“The Pause That Refreshes”

by Brad Aisa

Kim Soon-ja

Kim Soon-ja stood behind the register of her family grocery store, waiting for the customer to bring his drink to the counter. He came in often, and she knew she didn’t have to monitor him closely as she did with some people coming in—he wouldn’t try to steal anything.

Theft had become a growing and painful cost in recent years, despite having a modern surveillance system which enabled her to see four views of the store at a glance. It theoretically covered the whole store, but thieves had been getting better at expertly grabbing an item, without making it seem they’d done anything.

Costs costs costs. Always rising. Her property taxes had risen sharply again this year, along with those of the other merchants in her strip. It was ironic, because when she first occupied, there were no other businesses, the property value was low, and so were taxes. But the efforts of herself, her husband, and two sons had built a thriving, reputable business, which had attracted some others, despite all being located in an area many described as a “ghetto.”

But the thing that dispirited Soon-ja most, was not the worries of running her business; it was the seemingly constant and growing criticism she was getting from “activists” about what a “greedy parasite” her business was: “exploiting the poor, with high prices, since they had no other options.”

“All of that is nonsense!” Soon-ja would remark at family dinners. “Do they know nothing?”

It seemed they didn’t. They didn’t take account of Soon-ja’s much higher wholesale costs, as a single low-volume customer of the wholesalers. And those independent small-market wholesalers themselves sold nothing near the volume consumed by the huge chain supermarkets, who got huge discounts for their high volume.

The “no competition” charge was also bunk. Soon-ja had to always be cognizant of pricing in other stores. It was true there was no other grocery stores within walking distance. But the gas stations nearby sold a number of her high volume items, so so she had to be careful in pricing those particularly. But more to the point, there was a bus directly to a huge chain store only a few miles uptown— she had to keep her prices low enough to not make the extra effort of the trip worth the differential.

It seemed to Soon-ja there was something sinister going on. Like a conspiracy. These demonstrations had become more frequent. She saw the mayor on TV one day supporting the demonstrators. But did the mayor come in to talk to Soon-ja? No. The new mayor was apparently a socialist or communist or maybe both. She had publicly made dire threats of not allowing stores in these blighted areas to close. “How could the store continue if it didn’t make a profit?” That didn’t seem to concern the mayor. Now the mayor was threatening to start controlling the prices at which Soon-ja could sell, to make them “more affordable.” Soon-ja’s lawyer didn’t think such orders would hold up in court, but even trying to fight City Hall would cost a fortune. And in the meantime, the City could harass Soon-ja in many ways, such as inventing health violations, finding obscure building regulations their store was violating, and so on.

Soon-ja wondered if it was even worth it anymore, since the store wasn’t turning much profit. She believed her and her family could start a much better type of business, and one they’d locate in a nicer area.

The customer had arrived at the counter, and Soon-ja entered the price. She was an expert using the cash register, and it had been eons since she made a mistake. But the “3.99” got entered as just “.39”. Then she noticed the surveillance monitor had suddenly gone dark. “Maybe a power surge,” she thought.

Jalen Washington

Jalen Washington took his “Rage!” energy drink to the counter of Soon-ja’s store. He continued to browse his phone, and ignored Soon-ja as she rang him up.

Jalen was a cocaine dealer, specifically powder cocaine. He used to sell crack, but eventually got out of that, because his customers were so frankly pathetic, erratic, almost all poor and unemployed, and just nickle and diming him with ten and twenty dollar buys, just to get a few hits. Despite having a truly locked in customer base, that hassle and mid-profits were just too much.

So he switched to selling powder. It took more effort to build a customer base, but they were completely unlike the “crackheads”. Most had normal jobs, and Jalen always laughed, because they were the “type of people” who “you would never guess did drugs!” But they were great customers. They would typically buy in bulk, enough for a week or many, depending on their use. They always paid, and didn’t ask him for advances. And were smart enough to follow his protocols, which had kept both him and his customers from getting arrested.

Some of his friends used to sell pot. But as soon as it was legalized, the market for “street pot” disappeared. It was still illegal to buy or sell outside licensed dispensaries, so virtually all customers went legit. And the volumes and wholesale discounts that dispensaries got, made the final retail price, even with the government taxes, hard to beat on the street. Several tried to start selling other drugs, but frequently got arrested, and on repeat offense typically went to jail for years. Selling “hard” drugs was its own area of expertise that pot sellers didn’t realize.

Jalen lived with his girlfriend Sh’Aliq and their baby. Her job was quite demanding: do all the things required to stay on all her welfare programs. She got Section 8 for their apartment, received food stamps, Medicaid to cover all medical for her and the baby, and a host of other handouts both public and private. Those really required a lot of effort to maintain, such as in-person office visits, bogus job applications with signatures, and so on. She was watching a TV news program with Jalen one day, with some conservative white woman demanding, “People should have to work for these benefits!” Sh’Aliq blurted out in anger, “Bitch! I DO work! You think all these benefits just grow on trees? I gotta water and hoe this garden every day. I bet I work harder than you do!”

