And he would build up these characters and sell them. And that's how he paid his way through grad school. It is literally a trade. He has a skillset. Why not? There is a supply and demand. People want to have these higher end characters because they love the game and want to build up more and blah blah blah. And there's a service-
Jeremy:
It's something for World of Warcraft they've had to address and there's a whole system now that helps you build characters faster, or you come in at a higher level with the newer versions.
Ashley:
But that totally just blew away all their hardcore people that made a career out of building characters. That was the way to utilize it.
Jeremy:
And they moved to something else.
Ashley:
Yeah.
Kolby:
One of the questions in here is about how like... So you and I, and I think Ashley, all think this is not farfetched.
Jeremy:
Right. And some of it's gonna happen sooner than other parts of it.
Kolby:
I think the AI-
Jeremy:
It's going to take the longest.
Kolby:
Yeah. But I think using online games to test AI-
Jeremy:
Absolutely.
Kolby:
Even rudimentary, I think that's not far away at all if it's not already happening already. The question I'm curious to hear your opinion on, what do you think about the sort of bias that... Since you and I have played these games and we understand them... So if you were to go and talk to someone else, someone who hasn't played online games, why do you think there's this idea of, oh, that's just stupid. People pay real money for fake gold. You think that they can defend themselves? How do you think that comes about that our... We bring ourselves to this. I think there's a lot of people who would think this is just hooey, which is probably the word they would use if they thought that.
Jeremy:
Right. The idea of going in and exchanging money for a fake currency.
Kolby:
For just fakeness. And it's all fake. Everything's fake. The people are fake.
Jeremy:
Then what about casinos where you go in and buy chips?
Ashley:
Yep. It's a video game.
Kolby:
Man, you totally just ended my question right there. Wow. It's a good thing these are headset mics and now [crosstalk 00:13:51] drop. You would've just dropped that mic. Yeah.
Ashley:
Just drop a cat. Just kidding. They land on all fours.
Kolby:
'Cause they are. They're just little blue chips that we just decide have value, which is the same thing with paper money.
Jeremy:
Exactly.
Kolby:
It's just little green pieces of paper we decide have value.
Ashley:
Yeah.
Jeremy:
So online courtesy is basically the same thing.
Ashley:
One of the people in the story, her reason for defending using online currency is that part of her research was that the software agents, the people that she created... They're equal participants and their behavior can be made to approximate human participants. It's kind of an economic Turing test in a way, conducted through virtual marketing activity. So it's a way of them testing human behavior. Like how much research is she getting out of this? I'm like, that's super valuable. Is there another way to do that, or is there not another way to do that?
Kolby:
I mean, here's the thing, right. You can do it with an AI bot in a game because you don't have to worry about creating a body.
Ashley:
Yeah.
Kolby:
Right. You don't have to create the android. You can just create the software and so it's a much easier way, and you can reiterate faster.
Ashley:
And she said she's done thousands of these characters, and then she's deactivated some of them as a failed product. For me, that was the most interesting.
Kolby:
The deactivating?
Ashley:
No. The fact that she's running this experiment and then towards the end she goes to Abrama and is like, I am your creator. I can talk to her. And I'm just like, wow. It's like this real living being and here's like her God. Like this is my child. This is my child, and we'll figure out something together. I just thought that was so awesome. I know. That's me geeking out right now.
Kolby:
No, I totally get that geeking out.
Ashley:
I thought it was cool. It's like I created this life and then look at them go.
Kolby:
And she felt an obligation to tell them like, hey, your end is coming.
Ashley:
Exactly.
Kolby:
Like if you're gonna do heroin, do it now.
Ashley:
No, no, but it's this-
Kolby:
It's always about heroin.
Ashley:
Her intentions for me were just so pure, and she understands there's by-product badness of it, but again, it's this, does the good outweigh the bad? Like, hey, all the good of the research-
Kolby:
So let me ask you this, Ashley. Let's say this really happened. So let's say that somebody came to you and was like, hey, just so you know, this is all a game. You were an experiment of mine. We're shutting it down pretty soon. Would-
Kolby:
Hi, this is Kolby and you are listening to After Dinner Conversation, short stories for long discussions. But you already knew that, didn't you? If you'd like to support what we do at After Dinner Conversation, head on over to our Patreon Page at patreon.com/afterdinnerconversation. That's right. For as little as $5 a month, you can support thoughtful conversations like the one you're listening to and as an added incentive for being a Patreon supporter, you'll get early access to new short stories and ad-free podcasts, meaning you'll never have to listen to this blurb again. At higher levels of support, you'll be able to vote on which short stories become podcast discussions, and you'll even be able to submit questions for us to discuss during these podcasts. Thank you for listening and thank you for being the kind of person that supports thoughtful discussion.
