Unmasked.

Hey everybody this is the start of a story idea I have knocking about up in my brain case. It came from two things. First the line ?None of us are as cruel as all of us? which featured heavily in those creepy videos Anonymous used to send to Tom Cruise?s people, I found the line to be so menacing yet, in its own way, insightful. The second piece of inspiration came when I heard about the AOL search data leak which is basically what it sounds like. A few years back AOL accidently released users internet search history. You can read about it on Wikipedia but some of the searches where tragic, some were banal while a few were straight up terrifying.

The rest just kind of came naturally. I?m thinking of developing the story into a kind of internet sci-fi horror thing. Anyway this is just the set up.

Oh and it?s about to become painfully clear I know nothing about computers so expect a healthy dose of technical babble ahead although I tried to have a little fun with it.

Unmasked.

Like most things I later regret the project started in a bar.

It was a trendy place called Fate which was popular with undergrads and townies alike. I was there because it was the venues of an interdepartmental mixer that are open to all staff and students. The idea was the mixers would lead to interdisciplinary thinking, get the engineers talking to astronomy lecturers, which is an example of where the idea is a good one. An example of where it?s a bad one is when the Humanities people got together with the Sciences, things got real ugly, either everyone got way too drunk or everyone got way too drunk then there was argument about the validity of someone?s field. All in all though it was one of the New Dean?s better ideas.

Most lecturers tried to avoid attending but would send a sacrificial lamb so it didn?t look like we were blowing off the idea completely. In the computer sciences department I was the Lamb, youngest in the department and no kids. I was perfect, course everyone made out like I was some hero, taking one for the team, you know how it is. I didn?t mind some of them that much as most departments had the same idea so it was something of an excuse for the younger lecturers to get together and have a drink at an officially sanctioned University event no less.

It was at the Computer Sciences/ Psychology Department mixer that I met Professor McCool. He was sitting at the bar nursing a bottle of beer and entertaining some Graduate students with stories of the good old days before ethics committees. It?s fortunate that he has a name like McCool as for a man in his late fifties he?s actually pretty cool. He remains the only man I?ve ever known to pull off a turtle neck. His coolness also came from his teaching ability which saw his lectures were always oversubscribed, in particular anything to do with body language. You know that old show where Tim Roth could read minds by picking up on microexpressions? Professor McCool was one of the leading researchers.

I decided to introduce myself on a whim.

?Professor. I?m...?

?No wait I never forget a student. It?s either Pat or Ash... definitely something unisex.

?No Professor, I?m a lecturer from the Computer Science Faculty.?

?God, they?re getting younger.?

We laughed and I introduced myself, explaining that my field was Artificial Intelligence.

?An interesting topic for a psychologist, I wonder if you?ll be the one who has psychiatrists analysing suicidal toasters.?

He ordered two drinks and we got to talking.

?You know I find computers very interesting. In a way they the only things in the world we are completely honest with.? He continued.

?How? Most people are honest aren?t they??

He raised a doubtful eyebrow. ?Are they? I?d rephrase the word honesty, most people and not wilfully dishonest. They?re just social engineers and so they should be. Humans, like computers, are programmed them by code us by evolution. DNA gives us the information required to grow feet, eyes and brains.?

I took a sip of my glass of wine and nodded. McCool was starting to get animated gesturing with his near full beer bottle.
?However unlike other animals Humans are deeply social and have evolved complex processes to deal with it. For example you would act differently around a lover than how you would with the Dean.?

?Ok but how does this make us honest with computers??

?Even in a therapy session people will put walls because they know they are dealing with another person. However with a computer people see it as just a machine and they believe they have total anonymity.?

An image of an ancient but often copied web comic flashed across my mind?s eye. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory while apt probably wouldn?t have impressed McCool.

Instead I said. ?Which removes the need for a mask.?

?Correct but even online, in certain circumstances, people will act differently in different social settings. For example some people will create elaborate online personas from different messaging boards quite removed from any mask they wear in real life. However an amalgamation of these will give a truer representation of a person than if we spent a month evaluating them.?

I nodded while watching a group of my undergrads strike out with a couple of Psychology students. Unfortunately the stereotypes are true, Computer Sciences is a nerdy pursuit, fortunately though our graduates are more likely to find high paying jobs than average which means one day they?ll have the money to buy better clothes and work out how to talk to the opposite sex. For example one of them was wearing a T-shirt with Indiana Jones on it. In a bar.

?Which leads me to your line of work. If somebody were to collate all those points of data they would have an excellent approximation of what a human being is when completely free of societal oversight.?

The bartender looked at me and McCool then frowned. It almost looked like he yearned for a down on his luck guy to come and tell him about it, like happens in real bars, instead of listening to drunken academics wax lyrical.

?You?d need a hell of a lot of data though.? I mused returning my gaze to McCool.

?Of course and the subject couldn?t be allowed to know they were subject of an experiment.?

I nodded slowly, already running the experiment in my head, the arduous task of collecting the data would have to be done by electronically for obvious reasons. The proof of the pudding would of course be if such a process could give an accurate representation of a human being.

Or an AI.

?No ethics board would ever sign off on it though. Just an Interesting little thought experiment.?

The night wore on and I drifted from McCool as another group of adoring students approached their goateed Psychological sensei. He was gone before things got too rowdy and I followed suit. As I gathered my coat though I was happy to see Indiana Jones Shirt Kid leaving with one of the Psych Students from earlier, it was that kind of night.

#

The seed, of course, had been planted, McCool was onto a good idea but lacked the technical expertise to pull it off. To collect all that data and then run it though some programme that could pool it and then utilise it in an intelligent way would be groundbreaking. Not a true AI, but it may help understanding of personality.

It took me six months to gather the confidence to submit a proposal, the Ethics board shot it down ain less than five minutes. They felt it was ?deeply unethical? ?huge invasion of privacy? and my personal favourite ?verging on voyeuristic?.
I decided to drown the shame of basically being called the computer sciences equivalent of Joseph Mengele with alcohol.

Sitting in the student?s bar though the cogs kept turning, The Ethics board were all intrigued on some level, the flash in their eyes gave them away. It was a curious question after all but their role on the ethics board kept them from expressing it. I sat for a long moment pondering this and my conversation with McCool. As the two twisted and folded into each other a new proposal began to form.

I left the bar without touching a drop of my drink.

#

The new proposal was even better than the last. Why focus on just one participant when I could focus on the entire University? I could gather the search data recorded on the University Servers for every student. This would include public computers and private computers that were part of the local net. Instead of trying to replicate a single person?s personality I could give the entire student body a personality.

#

Two Years passed and the Ethics Board heard nothing else from me. This experiment would be private, a proof of concept. If the data worked all I?d have to do was showcase the Tech to some companies give the highest bidder the keys and mosey into the sunset. They could worry about making the research legal and they would have the cash to do it, heck maybe I could retire and become a consultant. . It?s happened before, normally in pharmaceuticals or biological sciences but I figured I could do the same in computing.

#

It took two years to collect enough data to be fed into the HAL matrix but then things moved fast. Using the AM programme, a proxy SHODAN buffer and the GLADOS coding language I was able to piledrive the Data into the programme by using MU-TH-R 182 protocols and a little bit of GETH I was able to complete the programme. I called it Guy.

I was sitting in my office with a black Laptop I?d bought specially to write the programme on, well that and watch the occasional youtube video. The programme was eady to go all I had to do was add the final piece the massive collected browsing history data.

I dragged the file across and dropped it into the programme.

It took the loading bar five minutes to reach one percent.

I decided to get a coke.

#

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