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raccoonhearteyes · 4 years

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Clarke vs. The Hot Customer

Meanwhile in DC, CIA Agent Lexa Woods and NSA Agent Anya Forrest sit across the desk with Homeland Security General Indra Beckman.

Beckman starts, “Last night at 18:00, CIA operative Costia Daniels was killed in action. Before her death, she sent the entire Intersect Project to a civilian, a top-secret mission known only among those with the highest clearance in the CIA. The project consisted of every CIA mission and intel since the CIA’s founding in 1947. All contained in a supercomputer. The goal was for the intel to be downloaded into the human brain. While it has yet to be tested, it would give the agency’s top agents every piece of information necessary to complete their missions, without having to read every file, look through every photo, and analyze every document. This project is now in the inbox of one Clarke Griffin. As I’m sure you can guess, this is not ideal. The recipient’s unsecured g-mail means that every terrorist and their mother can track who it went to. And they will go after them without hesitation in order to get their hands on our intelligence.”

“Why did she send it to a civilian instead of a CIA contact?” Anya asks.

“We don’t know. As far as we can tell, she’s just some random college dropout. She works at a Buy-More. Your job is to find Clarke Griffin, find out what she knows, and download the e-mail yourselves so our nation’s secrets are not floating around in the head of some idiot civilian.”

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Clarke wakes up on her bedroom floor to the blaring alarm on her nightstand. She’s groggy, and doesn’t quite remember why she apparently passed out on the floor instead of changing into pajamas and climbing into her bed.

Slowly, the memories of last night trickle in. She remembers a hot pocket, going to her room to play video games, and… an e-mail from Costia? That can’t be right. They haven’t spoken in years… But she distinctly remembers getting an e-mail from her, then a bunch of weird pictures, and that’s it.

She goes over to her computer to try and reread the email, but the thing won’t turn on. It seems to be fried from the inside. “Great, so not only did Costia ruin my life, she sent me a computer virus that destroyed my computer?” Clarke wonders.

Clarke’s still a little woozy from the unending strobe light of incomprehensible images her brain was exposed to the night before, so she skips breakfast, and thanks her past self for not even changing out of her work clothes so she can just walk right out the door and head to the Buy-More.

Raven is sitting at the Nerd Herd help desk waiting for her.

“You never logged on to LoL last night,” Raven complains. “Yeah, I got a weird e-mail from Costia and it torpedoed my computer.”

“I’m sorry what? Costia? Costia Daniels? The one that ruined your life and got you stuck working at a Buy-More with me?”

“The one and only.”

“What did she want?”

“I don’t know. It was a weird e-mail. It spazzed through a bunch of images and then fried my hard drive.”

“What a bitch.” “Yup.”

It’s a slow day at the Buy-More so Raven and Clarke spend most of the day chit chatting about nothing, planning their next video game all-nighter, and talking about starting their own electronics company to beat out the Buy-More. It’s an idea they’ve talked about for years, but is nothing more than a pipe dream. Neither of them have the capital to get that thing off the ground. No matter how many engineering degrees Raven collects. Eventually they fall into a game of “Guess what that customer is thinking.”

“I am going to hoard this for when the nuclear apocalypse hits us and toilet paper is scarce,” Raven says about the guy with 100 rolls of toilet paper and nothing else in his cart.

“I need a copy of Die Hard for every TV in my house,” Clarke gruffs about the old many with 8 copies of Die Hard in his basket.

The two are so enthralled in their game that they hardly notice a customer approach the help desk.

In a high-pitched valley girl voice, Clarke says, “I’m getting this video camera so I can finally make a sex tape with my boyfriend!” Raven laughs way harder than Clarke thinks the joke earned, but then the customer clears her throat and Clarke whirls around. The customer raises her eyebrows in surprise.

“Um… I… did you? That wasn’t… Hi, welcome to the Nerd Herd. How can I help you?”

Clarke chokes on her tongue a little when she realizes just how beautiful the customer is. She’s wearing tight fitting jeans, a tank top, and an unbuttoned flannel over her shirt. Clarke’s gaydar lightly pings in the back of her mind. Her hair is a mane of curly brown locks. She has a pair of sunglasses perched on the top of her head, and the greenest eyes Clarke has ever seen. When her gaze flicks back up to make eye contact, there’s something… intense about the way this girl looks at her.