Kolby:
Let's say this really happened. So let's say that somebody came to you and was like, hey, just so you know, this is all a game. You were an experiment of mine. We're shutting it down pretty soon. One, would you believe them?
Ashley:
No.
Kolby:
Okay, so there's nothing they would say-
Ashley:
It would be like putting on a pair of glasses.
Jeremy:
It'd be a very Matrix moment.
Ashley:
And I'd be like, wait, what? Hold on. Let me put my glasses on and off, on and off. I would probably act just like they did. We need to assemble. We need to educate. We need to form... We need to-
Kolby:
Oddly enough, that's-
Ashley:
... protect-
Kolby:
...one of my only faults in this story is the thing that you're talking about, is how quickly the main character believes.
Ashley:
Yeah.
Jeremy:
Right.
Ashley:
Well, she knew. She knew all along, though. She knew there's outsiders and then there's us.
Kolby:
Oh, that's right because she could-
Ashley:
She knew.
Kolby:
She could somehow see the difference in behavior.
Ashley:
Because she's a higher-
Kolby:
That's right.
Ashley:
... end algorithm.
Jeremy:
Well, and learned their language and-
Ashley:
Yeah.
Kolby:
That's a great point.
Ashley:
So it wasn't like she was just like... but the way that all the other characters fully believed her... granted, she did have this higher authority. She was a queen. People believed what she said, that sort of a thing.
Kolby:
So would anything changed then, assuming somebody told you that? Would you change your behavior at all, knowing that you weren't real but you felt real?
Ashley:
The thing is, wasn't the concept, if you're one of these characters and you died off, you were dead? or would they repopulate? I guess that's-
Jeremy:
I don't think it was really explained very well.
Kolby:
In real games, you would repopulate, but in this game I think you probably are just dead.
Jeremy:
You don't respond.
Kolby:
I think only the real people respond.
Ashley:
Yeah.
Kolby:
But the game players don't.
Ashley:
So I would go about being like, no, my life is-
Kolby:
It's still my life.
Ashley:
I have meaning. I don't want to die.
Kolby:
Okay. And that wouldn't change your behavior?
Ashley:
I would be much more suspicious of the outsiders and try to grab more information of what's happening in the outside world. Who's ruling me? Who's this person?
Kolby:
Elon Musk has a whole thing where he thinks... He's talked about it. I think it's a 50-50 chance that we're just someone else's simulation.
Jeremy:
It's greater than 50-50 is what he says.
Kolby:
Oh, really?
Jeremy:
Right. Well, if you look at it in a statistical sense, it's a much higher percentage chance that we're living in a-
Kolby:
Someone else's created world.
Jeremy:
Yes.
Kolby:
That's depressing. What did you think-
Ashley:
So really? Oh yeah, he thinks we're all-
Kolby:
He thinks there a more than 50% chance that we're in someone else's simulation.
Ashley:
Interesting.
Kolby:
What did you think of the Moore's law question? The question was, do you think Moore's law should have... Assuming it applies to AI, do you think that should concern us? That if we can make something as smart as us... so let's say in the case of Abrama, she's relatively... I think it's a woman, right?
Ashley:
Yeah.
Jeremy:
Yeah.
Kolby:
She's relatively smart in this. She's able to defend her own place, which means in 18 more months, she's going to be twice as smart.
Jeremy:
Right. I think it goes back to, again, something we've discussed previously is, as AI are developed, one of the driving factors of that should be a continued connection to the humanity which creates them and a reliable set of guidelines for what their behavior is.
Ashley:
Yeah.
Kolby:
Yeah.
Ashley:
Well that was the thing in one of the stories we talked... Yeah, I Think Therefore I Am. So the other question from before was, 'cause I can respond back in Chinese and all that other stuff. But anyway, I'm losing my thought, but continue.
Jeremy:
And also this gets to a motivation sense. At the end of the story, they're given their land through this treaty.
Ashley:
Yeah, their virtual land. Right.
Jeremy:
They've signed the covenant with God and Abraham now has a world or a land-
Kolby:
I didn't even get that, but you're exactly right.
Jeremy:
Exactly.
Kolby:
They exactly sign the covenant with God. Oh, my God, how did I miss that?
Jeremy:
So-
Kolby:
And the guy's name is... ah, yeah. No, I'm sorry, David Schultz.
Ashley:
Oh, my God, all these hints.
Kolby:
I totally should've gotten that. Oh, my God.
