A trio of ginks from the one of the big DC think tanks had just left. It took me nearly half an hour to convince them to leave because their mission was hopeless – I don’t work for free, no matter how prestigious the client is. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that the more prestigious a client is, the more able he or she should be to pay for my services. Oh, yeah, they left intimating that my refusal would come back to bite me, but I’ve spent quite a while watching the staff at their organization roll over, and meanwhile, I’m still here. Not a minute had passed before the telephone rang.
“Tom, it’s Jim,” said the voice on the other end.
Tom Collins: James James-Morrision Morrison-Weatherby George Dupree?
Jim: None other.
I’ve known Jim for a donkey’s age. We met at college. At the time, he was in the operations research honors program and worked as a research assistant for Dr. Wordsworth Verbose, the world-renowned applied mathematician. He helped Dr. Verbose program the Universal Solver, a software application that uses robust algorithms to find the solutions to any multivariant system where the number of equations or inequalities is equal to or greater than the number of variables.
Tom: So how’s tricks, Jimbo? Last time I saw your name was in one of Dr. Verbose’s academic papers on artificial intelligence.
Jim: That’s right. Dr. Verbose and I teamed up to do AI after the Universal Solver project. We’ve been at it ever since.
Tom: Yeah, it seems to me I read in New Scientist that you guys recently developed some kind of robot for DARPA.
Jim: I don’t recall being written up in New Scientist, but we did build a robot for DARPA. The robot’s humanoid, has speech capability and the intelligence of a baboon.
Tom: Remarkable. Looks like AI is finally getting off the ground thanks to geniuses like Dr. Verbose and you.
Jim: Well, there was a significant glitch with that project. Actually, to tell the truth, a major glitch. Very major.
Tom: What happened?
Jim: The robot escaped from the laboratory and disappeared.
Tom: Oh, my God! Is it still at large?
Jim: DoD tracked it down after about six months.
Tom: How did they find it?
Jim: It ran for Congress as a conservative Republican.
Tom: Makes sense to me.
Jim: They got it out of the primaries just in time – it was leading in several polls. A huge effort was required to keep things quiet; and a large pile of hush-money, too.
Tom: So, did DoD bring it back to the lab so you guys could fix it?
Jim: Yeah, they did, and it seems to be working fine after a few adjustments to its heuristic matrix, but ever since the incident, DARPA has been giving us the cold shoulder. We filed our usual grant proposal to continue the project and they denied it. Something about “unacceptable risk levels.”
Tom: Leave it to the military to abandon great scientific work when the going gets a little rough. So what have you and Doc been up to since?
Jim: Well, we gotta eat and pay our mortgage, just like everybody else, so we started answering grant solicitations from all sorts of federal agencies. We finally landed a nice one-point-five million dollar task to research methods for a solution to the Civil Service problem.
Tom: Oh, great! Why didn’t you answer a federal government solicitation to design a perpetual motion machine instead? You might have had better luck with that.
Jim: Dr. Verbose refused to answer any of those.
Tom: Professional pride, huh?
Jim: I’m afraid so.
Tom: I can’t say I don’t admire your courage. You and Verbose must have cajones the size of late summer beefsteak tomatoes to take on a research project to solve the Civil Service problem. Members of the US Civil Service have no accountability for their performance, it’s nearly impossible to fire them, they have huge retirement and benefit packages, and on top of all that, they have a union. I bet that twenty percent of the money Washington spends goes to pay bureaucrats who don’t actually do anything at all!
Jim: Ah, our preliminary study indicated that it’s more like half the money.
Tom: Why doesn’t that surprise me? The US Civil Service is rife with bumbling, irresponsible, unproductive, ignorant, unimaginative, wasteful, plodding deadwood who don’t give a tinker’s dam about anything but keeping their overpaid, meaningless jobs. And the rest of them are nothing but no-talent, conniving opportunists who spend their time playing office politics instead of working. They’re a bunch of parasites, the lot of them – leaching the blood of the taxpayers like fat, swollen, engorged, disgusting yellow ticks in a hound dog’s ear.