“I’ve been having phone troubles. It doesn’t seem to be receiving calls.”

“Can I have a name for the intake form?”

“Lexa.”

“Well Lexa, I’ll see what I can do.”

Clarke fiddles around with the phone, looking for external damage or immediately obvious reasons for malfunction. When she finds nothing evident, she tells Lexa, “It must be something internal, I’ll take it to the back and see what’s going on. Come back in about an hour, and it should be all set.”

“That sounds perfect. Thank you…” Lexa pauses waiting for a name

“Clarke.”

“Thank you, Clarke. I’ll see you in an hour.”

As Lexa turns to walk away, Clarke stares at her ass and says a quiet, “Bye Lexa.”

“HEY CLARKE! You telling this customer goodbye or are you announcing that you’re bi?” Raven says a little too loudly for it to not be intentional.

Lexa turns to flash a smile at Clarke, and Clarke turns to Raven and says, “Reyes, I will kill you in your sleep.”

An hour spent tinkering in the repair shop, and the phone is back to fully functional. Clarke waits at the help desk for Lexa to return. This time she ensures that she’s not mid-game so she doesn’t embarrass herself a second time in front of this customer. She most certainly notices when Lexa walks into the store. This time, the flannel is tied around her waist and Clarke stares at the tattoo curling around her bicep. Then she stares at the biceps themselves and considers tracing the lines with her tongue. Scolding herself for being just as big of a perv as fellow Nerd Herders Jasper and Monty, she smiles and pointedly does not stray from making eye contact. Lexa is less successful as she sneaks a peek down Clarke’s shirt that may have one or two fewer buttons done up this time around.

“What’s the verdict doc?” Lexa asks, leaning into Clarke’s space at the counter.

“All fixed,” Clarke smiles.

“How do I know it works?”

Clarke grins, “Aha, watch this.”

She digs her own phone out of her pocket and dials a number. She waits a few seconds until the phone in Lexa’s hand starts to vibrate and “NERD HERD HOTTIE” pops up on the screen.

“See? Good as new”

“Thank you, Clarke. I really appreciate it,” Lexa says, and turns to leave the store. Clarke’s bubble of hope pops as she watches her walk away. But then, after a few steps, Lexa picks up her phone, scrolls through a screen and lifts the phone to her ear.

A few feet behind her, Clarke’s phone buzzes on the counter. She answers.

“Do you want to get dinner tonight?” Lexa asks.

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They agree to meet at Grounders at 7:00. Lexa arrives 15 minutes early and waits at the entrance. She’s wearing a green button up, tight grey pants, and her hair is done up in a neat braid. She has a stun gun tucked into her jacket, a knife hidden in each boot, and a blade laced within the braid. But this is supposed to look like a first date, not a mission, so she tries to make herself look nervous by shifting her weight from one leg to the other, and gets ready to flirt some information out of her mark.

Clarke steps out of an Uber at 7:06 wearing a light blue sundress that makes her look even more like a ray of sunshine. It’s a stark contrast from the unisex Nerd Herd uniform, and Lexa can’t help but give her a once over. Twice maybe thrice if she’s being completely honest. “I thought you might have changed your mind,” Lexa confesses, looking at her watch.

“Of course not! Just bad LA traffic,” Clarke replies and leads them into the restaurant.

Conversation is easy. They make each other laugh. The waitress comes over three times in 45 minutes before either of them have even glanced at the menu. Lexa assures the waitress that they do, in fact, know how to read, and a few minutes later they actually order their food. Neither can stop themselves from long looks and bashful smiles. Clarke learns that Lexa just moved to town and is still looking for the right fit job. They talk about their childhoods and interests. Eventually, they stumble on the topic of whether or not it’s weird that Lexa asked out her phone repair woman. Clarke immediately reddens at the memory of the first words Lexa heard her say. Clarke apologizes for her having to overhear the game she plays with Raven at the Buy-More.

“Speaking of which, how does a girl as beautiful and smart as you end up working for the Nerd Herd?” Lexa asks incredulously.

