Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Page 15

  “You’re suggesting it knew the right thing and chose to do wrong?”

  “Yes, exactly that!” Still, Wells knew to hold her eagerness in check.

  “And have you found a consistent pattern of appeals and overturns with that particular clerkship?”

  “As far as I can trace, there’s been nothing this blatant, and nothing attributed to the intelligence itself.”

  “So … why not apply Occam’s Razor? Somebody miskeyed the inputs for Rafaella’s case, or even lied about them.”

  “I was hoping …” Wells suddenly realized that her own vanity had been in play, wanting to break new legal ground, to set a precedent.

  “These legal intelligences are still in the trial stages,” Wildmon went on. “Doesn’t your state have automatic judicial review of their results when contested?”

  “Yes, we were planning to appeal during the open term.”

  “Then do that, before you blame the software.” Already the woman seemed to be dismissing the matter. “The machines aren’t infallible—far from it—but they aren’t evil.”

  “I understand,” Wells said. “Thank you for your time.”

  “Say hello to my granddaddy, next time you see him.”

  “But I’m—” No use explaining, if Wildmon didn’t already know. “Yes, I will.”

  * * *

  Susannah Praxis understood that her great-grandfather had not simply appointed her to a sinecure from which she could draw a salary to relieve her job problem. He would expect results from her—as he did from everyone in the family. Maybe not within a week or a month, but sooner rather than later. She also understood that his offer of external resources was generous, but she wasn’t about to go out and rent office space and hire a gaggle of her fellow classmates right away—although she did discuss with PE&C’s Legal Department the notion of chartering her project as subsidiary of the family business. Then she came to terms with the job.

  The problem was, Susannah had trained as a mechanical engineer, not a social scientist. In her otherwise rigorous schedule, she had been required to take one course in microeconomics and another in urban sociology—the latter as pass/fail. So, before she talked to anyone else, Susannah knew she needed to brush up on the basics. That meant hitting the books. She sat down in the study of her father’s home in the hills behind Burlingame and read on a schedule from eight in the morning until noon and, after lunch and a swim, from one to five in the afternoon.

  She read the economists: Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Galbraith’s American Capitalism and The New Industrial State, and Sowell’s Applied Economics. She read the sociologists: de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, and Rifkin’s End of Work. She read the futurists—although their ideas seemed somewhat dated by her time: de Jouvenel’s Art of Conjecture, Gabor’s Inventing the Future, and Toffler’s Future Shock and The Third Wave. She didn’t just read and nod. She took notes, made comparisons, weighed theories, and searched for themes.

  Susannah quickly identified the one element missing in most of these old studies, and which had more recently been addressed only in fragmentary fashion, through the multi-headed and ephemeral academia of online discourse: machine intelligence and automation were not just supplementing human labor but displacing it. And the process was almost over. In the long battle between capital and labor, capital had won.

  Capital goods as they had been understood in the past—as Marx had understood them, certainly—were an adjunct to human labor. When the tools of production became larger and more sophisticated than a craftsman could buy for himself or carry in his tote bag, when factories required huge stationary processes like smelters, forges, presses, and assembly lines, then a single worker could no longer come up with the cash to acquire them or the skill set to use them all productively. Under the system of capitalism, the factory owner put up the money and hired the workers. Under socialism or communism, the workers or society at large made this investment. Either way, the machines simply helped the average worker who used and operated them become more productive. They made his work effort more valuable.

  When the first computers—essentially symbol and number processors—came along, they continued this trend. Except, instead of making the hands-on craft workers more productive, at first this new class of machines made the knowledge workers—the accountants and materials managers, designers and engineers, and factory supervisors—more productive. People upstream of the factory floor moved away from clipboards, inventory lists, and time sheets toward automated data processing. And then, on the factory floor itself, embedded and distributed control systems eventually took over some of the functions of guiding the machines as they worked. Manufacturing processes and the parts and components they handled became modularized and packetized. The controlling signals went from analog and after-the-fact to digital and real-time.

  For much of the last century and the early years of the current one, automation and computers still tended to increase human productivity. But somewhere along the way, an unexpected—or rather, not wholly expected—marriage took place between the machines and the computers that oversaw them. From mere symbol processors, the computers and their software became actuators, evaluators, and operators. With faster and better hardware and more complex and sophisticated programming, the machines became quasi-intelligent. Instead of helping human beings run the factory and increasing human productivity, the machines became the factory. They also became the systems of banking and money management, logistics and supply, and troubleshooting and reconciliation that supported the factory.

  Somewhere in the past ten or twenty years, as Susannah understood things, the machines had moved from simply making goods and providing services for the human economy to becoming the economy—a new and unprecedented situation for humanity. Humans were now merely the demand curve in this new market economy. The supply curve was almost completely machine-driven, self-actuating, self-regulating, and almost self-funding.