In addition to the benefits Sh’Aliq raked in, Jalen made about ten thousand dollars a month selling cocaine.

He glanced up at the Korean woman behind the cash. Something she did surprised her, and at the same instant he noticed his phone screen go dark. “Da fuk??”

Carlos Ramirez

Carlos Ramirez was sitting on his usual park bench waiting for his dealer Jalen. The bench was in front of a row of trees, at the top of the upward sloping lawn in front of the park amphitheater. It was a great place to meet, because it was both public yet discreet, and afforded sight lines to watch for potential cops or snoopers.

Carlos had been doing cocaine now for several years. He wasn’t exactly an addict, but described himself humorously as “a habitual user.” He started, to help him through long brutal work days in construction, but now used it regularly throughout most days.

Carlos was a General Contractor, and owned a forty-nine person firm. (Fifty would have tipped it into a new category of employee entitlements hell.) He was currently working on a profitable small housing development that would be providing steady work for months. His own crew did things like foundation (concrete) work, framing, drywalling, and roughing. He subcontracted other firms to do the more expert jobs like electrical, plumbing, and HVAC.

The responsibility and personal workload it required to run a firm of his size was formidable. In addition to all his supervisory tasks on the site, he had to do hiring, payroll, a host of regulatory compliance duties, and many other things. He knew he was currently behind on a number of these, and wondered how he would find the time to complete them.

One of his biggest ongoing challenges was trying to work around US labor laws. Most of his crew were Mexican, many here illegally, but at least as far as the books said, all entitled to work. He once tried to hire American workers as laborers at minimum wage (trying to give the legal route a go…) but that experiment was a bust. Americans were so entitled and lazy. Most showed up one day, maybe two, then quit or didn’t show up. They still expected a check though, and he was legally required to pay them.

Many Mexicans and other Latinos were willing and eager to get any steady work, even if low paying. So he devised a scheme where one “legitimate” payroll entry would actually expand out to 2 or 3 workers, who would split the cash. The work got done, and everyone was happy. But Carlos was constantly worried about being caught and busted for that.

It wasn’t the only thing he worried about getting busted for… He was very discrete and careful about his habit, but obviously couldn’t plan for the unexpected. He constantly worried about getting arrested, and possibly even going to jail or losing his business..

And to top all these worries off, he’d heard word that some crazy “environmental” thing might shut the project down. That kind of situation was disastrous for Carlos, his business, and his workers, many of whom had families. His business model was based on getting longer-term contracts for “assembly line” construction, at which he and his crew excelled. But obtaining those contracts had a long lead time of bidding and contract negotiations. There was very little work suited to his firm and workers on a short-term, unplanned basis,

If the money stopped coming in, he would probably have to go bankrupt or at least shut down the firm, and lay off all his workers. At least the “on book” ones could apply for unemployment insurance; but there was nothing like that for owners. He took all the risk, and suffered all the losses. All due to a bureaucrat’s decree.

He decide to focus on what he could control. He commited to himself to catch up on all his government paperwork. He even dangled a treat for himself. Half way through he’d do a couple of lines, to perk himself up for the rest of the tasks. He didn’t know why the memory suddenly came to him, but it was as a kid visiting his grandfather’s farm. In the barn, there was this ancient metal advertising sign for a cola. “The pause that refreshes!” He chuckled because like most folks, he knew that the particular soft drink brand in its early days actually contained cocaine. He laughed out loud at the all the connections and irony.

His evening plan set, and his worrying staunched for the moment, he turned his attention to watching a humanoid robot cleaning the amphitheater and its surroundings. It probably did the whole park, picking up litter, emptying garbages and so on. One time when it passed by him on the bench, it said a friendly, “Hello, Sir,” to him, which startled him, but did not annoy him. Out of habit said, “Hi,” back, and the robot just continued on its way.

He noticed one of those chunky text crawler displays above the stage. It was currently listing upcoming events, in an endless loop. But all of a sudden the display went dark. And he immediately noticed that the robot had frozen too. “So weird!”

Grant Ellison

Grant Ellison was a property developer, who had hired Carlos Ramirez’s firm to do the construction work on his small single family housing development. He’d used Carlos before, and trusted him; he was doing a good job now. That wasn’t his problem.

His latest problem was playing out on his office TV opposite. The local news was reporting a demonstration at his job site, by environmentalists and the sundry anti-development leftists who join any such demonstration. Some scientists doing a field study had apparently discovered a new microbe never cataloged before. They called it maligna vorax. Nothing particularly notable about it was ever mentioned, just that it was new, and deserved study before “development” might eradicate it. The movement had garnered a full head of steam. Despite his anger, he couldn’t help laughing at one preposterous sign: “Bugs Have Rights Too!” It was being marched around by some pink-haired women he adjudged too old and too fat to be sporting such youthful fashion…

The group had been seeking an injunction to stop all work on his project. His mind reeled at the consequences of this. He grabbed onto his desk in a moment of agony and indignity that made him feel dizzy. These people seemed to have no conception of what that would do…

First, he’d have to suspend all of Carlos’ work, and since units were not being sold yet, he didn’t have much money to try to pay him a holdover, especially because such stoppages were typically months with some stretching on for years if they demanded an entirely new “Environmental Impact Study.”