“That’s kind of a long story. The spark notes version is that I am one semester shy of a computer science degree at Stanford. My senior year, my former best friend and roommate Costia framed me for cheating and got me kicked out of school. No explanation. Since then I haven’t really had the drive to finish the degree. Or trust anyone. I’ve really just been surviving ever since. No sense in living when everything you loved is gone, right? Sorry, that was probably a little heavy for a first date…”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Lexa assures. The name Costia did not go unnoticed, so Lexa presses on, “What ever happened to that Costia girl?”

“The funny thing is I haven’t really thought about her in a few years, but the last two days it’s been at nagging in my mind. I actually got an e-mail from her yesterday, but all it contained was a virus that fried my computer,” Clarke shrugs.

The waiter interrupts to fill their wine glasses, and Lexa’s opportunity to press more about this e-mail vanishes as Clarke switches the subject completely, and they fall back into easy conversation, longing and somewhat thirsty looks, and grinning at each other.

Lexa pays their check while Clarke runs to the bathroom, and they have decided that 3 hours taking up this restaurant’s table is probably long enough. Yes, it’s a mission, but Lexa is genuinely enjoying talking to this girl. She’s sweet and funny, and looks damn good in that dress.

“Can I drive you home?” Lexa asks.

The drive is a comfortable silence. Lexa’s hand rests on Clarke’s knee and mindlessly draws patterns on her thigh until Clarke intertwines their fingers. The drive ends too quickly as they pull up to the complex where Clarke lives.

Lexa walks Clarke to her door. Clarke’s walk slows to a crawl, trying to prolong her time with Lexa as much as possible. But the trip from the car to the stoop is only so long, so she settles for pretending to struggle to find her keys. God she wants to kiss her. She wants to kiss her so badly she hasn’t listened to a word Lexa has said because she can’t think about anything else. Lexa pauses in front of the door, and shuffles a bit closer to Clarke.

“Goodnight, Clarke”, she says as she leans in. Clarke closes her eyes in anticipation, and then feels Lexa’s lips land just left of the mark. Lexa places a chaste kiss on the corner of Clarke’s mouth, then turns to walk away. She turns back with a wink and a wave as Clarke unlocks her front door, and melts to a puddle once she’s crossed the threshold.

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Lexa paces outside the front of the Buy-More while on the phone with the General. “Beckman, she’s just a normal girl. She hasn’t done anything wrong. I don’t even think the e-mail made it to her. She said she hasn’t heard from Costia since college!” “Agent Woods, Daniels was one of our top agents. There must be a reason she sent it to her. Now, go find out if she’s just a really good liar, or if she’s actually as innocent as you seem to think.” She hangs up without a greeting or dismissal.

Lexa tries to shake off the conversation, and walks through the Buy-More doors to go find Clarke, who at the moment is helping someone pick out a blender. Lexa pretends to be interested in a video camera and presses random buttons while waiting for Clarke to be free.

“Looking at cameras for our sex tape?” Clarke asks with a cheeky grin.

Lexa rolls her eyes and replies, “No, I was just in the neighborhood and wanted to say hi. I had fun last night.”

Clarke lights up with a goofy grin and thinks about how she didn’t kiss her last night. Clarke eyes her lips, and catches Lexa doing the same. She does a quick scan of the floor, hoping to confirm that no manager is there to catch her making out with a girl while on the clock. She’s made it almost a full 360 when it happens.

She sees a man standing in the DVD section. He doesn’t look that much different than a normal customer, but once she sees the scar on his neck, images flash before her eyes. The scar. The man’s name, and seven different aliases. A Russian Prison manifest. A rank within Russian Intelligence operations. They flash before her eyes in rapid succession, pulling the information to the forefront of her brain, and making her a little dizzy with the completely unconscious recall of information she doesn’t remember learning in the first place. The images stop and her eyes refocus

“Lexa, this is going to sound crazy, but that man in the DVDs section is a Russian spy and he

is armed to kill. Don’t ask me how I know that, I just do.”

Clarke watches Lexa’s eyes widen in alarm. “Holy shit, you downloaded it.”

“What?”

“The Intersect.” “The what?” “I have to get you out of here.”

Lexa grabs Clarke’s hand and pulls her towards the back of the store.