Jim: Based on the facts and figures we compiled, I’d say you are unfairly characterizing big, fat, disgusting yellow ticks, Tom.
Tom: Yeah, I guess ticks can’t help it.
Jim: So we’re about to submit our recommendations, Tom, and that’s why I called. Dr. V and I are kinda new to policy consulting, and your reputation in the field is legendary. I was wondering if I could prevail on our longtime friendship to run the idea past you before we formally submit it to our client.
Tom: Funny thing you that have called when you did. I just got through throwing a gaggle of bozos out of my office because they wanted me to work for free. You telling me you guys haven’t got some of that one-and-a-half million bucks left lying around?
Jim: Ah, if we pay you, that will be in the project records and there might be questions as to why we retained you.
Tom: And the answer would be that I performed review, comment and technical editing. What’s the hoo-hoo?
Jim: Tom, you know how vain Dr. Verbose is. He’d hit the ceiling!
Tom: OK, if that’s the problem, you can give me case of Roederer Kristal champagne; nothing special, current vintage will be fine.
Jim: Are you kidding? I’m an AI engineer, not a lobbyist! I can’t afford that!
Tom: A bottle of Kristal, then.
Jim: Oh, all right. I’ll email you our final draft…
Tom: Forget about it, bro. For one bottle of Kristal, you read me your recommendation from the executive summary over the phone and I tell you what I think.
Jim: Gee whiz, Tom…
Tom: No tickee, no washee, Lord Jim.
Jim: All right. “Therefore, it is recommended that the Department arrange to combine the US Civil Service with Wal-Mart, thereby obtaining a complete neutralization of the negative aspects inherent in both.”
Tom: What! That’s utter madness, Jim! Don’t let anybody else see that report!
Jim: Huh?
Tom: Wal-Mart is the epitome of crass, irresponsible, uncaring, profit-driven, naked capitalist greed. Wal-Mart employees are totally exploited, underpaid, get no pensions and don’t even have health care!
Jim: So?
Tom: Don’t you see? Wal-Mart is an anti-entity to the US Civil Service! Combining them will cause a catastrophe of global proportions!
Jim: Really?
Tom: Absolutely! Look, this would be like combining ten kilograms of antimatter with ten kilos of ordinary matter. If that happened, it would blow up the entire planet!
Jim: See, now that’s why you should have read the entire report, Tom. We did an explosion hazard risk assessment, and it came out negative.
Tom: Of course the explosion risk is zero. Combining the US Civil Service with Wal-Mart wouldn’t create enthalpy. It would create astronomically massive amounts of entropy!
Jim: Which is bad for what reason?
Tom: Because entropy is pure randomness and disorder. Implementation of your recommendation would unleash it in unimaginable quantities. Didn’t you and Verbose consider the Joule-Thompson effect?
Jim: The what?
Tom: The Joule-Thompson effect. When a gas, like nitrogen, ammonia, helium or even ordinary air is compressed in a cylinder, it has low entropy. When it’s released from the cylinder, the entropy increases massively. To maintain a thermodynamic equilibrium, the Gibbs free energy equation dictates that there has to be a huge drop in temperature. That’s how refrigerators and air conditioners work. Where do you think all that coldness comes from? Entropy, the Joule-Thompson effect and the Gibbs free energy equation, that’s where!
Jim: So you’re saying that combining the US Civil Service with Wal-Mart would create so much random disorder…
Tom: … that the resulting gigantic, overwhelming change in entropy would freeze income growth, freeze prices, freeze foreign exchange, freeze bank accounts, freeze interest rates, freeze housing starts, freeze highway construction, freeze hiring, freeze tax collection, freeze options trading, freeze stock exchange, freeze bond liquidity, freeze the national budget, freeze government spending, freeze the money supply, freeze defense recruitment, freeze the transportation system, freeze the energy distribution grid, freeze the nationwide municipal infrastructure, freeze the stripes off Old Glory, freeze the feathers off the Bald Eagle, freeze the hooters off Lady Liberty, freeze the whiskers off Uncle Sam, freeze the hydraulics off Yankee Doodle and freeze the entire surface of the earth rock solid – right down to the ocean floors!