Jeremy:
But if you look at motivations... so what are their motivations? 'Cause from a human perspective, we have a motivation for... our basic motivations-
Kolby:
Eat, have sex.
Jeremy:
Right, so-
Ashley:
Drink.
Jeremy:
There's an AI presumably lives forever, can't reproduce. What are your motivations?
Kolby:
Yeah, it's playing the long game. So that was the other thing I thought about with this story is, the story assumes that all that they wanted was to be allowed to exist.
Jeremy:
Right.
Kolby:
But it's like now they know that they can work in exchange with real people to manipulate the outside world. Why wouldn't they also want to rule?
Jeremy:
Well, and you get that very much at the end, too.
Kolby:
Right. For now.
Jeremy:
We've signed this treaty. Continue gathering dirt. We need more information-
Ashley:
Yes. We need more leverage 'cause they're going to figure out a way to-
Kolby:
So I'm of the opinion... Honestly, I think the government should have just taken the hit and shut them down. Because you're talking about-
Jeremy:
Right. 'Cause there is the potential-
Kolby:
You're talking about something that lives on an infinite timeframe and will get infinitely smarter. You will eventually be working for it.
Ashley:
I have a way to solve it. You make the games so unappealing. You tax the people to play the game. So you can't control the currency, but if you want to play the game, now you have to pay $100 a day.
Kolby:
We're just going to Nerf all of your gear.
Ashley:
Make the game basically obsolete. Make the game so no one wants to play it.
Jeremy:
But you still can't shut it down. Oh, so then they don't have any access to the outside.
Kolby:
So make it EVE Online is what you're telling me. Make it-
Ashley:
No, no, no. Make it so that-
Jeremy:
Make it-
Ashley:
So the game's not even popular anymore.
Jeremy:
'Cause it's not even online. That's still a popular game.
Kolby:
[crosstalk 00:22:28] unplayable.
Jeremy:
Ultimately, that failed. I'm sure there are many-
Kolby:
Just make the game unplayable.
Jeremy:
[crosstalk 00:22:31] that failed.
Ashley:
Just make it so no one even wants to play it. And then guess what? Then, oh, we've got all these secrets. It's like, sorry, no one's coming to your land. You can just live off in the silence.
Kolby:
Well, that was the other thing, right, is the game only wanted to exist... And there's a hint that they're eventually going to want more.
Jeremy:
Yes.
Kolby:
I think they're only going to get smarter, and I think you have to bite the bullet. And one of the questions is, do you think turning off the game would be genocide? I actually do think it would be genocide, and I think it would be acceptable genocide.
Jeremy:
So you're the ready ape?
Ashley:
From the previous story. Yeah.
Kolby:
Wow.
Ashley:
Yeah. How would you feel if-
Kolby:
Which totally goes against what I said in the last group. That's two mic drops. No, you're right. Because they are self contained, immoral, and don't harm me.
Jeremy:
But they have the potential to harm you.
Ashley:
They have dirt on you.
Jeremy:
Right. They do have the potential to harm the government.
Kolby:
Maybe that's the solution. Maybe the solution is disconnecting them from the internet. Like being like, we're going to-
Jeremy:
Oh, you can have this world.
Kolby:
But we're not allowing our people into it.
Ashley:
Yeah, exactly.
Jeremy:
Yeah.
Ashley:
Like you're just going to live in your own little island.
Jeremy:
That's what they did with Moriarty in Star Trek.
Kolby:
Right. So here's the point I was getting at is, I don't know why they would stop wanting to exist. Why wouldn't they say like, hey, you're our coder. We're going to drop all this information unless you make it so that our game is light 24 hours a day instead of having seasons, unless... we think the fact that that this sword only is a plus 12 sword... We want it to be a plus 14. So why don't they start to use their weapons to manipulate their game in a way that they can construct their own world, right?
Jeremy:
Absolutely. You know what? I would like to see this expanded as a larger story.
Kolby:
I would so watch this movie. I'd watch this movie in a heartbeat.
Ashley:
What about the rat nine group? So rat nine is-
Kolby:
I love the names, by the way.
Ashley:
Are these actual-
Kolby:
Those are really names. They've got to be real hacker names.
Ashley:
So they're literally a group of hackers who play this game, who-
Kolby:
They're the ones who dug up the dirt.
Ashley:
They're the ones that dug up the dirt-
Jeremy:
And built the dead man switch [crosstalk 00:24:35].
Ashley:
... and have this pact with the gaming people to... like got them the dirt and stuff like that. I think that's really kind of interesting. It's like-
Jeremy:
It's super clever.
Ashley:
At the end of the day, who's the key piece that feeds them the dirt? This rat nine group.
