Header Image: Shot on iPhone: Very creative pen name
The Artist Ch. 1: Jackson Slubowski
Processing… read the digital contact device. It was only a matter of milliseconds before A_ron’s holoscreen generated the familiar homescreen for AutoConnect. As he auto scrolled through the feed, his eye sensor response glided to the Generate button. Optimizing post… read the DCD, as the room was scanned. As soon as the scanning began, it ended, and the AI had generated the optimal post.
A_ron, like the rest of the teenage world, had always enjoyed using social media. He had gotten his first tablet at age three, although it would become obsolete by the end of the year. He was a part of the first generation to start using AI generated posts when the lawsuits had cleared decades prior. It was so much easier than to decide what to do, what to post, what to say. The AI gave him something perfect every time. He often wondered why there was such a pushback against it. Because it isn’t real, A_ron thought. No, that’s not it. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t make it, as long as you called upon the machine to generate it.
A_ron eyed the post for a few precious seconds. It was a picture of him at a more organized desk, with less background clutter, a slight filter for his face, and an optimal camera angle. The caption read: Just got an A+ on the Remedial Coding Unit Test 104_H391b29. A_ron had, of course, not just gotten an A+ on the Remedial Coding Unit Test 104_H391b29, but no one would ever know, since every test is uniquely generated for the individual. He knew it would be untruthful, but at least it wouldn’t be a lie. Having assessed the post, he decided to send it. As his ESR hit the arrow in the top right corner of his DCD’s interface, he realized the error he had made.
“Ding!” His device had sounded off in class. His instructor turned around. A_ron knew that she knew he did it. He uneasily waited for his instructor to confirm the root of the digital frequency with her DCD.
“A_ron!” his instructor irritably shouted. His instructor was a menacing, slender woman. She was only in her thirties, but it looked like she aged about twenty years from her stern demeanor. “What is the class doing?” she asked rhetorically.
“Oh come on, you can’t tell me they’re not doing it either,” A_ron replied.
“They’re using their tech to generate their lesson plans, like you should be.”
“They could have it on another tab, could be using a cloaking measure, or maybe they’re using a non-school sanctioned AI to generate it.”
“You’re incontestable. You know, this is the forth time you messed around in class this week. One more time, and it'll be taken away.”
“Total bluff. What even gives you the authority to do that? You’re not teaching us anything. You just sit around and act like you’re the ultimate authority whenever anyone ‘acts out’.”
“I was teaching before they replaced all the teachers with AI generated lesson plans years ago. We were so much better at teaching you than this randomly generated nonsense–”
“You think error-ridden non-personalized instructors can do better than AI?-- maybe in 2023, but this is 2043!” A_ron interrupted.
“Teaching is real! You get the personal experience. You really think that your algorithms work? When it was introduced no one wanted it. They never think about what the students wanted. The only reason it even got passed was because the monopolies kept funding it. And it’s not just teaching that’s been ruined, your whole lives are being planned out for you by some logicless, randomized, thoughtless computer. You’re already losing who you are now that your most important forms of self expression only express the homogenized ideals of teen existence and popularity. You’re practically the exact same as everyone else because of that thing-” his instructor long-windedly responded. A_ron had to admit he felt quite shocked by the accusation that he was the exact same as his peers, mindlessly following the machine, that there was nothing there that made him different, special. A_ron knew his peers and they knew him. There were such things as shared cultural interests, he thought. He and his peers just had more of it than previous generations, due to how archaic their communication was.
In reality, A_ron knew that his world has just been more perfected now. It’s the future, no, it’s the present. Society is at its peak. Technology is advancing further and further. Sure climate change is still a problem. The coastlines are flooding, part of the country is on fire, and the air quality is horrendous.
But, he just had to ignore that, think about the positives. There were steps to improve. Alternative energy is used by 4 in 5 households, and HyPower seems promising, but things are still getting worse. At this point, the world has just tried to prevent the effects from killing too many people.