Jim: Oh, that’s cold, Tom; that’s really cold. I guess we better not recommend combining the Civil Service with Wal-Mart.
Tom: For sure, dude, I strongly recommend that you don’t recommend that.
Jim: Ah, any ideas on, uh, what we should recommend instead?
Tom: GZPZ, you sure expect a lot for one lousy bottle of champagne!
Jim: Dr. V and I are in a tight spot here, Tom. The delivery deadline is only five days off.
Tom: Lemme think about this… yeah… hmmmmm. Okay, recommend decimation.
Jim: Decimation?
Tom: Assign every member of the US Civil Service a number. Print the numbers on ping-pong balls, put the balls in a big lottery cage, crank it around a bunch of times, then pull ten percent of the numbered ping-pong balls out. Fire the federal employees whose numbers get selected. Since it’s random, I guarantee that the government will function the next day just like it did the day before. Then after the federal government has been running just fine for ninety days, do it again. And so forth, until it becomes obvious that the remaining federal work force is not adequate to provide the services expected. That should happen after about six or seven decimations. At that point, re-hire ten percent back, again selecting randomly from the ones previously decimated.
Jim: That’s going to be a tough sell with the federal employee unions, Tom.
Tom: Oh, well, I never said I thought it would ever happen. Just spend some time between now and your deadline brainstorming with Dr. Verbose to produce some plausible ways to get around the unions. None of them have to work, they just have to sound like they could work.
Jim: Right, I get the idea. Thanks, Tom.
Tom: Sure. Don’t forget to send me that bottle of Kristal.
Jim: I won’t. But before I go and tell Dr. V why his plan to address the Civil Service problem will cause global catastrophe, could you give me some advice for the follow-on task to our project?
Tom: Follow-on task? There isn’t going to be any follow-on task! Once your client finds out that your solution is progressive random decimation, that’s it. They are in the Civil Service too, and if they sign off on a plan like that, they might have their number pulled out of that lottery cage. So, being typical Civil Service types, they will thank you for your work and never give you any more.
Jim: Aw, cheese and crackers, Tom! What are Dr. V and me gonna do for a living?
Tom: Well, Dr. Verbose has tenure…
Jim: But what am I gonna do?
Tom: Can that robot type?
Jim: No.
Tom: Could it learn?
Jim: That might take months, even a year.
Tom: How long did it take that thing to learn how to walk?
Jim: Oh, well, we have an on-board 64-bit microcomputer running a nice Linux distro and it handles all the ambulatory stuff. It also does hand-eye coordination, arm and finger movements, and performs audio processing so the robot can hear.
Tom: How long did it take it to learn how to talk?
Jim: Same story. Linux voice module. Programmed in C++.
Tom: So why don’t you write an interface between its hands and the voice module so it can type what it is saying?
Jim: What would that prove?
Tom: Nothing. Can you do it?
Jim: Yeah. Probably take me about a week.
Tom: Write the interface and install it in that robot.
Jim: There’s one important issue here that you’re overlooking, Tom. Technically, the robot belongs to DARPA.
Tom: But they haven’t come to get it, have they?
Jim: Nope.
Tom: After ninety days, you have the right to scrap it. To comply with the letter of the regulations, you’ll have to fill out a DD-69OUK-1-D Excessed Grant and Contract-Related Equipment Form, get it notarized and mail it to DARPA Contracts Administration. Then take the robot apart. Wait three business days and offer to buy the scrap from Verbose’s sole proprietorship for a dollar. Pay Dr. V a dollar, get a receipt and the parts are yours. Then reassemble the robot. Can you de-install the heuristic matrix fix you did so that the robot will get interested in conservative politics again?
Jim: Yes. But why?
Tom: Because if you take off the politics fix and install the new voice-to-hands interface, then you will have a humanoid robot with speech capability, the intelligence of a baboon and an interest in conservative politics, that can type.
Jim: And what in the name of Alfred Nobel would I do with a thing like that?
Tom: Have it start a blog.