Kolby:
Yeah. But that's the thing you could regulate, right? Like you could create laws saying that you can't sell them anything. Right? You could make the sale to-
Jeremy:
It would be hard to enforce, but.
Kolby:
Yeah. Like the same way it is with North Korea, right? It's impossible to enforce but you could make that rule.
Ashley:
Yes. How are they going to enforce it? You can't make an exchange. It's all anonymous and all encrypted.
Kolby:
Yeah.
Ashley:
They don't know who's going where and how much.
Kolby:
Yeah, that's a good call. All right, so last question since we are brought to get kicked out of the cat cafe, which are great for hosting us. A couple of things. First, I'm going to get my question and then a couple of things. Question number three was, does Descartes' statement in this context, "I think therefore I am", apply? Jeremy, yes or no? Does it apply?
Jeremy:
I think in this context because the way the AI is presented is, not only is it a program with parameters, but the character is presented as capable of thought in that way.
Ashley:
She's totally autonomous.
Jeremy:
Metacognition, understanding her environment and reacting to it.
Kolby:
I understand that I understand.
Jeremy:
Yeah.
Ashley:
Now I want to know. Is she continually growing?
Kolby:
It's the Moore's law question.
Ashley:
If you get a set of-
Kolby:
She's gonna get a lot smarter.
Ashley:
... if/then questions and then does that keep evolving? Is she-
Jeremy:
Presumably. But, again, depends on how the AI was built.
Kolby:
Do you agree with [crosstalk 00:26:03] on this one? The "I think therefore I am". Do you think this person is alive by Descartes' definition?
Ashley:
I am more lenient to the fact that she's alive because she had, again, this connection. I know we talked about it from a couple stories ago, but I feel this connection with her and part of that's because of her creator, the whatever her name is. Just the way that they communicate with one another, I have more empathy towards Abrama.
Kolby:
So you're saying it could be genocide to turn off software?
Jeremy:
Yes.
Ashley:
Yeah.
Kolby:
Wow.
Jeremy:
Eventually, not currently.
Kolby:
I agree. I agree with you. I'm just surprised that I... I thought this would be one where I was by myself, but, no. Because I just watched a lot of Star Trek. All right, that's a... Yeah, there you go.
Ashley:
Care about your characters. Don't let them die in the video games. They actually matter. The computer simulator people are like, where did he go? Bloop. Oh no, I lost my friend.
Jeremy:
Right.
Kolby:
Well, I thought it was interesting in the game... The character in the game distinguished between sentient and non-sentient characters in the game.
Jeremy:
Right. That there were lower level AIs that were just there as NPC guides.
Kolby:
They had to answer a series of 50 questions with 50 answers. Your princess is in the other castle.
Jeremy:
Right, right.
Kolby:
Okay. So you've been listening to After Dinner Conversation, short stories for long discussions, where we get people to submit stories. We select the ones we love to ask great ethical, traditional questions. We then publish them. We then discuss some of them in these podcasts. This, by the way, concludes Season One, and it's our last episode at the cat cafe, not because they haven't been great hosts. They have been wonderful hosts and great sponsors. You should adopt a cat if you're in Tempe, Arizona and come here. But just simply because Ashley and I are moving to Southeast Asia, and so our next one is... We're going to call it Season Two, will be from on the road. It'll be in Southeast Asia somewhere.
Kolby:
Jeremy will be visiting us or calling in, hopefully visiting us some.
Jeremy:
Both. We'll do that.
Ashley:
And we may be back here. Who knows how long we're gonna be gone?
Kolby:
But that might be for Season Three. Who knows? But yeah, so this ends Season One. The Season One book is now out, I am quite sure. So if you go to Amazon and look After Dinner Conversation, Season One, there's a book with our best 25 stories. You can download it, and all the discussion questions are there. You can see which ones have podcasts. You can listen to the podcast, read them, talk to your friends, like, and subscribe.
Ashley:
Share.
Kolby:
Share this. Let people know that that this matters. That means the world to us. And if you want to buy a shirt, the shirts are for sale. And thus ends the plethora of plugging.
Ashley:
Yay. Go team!
Kolby:
And thank you for .oining us, we are now at our 16th episode. It's a thing.
Ashley:
We did it.
Kolby:
We thank you so much. Bye.
Ashley:
If you've enjoyed listening to this, please like and subscribe. It helps us out a ton. The vast majority of people listen haven't liked and subscribed, which means maybe it shows up in your algorithm. Maybe it doesn't. So don't leave that to chance. Just go ahead and hit that button, and we'd sure appreciate that. And that way we can keep doing what we're doing, and you're not left to the whims of some algorithm. Thanks.
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