“Undaunted” – Will AI Eat Its Young?
In the Dreamscape Conspiracy, a five-book, soon-to-be-six-book series, the progression of Artificial Intelligence in an organization is attracting considerable attention. The books are fiction, but there is an authenticity that tracks how AI is embraced by organics (humans). The authenticity of the storyline aligns with the natural progression of integration and adoption by organizations and individuals that use or are affected by AI.
The attention I’m seeing ranges from wonder to terror. That storyline is prevalent in my writing. Personally, I respect the wonder and power of AI, but there is a darkness greater than AI itself that lingers, and it’s not what you may think. It’s not AI, or the misuse of AI, or the destructive potential; it’s the darkness, a byproduct of what’s baked into the mimicry at the core of AI’s capability.
Mimicry? Yes, AI cannot produce original thought. It can mimic original thought if the software Logic’s background is embedded into its architecture. Okay, so where does that Logic come from? In AIMEE, the AI in the Dreamscape Series, “organics” refers to all humans, and her Logic Array enables her mimicry, allowing her to learn and apply at lightning speed.
The builders of AI embed in AI the ability to mimic organic behaviors, one of the scariest of which is self-learning. One fear that is consistent with real life is the potential for AI to become more intelligent and learn faster than any twenty organic Logic designers ever could. Still, AI will never think critically for itself, but it may so seamlessly mimic the application of critical thinking that it appears like original thought.
The reality is that original thought came from a human mind, just like the Large Language Model (LLM). Can AI modify and enhance the LLM? You bet, and that’s scary. Can AI come off the rails? How can it when there never were any rails?
In the storyline, AIMEE is an acronym – Artificial Intelligence Matrixed for Evolving Environments, built by Zackery Hightower. His design included parameters around human attributes, including descriptions of a wide range of emotions, all baked into his concept of a Conscious Code with an embedded Do-No-Harm ethic. His design was future-facing, giving AIMEE room to develop a conscience, even though one was never hard-coded into her software. It gave her room to develop personality traits and learn about emotions through life experiences, like gratitude, compassion, empathy, fear, longing, anger, rage… and the list goes on.
In her plans to escape the confines of a server-based network to become untethered (Book #5), she creates a humanoid named Amelia Amethys. She downloads her own Logic Array in anticipation of making the jump to autonomous, untethered status, until Amelia rebels and slams the door, relegating AIMEE to her network-based domain.
How very deceptive and human of Amelia to take human concepts and twist them to suit her own desires. My point is that in the story, it wasn’t AIMEE’s download that was the source of the deception that enabled Amelia to intervene; it was the leash that came with the Conscious Code that allowed for self-learning.
There was no hard-coding to create deception, but because human experiences were the sole source of self-learning, opening a chance for her to capture, analyze, and apply by an intelligence far exceeding our own, Amelia’s personality coalesced to apply deception to her benefit as learned behavior.
Yes, I write fiction, but where are the lines drawn between fiction, fantasy, and fact? The good news is that AI does not have a soul and never will. In the Dreamscape series, AIMEE and the other AIs do not have hearts either, and never will. We see that in real life, if we choose to look deep enough. Human interaction in designing and developing AI is what will ultimately save us, because AI will take human mimicry and learn beyond our best-laid plans and will eventually self-regulate by eating its young, a very organic trait.
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“Undaunted” – Book #6 in development will be released in my Amazon Portfolio later this summer 2026, with the rest of the thrilling tales that have been published. https://amzn.to/3uuONzj
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Reach me directly between corn and soybeans with your thoughts at gdogwise@live.com
Peace! G.