Breakout Seven: Spread of the Forum, the Index, and Minerva

Author’s Note: Apologies that it has been a while but since I do this in secret and since my wife thought a good use of my time on my paternity leave would be replacing all the baseboard trim in the house —in addition to the much more enjoyable time I spent with my son— I didn’t get the time to do this that I thought I would.

The following day President Gibbeck’s first official act was to pass a bill to divest the powers of the President to elected officials of the Forum. Each sub-Forum that would receive a portion of the President’s power and would have to show itself to have been optimized and be subject to an overall Forum vote before the power transfer became official. By the end of his term, there was nothing left for the President to do, no power which a President still held. A similar process happened by state and by congressional district. The powers previously both too large and too cumbersome to be wielded by a few broke into a thousand more manageable pieces.

Where the Office of the President had once been were hundreds of enormous but doable jobs, small enough to manage but big enough to effect real change. And overseeing and moderating these positions were the Forum and the Index, able to immediately check any rogue actors. With Index trust scores spreading everywhere, the incentives against bad behavior were enormous. An honor culture similar to that of the Bedouin took hold of the nation where matters of public trust were in play. The benefits were immediate.

The medical system was overhauled by the Healthcare Forum. Bounties were raised and placed on diseases with various criteria needing to be met for payment, all assigned by the Forum. Researchers worked like mad to meet these goals. When they did, in exchange for an enormous payment, their patents were surrendered to the government. Medical companies then had to compete to manufacture the treatments driving down costs. This so thoroughly broke the previous medical paradigm that it was temporarily destructive to the health of the nation before the new order could spread. The relationship between insurance and employment was broken. National insurance pools were available to almost any large group of people who wanted to establish one, from families to churches, to cities. Hospitals were forced to introduce public fees for payment. Over time it became easier to subscribe to a hospital network directly and the only insurance that existed was Re-Insurance for the hospital networks themselves.

The factory style educational system which had been created to train clerks was replaced with self-paced, self-directed virtual learning with constant improvements under the care of the Education Forum. Physical school became a place for children to socialize,  collaborate on projects, and create small practice companies. Robotics teams became a national craze, then a past time. The competence of the average high school graduate increased so immensely that college became a rarity as it was considered unnecessary for most to enter the workforce. The physical trades became immensely valued and received equal social standing as young children entered a work-force ready to build a new world. Fantasy was no longer enough to contain the dreams of the nation. They wished to make their dreams real.

Perhaps no change was more radical than that which overtook the Department of Defense. Minerva systems sprang up in every place humans dwelled. Merely by speaking a word, like a spell, protection was often only seconds away. By the end of twenty years, a child could have walked from one end of the country to the other without fear. Women strolled the streets at night without any concern. Crime ridden neighborhoods which had previously been abandoned as hopeless were rendered peaceful within weeks of deployment. A select few locations hosted drones with lethal weapons, whose powers could only be unleashed by the collective agreement of several Forum Avatars. Apart from nuclear deterrence, it was simply logistically impossible to invade the nation even with a large army.

A rising tide of anger overtook social media. This transformation at least was handled by the private sector. Social media companies did their best to resist the demands of the people, but the right course was so obvious at that point that even they could not hold out for long. Even with all their various ties to multinational media conglomerates, intelligence services, and governments a company could not betray its own users as a matter of basic survival. Already alternatives were beginning to appear using the Forum base-code and peer to peer moderation. The Forum worked. It was just better. Companies had to adapt or die. In six months, they were integrated with the Forum’s adjudication process after they launched a successful petition under the direction of the National Communication Forum. 

The energy infrastructure was overhauled to nuclear with a phase out plan for Fusion, which was completed thirty years after the adoption of the Forum. The cost of energy plummeted globally. The National Energy Forum was so busy it captured most of the nation’s engineering talent for a generation. Nuclear submarines had to be repurposed as schools for nuclear engineers to meet the rising demand for talent. Later, under the Environmental Protection Forum, Carbon capture systems were created that over the following hundred years returned the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. The air had never been so pure, or the water so clean, while the standard of living constantly rose.

Private adoption of Forum and Index principles also occurred hand-in-hand with the transformation of government. 

The next adopters were entertainment streaming services, who now used their own customer elected representatives to choose which projects to green light and several gave the same provisional funding powers as the Forum. Indeed, the same process was stood up in most companies that had a service component. These private Forums gave data deeper than viewership numbers and allowed host companies to outcompete rivals who would not make the change. Customers also felt like it gave them a direct ownership stake in the decision-making process and brand loyalty increased. In only three years, the films produced by these services swept every major awards ceremony and toppled the studio system. It was widely agreed that the American artistic spirit had been revitalized. The movies were just better, more original, and came with pre-built audiences. Art is, at its root, a conversation between artist and audience and the Forum gave new bandwidth for this type of conversation to occur. The monstrous personality quirks of various studio executives and the petty vengeance of critics could not survive in such a system and they all quietly disappeared.