“Lexa, what is going on.” She doesn’t answer. Instead she goes into the breakroom, punches a series of numbers into the vending machine, and watches the machine slide to the right to reveal a passageway. Lexa pulls Clarke through, ignoring her questions and utter shock at what is going on. Clarke is led down some stairs into a conference room with screens taking up a full wall, a wall full of weapons, and a video conference call happening at the table in the center. An angry looking Asian woman sits at the table talking to the screen with a black woman with more medals on her military coat than Clarke knew existed.

Lexa interrupts their conversation with, “She’s the Intersect.”

“She what?”

“She’s the Intersect. She downloaded it. She just recognized a Russian operative upstairs.”

The other women in the room and on the screen look shocked and horrified.

“So it works?” the woman on the screen asks. “WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON. WHERE AM I? WHAT IS THE INTERSECT? WHY IS THERE A SECRET BASE IN THE BUY-MORE? WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?” Clarke yells, finally getting Lexa’s attention.

Lexa starts, “My name is Lexa Woods. I work for the CIA.”

“Anya Forrest, Colonel in the NSA.”

“And I’m General Indra Beckman, head of Homeland Security”

Clarke begins to laugh hysterically. “Did Raven put you up to this? She always goes WAY TOO BIG or way too small for pranks. Jeezus how much did she spend on this?!” She wanders the base touching weapons, poking screens, and searching for a hidden camera.

“This isn’t a joke, Miss Griffin,” Beckman interrupts.

The tone sobers Clarke immediately.

Beckman continues, “Three days ago, CIA operative Costia Daniels sent you an email. That email contained every secret the CIA has in what was called the Intersect Project. That information is now in your head. Until a new Intersect can be built, the CIA and NSA’s number one priority will be protecting you.”

“I’m sorry, what now?” Clarke asks.

“You will assist in missions as needed.”

Clarke is, again, much too stunned to grasp anything that was just said. Instead, she asks every question that has run through her mind since she thought she was about to kiss Lexa at work to the current moment. Costia was CIA? Why did she send it to me? How does it work? Can I get it removed? You’re sure this isn’t an over the top prank? Costia is dead?

Lexa, Anya, and Beckman patiently answer every question Clarke has. For the most part, they are very understanding of the barrage of questions. The questions continue for about thirty minutes, but eventually die down. This is real. Clarke will be working with the CIA. Other countries will try to find the Intersect, so she is in danger. She is now their most important asset, and they will protect her at all costs. She doesn’t really have a choice in this.

“I didn’t ask for this,” Clarke states. “We know, but your country is calling,” Beckman answers.

General Beckman hangs up the call, Anya goes back to cleaning an enormous gun, Lexa starts to organize files, and Clarke… Clarke sits at the table staring at her hands. Deep in thought, and too stunned to form coherent thoughts. After ten minutes, she takes a deep breath and addresses Lexa.

“So that date then?”

Lexa reads the implied question and answers, “Was part of my mission to find out what you knew.”

“Ah.”

“Clarke.”

“I don’t know why I thought it was anything else. No one that model hot dates a girl from the Nerd Herd. Is that like a requirement for spy work?”

Lexa cocks her head like a confused puppy.

Clarke glances between Anya and Lexa, and waggles her fingers between the two of them. “You know, the mind-blowing hotness? I mean, it works. Girl that looks like you asks me to jump off the roof and I’d probably do it without asking any follow up questions. Of course it was all fake. You’re probably straight. Really deluded myself into this one. Big yikes.”

Anya looks up from the barrel of her gun and chuffs, “Definitely not straight”

Lexa blushes but doesn’t disagree with Anya. Instead she addresses Clarke directly. “You do realize that we will need to continue dating, right?”

Clarke continues rambling to herself about being an idiot for thinking a girl like Lexa was into her, but then the content of Lexa’s question sinks in. Her brain jolts like a record scratch. “Huh?”

“It’s the perfect cover for why I’m suddenly in your life and may suddenly vanish from it. I can keep a close eye on you when you’re not at work, and it won’t seem suspicious if I stay over. During the day, Anya will work at the Buy More with you.”