  Susannah, with her push-pull, action-and-reaction mind-set, drummed into her brain from years of engineering studies, knew intuitively that a system like this—with its unequal distribution of forces—was bound to be unstable. In the traditional market economy, which had functioned for a couple of thousand years—at least since the hunter-gatherer tribes had sat down by the riverside to practice agriculture and small-scale, craft-based manufacturing—the income from a man’s work allowed him to buy the goods he needed. Humans were a necessary part of the marketplace on both the supply and demand curves. But without income from personal work, how was a person in this day and age to buy the goods and services the machines produced? Without the demand signals from buyers, how were the machines to know which and how many of those goods and services to produce and when to deliver them? And finally, without the revenue from goods and services sold, how were the machines to continue funding their own operation and, as populations grew and diversified, their own expansion? The system was breaking down—if it had not already broken.

  So the question was, in the absence of factors like labor inputs, money, and earned income, how should or could society fund this new production paradigm and apportion its essentially free flow of output, and the rights to what was being produced, equitably among the humans? The dystopian view said that all the means of production would eventually be owned by just a few super-rich entrepreneurs and moneymen, who would then laugh while everyone else starved because they couldn’t afford to buy any products. But that was the stupid view. Without customers, who would invest in the land and resources to build the factories and make those products in the first place?

  Well then, Susannah reasoned, how had people handled such dynamic changes in the workplace before this? During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, with the flowering of the Industrial Revolution and mass migration from the farm and the village into the factory and the city, what had people done then? />
  In some places, a number of them had simply clung to the farm, to the old ways, and to notions of self-sufficiency. They had formed religious colonies or utopian enclaves, not all that much different from the hippy communes of the 1960s, to pursue a less mechanical, more naturally based way of life.

  But even after people migrated to the cities in the nineteenth century, they still banded together. Instead of the farming village, where everyone knew and trusted his or her neighbor, they formed fraternal associations, brotherhoods, lodges, and benevolent societies based on personal beliefs or ethnic identity or some other such cause. These were the early precursors of twentieth-century unions and insurance companies, designed to care for their members in uncertain times. And the bonding process, Susannah found, had been going on quietly in the background all along. The first such associations in the twenty-first century were the farmers cooperatives, artists studios, and writers groups, which formed not only to protect the economic and legal interests of their members but also to provide them with low-cost marketing and support services, access to resources and materials, liability insurance, and health care.

  These groups had since expanded to provide basic services like cooperative food buying, transportation sharing through the purchase of vehicle fleets, and building and operating their own automated workshops and factories based on stochastic design, 3D printing, and similar technologies. PE&C had even built a few of these factories for such private groups. Basically, people in small enclaves all across the country were pooling their resources, buying land and equipment, and becoming self-sufficient. They were carrying on the traditions of the Israeli kibbutzim, the Amish colonies of Pennsylvania and Ohio that had survived into the twenty-first century, or the neighborhood homeowner associations of condominiums and planned urban developments—except in the latter case they now provided energy independence, wide-ranging services, and physical products as well as housing, property maintenance, and communal landscaping.

  While some of these groups were geographically based, especially those with a farming or neighborhood interest, Susannah could see no reason why their reach should be limited by proximity. Distribution of goods and services, and trade agreements with nearby and similarly minded groups—not unlike the reciprocal trade agreements of Renaissance Italian bankers or the protective alliances of Los Angeles street gangs—made association possible on almost any basis. A few of the self-help associations were even based on extended kinship. For instance, Susannah had discovered in her researches the Smith Collective, whose only requirement for membership was a last name of Smith, Smithe, Smythe, Schmidt, or for those of Arab extraction, Haddad.

  And that gave her the answer, at least for the near term, in this time of transition, to the problem John Praxis had asked her to solve for her generation.

  * * *

  As Antigone Wells took the next call from John Praxis, some part of her spirits rose up in what anyone else might have called a spark of hope. He once was able to do that for her. And at the same instant some part of her sank in bleak despair. She had become too fixed in her ways, in her life. Whatever he had to tell her, it was too late, too late by many years.

  “Hello, Antigone,” said the man on the screen, who wore the face he must have had at forty. “It’s good to see you again.”

  That was a lie, because she kept her face in shadow as always.

  “You are looking well, John,” she said equitably.

  “Thanks … Hey, um, I’m planning a little trip up to the Sierra. I haven’t been to the forest in years, and I wanted to take a fresh look. And, since winning the legal battle was more your triumph than anyone else’s, I wondered—well, if you would come with me—with us—to see what you’ve won.”

  “John, I …” Go out in the open? Join his entourage? See new people?

  “We’re going to be traveling for a week or so,” he continued. “Overall, that is. It’s kind of a preliminary survey—things to change, things to keep the same. I know you’re busy with your legal work, but if you could possibly take a weekend off? Meet up with us along the route? We’ll be in continuous touch by GPS and satell phone. It would be easy to—”

  “Why do you pursue me, John?” Wells could hear the break in her own voice, and she despised it. “Are we still lovers? Business associates? Friends, even? We haven’t seen each other in almost three decades. I don’t know what we would have to say to each other.”

  “We used to have a lot to say,” he replied.

  “Yes, once. It’s been too long, John.”