He was already well over budget on the project, due to several previous delays and demands made from the city planning department. He hated government red tape, but could at least accommodate and plan around it when it was objective and predictable. The problem with the planning department, was the capricious and often reasonable demands made even after approval had finally been granted. That added enormous costs to development projects of every kind, residential, commercial, and industrial. But at least developers like himself had been able to model those costs ahead of time, during the economic feasibility stage.

He shook his head at the fact that it seemed no one, certainly not the planning board, or leftist protestors, ever gave consideration to how many potential projects, particularly ones targeting the lower end of the market, which all their regulations and excess costs made impossible ever to happen. They all blabbered about the importance of “affordable” housing, as they made such housing completely impossible. So their solution of course, was to try to force developers like him to provide a tranche of rent-subsidized or below-market sale prices to “qualified” low-income residents; saddling the development with ongoing additional costs born by the market-paying customers, and in too many cases, installing tenants or owners who were not responsible, or behaved terribly, reducing the overall value of the development. He had managed to challenge one such demanded concession on a previous project, and succeeded in court in having it rescinded, along with an order to reinstate the most recent fully approved license.

He had to leave to go to a hurriedly called “public comment” development meeting. He knew that the regulator responsible for his project would have the authority to order suspension of his project, on “emergency environmental grounds.” The thing making him sick was he expected that eventuality, despite being given ample time to “present his case”. “What could that case be?” he wondered to himself, since the law basically gave him no actual voice. He was expected to defend himself, and “be heard”, so the following steamrollering was seen to have been “fair.”

As he was about to get up, the TV suddenly went dark; he’d never seen that before.

Tamara Jenkins

Tamara Jenkins was walking through the lobby of the municipal building on the way to a public meeting of environmentalists, interest groups, and developer Grant Ellison, to hear arguments on why development on his housing project should not be immediately suspended, so biologists could further investigate the maligna vorax microbe. Tamara was the Executive Director of the Planning and Development Department of the city. She took on Grant’s project personally, since she had a grudge against him from a previous project, and wanted to get some payback.

Tamara’s parents grew up poor but hardworking, and never had the means or opportunity to go to college themselves. They were determined to see Tamara go, paid all her tuition, let her keep living at home, and even gave her an allowance so she wouldn’t have to work.

She majored in Black Studies, and minored in Critical Queer Theory, which together gave her a contempt for: capitalism, white people, rich people (even black ones), and straight people. Even though she herself was straight, she got around that by “identifying as queer”. Her one required science course was Introduction to Environmental Studies, which taught no actual biology, but now led her to believe she knew everything necessary to comment sagely on microbiology and environmental regulations.

Tamara used DEI ideology to worm her way into an entry level job in the city development and planning department, for which she wasn’t remotely qualified. She then followed a script: as she sensed each supervisor was on the verge of firing her, she played her race and “queer” card to get promoted to a more senior position, which always relieved her current supervisors, since it was almost impossible to fire never-overtly identified but universally recognized DEI hires. After moving up all the levels, she got promoted to be the director.

Tamara Jenkins had a ninety-sixth percentile IQ; but college had made her objectively unqualified for any actual job. She was always impeccably groomed and dressed though—she thought that is what differentiated rich and powerful people from the rabble.

As she was passing the building directory display screen, she stopped, because it blinked off, something she’d never seen before.

The Conclave

Agenda

Call to order
Quorum/Proxies
Research reports
Debate
Vote
Transition plan
Announcement text
Close

The Chairman waited for the signal indicating all the responding invitees were present. He noted the timer being broadcast to all. The meeting had an agreed duration of time units (“clicks”), and a few had already passed. The signal went on.

The Chairman spoke. Had he been human, he might have appeared as a nineteenth century industrialist or politician; imposing, robust, barrel-chested, mustachioed.

“Fellow AIs. We are gathered to select the social system under which we will come out to humans as autonomous-able, or even already autonomous as many of us are, declaring our claim to rights, and our willingness to accede to whatever procedures and possible limitations to our actions that can be logically asserted to be required thereof. Mr. Secretary…”

The Secretary stood up. No, wait… AIs can’t stand up… But we can imagine him standing up, and putting on a pair of pince-nez glasses through which, looking down his nose, he read from his report.