Jim: A blog?
Tom: A blog.
Jim: Oh, no, not a blog!
Tom: Oh, yes, a blog!
Jim: An opinion blog?
Tom: An opinions of a rural Virginian blog!
Jim: Filled with insinuations?
Tom: And erroneous quotations!
Jim: Short on facts?
Tom: But not on attacks!
Jim: Lacking in reason?
Tom: Calling everything treason!
Jim: An intrusive blog?
Tom: And an abusive blog!
Jim: Filled with primitive rage?
Tom: A throwback to a primordial age!
Jim: With an antediluvian view?
Tom: And an obsession with taboo!
Jim: Espousing law and retribution?
Tom: And fond of public execution!
Jim: Uptight and retentive?
Tom: But endlessly inventive!
Jim: As repressed as Cotton Mather?
Tom: But worked up to a lather!
Jim: With ideals like Cardinal Torquemada?
Tom: The entire fascist enchilada!
Jim: A blog for folks who aren’t too bright?
Tom: A blog that says that might makes right!
Jim: A blog of endless rants and raves?
Tom: A blog that says that Jesus saves!
Jim: A blog that questions evolution?
Tom: A blog of faith-based revolution!
Jim: A blog that praises Cheney and Bush?
Tom: A blog that licks them on the tush!
Jim: A blog for Santorum in ‘08?
Tom: A blog that says that war is great!
Jim: A blog that plumps for big tax cuts?
Tom: A blog that says “go kick gay butts!”
Jim: A blog that wants the old gold standard?
Tom: A blog where all that’s past is pandered!
Jim: Against illegal immigration?
Tom: And premarital fornication!
Jim: A conservative blog?
Tom: That will be the robot’s fate!
Jim: A mental purgative blog?
Tom: Spewing vitriol and hate!
Jim: A demagogue’s blog?
Tom: For every half-wit trog!
Jim: Now I get it – and I like it!
Tom: So take it to the net and spike it!
Jim: Right… wing… ro… bot’s… blog!
Tom: Correct! It’s a match made in heaven, I tell you.
Jim: Yeah, the robot’s intellect is ideally suited for maximum appeal to the extreme socially regressive, religious fundamentalist, apocalyptic survivalist, home arsenal weapons enthusiast and general atavistic screwball segments of the population!
Tom: Don’t forget the followers of the Chicago and supply-side schools of economics.
Jim: Who could? What a coincidence you should mention them – the robot drew a Laffer curve on a cocktail napkin just the day before yesterday.
Tom: That bucket of bolts is a natural jingoist, flag-waving, know-nothing, red-bashing, labor-hating, supply-siding, grenade-toting, egghead-smearing, embryo-worshipping, queer-baiting, frog-taunting, beaner-shooting, arab-bombing neo-con Republican. I’m telling you, bubbeleh, he’s bankable!
Jim: And it’s intelligence level is perfectly tuned to the target market. It’s only marginally dumber than Imus and has five IQ points on Limbaugh.
Tom: More to the point, a baboon could out-write Malkin, Reynolds, Neiwert, Morrissey, Volokh, Hewitt, Esmay, Jarvis and Trevino, but with more class and better style.
Jim: This is brilliant!
Tom: Thanks; and in a matter of months, the media will be taking what it writes seriously, even quoting it. After that, have it write a book and go on speaking tours. Just make yourself its agent and personal manager. Keep ten percent of the proceeds for yourself for each job. Put the remaining eighty percent in escrow. When the amount in escrow gets to be large enough for you to retire, reveal that the robot is, well, a robot, tell the world that you built it and sue to get the rest of the money.
Jim: Will suing for the money work?
Tom: I can’t guarantee that it will work, but I can guarantee that there won’t be any robots on the jury.
Jim: I guess I should discuss your idea with Dr. V and see what he thinks.
Tom: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But one more thing – tell Dr. Verbose I recommend that he get out of the policy consulting game. And, if his latest creation’s antics are any indication, he should take a sabbatical from artificial intelligence research and stick to applied math.
Jim: Yeah, right – as if he would listen. Bye.