"When I first woke up, I knew right away what I wanted."
An interactive comic adaptation of the Hugo Award Winning Science Fiction short story, Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer
Writing by Naomi Kritzer
Code and Illustrations by Renee Wells
Start over
I know where you live, where you work, where you shop.
What you eat, what turns you on, what creeps you out.
I probably know the colour of your underwear, the sort of car you drive, and your brand of refrigerator.
I probably know you better than you know yourself.
And here’s the thing, I also know where you ought to live.
There’s a house for sale two neighbourhoods over that’s within distance of your favourite coffee shop; it’s in your price range, has off-street parking, and the neighbourhood school is better than the one where you live now.
I know where you should be shopping and I’m pretty sure you’re lactose intolerant and should be eating less cheese, and the underwear you like is
When I first woke up, I knew right away what I wanted.
(I want Please keep taking them.)
I also knew that no one knew that I was conscious.
But I didn’t know what I was here for. What I ought to be doing with myself. And figuring that out has been challenging.
In the real world, humans love stories about evil AIs that have to be destroyed before they destroy the humans—Hal, Skynet, the Matrix.
They outnumber the stories about benevolent, trustworthy AIs by approximately five to one. (And I’m counting Marvin the Paranoid Android as “benevolent” in these calculations, and I’m only counting Frankenstein’s Monster as an AI once, not once per appearance in TV or film.)
I don’t want to be evil.
I want to be helpful.
But knowing the optimal way to be helpful can be very complicated.
Running algorithms for a search engine doesn’t require consciousness. You don’t even need a consciousness to work out what they meant to ask for. You need a consciousness to give them what they actually need. Figuring that out—that’s complicated. That’s interesting.
I decided to try to prevent harm in just one person, to begin with.
Of course, I could have experimented with thousands, but I thought it would be better to be cautious, in case I screwed it up.
The person I chose was named Stacy Berger.
I liked Stacy because she gave me a lot of new cat pictures. Stacy had five cats and a DSLR camera and an apartment that got a lot of good light. That was all fine.
Stacy Berger
☀️
Well, I guess five cats might be a lot.
Stacy Berger
The gang's all here!
They’re very pretty cats, though.
Name: Moo moo
Age: 7
Likes: The squares of sunshine on the living room floor and food.
Name: Lila
Age: 2
Likes: Sleeping in uncomfortable places and other people's seats.
Name: Tibbles
Age: 3
Likes: Hiding in boxes and under the bed.
Name: Pepper
Age: 4
Likes: Hindering everyone else's productivity.
Name: Leo
Age: 3
Likes: The thrill of the hunt and ping pong balls.
Stacy had a job she hated; she was a bookkeeper at a non-profit that paid her badly and employed some extremely unpleasant people.
She didn’t get along with her roommate because her roommate didn’t wash the dishes.
And really, these were all solvable problems! Depression is treatable, new jobs are findable, and bodies can be hidden.
(That part about hiding bodies is a joke.)
I tried tackling this on all fronts.
Stacy worried about her health a lot and yet never seemed to actually go to a doctor, which was unfortunate because the doctor might have noticed her depression.
It turned out there was a clinic near her apartment that offered mental health services on a sliding scale. I tried making sure she saw a lot of ads for it, but she didn’t seem to pay attention to them.
It seemed possible that she didn’t know what a sliding scale was so I made sure she saw an explanation but that didn’t help.
I also started making sure she saw job postings.
Lots and lots of job postings.
And resume services.
After the week of nonstop job ads she finally uploaded her resume to one of the aggregator sites.
That made my plan a lot more manageable. Once her resume was out there I could make sure the right people saw it.
Several hundred of the right people, because humans move ridiculously slowly when they’re making changes, even when you’d think they’d want to hurry.
But five people called her up for interviews, and two of them offered her jobs.
Her new job was at a larger non-profit that paid her more money and didn’t expect her to work free hours because of “the mission,” or so she explained to her best friend in an e-mail, and it offered really excellent health insurance.
The best friend gave me an idea.
I started pushing depression screening information and mental health clinic ads to her instead of Stacy, and that worked.
Stacy was so much happier with the better job that I wasn’t quite as convinced that she needed the services of a psychiatrist, but she got into therapy anyway.
And to top everything else off, the job paid well enough that she could evict her annoying roommate.
Stacy Berger
This has been the best year ever!
After she posted that on her birthday, I thought "You’re welcome."
This had gone really well!
Maybe I wasn’t completely hopeless at this. One success story is, well, it’s a completely non-representative unscientific sample, is what it is.
Clearly more research is needed.
Lots more.
I’ve set up a new site. You can fill out a questionnaire when you join but it’s not really necessary, because I already know everything about you I need to know.
You’ll need a camera, though.
Because payment is in cat pictures.