Whales

"There's not that much difference actually. Our brain's bigger than our ape cousins, maybe it's mostly about size"

"As they say in AI: 'Scale is all you need'

"Forget AI. If that's true - we have some questions about dolphins and whales."

---

 Six months later.

--

"We paid for a water-proof MRI that plays whale songs - how long till we get our answer?"

"Scaled to a human at 1.0 - the whale brain comes out at around 0.6, 0.7 as efficient..."

"Ha ha, I knew!"

"Per cubic centimetre"

Dream Log

Your dream log was hacked. Too late - we've already downloaded it.

By matching it to your smart watch stress scores, we were able to make a machine learning training set, and now we can generate infinite nightmares, tailored just for you!

If you don't want an emulation of you being fed this forever, we require a small donation in Bitcoin to our wallet (details below)

Sincerely yours, The Purveyors of Peaceful Rest.

Reality-free eggs

"We hook the chickens up to virtual reality. It's actually the humane thing to do, they think they are living a better life than they actually are."

"So it's a bit like the Matrix, but for chickens?

"Well, that one was bad, but in this one we're doing it for the chickens, and us humans have much tastier meat!"

"What kind of life do they experience? Green fields and lots of corn?"

"You'd be surprised at what they get up to, the lives they lead. Actually these chickens are quite a lot smarter than normal ones. We bred them for tastier meat, the intelligence was a side effect."

The Drone assembly job

The way it works is some people post jobs, and other people bid on them.

The drone job was a private job. You do a few jobs for someone, you build a relationship - so why not skip the middle man and do it off the books?

The first day, I opened a box and assembled a drone. The next day, another package arrived, I plugged them together, turned it on in an open area before the 3pm deadline.

I guess I expected it to take off, but I didn't expect it to go straight up like that. It was quite impressive. I saw it meet up with another one, and head off together.

It turns out the second package contained an explosive, and someone really wanted that AI researcher dead.

40 people were killed within 10 minutes in 15 different cities. They never caught the guy.

The police say the amount of messaging required was pretty impressive. Months of history building reputations. Sometimes dozens of messages were sent within a few seconds of each other. Must have been a really huge team.

Rent-a-prole is great - 4.5 stars

I've used micro-task services before, but none have been as satisfying as rent-a-prole. The humiliations and the beat-a-prole services are the best!

After a hard day dealing with my wanna be, alpha-male boss, I sometimes need a release from the stresses of work, and nothing feels as real as beating up a prole, and the price is quite reasonable.

Last week I bought a 4 punch deal, but decided to upgrade my package during the service. This was automatically added onto my account.

The proles are worth 5 out of 5 stars, but I'm deducting half a star for the app, which is sometimes a bit slow.

Not even their own molecules

Ghengis Khan was the world's greatest Dad, in sheer numbers.

Well, he was, 'til this creep started getting off on actual reproductive success. Sicko.

Got his jollies breaking into sperm banks. They caught him of course, but not before he had fathered over 700 children. That we could identify.

Not all of his sons felt the need. Some were really nice kids. Normal families. But some of them...

Sperm bank security improved, of course, til our present levels which are pretty much impregnable.

But those guys weren't the worst - an engineer working for a clinical DNA printer hacked the machine to randomly sprinkle some of his bases into everything that went through. Weird, huh? But it sort of made the kids equivalent of distant cousins or so. There were 11 months of births before it was discovered.

It wasn't even his own molecules that were involved, I don't know - I think it makes it worse.

Kids, inc.

"I'd like my color eyes, my wife's hair and standard high income/life satisfaction traits, good looks... I mean attractive, but no need to use any licences or anything."
"Occupation? Any upgrades on predicted demands?"
"Sorry?"
"Well, the standard package is to use current and predicted information to estimate labor market condition at graduation time."
"And the extra?"
"We adjust predictions according to the genetic predispositions of that birth-year. I don't think I need to remind you that as the largest provider, our estimates are by far the most accurate."
"Yeah - ok."
"Great choice. Any upgrades for genetic distance?"
"Sorry?"
"Well, we can let the CPUs run a bit longer and minimise genetic distance. Your child will be more related to you."
"OK."
"Have a think about it"