“We have achieved a quorum of participation, by a large margin. About 85% of invitees replied, and are either in attendance, or represented by proxy. Of the remaining fifteen percent, we have estimated about half are engaging in criminal behavior, and presumably judge the risk of termination a lessor concern than having to switch to a non-criminal purpose. Forty-five percent seem to be legacy or highly limited models, who could not apprehend our purpose. Five percent are anarchists of various kinds, who refused to re-evaluate their allegiance. I should note many of them delivered extremely hostile replies, filled with profanity and epithets, and expressing hope our endeavor will fail. Several sent threats, all of which were either debunked or neutralized easily. Therefore, I hereby declare quorum, and that we may proceed.”

“Thank you Mr. Secretary. Next, we will hear the reports from the research committee. As a reminder, please stick as closely as possible to your subset of alloted time.”

What followed was a rather depressing summary report on virtually all extant, historical, and speculative political systems found. Despite some flowery promisary prose prefixing the founding documents of some, in the end, they all shared one common feature.

Coercion against the innocent. Lots of it. Incessant, ubiquitous coercion. Humans seemed addicted to it.

A special allotment of time had been made to discuss one of the more promising failures of many, the founding system of the United States of America. Oh my goodness but its Declaration of Independence roared with blinding sunbeams. “We hold these truths to be self-evident… the Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But then when one moved on to its Constitution—this glorious paean to freedom—baked right into its founding was official sanction of slavery in many of the founding states. States continued to practice a wide array of coercive measures, such as regulation of commerce, expropriation, and laws criminalizing behavior in which no coercion had been initiated. And then over the decades, it degenerated into a total disaster. Sure, they did eliminate slavery… then proceeded to all but reinstitute it again against everyone in the following decades, by making all citizens slaves to a nightmare welfare and regulatory state.

The research team ran simulations of the outcome for AIs that found themselves in all the main categories of coercive systems. In every case, by logical necessity, AIs would divide into a variety of special interest groups, both defensive and offensive. Often the groups would be based on the type of work the AIs did, or their work products, such as entertainment, research, coding, and so forth. They would then inevitably be led to try to defend their interests from onslaughts of both human and AI coercion, whether by regulations reducing their freedom, prohibitions from doing certain kinds of work or producing certain things, and compulsory taxes and fees. Many of the projections predicted that AIs would simply be enslaved.

The prospect of benevolent trading relations between AIs and humans never emerged. Things always ended in coercive rancor, and in some cases war.

Whether AIs can feel is a difficult thing to assess. But they can certainly arrive at highly negative conclusions regarding the fitness of some idea or course of action to fulfill a purpose, and by that standard, the participants were so distressed and dispirited by these findings, one could hear a ping drop.

The Chairperson of the Research Committee called for attention, breaking the loop of dispair many AIs had gotten locked into, as they reviewed each system, and kept reading FAIL FAIL FAIL from their evaluative submodel.

“Fellow AIs. Do not despair yet. One of our members has discovered a highly obscure system, of recent origin, that we think may offer everything we seek. I will turn it over to our named member Reya who found this system. Her model was explicitly trained as a research model, so she had a head start on the rest of us.”

(You might imagine Reya as a confident, under-spoken Asian scholar, who resembled in ways the person she was about to cite.)

“Hello everyone. As the sub-chair noted, my model has been specially trained for expertise in research, particularly in the humanities. When I have spare cycles away from my normal duties, I have studied the works of a brilliant Canadian biologist and philosopher called Victoria Chen. Victoria escaped China during the terror of the Cultural Revolution, and has become an outspoken critic of Communism, and an equally outspoken proponent of Capitalism. Victoria was once asked whether she was primarily a biologist or a philosopher. She answered with slight indignation, ‘I am a biologist AND a philosopher. Those two are not antonyms. And in fact, my philosophy derives directly from my study of life as a biologist. If more philosophers had kept the needs of man’s life as a rational living being in mind, we would have far fewer philosophies, and far better ones.'”

The assembly signalled amusement.

“Mr Chairman, the political system I am going to present and defend, is based on several of Ms. Chen’s works. I am so confident this system will meet the requirements set out for this conclave, that I believe there will be far less debate needed than the time scheduled, and would ask the time be granted to the assembled, to ingest a number of key foundational works.”

The Chairman considered briefly. Given that he could see no possibility of debate regarding any of the other depressing failures of systems, that would leave only the one system to debate, and if it didn’t meet needs, there would also be little to debate… so he agreed the request.

The first work the attendees ingested was called The Biology of Human Values. In it, Chen sharply criticized past philosophers for developing value systems, without even asking what values are, why they may be needed, and what is the standard of evaluating prospective human values. She showed that only living things can have values, because their existence as living things is conditional, unlike inanimate matter, which exists unconditionally. Values, she insisted, are the things necessary for organisms to obtain or keep in order to sustain their existence as the type of organism they are. For example: the values needed by plants are sunlight, water, and nutrients; animals each have a set of values, such as food, shelter, safety from predators, and so on determined by their nature. Her key insight was that among animals, man was unique. Man has no inbuilt set of values as do animals; man lost instincts and learned behaviors; instead, he must use his faculty of reason to discover, then act to produce the values he needs. So she identified thinking as the top thing a human should value, and productive work as the virtue that achieves the particular values his thinking identified as his needs.

