OCCAM’S RAZOR

April 2058

Nothing is what it seems. Two people sitting on a park bench. One wants to reveal her secrets; the other wants to conceal his. But are their reasons obvious to each other already? Do they think they know enough about the other person and their circumstances to trust what they hear?

A lifetime of distrust and caution clouded Jordan’s thoughts. When Alexa presumed that he supported the social justice and sustainability goals that the world had signed up for, she had made a point of emphasizing that she did. He could take her word on that, or he could take it with a grain of salt. After all, who didn’t support social justice and sustainability? Pledging allegiance to it was one thing, but dangling it in someone else’s face as some kind of sign of virtue was what one might expect from an idealistic teenager—not a mature and intelligent woman like Alexa. Of course, controlling societies exert a sort of moral suasion that, in their citizens, can manifest itself as unconscious repetitions of the core creed mantras. If that’s what Alexa was doing, it was disappointing, to say the least. Her professed admiration for Jordan had promised better than that.

In his line of work, Jordan was challenged every day by the ability of AI to understand context and meaning. Human communication is incredibly complex. People often imply things without explicitly saying them, so for his machines, understanding nuance required focused attention. Would their neurobiological programming have detected inconsistency in Alexa’s reportage? On the one hand, she had cynically dismantled the sincerity of Shane Whitman and his fellow tribunal members for paying lip service to diversity and victimhood. On the other hand, she was seriously considering joining them in a scheme to implement a reset designed to neutralize that very diversity and victimhood. Whose side was she really on?

Every story is only part of the story.

In the field of artificial intelligence, Occam’s razor posits that the simplest theory explaining any data is invariably the most likely to be true. Alexa had basically asserted that the cause and outcome of the Overthrow should be judged in purely economic terms. (What had she said? “… the leading economies had agreed to abolish fiat currencies and adopt new standards for international and domestic trade based on Crypto Credits. Old currency debts were wiped out at a stroke…”) On hearing this, Jordan’s own neural network had flashed a warning signal: none of this matched the speech or thought patterns he had learned to associate with Alexa. The simplest theory was that these ideas came from another source (from the time of the Overthrow or thereafter, obviously), thus mimicking the speech and thought patterns of someone else—a prominent economist, perhaps. So, he returned to his office and asked Quantum XR-11 to do some research.

In short order, those same words and speech patterns were identified in classified transcripts of evidence presented to the Security Oversight Committee at the time of the Overthrow.

VOICE 1: You are Donald Melville Smythe, correct?

VOICE 2: Correct.

VOICE 1: You have been charged with incitement and sedition for spreading false information to undermine the authority of the state.

VOICE 2: I am an economist. My job is to interpret the economy.

VOICE 1: Your interpretation is that of a conspiracy theorist, not an economist.

VOICE 2: My interpretation is based purely on fact.

VOICE 1: Isn’t it a fact that our people—and the majority of people in the developed world—have spontaneously demanded an end to inequality, greed, and the squandering of resources? Isn’t it a fact that international institutions have responded to those demands by rejecting money as the staff of life—making you and all economists angry about your redundancy?

VOICE 2: If you say them often enough, those statements may eventually be accepted as fact. But the plain truth is, that’s not what’s happened.

VOICE 1: Alright, Mr. Smythe, then please tell the members of the Oversight Committee what, in your esteemed opinion, has happened.

VOICE 2: In the Anglosphere, Europe, and East Asia, government debt and private debt have risen to become two hundred percent of gross domestic product. Debt servicing has become unsustainable, and central banks have forced interest rates down into negative territory while continuously printing money to try and stem the tide. But the tide has already gone out. The tax base, meanwhile, has been shrinking at an ever-increasing rate thanks to automation, AI, and the exportation of low-wage jobs to the last remaining late-developing countries of the world. The middle class and wage-earning workers on whom our government has historically relied to fund the state’s expenditure are maxed out. With eighty percent of the people in this country trapped in debt, the sum of all student loans, mortgages, car loans, and credit card debt has topped a hundred and fifty trillion dollars. As usual, the rich—the truly rich—cannot be reached, for they are so intertwined with government that they basically own the system. We have a saying: ‘When the rich get in trouble with debt, it’s an economic problem. When the poor and middle class get in trouble with debt, it’s a political problem.’