  “I still love you, in my own way.”

  “Please don’t. I’m gone now.”

  * * *

  It was not exactly a camping trip, John Praxis decided. Not with three Wagonells modified for four-wheel-drive pulling a pair of silver Airstreams riding on the super-suspension package, as well as a heavy-duty trailer full of supplies and equipment. In addition to Praxis and his grandson Jeffrey, as head of the new Praxis Forest Development subsidiary, they were joined by Jeffrey’s two assistants, Bill Schwartz and Sonny Rolf, who both had forestry backgrounds and doubled as their drivers; a woman who introduced herself as “Mother Simms” and did the cooking; and Pamela Sheldon, who insisted on accompanying Praxis, “in case you run into bears or something.” No matter what she wore—business suit or safari jacket—Pamela still had an ominous bulge under her left breast and moved to shadow him like a tackle protecting her quarterback.

  So they traveled in style, moving fast along the state roads, Highways 4, 108, and 120, and then more slowly along the side roads and fire trails. They crisscrossed the hills and valleys, crossed the rivers on bridges, and forded streams where necessary. Praxis himself had forgotten how much raw land, near-wild and relatively untouched, except for the Rim Fire, the forest tract contained. He had also forgotten how many privately owned hotels and personal residences, cottages, and campsites dotted the land under special-use permits and passes.

  It was a question that had peppered his correspondence ever since the Praxis deed was finalized, and one that he discussed with Jeffrey late into the night on this trip: what to do about the other people already here? These included public groups like the Berkeley Family Camp, owners of commercial and private improvements, and those with special logging and resource permits. All of them had long-standing use of the property, which had been grandfathered into the arrangement by which Praxis had managed the national forest for the last thirty-five years. In one sense, they were now trespassers on his land. He could boot them off without much public outcry, especially from environmentalists, who had never wanted a human presence on public wilderness in the first place. In another sense, they were valued stewards, people with a connection to and a pride in the land, who would watch out for their own interests and—with the right treatment and incentives—for his as well.

  “Let’s not do anything hasty,” Praxis told his grandson.

  “The longer we wait, the more entrenched they become.”

  “They’re already entrenched. Let’s not make enemies.”

  Their tour reached its furthest point on the eastern side of his land, along the shores of Cherry Lake, almost on the border with the Yosemite National Forest. John Praxis immediately fell in love with the deep blue waters nestled into hills covered with evergreens. It was a small lake, only three or four miles long and less than half of that wide. It was a place of utter peace.

  “This belongs to the family,” he told Jeffrey as their little group stood on its shores and smelled the breeze. He glanced sideways at Pamela and saw that for once she was smiling.

  “How do you want to structure that?” Jeffrey asked?

  “Work out the details with our Legal Department,” Praxis replied. “But I want no public access, no private permits, nothing to be built for at least ten square miles all around this lake and its valley—not unless we build it.”

  His grandson pointed across the lake. “The border with Yosemite lies less than a mile in that direction.
We don’t control it.”

  “What part do we own?”

  “Up to the ridge line.”

  “Then up to there.”

  John Praxis didn’t know what he wanted to do with the lake and its environs, but he wanted to keep them just as he was seeing them now.

  “And Jeffrey, no development. Not even subsurface.”

  “Okay, Grandfather. But what if we find gold here?”

  “We’ve found gold, boy. We’re looking right at it.”

  * * *

  Four or five miles west of Cherry Lake, if they had been flying with the crows, but a whole lot further by winding around on the fire trails, Jeffrey Praxis instructed Sonny Rolf to stop the lead vehicle of their caravan along Forest Route 2N32, where it paralleled Twomile Creek, and the others pulled up behind them. They didn’t bother edging off onto the road’s shoulder because there was no traffic to speak of—and no shoulder, either.

  “This looks like as good a place as any,” he said.

  “Anything around here, other than hills?” asked his grandfather, who was sitting in the Wagonell’s backseat.

  Jeffrey studied the topo map and compared it with his satellite tracker. “Hull Creek campground and an off-road vehicle area are some ways to the north. And a few private camps to the west.”

  “You’re sure your mechanical vermin won’t get in there?”

  Jeffrey grimaced. “They’re not ‘vermin,’ Grandfather. They’re explorers. And no, they won’t go anywhere outside of the fifteen thousand square yards built into their robot brains and staked out in GPS coordinates. When they reach the border of their territory, they turn back.”

  “Okay then. Just asking.”

  Jeffrey walked back to the trailer hitched to the last vehicle and took out a corrugated box sectioned off with styrofoam baffles. Inside, separately packed, were six of the robot beavers that Black Belly had designed for him—although they were more the size of squirrels. They also had bushy tails that reminded him of a pine bough and collected sunlight on the same principle: from any angle and orientation, where a photovoltaic panel would have required constant realignment as the animal moved along the ground and the sun moved across the sky. He used a master radio controller to dial in their territories and power up their reserve cells. Then he set them on the road behind the trailer, six of them in a line, and watched them.