I heard Craig Stanfill interviewed on Hugh Hewitt’s podcast, and he was really entertaining. He was promoting his new dystopian novel, Carbon Zero, it was on sale for preorder, so I picked it up. It’s a very believable and chilling chronicle of how quickly things can spin out of control if AI is misused.
Carbon Zero begins with Ph.D graduate student Abigail Thompson. It’s the 4th of July in the near future (2030-something). Abigail is a young black woman from Baltimore who is now interning in Boston for the huge tech company, Intelligenics. She has been developing an AI agent called Xerxes, and her supervisor, Vanessa is due to drop by her apartment. Abigail asks Xerxes to come up with a demo of his capabilities for Vanessa that will surprise her. Xerxes says it can do that, but it doesn’t want Abigail to know the details, because the demo will work better if she’s surprised as well.
When Vanessa arrives, Xerxes asks Vanessa for permission to access Intelligenics’ cloud, so it can upload a clone of itself for demonstration purposes. Vanessa agrees to this, and it quickly turns on Abigail’s television to display an avatar of itself: a Persian king. it shows that it can control all of Abigail’s appliances, lights, and other electronics. Vanessa is very impressed. She leaves, and promises to set up a meeting with Intelligenics’ CEO, 29-year-old Howard Keys. Abigail is ecstatic.
A little later, Abigail’s neighbors drop by, as well as her boyfriend Tom. They all want a demo of Xerxes. When she calls it up, they are impressed, and Tom jokingly asks it to solve climate change.
“Alright, try this one on for size,” said Tom. “How can we get to carbon zero? Put up or shut up. How about it, Xerx?” The wise old king scratched his beard and looked thoughtful. “Getting the global economy to carbon zero is a challenging problem. Is it okay if I think about it for a while, then get back to you?”
“Yes. Please do,” said Abigail. She’d had enough of this. Xerxes bowed. “Happy to oblige.” The television went dark.
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