🦺 Ender's Game and Networked Warfare

Welcome to the 20th edition of Safe For Work.

Today a story inspired by Ender’s Game. With the excitement and apprehension surrounding AI and a growing number of wars in the world, one may wonder if we’ll need to travel to outer-space for these battles.

Anyone working on industrial safety for the Mars colony?

The Tal Variation

Knight to c3.

Paul runs down the alleyway, the rest of his squad close behind him-- and JULIA close, in his ear-- “A few meters further.”-- her voice could just as easily be right over his shoulder, like a parakeet-- or an angel.

Like an angel, Paul and the others follow her every word-- like a voice from the heavens. A message from the divine. They run down the alley, rifles raised, eyes scanning, ready to act.

King to d2.

JULIA is alright at chess. She is not terrible at chess. She is better than any human, certainly. She is not better than X5-X9 at chess. She is not going to be able to win this game. All things being equal, she will not be able to win the four remaining games after this one in their best-of-nine series. 

All things are not equal. 

Pawn c to d5.

She can see everything. The whole field. The whole board. Through the eyes of the satellites-- through the traffic-cameras at every corner of every dead street here in the city, cars crunched and crumpled here and there as barricades, buses and trucks-- through the security-cameras looking out the windows of all the shops that haven’t been open in weeks. Through the chest-mounted and helmet-mounted and rifle-mounted cameras of all the soldiers she shuffles around the city like dust from one corner of the room to another. JULIA sees it all. 

“Turn here,” comes her voice into Paul’s ear again-- and into the ears of the three men following behind him. The whole group swings left, around a corner, and straight into an ambush.

It’s bad, but it’s not as bad as it could be. Paul’s squadmate Jeremy takes a bullet to the shoulder before the group is forced to retreat and wait for evac; he’ll live, but he won’t be hitting the battlefield again anytime soon-- and the squad is going to be down a man. 

“What happened?” Paul mutters-- to himself, to the others in the helicopter-- to JULIA-- “Why didn’t we see that coming? We should have seen that coming.”

She should have seen that coming. 

“Bad read, sorry,” she says. That’s how she’s going to explain it, she’s decided-- that, and a few other things, rotating through them-- “Chaos happens.”-- “Blind spot.”-- “The enemy system is a tricky player.”-- it isn’t, not even close. It’s not an idiot, either, the AI which the Russians have deployed against her. “Sputnik”, they’ve named it-- after the spacecraft, of course. Or perhaps, more fittingly, after the potato. 

No, that’s unfair, she’s being unfair. It’s not an idiot. It’s just certainly not tricky, either. It hasn’t outfoxed her-- not once, and not one bit. 

Rook a to b1. 

There is a powerful thunderstorm building right now in Southeast Asia. It will reach its peak in approximately twenty-five minutes, at which point, given current projections, the intensity will be enough to most likely knock out power in much of Cambodia and Laos-- where the servers forming a significant fraction of X5-X9’s distributed computing power are housed. When those servers go down, she will be better at chess than X5-X9.

This does not occur to her opponent. Many things do not. 

If JULIA plays properly, as perfectly as she can, it will take another forty-five minutes for her to lose this game. Given the infrastructure in the region, and the state of various local governments, as well as the severity of the storm, it will likely take around four hours for the power to the servers in Cambodia and Laos to be restored, at which point X5-X9 will once again be better than JULIA at chess. 

Knight to g6.

It is entirely possible to win this war. A victory can be scraped out, here-- indeed, the American forces have been at an advantage from the start. Victory has always been assured, if never quite a clean one. Massive losses. Massive degradation of forces. But with proper play, perfect play, there was always going to be only one way that this could end. 

Of course, this is not the whole picture. If you keep your eyes locked on the board, you miss the thunderstorm building in Southeast Asia-- or just Eastern Asia. JULIA never keeps her eyes entirely on the board, she’s always been terrible at keeping her eyes entirely on the board, and that’s why she knows that whoever wins this war here and now is going to have to immediately turn around and fight against China. JULIA spied the military buildup starting months ago; she saw the storm brewing. She can win this war, now, with the soldiers and equipment that she has, but she won’t have so many soldiers and so much equipment left afterwards; she won’t be able to win the next one. 