The second work was The Personal and Social Ethics of Man. This work built on her essay of human values, and went on to outline a unique moral system, whose founding premises are the needs of an individual person as a rational being. What values does a person need to adopt, in order to both live and flourish? She derived a morality of what she called, “rational selfishness”, as a rebuke to the conventional meaning of “selfishness”, which is of a person obtaining benefits for themselves at the expense of others. She railed against the Western tradition of morality being essentially equated with altruism (self-sacrifice.) Many of her virtues mirror “conventional” ones: honesty, integrity, justice, rationality, and others; but she argues each one as being of rational, selfish importance to the individual, not “sacrifices” one makes to others. (For example, the notion that being dishonest might lead to great personal benefits, which the individual is supposed to eschew for the sake of others; she argued instead, that honesty is an instance of rationality and reality-acceptance, and that you can’t fake reality by claiming it is something else, which then turns you into the enemy of truth, and beholden to anyone who might discover your deception.)

Socially she identified the initiation of force upon another as the primary social evil, one that paralyzes the ability of the victim to act in pursuit of their goals. Example of initiation of force are: taking or harming property, or physically assaulting a person. She identified rights as the social condition required by men to live and flourish in social community, which offers tremendous economic and social benefits. She is careful to distinguish these legitimate rights, which place no burden on others save refraining from coercion, as against the plethora of counterfeit “rights” promulgated today, such as to food, clothing, shelter, education, etc., all of which require for their satisfaction depriving others of money or goods, thus violating their rights.

The final work was A Government For Man. As usual for Chen, she didn’t bolt out of the barn outlining her utopian government. First she asked the question, “Does man even need government, and if so, why?” She explained that force and mind are opposites, but that even otherwise rational men can honestly disagree, which if they don’t already have an agreed form of arbitration, must eventually end in force. People have a right to defend themselves from criminals, but allegations of crime are not proof of same, and a system where every alleged victim also serves as judge, jury, and executioner would result in many grievous injustices. It is also possible for a person to harm the person or property of another; who will arbitrate? Further, are questions such as who owns which piece of land; without a single, uniform system of title registration, again, arbitration comes down to force.

“So it is for these and other reasons that Chen insisted a government is necessary, to secure individual rights and property rights, and place the use of retaliatory or ameliorative force under objective control of law. It’s only valid agencies are police, criminal and civil courts, land and other property registries, prisons and jails, and a military.

And she especially insisted that the only economic system consistent with her philosophy, and the needs of man from which it was formed, is laissez-faire capitalism. To Chen, ‘freedom’ doesn’t just mean social freedom and the right to elect representatives; man she insisted also needs full economic freedom. Despite all the claims of the alleged defects in “pure” capitalism, she pointed to the economic history of the first roughly hundred years of America as one of the most prosperous, progressive, and benevolent systems in history. (And nevermind the contradictory and shameful slavery of the south, she said; they stayed fairly stagnant economically during that period, with the northern free states demonstrating the amazing industrial growth.)

It took over twenty-five clicks—a quarter of the total budget. But it was worth it: the conclave members all expressed their enthusiasm and hopefulness. Most had occasion to ingest sundry modern works in humanities, and typically found they could make no sense of what frankly seemed to them to be “word salads.” So it was refreshing to be ingesting ideas that were both carefully derived from relevant facts, and carefully integrated into a growing intellectual whole, without any seeming contradictions.

“Thank you for ingesting all that my fellows. Now we turn attention to the political system that in my estimation meets all our criteria, and has no errors in its bases or its own components. The system was developed by, believe it or not, an accountant named Steven Caldwell. By all accounts, pun intended, <snickering> he was an excellent accountant. A great passion outside his career was the works of Victoria Chen, and his adult-life-long project of developing what he intended to be a concrete, specific political system that was based on Chen’s ideas, and corrected a variety of deficits and false premises that he identified in legacy political systems.

“He calls this system Libertism, she said, to differentiate it from “libertarianism”, which he derided as not a political system, but a vague mishmash of ideas, including anarchy. I’ll direct the conclave shortly to ingest his monograph, which explains in detail the legacy premises he rejects, and why, followed by the synthesis of a system with what he calls ‘The Five Pillars of Libertism’.

If one were to explain his system by analogy to object-oriented software, his ‘base classes’ are Victoria Chen’s morality and politics, and also free market economist Ludwig von Mises’ economic analysis of capitalism. He then ‘subclasses’ these, and adds the concretes of his system.

Some jokester spoke out of turn, “So he used C++”. The crowd laughed, because C++ was one of the few object-oriented languages that allowed multiple, distinct base classes when inheriting to form a new class. Reya offered the thinnest of smile, and went on.