Clarke still hasn’t wrapped her head around “continue dating” so instead asks, “I’m dead, right? That Russian operative in DVDs killed me and I’m bleeding out on the Buy-More floor, right? Because there is no way the US government just asked me to fake date a bombshell agent for the safety of our country.”

Anya finishes reassembling her gun, looks up at the newly christened fake couple, and says, “Believe it, babe.”

#clexa #chuck au #lexa #clarke griffin #chapter 2 #slow burn #fake dating #clexa chuck au #cia #formatting is a bitch going from word to this #anyone have recs for how its not?

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reddragdiva · 7 years

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the state of the rationality, 2017: why artificial intelligence will kill us all before global warming

so! what’s eliezer yudkowsky been up to?

well! there’s arbital! the exciting new general encyclopedia uh mathematics encyclopedia uh general social site and apparent latest step in the sequence “sl4, overcomingbias, lesswrong” now that he can't be bothered with lw. no other audience would think that front page was a good idea. with the end of all things approaching fast per the above, he's doing his bit to SAVE HUMANITY HOW HE CAN: writing incomprehensible deep LW theology on arbital (see recent activity list at bottom).

i posted the above elsewhere and got a response from an actual AI engineer working at google. that response, posted with permission:

This is insane. The AI gold rush (which is a pretty good term) is not doing anything that feeds into his preferred disaster scenario. He believes in what he calls the AI FOOM, where an intelligent system is given the task of updating itself to be more intelligent, recursively. He believes, for whatever reason, that intelligence can be quantified and optimized for, and that the g factor is a real quantity rather than a statistical artifact. These aren't majority views, but it's not implausible. Or, at least, I'm the wrong kind of expert to say that they are implausible. I'm an AI guy, not a human intelligence guy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) So, let's generously take those as true. He believes that optimizing g is something that's possible. He's never addressed it directly, but a necessary piece of his belief in FOOM is that the upper bound on g is sufficiently high that it counts as superintelligence (or else the upper bound doesn't exist). As far as I know, there's no research on these points because the field of AI doesn't really include these sorts of questions, but let's pretend that these are true as well, and that we live in Ray Kurzweil's future. Keeping score, we're at two minority beliefs and two completely unresearched propositions accepted on faith. He believes that, while optimizing its own g factor, the intelligent system in question will have a high rate of return on improvements, that one unit of increased g factor will unlock cascading insights that contribute to the development of more than one additional unit of increased g. This is argued here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/we/recursive_selfimprovement/, and you'll find there's not a shred of argument there. It's bald assertion. He also baldly asserts that the "search space" (which is not the right term, but remember, he's a high school dropout autodidact with no formal AI education) for intelligence is smooth, with no "resource overhangs". I'm pretty sure he means to make the point that he expects to find relatively few local minima*. That's just unknowable, but while working on much much simpler optimizations, I have found absolutely no end of local minima. There are almost no complex problems without them. I would not be inclined to believe this if he had already done it, that's how unlikely it is. So now we're at two minority views, two unresearched but cogently phrased propositions, one bald assertion, and one deeply, deeply unlikely belief. This doesn't carry us all the way to his nightmare scenario, there's a lot more stuff in the house of cards that makes up his FOOM beliefs, but that's enough, really, to get the point of my next paragraph. We are not studying any of those things. The AI gold rush is almost entirely about deep neural networks in new and weird variations, or, if he's really up on the AI field, GANs, which are deep neural networks in new and weird variations plus a cute new training mechanism. (As I write this I realize he's almost certainly terrified of GANs for a misguided reason. I'll come back to that if someone wants to hear it.) None of this validates any of his beliefs. Deep neural networks are entirely inscrutable. No one anywhere can tell you why a deep neural network does what it does, so there's no reason to suspect that they will spontaneously evolve a capability that have proven to be beyond the very best AI experts in the world out of nowhere. Deep neural nets also have severely limited inputs and outputs. They are not capable of learning anything about new types of data or giving themselves new capabilities; the architecture doesn't support it at all. The sort of incremental increase in capabilities that Yudkowsky needs for his FOOM belief to come true does not exist, and really just can't be brought about. I'm not even halfway done with the reason that neural nets can't be the Yudkowsky bogeyman. They train too slowly for a FOOM. They don't use any of the Bayes stuff that's so essential to his other beliefs. They don't have any mechanism for incremental learning outside of a complete retraining**. They can't yet represent sufficiently complex structures to write code, let alone complex code, let alone code beyond the best AI programmers in the world. I'll stop here. It makes no goddamn sense. Maybe his beliefs have evolved from the AI FOOM days. I don't know. I've been impressed with how some of his other beliefs have changed to reflect reality. I'll go read what he has on Arbital and let y'all know if I'm way off base here. *minima on a loss function, maxima on "intelligence"; by habit I use the former but it might be more intuitive to think it terms of the quantity being optimized. If so, read this as "maxima". **someone might call me on this one; I should say instead that everyone I've ever worked with has done complete retraining, and if a better mechanism existed they'd probably be using it, but I can't say that there's definitely *not* such a mechanism. It's not impossible due to the nature of the architecture.