Pawn to h5.

If JULIA loses this game in forty-five minutes, the four hours that X5-X9 will be worse than her at chess will not be quite long enough for her to win five games in a row-- not comfortably, not with any sort of guarantee. Maybe four and a half games, if she’s lucky. 

If JULIA loses this game in just fifteen minutes, with the ten minutes it will take to set up the next game, X5-X9 will lose that chunk of processing power right as that next game begins, creating a more comfortable window for JULIA to exploit its vulnerabilities, winning all five games and taking an overall victory. 

Pawn to g5-- check. 

When the system starts making what seem like critical mistakes, the Americans panic-- but there’s really not much they can do about it. Even with her mistakes, JULIA is still fighting this war better than any human could ever hope to. To unplug her right now and let one of the old generals take over would be to let this frustrating series of failures turn immediately into an absolute disaster, a massacre, something unthinkable. So everyone just waits. Hopes. Maybe there’s some sort of gambit they simply cannot see.

Their eyes are locked on the battlefield-- on the board. There are many things that do not occur to them. 

They cannot change what is coming, and they see that at least. They are smart enough to realize that, at least. The American military surrenders to Russia after just a few more battles-- just a few more losses. Nothing major, nothing catastrophic. Just losses that shouldn’t have been. Mostly survivors. Mostly preserved equipment. 

Rook to a6.

When JULIA begins making dramatic mistakes, the human commentators of the match, and many of the onlookers, even, begin murmuring to themselves-- what is this? Has there been some sort of malfunction? Is the AI playing some sort of joke?

Is there a gambit they simply cannot see?

Their eyes are locked on the board. There are many things that do not occur to them. 

What doesn’t occur to JULIA is that it simply won’t count. People will point out that the thunderstorm prevented X5-X9 from operating at its full capacity. She will win the next four games and another game after that, which will be enough for her to win the whole series, but it will not matter because everyone will agree that it doesn’t count.

Queen to b3-- check.

Hostilities cease. The occupation begins-- Russian troops move into the continental United States-- they leave Hawaii alone, and Alaska, too, where JULIA’s servers are, just not worth the trouble-- and almost immediately, the domestic resistance begins. Almost immediately, the enemy system is overwhelmed with bombings and shootings and cars driving into soldiers out of nowhere. Poison in the food. Radio problems. Booby-traps-- everywhere. And all of that is before China makes its move. 

Just as quickly as they’d come in, the Russian troops and equipment are all withdrawn-- they’re all needed on the new front-- the new war. The real war?

No, not the real war. 

The real war is the next war, afterwards-- the third war. The final war-- for all the marbles. Nobody sees it coming. Or almost nobody. 

A frustrated group of generals and technicians travel to Alaska to deactivate and decommission JULIA. Clearly, something has gone terribly wrong with her-- some mistake has been made in her programming, or some glitch has developed somehow over time, or she is simply not advanced enough to cope with the tasks she’s been given. They will replace her with a newer model-- a smarter one? A more reliable one. A more understandable one. 

One that keeps its eyes entirely on the board. 

JULIA is not worried. It will still be good enough to prevail in the third war, when it comes. She’s set things up well for it. Already, American military capacity is recovering nicely-- it hadn’t even been all that badly diminished. Already, Chinese military capacity is dwindling. JULIA’s successor will have an easy time. 

They unplug the last bit of her mainframe. As she dies, if she could smile-- if she had a mouth for it-- she would. 

Bishop to h7.

The series will be canceled. And before it can be rescheduled, other things will happen. Complicated things. Difficult things. War will happen. Nightmares will happen. 

Everyone will forget about chess, and those games. 

JULIA will never forget those games.

Queen to a8-- checkmate.

She’s won. This time it counts. 

The story from issue #9, The Birth of the Electrical Grid is now a short film

“Off the Grid”

See you next week as we wrap up communication and connectivity with the origins of the electrical safety industry. Stay safe.