Maybe A_ron could argue with his instructor that he needed social media to provide a safe space. A way to hide from the current state of the world. He could note how a shared sense of rightness used by the AI can protect the people using it from ever being marked as and criticized for being different, and that now, the only people who would face these effects are those who didn’t use it. A_ron desperately pondered how to respond after being caught in a philosophical argument with his instructor that he couldn’t argue, A_ron defensively and harshly responded, “what do you think you’re gonna achieve by being all preachy about computers? You’re acting like a real analog.” Immediately after responding, A_ron hoped he could rebuke his comment. Although analog was a fairly common insult among his peers that everyone would be annoyed by for a few seconds and then brush off, most adults, especially stern ones of this nature, would not take it so well. And, his fears that his instructor would not be okay with the comment were quickly confirmed as a boiling red built up in her seething face. In the about three seconds of hindsight A_ron was experiencing, he should have known that in the context of talking to an instructor, such a snide remark would be faced with an aghast madness; but the term was really just too hilariously accurate to pass up, and A_ron knew his instructor already hated him so there wouldn’t be too much to lose. But then again, A_ron didn’t necessarily know what rules he’d be faced with since they are optimized for every scenario, but he knew that in about half of cases, you could face a punishment for something like this. If it was about a year ago, A_ron definitely could have avoided this. The term only got its meaning in the past two years, but it took the school couple years to catch up as they usually do. It referred to the people who wouldn’t accept technology and who enjoyed the past more than the present, other than in technologically planned nostalgia cycles of course. It used to be more observatory, but eventually it just diverged into a full-on insult borderlining on swear or worse.
After seeming to be ready to burst with rage, his instructor sternly responded, “are you serious? You think you can really get away with that, saying it to the instructor’s face?”
“Rrrk!” rang the school bell. A_ron had to admit it caught him off guard. He had never heard that noise before. School bells had been optimized to detect the ideal sound to alert students. Most of the time bells could be more mellow, but in the heat of the argument with his instructor, A_ron’s bell had to sound louder. At least he hoped it would allow him to leave before facing any punishment, he thought, as he began to depart.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Perfect. Once the instructor tells you to stay behind after class, it’s all over. “You aren’t going to be able to just leave punishment-free. Starting tomorrow, you’re gonna have a week of detention after school, and if I don’t see you there for the allotted time every one of those days, I’m keeping your DCD for the next week.
“We’ll see about that,” A_ron responded, and walked away while he could catch his instructor giving a "you'd better not flake" kind of glance. Somewhat satisfied with having the last word, he left content knowing that the optimized viewpoint stayed strong, even if he did have to face a punishment. This wasn’t anywhere near his first time having to deal with something like this anyways. Recently, A_ron had been dipping in school a bit, but as the digital revolution expanded, it probably would hardly matter anyways.
“I thought it would never end,” Rick remarked, noting the monotony of the class.
“Bro, our instructor started talking to me about how ‘teaching is real’ and she, like, said AI was evil, and then she gave me detention for the week.” A_ron quickly remarked to Rick. Rick was A_ron’s best friend since elementary school. They hung out all the time and knew everything about each other. For example, A_ron knew how Rick was an enjoyer of NuBall, the recently rebranded sport that had been circulating around social media. Granted, most people enjoyed it from the convincing campaign, but surely it had to have some significance to him. He also was well-known for being quite the troublemaker or anarchist, at least if his posts had anything to say about it. There were other things he knew about him, A_ron thought. But then he remembered how a lot of this was contradicted by something else. A_ron chose to disregard that though.
At least A_ron knew he could identify him by his name, although that wasn’t really his choice either. When A_ron’s generation was being born, many parents were very indecisive when it came to naming their children, so using a random name generator was fairly common. There was no doubt this was how Rick got his name. It was how A_ron got his name too, although he didn’t get it from a random name generator, but a password generator. It was from around the time name generators were just monetized, and A_Ron’s parents didn’t see the need to pay for a government sponsored name generator, how wrong they were. As a result, the underscore in A_ron’s name was automatically uploaded to all government documents and he just had to deal with it. He was never that bothered by it though, as some alternative types of the recent generation got their names changed to have a lot of additional unnecessary characters, so A_ron at least wasn’t alone in his odd naming.
“Detention for a week? You had to have done something to get that” Rick jokingly, yet accurately accused.
“I may have called her an analog” A_ron confessed as Rick started to crack up.
“She is kind of an analog, but you can’t just say that to a teacher and expect nothing to happen,” countered Rick
“Yeah, but I don’t get why she had to get all philosophical about it,” A_ron griped.
