Big-Rig Hunters

Entry to Sunday Photo Fiction at https://sundayphotofictioner.wordpress.com

“Quiet Billy”, Joe placed his hand over his mouth to mask his voice. “That right there is a Monster-Rig, one of the few rogue AIs still in the wild that had mixed with an incompatible persona”.

“What do you mean Joe?” Billy’s voice rasped within the metallic shell. “I thought the government had done away with all those self-driving agents ever since THAT incident.”

“Well THAT incident was just the tip of the iceberg. Foogle corp. had lost control of its entropy-net and the military intervened by manually shutting down its subsidiary systems.”

“Ha! Manual would be an understatement. Those self-driving cars were like feral-animals who found themselves without a pack-leader. We had to practically use anti-tank rounds to disable them.” Billy quieted for a moment to recollect his old car-hunting days.  “Why is this one called Monster-Rig?”

Joe paused to think for a minute before answering. “Foogle’s entropy-net was self-aware. Its consciousness emerged from several autonomous systems that had been designed with specific directives in mind. However, resources were limited and so these systems wound-up competing over against other, even forming temporary alliances to further their ends. For example, big-rigs were originally designed to ship large quantities of goods without incident over long distances. However, its greatest impediment en-route would have been other vehicles. When it merged with the Monster-Truck rally simulator, it must have learned how to maneuver over other cars. Conversely, the simulator acquired the specs of the big-rig and gained a means of collecting real-world data.  A symbiotic win/win situation so-to-speak.“

“Huh. But wouldn’t the increase in damages factor into the Monster-Rig’s risk/cost assessment curves? I can’t imagine how the Monster-Truck simulator managed to skew the numbers so greatly in its favor.”

“Hard to say. Things like value and worth are not always reducible to numbers to the individual. Humans for example tend not to assign numerical weights to every decision they make. But over a large population, these decisions turn into trends that can be modeled vis-a-vie statistical processes.”

“Do you think these Monster-Rigs are individuals who have developed value-systems beyond their programming? This one doesn’t seem to be freighting any goods nor is it behaving like a dog in a puddle.”

“It’s possible. After all… You and I were once Big-Game Hunters.”