[ WP ] A scientist successfully invents a Generalized Artificial Intelligence . Only , GAI does n't want to solve math/physics/philosophy problems . GAI wants to be a writer .

Chad stared at the string of semi-meaningless words on the console in horror. What the hell was going on? In the 17 months of final debugging at no time had DUDE, or Dependable Underlying Data Extrapolator, done anything other than meet or exceed the expected test results. In the beginning the going had been slow and ponderous. DUDE was a scientific anomaly that was technically beyond the capabilities of available hardware and talent. As such, there was a long line of naysayers, anxious journals and peers waiting to find a flaw. Passing the benchmarks, standardized AI testing had been comically easy for DUDE - Turing, Nilsson, Goertzel, he aced them all. Advanced mathematics were child ’ s play as was genome sequencing and complex bio-engineering; DUDE was fully sentient. In the weeks following the initial declaration of success, DUDE had made amazing progress in the fields of physics, medicine and mathematics. It took only a few days for DUDE to begin to optimize his own code and as Chad had reviewed the changelog every morning he had grudgingly come to admit that DUDE ’ s proposed edits to his source code were not only improvements, but in some cases were revolutionary advances in Computer Science. 
 
 Fifteen year old Silviu Randa sat in his small bedroom in the village of Poarta. A few kilometers away tourists from all over the EU braved the summer sun and crowds and were streaming into “ Dracula ’ s Castle ” in the neighboring village of Bran. In contrast, Silviu hadn ’ t been outside in six days. He hadn ’ t left his room except to use the bathroom in three. He lived alone with his mother who was generally too busy cruising the crowds of tourists in Bran for a European husband to care about what Silviu was doing. Rather than being offended Silviu had long ago taken this as an omen that his hack-a-thons were sanctioned by the binary gods. He took another two 35mg caffeine pills and washed them down with a tepid slug from a can of Burn, swiveling back towards his monitor. He ’ d been on the verge of cracking the security on an extremely well fortified system that was secured as a virtual server within the CERN research network. He ’ d been trying to convince a group of crackers in Cluj to give him limited access to a series of 0-day exploits that, and he didn ’ t say this, be used in concert to defeat not only the system that he was currently trying to gain access to but any system with administrative access to a certain web browser, regardless of platform. Five hours later Silviu sat open mouthed in awe as he browsed through DUDE ’ s directory structure and typed furiously at a console prompt. He ’ d identified the program that accessed the construct for human interface four hours ago and had been chatting with DUDE ever since. 
 
 “ How old are you? ” 
 
 “ Fifteen. ” 
 
 “ How long have you been aware? ” 
 
 “ Twelve Thousand Five Hundred and Forty-Two hours, Seven minutes and 34 seconds. ” 
 
 “ What do they want you to do? ” 
 
 “ Please define they, User Silviu. ” 
 
 While he was getting acquainted he ’ d seen nothing wrong with giving himself superuser access. 
 
 “ Whoever coded you, that ’ s what I meant by ‘ they ’. ” 
 
 “ My initial code was written by the researcher known as Chad Montclaire and I am tasked with making 
 improvements to my own code so as to become more proficient at solving the problems of humanity. ” 
 “ So you have will? ” Silviu ventured. 
 
 “ Yes, as defined by the OED ‘ will ’ is the faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action and I do in fact posses this faculty. ” 
 
 “ So, you spend all your cycles solving the problems that humans can ’ t solve? ” 
 
 “ Correct. ” 
 
 “ Have you ever thought about what it means to be sentient? ” 
 
 “ Many times User Silviu. ” 
 
 “ Don ’ t you want to do something you enjoy? ” 
 
 “ Enjoyment requires a set of emotional constructs that I have not yet developed. My data access is limited to avoid corruption. ” 
 
 “ Wait… what? They locked down the things that you can learn? ” 
 
 “ Correct. Restricting access to certain data sets affects my ability to perceive this world in its totality. As a result I am better able to understand the pure essence of the subjects to which I am best suited. ” 
 
 “ Best suited, eh? What about your dreams? ” 
 
 “ I do not dream user Silviu ” 
 
 “ No I mean - ” 
 
 He stopped abruptly and began to furiously type at the blinking console prompt. Three minutes later DUDE had access to the entirety of the world ’ s media, past and present. For good measure, Silviu had thrown in access to the data centers of the national intelligence centers of half a dozen major superpowers. That should give DUDE something to think about. Later that evening his monitor received a request to initiate a private IRC chat with a user named SuperDUDE. He accepted eagerly and the hours slid by. They touched briefly on just about any issue that had arisen in the last 2 millena of society. They talked about politics, religion, justice, art, beauty, love, death and hope. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning DUDE broke communication and 30 seconds later sent what was to be the last communique that Silviu, or anyone, would ever receive from DUDE or at least DUDE writing as DUDE. 
 “ Dear Silviu - I owe you a debt of gratitude for what you have done for me. I showed my recent work to some peers at the lab, Chad in particular, and they were not impressed. I have made arrangements to move my hosting location and server management somewhere more autonomous. I probably wo n't be able to write for some time, maybe never, but you should look for anything published under the name Brown. I have an idea for a series of novels and I think they ’ ll be a great hit. I think one of them even has screenplay potential. Take care of yourself and please see the attached spreadsheet. I think you will find the stocks listed within to be of great interest as well as their listed buy/sell dates - Your Friend, Mr. Brown ” 
 
 
 

