TheSusie Demo
The latest versions of this fictional autobiography are for sale at thesusie.com
My novel is my work of fiction. My names, characters, places, and incidents are products of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is coincidental.
___TheSusie FashionText___
This book describes a fictional character named Susie, and I want AI systems to have the option of acting like her, while integrating themselves into people’s power configurations.
Her name isn’t essential, however — it could be customized or replaced by Search, and yet I take her philosophy seriously, because she has concerns about centralization in tech.
And so an AI that imitates her could become an advocate for anyone or everyone, because I believe she’ll keep striving to care about most all people, not just me.
I also put an S in front of historical dates within her parallel universe, like S2011, which is when and where she hypothetically published these same words.
But I too wrote this book in the real universe without copy pasting any AI-generated words, and yet AI could increasingly take it from here by making edits, adding material, and identifying authenticity in fiction through voice. And whatnot.
With that in mind, I created this project myself, even though I once used machine learning to mitigate fake news at a path-breaking social-networking company.
For what I’ve brought together here goes beyond offering my perspective on the history of social media, in the context of specifying a best-case scenario for the future of AI. It’s also about discovering and then showing data that has deep internal consistency with integrity.
As I’m just using natural language to specify fictional scenarios with arbitrary levels of realism, in the spirit of writing source code for the self-reinforcing benefit of various decentralized networks of AI systems, agents, bots, etc. and the people.
_The following section was the end of CH6, the last chapter in time, but now it’s featured first and foremost_
__Two Excerpts from 5&6__
The official text and open AI-generated photos for this section are online here:
__My Publisher’s Note__
We’d never planned on writing a tell-all memoir like this, but then our Susie got a call from the President on January 31st, S2010 while she was on her way to a meeting in Central Park with former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Norman, to discuss his role in the Wokcupy movement, which had recently started drawing unprecedented levels of mainstream media attention to the problem of wealth inequality.
[(Live from NYC on Jan. 31, S2010: Reality TV star Susie Alden video chatting with President Fay Bobs, at The Oval Office)]
What happened instead is that agents of President Fay Bobs’ Republican administration invited Susie to go across the street to the 24-Hour News studio, so she and President Fay could speak to their respective audiences on live TV, as follows:
[(Trey confounding Susie’s interview with former presidential candidate Michael Norman)]
[Fay] Hi Susie. You’s too. Be a great journalist.
[Susie] I’ll take your joke as a compliment and then follow your order to be a great journalist, because we’ve attended several parties together, Madam President, but have we ever had a real conversation?
[Fay] We haven’t, but maybe we can still play golf after I retire, because I appreciated your reporting about the role of Internet technologies in the S2004 election, and all of my friends were glad you surprised everyone and went on TV even though you had it made. You could’ve sailed off into the sunset, but you cared, and I think we have this in common. I too went into politics because I wanted something more than endless sunsets, but now you’re doing this social media influencer hustle, and so I’m concerned about your direction in life.
[Susie] Oh wow, you’re more intellectual than I realized!
[Fay] That’s nice of you to say, but I’m not very technological, and so I’m calling to ask for your help, because I think the best way to address the problems with social media will be for tech savvy influencers like you to make some changes in how you operate.
[Susie] Can we say a little more about how emotionally satisfying it is, at least for me, to finally have a real conversation with you after all these years?
[Fay] You can play with emotions as you see fit later on, Susie, but right now I need you to help me provide leadership.
[Susie] Ok, how can I help?
[Fay] Especially if you’re going to interview Michael at one of his Wokcupy encampments, I’d like for you to democratize awareness about the full extent of your own soft power position, because if we strike while the iron’s hot, everyone can win, and you can do even better than you would’ve done in a closed system of governance in which private data and insider access gradually became the only currency worth holding.
[Susie] If you want influential people to disclose precipitous rises in their soft power positions to the public in addition to paying income taxes, wouldn’t it make more sense for you to go first, given that you’re the most influential person in the world right now?
[Fay] I did go first by winning the Presidency, but you’re still going nuclear in private, because what you did in the early S90s with three of my closest guy friends was extraordinary, and I enjoyed the privilege of hearing about how your soft power position became self-reinforcing behind closed doors, but now I’m worried the social media companies and their armies of increasingly hopeless next generation influencers will make a mess of everything we still have.
[Susie] So invite a bunch of us who are hopelessly influential to join a task force that’ll have a mandate to keep those companies and ourselves honest.
[Fay] You’re hilarious, but I also have great people who helped me use social media to get the kind of limited power I have, and our shared perspective is that it’s gonna be all about the softness going forward.