and, from a followup in which he explains general adversarial networks:

I guess it's pretty obvious why that might terrify Yudkowsky, right? I mean, this is all conjecture on my part since he didn't come out and say what he thought was so scary, but it seems to hold together and it's the best I can do absent actually talking to him. I realized while I was thinking about it earlier today, his whole ideology folds back in on itself. That's why he's got 5,000 links in every post he writes, so that he gives the appearance of having well-supported opinion. He probably thinks he has well-supported opinions, but if you try to hold the whole thing in your head at once, you see it's circular. The essential circular argument at the distilled core of the whole thing is "AI research is dangerous because the impending superintelligence will allow 3^^^3 units of pain to be distributed to every living human", and "Superintelligence is impending because of the dangerous irresponsibility of AI research". Usually you have to step through 3 or 4 intervening articles to find the loop (or bare assertion), but my sense is that there's always one. If I could ask Yudkowsky for anything at all it would be a single, self-contained argument, in less than 3,000 words, for why superintelligence is imminent.

So, starting from those two premises (which of course I believe to be false), that superintelligence is imminent and that AI research is dangerous, you can see why he'd be scared of GANs; it's exactly the sort of introspective AI that he is normally terrified will run away and become God. It looks like self-improvement, if you squint a little bit, and it is recursive, and you add those two things together along with a baseline belief that something is going to become superintelligent and end the world, and some AI technique is going to be responsible, you could pretty reasonably come to the conclusion that it's going to be this thing, this time. And Yudkowsky already believes that GOFAI ("Good Old Fashioned AI"; expert systems and decision theory and so on) techniques are not going to create God (source:http://lesswrong.com/lw/vv/logical_or_connectionist_ai/), so GANs are my best guess about his best guess for the end of the world. Invented in 2014, which is when he said that this whole situation got started ("The actual disaster started in 2014-2015"), so that fits too.

I think I already covered why it's not going to be a deep neural net (or any neural net) which ends the world, unless you count the brain of the guy with the nuclear codes.

he notes he didn’t write the above for an adversarial audience and notes there may be errors of detail. however, he’s confident in the general argument.

the other problem with the ai-foom scenario is that recursion of this sort doesn't work even when it's humans doing it. in Sustained Strong Recursion, EY tries to explain his idea better to those foolish people who don't just believe him, and uses various analogies involving Intel and the business of designing ever-faster CPU chips that an actual Intel engineer in the comments characterises as "an apples to fruit cocktail comparison". (note EY telling the first two people who said the exact things to shut up and stop talking.)

the essential problem is the fixed belief that recursive self-improvement will just happen, rather than being the explicit aim of billions of dollars' ongoing investment on a commercial basis.

overly optimistic commenter, downvoted to -5:

Seriously, I guess Eliezer really needs this kind of reality check wakeup, before his whole idea of "FOOM" and "recursion" etc... turns into complete cargo cult science.

robin hanson foreshadows the AI-Foom debate:

In the post Eliezer and comment discussion with me tries to offer a math definition of "recursive" but in this discussion about Intel he seems to revert to the definition I thought he was using all along, about whether growing X helps Y grow better which helps X grow better. I don't see any differential equations in the Intel discussion.

#the crackpot offer indeed #robin hanson #artificial intelligence #arbital

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