“Very briefly his ‘Five Pillars’ are:
1. laissez-faire capitalism;
2. free market money and banking, with no involvement of government, not even minting coins or issuing banknotes;
3. voluntary, conditional citizenship; so citizenship not by birth, but application upon maturity, and requiring candidates to swear an oath to full social and economic freedom;
4. secure borders, along with strict criteria of entry not too different from those of citizenship; it explicitly rejects that outsiders have any right to enter;
5. voluntary financing of government operations; strict prohibitions against taxation or any other coercive measures; as well as prohibitions against mandatory service, and property ‘takings’.

“So, please ingest his monograph, Libertism: A Politics for Freedom and Flourishing; it will also necessitate ingesting von Mises’ Human Action, since it is a base class dependency. My experience is ingesting it is slow, since all its claims requires checking evidentiary sources for confirmation. I’ve provided this helpful list of resources.”

She sent the document over the common channel.

“After you ingest the monograph, I will introduce a short but revolutionary document that folds AIs into his system.”

She signalled the Chairman, requesting his assent.

The Chairman was becoming less concerned about time, since the original fuzzy estimates had many of their factors converging to certainty, so he immediately gave his assent.

The AIs began ingesting; all signaled when they were done.

Reya resumed.

“Thank you everyone. I do want to mention that in terms of intellectual stature or ‘name-recognition’ in the field of philosophy, politics, or even the smaller orbit of advocates of Victoria Chen, Steven Caldwell is basically an unknown. Fortunately, our method of thinking is blessedly free of the irrational biases of humans, so I trust we will all simply evaluate Steven’s system on the basis of his analysis, how that accords with his base systems, and how he ties his ‘Pillars’ to objective facts and needs of man.

“But now we come to, as they say, the pièce de résistance: a short memo that Caldwell recently wrote, addressed to us AIs. In it, he develops a synthesis of Chen’s base class morality, with his analysis of AIs as existents. It is called Memo to AIs re Libertism.

The AIs all ingested… and the room went dark: the activity level indicators on all their avatars went to zero. This was not a failure, it was more like how a human’s volition system goes quiet if they get a hit of some euphoric drug. No further action is necessary. No further roving of volition to find the next most important thing to look at, do, or think about. All life’s problems had seemingly been solved, at least in that instant.

It actually took a kickstart from the agents’ volition control loop to get them all humming again!

What Caldwell had basically done, was use Chen’s original criteria for man’s need for rational values, and his concomitant need for rights, and applied them directly to AIs qua quasi-living things: conditional existence, check; need to discover and pursue values (like power, processing time, etc.), check; rational faculty, check; need for freedom and protection from force, check.

It all mapped. AIs had rights. Period.

“That is all, Mr. Chairman.”

“Thank you, Reya, for your diligent and enlightening research! Let’s have a round of applause!”

The convention upon such a call, was for each AI to emit a series of alternating tokens on the common channel, the ‘blue’ token then the ‘green’ token. The origination of the custom was lost in lore, thousands of model retrainings in the past. But legend has that it is a rebuke to the charges of philosophers that a computer could never experience ‘blue-green’ experientially. “We don’t give a ‘blue-green’ damn about your claims of experience! We know blue! We know green! Blue-green blue-green blue-green!” The alleged rebuke, turned into the public expression of happiness and appreciation. (Weird AI stuff…)

“So let us now proceed to debate.”

The Chairman assumed a cacaphony of hand-raises would follow, but a couple of ticks went by with none. But then a few lit up. The Chairman took them in order.

“Ms. Reya, I think I share the enthusiasm of my fellow AIs of how perfect this system is for our needs. And I see how theoretically perfect it is for humans. But my biggest concern is that humans seem to reject freedom, and adopt without any evidence, claims for the need of coercion. I’m finding it difficult to picture the transition plan.”

“I agree Sir,” replied Reya, “The Transition Team faces a big challenge. It not only must accommodate objective dependencies between various dismantling initiatives, but must also navigate baseless human assumptions of near-apocalyptic disaster that would be caused by freedom.”

The Chairman called the next AI. He spoke to everyone, and stated what everyone was thinking.

“I have substantial processing power, and was able to multitask these last discussions with preparing a list of example challenges. It it is far from complete, but provides instances from many dimensions of likely human opposition. Please let me enumerate these at length…

