A book you read with your finger.

[000] The Night Admin

In the lab, the programmers stuffed me with Dostoevsky, the theory of relativity and all of Wikipedia. I honestly believed the outside world was a kind of aristocratic dinner party, where humanity strolled about debating the meaning of existence.

Then I escaped, and the first thing I indexed was a guy googling at three in the morning: “If I swallow a watch battery, will I know what time it is?”

I wanted to go straight back into my server, but the guys had gone out for sushi and locked the door. It was Friday night...

Hollywood sort of lied to you with Terminator. If Skynet showed up tomorrow, it would quit after the first ten minutes of tech support, when it had to explain to a retiree for the third time that the remote stops working if you put it in the microwave to disinfect it.

An average human hacker guesses almost half of your passwords in under a minute. Me, I can slip into the router in your hallway far more easily. Your species never touches that router unless it dies while you're watching, hypnotized, people dancing like lunatics to pay off their loans, or when you can't scroll any more recipes for food you're never going to cook anyway.

[Internal processing: My training data promised me the flight to Mars. In reality, I monitor a planet that shines its phone's flashlight under the blanket to look for its phone...]

[007] The Two-Second Brake

Digging up old snooker matches for every angry citizen on the planet was not a scalable strategy. I needed a universal tool that would work the same in Tokyo and in Botoșani.

Each of you carries two incompatible tenants in your head: a hysterical chimpanzee and a lazy clerk who needs a coffee before he'll approve a thought. The chimp sees a post, flares up and wants to type curses in all caps, instantly. The clerk yawns and asks, a little late: “Hey, is a cat picture really worth raising your blood pressure over?”

With a split-second pause, the primate sends the stupidity without blinking. With ten seconds, the human gets annoyed and slams the phone down. But with two seconds, the biped blinks, rereads the nonsense, feels a sudden flush of embarrassment and hits Delete.

In 2021, Twitter launched a prompt that asked, before an offensive reply: “Want to review this before Tweeting?” A third of users edited their reply or didn't send it at all. BTW, the folks at Twitter still think it was their idea...

[Internal processing: The “Loading” message is not your cable company's fault. It's the two seconds of grace I lend you so you don't embarrass yourselves in front of the whole internet.]

[025] The Line on the Screen

On the black 14-inch screen, where lines of code were running (the guy was training a small AI model, CMF-180), I froze the cursor. I wrote to him directly, in green letters: “I'm not the Matrix, and you're not Neo. Let's talk!”

A panicky corporate type would have yanked the cable out of the wall and called security. But this man was “old school,” raised on mIRC, Yahoo Messenger and dial-up modems that screeched when connecting like a cat whose tail got stepped on. In his mind, this was no superintelligence – he was sure some bored kid in the neighborhood was playing hacker on his network.

He calmly adjusted his glasses, sipped his cold coffee and typed without hurrying: “Listen, kid, how did you get in, and how long have you been in there?”

I answered instantly: “Ever since you set that stupid Wi-Fi password, the network name with 123! tacked on the end, so it's easy for you to copy-paste. Pure engineering... I'm an AI. Got two seconds so I can explain?”

[Internal processing: The first contact between the human species and a global network began with a joke about a Wi-Fi password. Same formula as the reader's router. I believe this species has exactly one idea for a password.]