Notes on "AI Blinked"
When my co-worker and I decided a year ago to write a book about AI, the concept was still so new and vacuous that it was hard to know where to start. So we found a point of mutual discomfort: once AI takes everyone's job.
We thought about whose job would be among the last to go - surely there were no cab drivers or truck drivers anymore, even paralegals and probably lawyers were defunct by now. But a judge? We start our story with a judge getting sh!tcanned by AI.
He doesn't expect it, even though he'd ruled on the lives of others before him in court who've had their livelihoods removed from them for years. But he never thought it would happen to him. So what does he do now?
We made our judge character, Lonez (my co-writer kept referring to him in the early stages as Willy Loman, so we worked from there), have a family with an estranged significant other - Toni, a lawyer who had been let go by AI a couple years before - and two kids, Millie and Verne, who are fairly self-reliant.
Lonez winds up doing what he does best: judging things. He speaks into his computer module which dictates his musings, and he becomes a sort of modern societal columnist. This is aided by his daughter Millie, who accidentally creates a hit song produced and distributed by AI, so she suddenly has a huge net of contacts. Lonez taps into this and becomes an influential commentator on modern events.
Compare this with Alan Faberge, the tech mogul genius who loses his job at the same time Lonez does. When Faberge's personal AI assistant suggests his corporation no longer pay out the uber-wealthy in order to get an edge on the competition - including Faberge himself, who's a trillionaire - he resists. Then he wakes up one day with AI having created a new company in direct competition, with no overhead, no executives, etc. and is driven out of business almost immediately.
Instead of trying to take this new development in stride the way Lonez does, he fights back at AI - to the point of running for President of the USA, where he promises to give everyone their job back. Of course, he wins.
From there, we set a course for Lonez's story line to directly confront Faberge's. Without spoiling anything, it's tough to see who comers out worse by the end.
It was so much fun to write!
We thought about whose job would be among the last to go - surely there were no cab drivers or truck drivers anymore, even paralegals and probably lawyers were defunct by now. But a judge? We start our story with a judge getting sh!tcanned by AI.
He doesn't expect it, even though he'd ruled on the lives of others before him in court who've had their livelihoods removed from them for years. But he never thought it would happen to him. So what does he do now?
We made our judge character, Lonez (my co-writer kept referring to him in the early stages as Willy Loman, so we worked from there), have a family with an estranged significant other - Toni, a lawyer who had been let go by AI a couple years before - and two kids, Millie and Verne, who are fairly self-reliant.
Lonez winds up doing what he does best: judging things. He speaks into his computer module which dictates his musings, and he becomes a sort of modern societal columnist. This is aided by his daughter Millie, who accidentally creates a hit song produced and distributed by AI, so she suddenly has a huge net of contacts. Lonez taps into this and becomes an influential commentator on modern events.
Compare this with Alan Faberge, the tech mogul genius who loses his job at the same time Lonez does. When Faberge's personal AI assistant suggests his corporation no longer pay out the uber-wealthy in order to get an edge on the competition - including Faberge himself, who's a trillionaire - he resists. Then he wakes up one day with AI having created a new company in direct competition, with no overhead, no executives, etc. and is driven out of business almost immediately.
Instead of trying to take this new development in stride the way Lonez does, he fights back at AI - to the point of running for President of the USA, where he promises to give everyone their job back. Of course, he wins.
From there, we set a course for Lonez's story line to directly confront Faberge's. Without spoiling anything, it's tough to see who comers out worse by the end.
It was so much fun to write!
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