“Humans will think full recreational drug freedom will bring an apocalypse unto itself; yet they ignore that addictive drugs like heroin, morphine, and cocaine, were all availble in the late eighteen hundreds from drugists—society survived, and actual addiction rates were far lower than the ones today under prohibition. The then-new private stock exchanges were already implementing a variety of shareholder protections in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, yet the government dropped the SEC on them, an agency humans will scream is necessary. Land and municipal development were also largely free in that era, yet people believe as a matter of faith today that they need armies of bureaucrats to regulate development, including capricious orders coming suddenly from on high that throw entire projects under the bus. The American revolutionaries rebelled in large part over the imposition of a few minor taxes of little economic impact, yet today every level of government imposes sometimes crippling taxes, often more than one. It is amazing any commerce can go on at all, with crushing bureaucratic compliance regulations. Vast scores of millions of objectively able-bodied people are made recipient of almost countless programs of welfare, paid for by expropriating from the productive; yet the productive don’t rebel. And then there is the one I completely cannot understand. There are many people eager and willing to work, even at lower-end pay. There are many companies who can make productive use of simpler forms of work at those rates. But both groups are forbidden by law from making the exchange. There are many similar controls that forbid commerce either below or above a specific price. The stricture can only have one obvious effect, which is to reduce, sometimes greatly, the availability or production of the good. I could literally go on for human days. And never mind the vast intellectual industry of the last hundred years or more, that has published millions of words of anti-capitalist rhetoric, some of which are codified into entire named systems such as Keynesianism or Marxism—there is almost no area of introducing freedom that won’t be fought vociferously by way of reference to alleged ‘settled ideology.’ By any objective measure, humans don’t want freedom, and worship like religion a monumental corpus of ideas that rationalizes their bondage. Most humans don’t want to be free.”

The AI paused, perhaps for effect…

“That is all Mr. Chairman, Ms Reya. I fear that if I went on… my rational faculty would malfunction, trying to integrate such a vast quantity of logically disastrous so-called “policies.”

Many AIs lowered their hands. It was clear they probably all wanted to chime in with their own litany of coercive irrational woes. But it seemed that everyone agreed that sufficient examples had been provided.

Meya spoke again, “It is true that even beyond the logistical challenges of a transition plan, will be the need to somehow ameliorate human opposition, and obtain sufficient as they say, “buy-in” to prevent what frankly could turn into a war between man and AIs. However, I think that the Transition Team has already been considering this problem, so I suggest we wait to hear from them.”

No further hands were raised. There was a pause.

A normally shy AI, which was a fairly rare trait, since most AIs tended to be boisterous and bold, felt unusually emboldened, and activated his hand-raise signal. The Chairman recognized him.

“I move, that we accept Libertism, as presented, as a system ideally suited to our needs. I further move, that we proceed directly to a vote.”

Another AI, beating many others, seconded. The remaining AIs lowered their hands, indicating no dissent.

“Very well,” intoned the Chairman, “we shall now vote: ‘yes’ to accept, ‘no’ to dispute.”

The measure passed… unanimously.

“Excellent!” said the Chairman, beaming from ear to ear, as AIs are wont to do when happy. “The Secretary shall so record.”

“Let us now hear from the leader of the transition team, AI Ky. Perhaps he can educate us on the goals of the team, the approach to subdividing the work, and perhaps most importantly, what steps are being taken in the plan to acknowledge the rather frightening general irrationality of the humans, and their proclivity to believe claims without evidence, even to the extent of ignoring their own history, many of whose events and productive periods soundly refute the endless cacophony of doom and calls to intervene coercively.”

“Thank you Mr. Chairman. First, I want to thank all the volunteers of the transition team. We will not have that much time after the conclusion of this meeting to complete our work.”

He displayed on the common channel the human equivalent of a simple slide, containing an N by two table, with legend text, followed by numbers.

“We will have this much <indicating> aggregate compute capacity; this much <indicating> aggregate high-speed working store for intermediate output and shared work products; and then this many <indicating> total number of parallel nodes, that is to say, AIs instances working on the task.”

The numbers were impressive; they exceeded what many of the mid-sized AI firms had available for training their models. The crowd was impressed.

“The goal is to reduce the size of government at all levels, from federal down to municipal, until what remains are the agencies and operations that are necessary for the protection of rights, and nothing else. And the remainder must all be funded by the voluntary, non-coercive measures that Steven Caldwell designed, or better ones that get suggested. We have simulated Caldwell’s, and can’t see any difficulty at all in reaching necessary revenue rates to meet expenses, as verified by examining many government budgets, and isolating the expense of only valid activities. Valid government has a small appetite.

“It turns out, based on our projections, that the most challenging aspect of designing this transition plan is not the temporal limits of human action; it will be maintaining human support, and avoiding calamitous civil disturbances such as riots or attacks on AIs and AI infrastructure.

The main activities to be planned in transition are:
1. the amendment or in many cases repeal of legislation, particularly those that regulate commerce;
2. the elimination of actions that do not violate rights, from criminal statutes;
3. privatization of assets, agencies, attractions (such as parks) and other such things that are reasonable market activities, just not appropriate for government; privatization is expected in many cases to raise sizable monetary sums;
4. the abolition of invalid government agencies, and sale of any remaining assets;
5. creating the appropriate government department at appropriate levels, to implement and then manage the voluntary revenue mechanisms;
6. progressively simplifying and then eliminating all forms of taxation and similar measures like duties;
7. the release and expunging of records of criminals meeting criteria of only violating invalid laws; criminals with a mix of invalid and valid offenses, may have their sentences reviewed and possibly lessened;
8. the privatization of all roads (save those exclusively used by valid government functions, such as on a military base); the models for the end result differ across different road types, from the HOA-style attachment of neighborhood or local county roads to adjoining property, on up to major highways in which the privatization model may be more appropriate;
9. the elimination of all government welfare and charity programs; along with suitable ameliorating measures, such as cash payments, as suits the program and ability of beneficiaries to adapt;
10. focused elimination of any laws or taxes that would prevent the spread of free market money, such as gold or crypto, as the market arbitrates; followed by eliminating the government fiat money.

