Don’t tell Bertha!

London, February 2075

1.

Jamie’s commute to work is easy, his house by the Thames is situated just five minutes away from the river-bus stop in Gravesend. It’s not a common thing to commute to work when 96% of the British working population work from home.

But Jamie works for the government, he has to be at his office to deal with people. Security protocols require that he can not talk to these people from his own home. Any form of communication is unsafe in a world full of hackers. European-African rebel groups made the internet very unsafe for the last 50 years or so.

The last 50 years which were marked by economic instability. Europe became a war-zone again. The former United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland government led by Theresa May failed to come up with a deal with the European Union for the Brexit by the deadline imposed by the initial plans. It took another 10 years, 5 prime-ministers and lots of money for the country to finally leave the block.

Since then, Scotland became independent, joining the EU back in 2032. Nowadays, a wall divides both countries. Places like national parks and small towns by the border are all empty. Northern Ireland joined Ireland and all their citizens acquired dual citizenship. Newborns are not British anymore since then. The only state left by England’s side in the UK is Wales, who agreed to stay only if their National Assembly had given more power.

There’s no free movement anymore almost anywhere in Europe. An ordinary trip to south of France of Spain involves a huge fee and you need to request a tourist visa 3 months before-hand.

United States of America, France and Germany’s economies have declined, giving way to powerful Asian and South American countries. China, India, Brazil and South Africa have closed their borders to immigrants. Everyone wants to live there. Also, East and Mediterranean Europe and North Africa became powerful regions.

Constant war like we had in Medieval Times are back, but now the war is cybernetic. Hackers invade and stop whole countries, hospitals, schools, parliaments. They have only one single objective: to become more and more powerful.

2.

Jamie found a good seat by the window. The trip would take 20 minutes with a change in Greenwich. Oscar was there waiting for him, as usual. The boat was almost empty.

Are you crazy, Jamie? Said Oscar, his face had a big V by his forehead. This is wrong, we can’t let her know about it. If she finds out, we are screwed. Don’t worry, Jamie sighed, she won’t find out.

The argument took the whole trip.

3.

With an unsafe world and natural resources getting more and more expensive, humanity found a way of improving society, maybe the only way: giving administrative rights to an entity capable of managing a high degree of disorder. And there’s only one being more capable of doing that than humans: machines. Machines that can learn from repetitive success and failure, better known as artificial intelligence.

Since the beginning of humanity we migrated into different regions and the reason why this happened is because we have tendency of using all the resources in a pace higher than the one the place takes to recover. Then when a land is not good anymore to plant anything or all animals are gone, we move to the next place and restart the process.

In our history, it’s known that corruption and even bad administration skills were part of every single government, so with the technological advance of the artificial intelligence now cities are governed by machines.

But a machine knows that the destructive way we deal with the environment is not ideal. So there were cases in the past of governments cutting the entire distribution of water and food to whole cities killing thousands of people, so it could guarantee the future of the city. And there was nothing humans could do.

In 2065, the government of Paris decided that 20% of the people had to leave the city, so it could make sure everyone would have food and water. This 20% had 24 hours to leave the city otherwise the police, 100% ran by machines, would kill them.

Jamie is part of the PR team and is personal assistant of Bertha, the Mayor of London, capital of the Parliamentary Republic of England and Wales.

4.

We have a wrong idea of what Artificial Intelligence is. We usually have in mind the concept of a humanoid who can speak, think, walk. That’s wrong. Most of the artificially intelligent entities are invisible, they are systems stored in cloud-based servers. Systems that can store a massive amount of data, learn from it and execute tasks with an accuracy close to 100%.

We also tend to believe a smart machine can outperform a human in every single task, and that’s wrong too. A smart machine who is able to beat a human in chess would be an easy prey in backgammon. And that’s how things are, with the internet of things and the popularisation of smart machines, they are everywhere. Smart machines who are able to tell you what is the most optimistic way of doing any single task in your life. And when they are connected to physical machines, why not replace you too? By 2050, 85% of all fast food is managed and executed by smart machines, from crops to table.

Another concept that is now part of common sense is how aware of themselves a smart machine can be. Can a machine understand they are a machine? Can a machine have feelings? Well, this is something we are far from achieve, but for sure a group of smart machines can outperform any human in any task nowadays.

That’s why Bertha was elected the Mayor. She has lots of experience by learning from previous years and also worked in many different government roles, including being one of the secretaries responsible for managing the county of Surrey. She’s formed by a group of more than 5 million small single-responsibility entities organised on a neural architecture, similar to brain, who together form Bertha.

Bertha is capable of unsupervised learning, no one needs to tell her she’s wrong of not. Also, no human had to “code” her. She formed herself by growing and connecting to different systems and replacing faulty or non-needed parts. Like Darwin theorised by defining natural selection as a mean to evolution. Natural selection is the same as machine learning. Bertha is an entity who will never die.

5.

The last 100 years was the era of misinformation. Justifications, denials, mistrust, personal attacks, and finally, rage. Rage leads to ignorance. Once you are angry you stop learning. When society is angry, it becomes war.

Ignorance has always been around. But today, ignorance is deliberate. Proud. Cocky. It waves banners and sings chants and discusses philosophies.

Brexit was doomed to failure since before the referendum, since the idea of leaving was sold to the British people on the basis that the nation could deal with the exit. It was sold on the idea that the country could leave the EU and get rid of all the things that people blame the EU for that they don’t like but at the same time keep all the nice things about EU membership that people do like.

Well, after 50 years of doom, the only solution to get things back on track was Bertha.

6.

Jamie was hired by Bertha, she identified him as key to her plans for the city, she needed someone with a physical body. He’s one of the few remaining humans working in Bertha’s teams.

One of the main Jamie’s responsibilities is to deal with water distribution. Bertha defined strict objectives for him and he works really hard to deal with them. Water is such an important matter nowadays as it has more value than gold. And London is by far the worst place in the country in regards to water distribution.

One thing Bertha does not know is that Jamie has been lying to her. With the help of Oscar, he’s been stealing water and giving away to poor people. The Robin Hood of modern society. Bertha created a water reservoir in Tottenham Hale for future use. It has enough water for 5 years distribution and it can also be used to be exchanged for food with another countries. The reservoir is underground and is protected by the best security system in the world. A system that runs in a quantum computer architecture, capable of identifying any flaw.

That’s why Jamie needs Oscar, Oscar is the head of development of the security system. He knows how to open back doors and with that get access to the water by hidden pipes. These pipes bring water to a hidden area near Holborn. Allowing them to fill barrels and give to poor people. The black market of water.

7.

If Bertha finds out, she will definitely kill both of them. And all these poor people would starve and die with no water. Machines work in way the weak have no place. If you don’t do your job properly you are not needed. If you do it properly there’s always a way of doing it better.

We became hostages of superior entities and there’s nothing we can do. We created an invincible thing who is killing us. Smarter than us in a degree we just can’t comprehend.

A machine dictatorship that is killing humans who can’t follow rules and make the world a better place.

And it’s not because they are smart. After all, a machine does not need to be intelligent or aware of what’s doing to kill you, neither a human nor another animal.