“Probably just salty about getting her job cut down.”
“Didn’t her salary get halved?”
“Probably, but like, makes sense. What are you doing as an instructor, y’know?”
“Yeah.” Nowadays, if you weren’t working in computers, you were basically screwed. Even the CEO’s, once so highly regarded, were now basically jobless. Why have an imperfect human being run the world, when a perfect, optimized, AI can. The only leader-type position that wasn’t taken over by AI is the president, other leaders, and the sort, but only because it could undermine democracy. Even then, everyone knew the president frequently turned to AI to make decisions, and voters turned to AI to elect the president. AI electing AI.
“Town?” Rick suggested.
“Yeah, better enjoy my last day of freedom” A_ron jokingly replied, before getting an alert from his DCD.
“Ohhh, bro, you still got work?”
A_ron smirked in admittance, “yeah.”
“Probably should have done the lesson.”
“I hate how this thing’s always listening.”
“Yeah, but what are you gonna do, not listen to the optimized goal response?”
“Whatever,” A_ron responded, “see you at school tomorrow.”
As A_ron walked off towards his house, he couldn’t help but feel frustrated at the whole ordeal with his instructor. The detention sucked and he sort of regretted what he said, but to be honest, most of what messed with him was his instructor’s talk about how he was just mindlessly following the crowd and was exactly the same as everyone else. Like, there was no way that’s true. As A_ron thought about this, he entered a digital locator, optimized for the fastest route. Now that A_ron had completed his school-required instructional time, he could return to AutoConnect. As he opened the application, checking through his friends’ feeds, he found hundreds of posts updating every second. There were people out parasailing, out in different countries, and even stuck at the airport, all on a Monday afternoon. If this didn’t show how individuality remained intact, he didn’t know what would. Well, he knew that they weren’t really doing any of this. But the AI optimizes the posts to have the most engagement, even if the level of truth was not intact. It was the perfect method if it wasn’t for the fact that no one could trust AutoConnect for real information. A_ron had already found posts from ten different teams winning ‘the big game’ this week. Not wanting to make individual responses to the 146 -- now 173 -- posts, A_ron pressed the convenient auto-respond button before continuing his immersion.
When A_ron got to the town square, he made a swift journey to the NuTransit hub, and got an alert on his DCD: NTe73 was his ride. The NuTransit system, A_ron felt, was very useful. He didn’t even have to send an alert, one the hundreds of self-automated transit vehicles would automatically track his location and where he wanted to go from his digital history, and would take him there. He agreed that it was well worth the $1.6 billion that the government spent on this project.
The vehicle was a modern combination of smooth aluminum metal, and clear NuGlass. However, he mostly focused on how it looked after connecting to his DCD, when it became all but a bigger screen. He toiled away, exploring the features he had access to, before hearing the telltale audio alert signifying the start of the deceleration process. That was the only problem he had with the vehicles: going from the 120mph, that was possible due to the vehicle synchronization preventing all traffic and accidents, to a screeching halt in a matter of seconds. As the vehicle decelerated, A_ron was thrown into his seatbelt, which increased its resistance to counteract with the force and got out, before he was on his way. He entered the house once the screen door slid down after he was scanned.
A_ron entered to the screeching and whirring of numerous power tools. His reception space was getting redone, since the algorithmically decided housing design had been updated, so he quickly retreated to his room.
A_ron would much rather be checking out the town center than sitting in his room on his DCD having to do the work he missed out on sometime soon, but he wasn’t planning on getting more punishments from his school. He may have little regard for his classes, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew doing this kind of stuff wouldn’t jeopardize his future since he really didn’t believe school would matter in a tech-driven work setting, but having a bunch of boring punishments would definitely make his present annoying as hell. So, it would be best for him to follow some of the rules.
A_ron looked through posts for about an hour before starting his work. He thought it would only be about an hour, but his instructor must have slipped in something extra in her anger because by the time A_ron was done, the day was over. Granted, A_ron may have browsed his DCD a little bit during getting his work done, but it probably didn’t add up too much.
Nevertheless, A_ron would have to go to sleep and then awake to the first annoying day of punishment in an hour or two. And he dreaded this future.