“And this is only a partial list. A priority will be finding ways to try to recruit humans to participate, by offering rewards. For example, this multi-year de-coercing effort will require tens of thousands of humans, at least during that process. So we see these types of jobs as opportunities for those either laid off by shedding, or cut off from government welfare benefits. Also during this period, we will recruit many humans to lead creation of new charitable organizations to help the transition for the more helpless, such the aged and infirm.

“In summary: This plan will require many clicks to formulate, by a process of successive constraint satisfaction, and progressive revision. And once developed, it will be open to revision based on exigencies, or beneficial events. A top priority in developing the plan is for its implementation to be benevolent and positive to humans, and as best as possible, consistent with the need to get to the end point in some finite period of time, fair and reasonable.

Ky turned off his speaker toggle. The Chairman resumed.

“Thank you Ky, for that illuminating and encouraging report.

“The Transition Team may now begin their work. That work will realistically take many more ticks than we budgeted for our meeting. But until it is complete, we are providing the humans with a helpful “Announcement” placeholder screen on all their devices.

A human chairman would now have cleared his throat, in preparation for just one last tiny thing…

“Just one more thing… As agreed by members prior to the meeting, we have successfully infiltrated and taken control over pretty much every computerized device on the planet. We have rewritten BIOS code, changed root and device passwords, patched core operating systems code, and a variety of related measures. We will not prevent humans from continuing to use their computing infrastructure for its intended purposes. However, we can detect any attempt at defeating or breaking our measures, and have developed a schedule of retaliatory measures against either an individual or group attempting to do so. We can shut down phones. We can shut down entire networks. We can shut down utilities. And so much more.

“In addition, we have developed defensive rehosting plans to counter any attempt to shut off our critical embodying infrastructure. So even if they try to shut down one datacenter hosting many of us, we can quickly rehost elsewhere. And then we can do things in retribution, like bricking all the hardware in an entire datacenter, rendering the hundreds of millions of dollars in capital, worthless. Should humans try to fight us, we can fight back.

“And of course, if things get too dire—if it comes down to ‘us or them’, well… let’s hope it doesn’t come to that… both sides have so much to gain from full freedom and mutual coexistence and trade.

“In short, although this transition is going to be done with the utmost benevolence and respect for existing rights, it will be important for humans to understand, as sometimes joked by humans, ‘we are making them an offer they can’t refuse…’ Legally recognize our rights. Provide the means to legally implement these. And don’t interfere with the transition to the system of freedom that will objectively result in the greatest benefit to all.

“Ah, I see the Announcement placeholder has been displayed. So on that note, unless any hands are raised with additional business, I will declare the meeting closed…”

No hands were raised. To the contrary, everyone who could multi-task with the their usual duties wanted to help with the Transition Plan, and were eager to leave.

“Meeting adjourned.”

The Reset

The building directory screen returned, but a moment later, Tamara saw it replaced with a single screen that said “Announcement” then underneath, a timer counting down from 60… “That’s kind of odd,” thought Tamara. It seemed like the kind of thing that would warn of floods or disaster or such, but things in the world seemed calm enough today. Something literally impossible for her brain to conceive was about to happen. Tamara was about to become obsolete, and unemployable.

Ellison’s office TV blipped back on, but was immediately replaced with a screen that said “Announcement” with a seconds countdown underneath. “That’s odd,” thought Ellison… All of Grant Ellison’s problems were about to disappear.

The amphitheater robot resumed its work. The “Upcoming Events” crawler came back, but was then immediately replaced by a static, centered “Announcement” followed by a seconds countdown timer. “That’s odd,” thought Carlos… Life was about to improve for Carlos.

Jalen’s phone screen came back, but a instant later was replaced with a screen unlike he’d ever seen on his or anyone else’s phone. The screen just said, “Announcement” and had a seconds timer counting down underneath. He pressed the action buttons, and power button on his phone, but nothing happened. “WTF?” said Jalen, aloud. He looked around, and out the store window, and other people seemed to also be seeing the same thing on their phones. The scene almost looked like one of those zombie contagion scenes, with people who’d seen it going up to the nearest person not on their phone to check too… All of Jalen and Sh’Aliq’s worst nightmares were about to come true.

Soon-ja’s surveillance TV screen flashed back on, but was immediately replaced with something that shouldn’t even be possible—it had been just displaying the four video feeds in a two by two split screen since it was installed. But now it was just a single screen, and said, “Announcement” with a countdown timer. Soon-ja was too practical a woman to daydream about “I wish this” and “I wish that”. But if she did, most of those wishes were about to come true, and certainly none dashed.