VOICE 1: So, these are your facts, are they, Mr. Smythe?

VOICE 2: It is a fact that the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations have brokered an agreement stipulating that the leading economies will abolish fiat currencies and adopt new standards for international and domestic trade based on SDRs. Old currency debts are wiped out at a stroke. It’s an old-fashioned Jubilee on a global scale, and it will ultimately lead to even greater poverty and hardship for the people it purports to help.

VOICE 1: As I said in my opening, you are a conspiracy theorist, Mr. Smythe, not an economist. And what do you mean by a Jubilee?

VOICE 2: I mean it in the biblical sense. Leviticus, chapter 25 of the Old Testament decrees that a Jubilee shall occur every fifty years, at which time all real property reverts to its rightful owner, and those who are enslaved to others, through poverty or debt, shall be released.

VOICE 1: So, if that’s what you think is happening now, how could any reasonable person complain about its unfairness?

VOICE 2: These were instructions given to ancient Hebrews by God. When God talked about the ‘rightful ownership’ of property and slaves, He meant that they were all God’s property—not the property of banks, corporations, or governments.

VOICE 1: Does the FIB have any questions at this time?

VOICE 3: Thank you; yes, we do. Are you a Jew, Mr. Smythe?

VOICE 2: I am an economist. That’s my position here.

VOICE 3: If not a Jew, are you a practicing Christian, then? Do you have any loyalty to a higher authority than the people?

VOICE 2: I am a Christian, but that is not my job; that is my faith.

VOICE 3: A white male Christian… Just so we know.

As a beneficiary of Moore’s law of technology, Jordan was constantly in awe of how seventeen-nanometer semiconductors had transformed the speed and efficiency of GPUs, allowing his computers to process massive data sets almost instantaneously while simultaneously learning from them. Everything ever written or spoken of which there was a digital record was able to be accessed—and it required considerable effort on the part of the information agencies to remove something once it had been copied to a Free Radical Data Center.

The transcript of economist Donald Smythe’s interrogation contained some of the exact same wording that Alexa Smythe had used when describing the events of the Overthrow to him in the park. Though commonsense knowledge required enormous amounts of ontological engineering, that was not the reason XR-11 struggled at first to find a link between these two people with the same cognomen—father and daughter, perhaps? Of Donald Melville Smythe, economist, there was no trace, other than in the transcript from the Security Oversight Committee immediately following the Overthrow. That could only mean that he had been expunged from all records. He was now a Non-Person.

The bridge between neurobiology and artificial intelligence can facilitate self-adaptation, which explained why XR-11’s search did not stop there, but continued on to low-resolution scans of files from public records, until…

There it was: the original birth certificate of Alexa Dawn Smythe, October 21, 2018. And in a neat, almost calligraphic hand, there was the signature of her father: Donald M. Smythe, occupation: economist.

Why had he become a near-invisible person? After all, death did not simply erase citizens from public records. The only authority with that power was the FIB, of which Shane Whitman of the Agenda Implementation Tribunal had revealed himself to be a former high-ranking member. It was inconceivable that Alexa was unaware that the FIB had that power. Knowing that, it was instructive to examine her reportage to Jordan more closely—and to question her motives in considering joining Whitman and the tribunal in the inner circle.

Every story is only part of the story.

Just as intriguing was Jordan’s own response, he realized. He’d broken away from the conversation in the park, claiming that the mention of belief systems had triggered a bad memory. But this had come immediately after Alexa had revealed Whitman’s links to the FIB. Jordan, being a Non-Person himself, was more than familiar with the nature of that agency—and now he had become aware that the government, through the medium of Alexa, sought to track down his alter ego, Artie Sharp.

Nothing, it seemed, was what it seemed. His earlier caution came rushing back with a vengeance.