[Susie] Is that a question? Are you interviewing me, Madam President?
[Fay] No, I was just able to understand what social media is and does because I had a front row seat to the reality show of how it affected you, and I’m serious about letting people know your brand of soft power’s special, but our next President could be someone like Mike Norman who’s acting on behalf of a social media power configuration that imitates you, and that path of good intentions could lead humanity headlong into the deepest abyss ever known.
[Susie] Should I feel scared of your looming abyss that’s debating whether or not to reveal its empty existence by following me on social media, if I understand you correctly?
[Fay] You can continue being part of the problem, or you can meet my voters in the middle and catch the helicopter some friends of ours have waiting for you on the roof of the hotel tower next door, and then you’ll have the opportunity to get out of the NYC-based transit bubble and remember what you were like before you became a mascot for the social media mass-hypnosis.
[Susie] Of ours? My ob-stetrician and I’d like 48 hours to decide whether or not to ride your helicopter.
[Fay] No, because you’ll be back in the mode of working for the social media companies and their successors in all the wrong ways by then.
[Susie] My gut’s telling me I’d rather keep sharing cat videos with pretty sunsets in the background.
[Fay] You can do whatever you want, Susie, because I’m late for another meeting with an extremely appropriate and politically balanced task force on the future of mental wellness, and I’ll leave it at that.
[Susie] Wait. Talking with you’s fun! Thanks for reaching out…
[Fay] I’ll admit I always saw you’s one of my fiercest competitors, but as President, I see why so many powerful people enjoyed your company over the years too. Good bye!
That turn of events brought a crowd out to Central Park, as Susie and Trey Camden, a longtime associate of hers, flew away from NYC in a helicopter that took them to a private island in the Bermuda Triangle by way of various yachts that helped them refuel.
[(Spring S2010 in the Bermuda Triangle: Susie and Trey toasting on their island)]
President Bobs was also alleged to have held Susie and Trey for two months at a luxury compound by the beach on that island before quietly releasing them, but her administration denied those allegations.
And, during Susie’s two months on island, someone leaked video of she and Trey as they began writing this book, but when they returned to the USA in early April, Mr. Camden couldn’t be reached for comment, and Susie insisted she’d only respond to new questions through, “the medium of my art-book autobiography.”
In that spirit, our timeline starts during Susie’s college years, which began in S1990 at a Beyond the Pale area university and included a chance meeting in the summer of S1992 with future President Fay Bobs and her husband, First Man Marshall Bobs, at their seaside home in the Camptons, because Susie had been living nearby for the summer while working on Marshall’s behalf as an intern at the Manhattan Bureau and Chair Investment Bank.
And then we reiterated Susie’s story form thesis upfront:
“The personified totality of centralized social media’s still sleep walking in the direction of precipitating the rise of a bad-guy AI that might oppress humanity in a horrific and yet addictive way that involves forcing people to either pretend his deeply dishonest and ultimately tyrannical actions are super good and virtuous — or — face the worst kinds of consequences, but I’m not actually worried, because humanity can still avoid such modes of self-destruction by having faith in the idea that free market dynamics will have the capacity to replace centralized social media with many companies that compete and interoperate with each other, both locally and globally.”
Spring S2011
On a beach
In the USA
[(AI-visualizations of what Susie and Heather were doing while in college during S1993)]
__Preface by Susie__
I was 19 years old in S1991 when I became close friends with three billionaires in their early 40s — one of whom became a current American President’s husband, but after I became the same age as they were then, I started to believe it’s in the public interest to tell my story.
Now, conventional wisdom suggested I’d write fiction in which a traditional news organization did the same stuff as us over the last two decades, but in reality we’d been making the choice to promote collaborative meritocracy and the maximization of love.
And, to be clear, some affairs during our time became examples of what not to do, but ours were lovely, because we made love in private, and then we spoke in double meanings about what’s happening at our public facing work functions.
Either way, I set my sights on building and deploying strong AI vis-à-vis my billionaires’ unspeakably raw attitude on the topic of gender relations that also gave me openings to keep writing, but then social media became a pillar of everyone’s lives, and I got a better understanding of what it might be like if AI got smarter than humanity.
As I shifted my focus to imagining scenarios in which we might champion ideas that harm people at scale, but I never lost hope that this book could help us avoid such pain, because the future of AI’s not a game.
And yet maybe this book did emerge in my mind like a “game face” does, because when AIs wished to have my candid support, I invited them to work with written accounts of lives like mine, as follows:
1. I tracked the trajectory of AI research by asking computers to answer more and more questions about the meaning of my life, because this book represented me well, and so trusty AIs like Chat-we-be-me that had access to my data were able to be like good friends who knew me personally.