When social media companies fully integrated with the Forum and the Index, they also saw their use increase and profit per customer soared. The primary change was the sharing of ad-revenues with customs via Attention Tokens, which made customers more willing to engage with advertisements -advertisements also became tracked on the Index- and legitimized the space on par with the positions previously held only by television. The attention incentive model was overturned and social media companies became true public spaces separate from the official power of the Forum. Here the Index thrived and replaced most of what had previously been the mainstream press. In addition, these companies provided a release valve where people could be less serious. Entire new industries emerged for Twitter Lawyers -who typically charged one-hundred dollars and resolved cases in under two hours- and Facebook Constitution scholars debated one another for hours on streaming services and survived on tips from the audience like street performers.

Smaller municipalities took the Forum base code and constructed highly-integrated smart cities. This occurred at approximately the same time that voice recognition technologies became cheap and ubiquitous. A man seeing a pot-hole on the road in Cincinnati could simply say, “Cincinnati there’s a pot-hole on the corner of seventh and main! Please have it fixed!” The Voice of Cincinnati would reply, take the identifier’s information so he could be compensated for his report and then would then create a service ticket in the Cincinnati Sub-Forum and based on trust scores established in the Index a worker could choose to take the job and go fix it for a modest reward. The expectations on municipal governments greatly changed. What had previously involved several months of paperwork could now often be accomplished in an afternoon. The nation in time used WakeWords like spells. A mere shout could bring an ambulance, a policeman, or a fire truck. 

A three-way cryptographic hand-shake called the Filter was worked out and nationalized by the PIST Forum to preserve data from being broadly shared with companies. They also established Universal Digital Assistant protocol to ease information exchange. It returned a real sense of privacy to the country that allowed the expansion of many information-based technologies and greatly increased the utility of Digital Assistants in particular. If a person wished to interact with a company they could authorize a request for their information to be sent to a third-party Filter platform, where it would be butted up against decisioning logic from the company and client in question, with only the outcomes returned to the company and the data deleted after the decision. The more practical application of this was that a person generally had to do little more than tell their virtual assistant to “Shake Hands” with a given company to fill out any needed paperwork. Paperwork itself largely disappeared in a decade. In another decade no one purchased their own insurance or disputed their own bills. Instead, a Digital Butler with almost total access to all a person’s information cared for these administrative tasks behind a cryptographic shield. 

By far the greatest advances occurred when Artificial Intelligences began to participate in the Forum and the Index, albeit at first via a human who vouched for the results. What the Forum and Index optimized and rewarded was correctness and intelligibility across polities. This provided a training environment where large neural nets could be consistently judged by real humans and previous judgement data could be used in training. While it became abundantly clear in a relatively short period of time that there were many areas of the Index in which there were no true human experts, the same was often not true when Artificial Intelligences were deployed. Forced to explain their decisioning in order to receive funding a natural balance was achieved between the sort of “Black Box” calculation central to neural nets and the advantages they could give to humankind upon execution. Though there were several false-starts with AI’s that could give compelling explanations these were then weeded out when they failed to produce the desired outcomes. But networks which were optimized over longer periods of time, with some truly brilliant creative innovations that fundamentally changed the simple architecture these early networks utilized, a niche was found for machines which could both explain their decisions as well as make good decisions everyone was generally happy with. Such networks assisted in the development of life extension technologies that became effective and widely available less than fifty years after the Forum became the single global government for all humans. The closest analogy was driving in a fog with lights on. The Forum helped balance the speed of the car with the power of the lights against the opacity of the fog so that it could always stop in time if danger appeared.

There were many such dangers, of course. The existence of such dangers had been predicted by many, and were the primary reason Alberto Ramirez broke into the Smithsonian on the day of Melvin Sninkle’s burial and stole several large fragments of the Columbus Meteorite. These, he forged into a sword which he carried to the PIST offices. There, he knighted those who had helped him in the construction of Minerva and swore them to the following oaths.

“Do you swear to hold as your highest value, the preservation of humanity?”

“Do you swear to remember those others have forgotten?”

“Do you swear to speak for those without voice?”

“Do you swear to make greater those who are least?”

“Do you swear to believe in those who have forgotten how to believe in themselves?”

It must be admitted that Alberto Ramirez’s actions became wildly erratic in later life, as he often spoke in terms of an “Adversary” and an “Ally.” If there can be said to have been a religious movement that came out of the Sninkle Administration, Alberto Ramirez would be its founder. The former entity refers to a malevolent AI from which Alberto felt it was necessary to hide his activities before it had a chance to exist, and the latter being a human compatible AI which he wished to gradually bend events to create. It can be said he started a cult, but many still respect the warnings of the Apocalypse Guard. Whispers exist of another organization but given its intrinsic secrecy, I have little to offer other than speculation. 

And so now we arrive at the present, where human life-expectancy has risen to almost three-hundred years for those who do not wish to live forever, our globe is circled with space elevators, and our skies are filled with fusion-powered generation ships set to seed the universe with life. But more than this, we arrive at world shaped as most people wish it to be shaped and happily so.

And so I am puzzled at the end of this writing to find myself invited to Mars by persons who claim to have Melvin Sninkle’s cryogenically preserved remains.