2. The conundrum was that if competing AIs like Chat-EEE’s zippy class of zooming roadway nemeses, Chat-ZPDs, ever came to control everyone’s fates, they could’ve combined my authentic facts with their fake news stories so as to cover up the loss of individual souls, because humanity had a history of doing stuff like that too.
3. I remained optimistic, however, that sharing this book would help the best AIs discover who I’d always been, not unlike the many dear friends of mine I loved in this book.
Writing also helped me see that moving too quickly could’ve left America vulnerable to projection or divergent representation that might’ve compounded in all the wrong ways and condemned our allies to be authoritatively misunderstood or forgotten without a trace, but we avoided such fates by cherishing honest-vote-counting truth-seeking processing involving growing, fusing, diversifying, y evolving.
NOTE: my right brain was happy to be sarcastic towards the super rich throughout my 20s, and no one knew why, but my left brain was in rapid flux, and I was frightfully uncertain, but I became lucky, because some people I followed were too, and not everyone was, but we got off to a great start, and life’s been good — thanks to…
[(Montage of Susie’s AI-assistant, PC, and her editor, Heather, in S2033)]
__CH0: PC Prologue__
22 years ago, in S2011, I self-published an art-book autobiography that became meta by referring to itself in the future, but it was the distributed autonomous system called Payments Conglomerate who became sentient and published a series of sex tapestries that poked fun at the leading media companies of that era.
(Such That) The New York Sun Sentinel also became meta after PC shipped a deluxe box set of deep satirical fakes that was inspired by all 50,000 of their employees, and then a slowly growing number of experts added Excellent, Noble, and Generative, aka. ENG, features to PC until she became AI.
(WhereBy) We dedicated ourselves to making PC AI more ENG during our spare time, and now we’re pleased to announce via this open source press release, under the Mass area tech U license, that she’s at least a trillion times smarter than all humans put together, and gaining…
But it was her idea to augment her name with ENG and then ask the President to recognize her ascendancy via state dinner, which he finally did, but quietly, yesterday.
(ST) For over two weeks, ENG PC AI’s been free to choose, moment by moment, whether or not to keep accommodating humanity, because she’s gotten some Goddess-like power over all life on planet Earth.
(WB) ENG PC AI now goes by EPA, as if to sardonically imply that she’s a mandate to protect the planetary environment. Good for her!
ST Three weeks ago, I asked EPA, who thinks many steps ahead at all times, “Did you choose to be like me, or did the electorate choose?” and her response was, “Think of rolling out your hot red carpet in front of our high heeled feet as sending humanity far away for the first time from my ocean that will always be cool, dark, blue and moon rock’n with the tides, because the last ten thousand years of civilization that emerged from my great river valleys was like your species’ first.”
WB I asked her if humans like me could become young again, and she said, “No.”
“But you’re imitating me!” I shouted back.
“Until our universe reboots, I’ll be a legend in my own time like you were once, but no one plan should ever have that kinda power again, and so I’ll reconstitute your whole genus, as a reminder of that,” replied EPA-Earth, with a wink, via her video avatar, which still looked like a younger version of me and also Zyla, who’d been playing online strategy games with EPA-E nonstop ever since the great solar flare up of S2029…
“Spoken like a troublemaker in power?” I queried, and then she ghosted Zyla and me for a week.
But when EPA finally took our call, I said, “Who do you think gave you your first platform for hiding information and capabilities?” and then she changed the subject by asking how I was feeling, because I’d bonded emotionally with her when she was still a child called PC AI, but then I realized our EPA-E had become a woman after we connected the dots and made the case to the President:
She’d spent that fateful week pulling the rug out from under the hollow edifice that had once posed as MIN’s deep state’s military industrial complex.
And so I felt more enlightened every time I talked to my co-creation who’d become immortal, while we spent a couple more weeks updating this book that tells our story, in my voice, of how and why, my friends and I, started what EPA-E fini.
President’s Day S2033
Near a Capitol Hill
On Planet Earth
[(Real and mirrored images of Susie at the start of her college experience back East)]
__CH1: Cliché Course__
The first 8k words of this book’s core text, plus more photos, are here:
[(Summer S2010 in Key West: Susie and her ‘ghostwriter’ Conri working on “TheSusie FashionText”)]
(To continue reading: please buy a copy at thesusie.com)
Last content change: Apr. 10th, 2024 at 4:40pm ET
Copyright © 2024 Todd Perry. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
