AI and Highways by Nancy L. Eady

The Florida Everglades are suffering from a surfeit of invasive Burmese pythons. Because the pythons have no natural enemies there—except maybe alligators, although pythons busily digesting alligators have been found—the snakes are destroying the already fragile ecology there. 

The state has tried many tactics to deal with them. I say “deal with them,” because Florida won’t let you shoot the things. Instead, they have to be caught and “humanely disposed of.” If you catch a note of skepticism in my tone, you’re not mistaken, but that’s a topic for another day. (I am not, and never will be, an ophiophilist.) 

One of the more unusual tactics was the dispatch of robotic marsh rabbits, solar-powered, designed to have the movements and heat signatures, and various other characteristics of live marsh rabbits. The rabbits, kept in clear pens, were to sense pythons drawing close and send out a signal to call a snake disposal expert (whatever one is called) to retrieve them.

It worked at first, but there was a flaw. The same rabbits that attracted the pythons also attracted alligators. The pythons weren’t able to destroy the pens the robots were in, but an alligator? When a six- to ten-foot alligator crashed into a pen, the pen became toast, as did the roughly $4000 robotic rabbit. 

But then a bright soul realized that even if the rabbits were toast, the data generated from them was not. The scientists fed the data to a powerful AI program, which discovered a hidden pattern. The pythons and other predators were following regular routes through the waters of the Everglades, slithering superhighways. Armed with this information, the python hunters have been able to find and remove more pythons than they were before. This doesn’t mean that the python problem is solved, but it is a step in the right direction. 

Now press pause. 

As you may remember, my family recently moved. My daily commute was cut down from two hours each way to one hour each way. My route is sixty-odd miles, straight interstate, between one small city and another medium-sized city separated by farmland. Piece of cake, right? 

Resume play. 

No. The interstate is two lanes in both directions and should have been three-laned on each side two decades ago. It connects Atlanta to I-65 and thus Birmingham to the north and New Orleans (via Mobile and I-10) to the south and west, all huge metropolitan areas. Like any other bottleneck, when more traffic squeezes through than the original design anticipated, strange things happen. 

Like many people, I rely on my phone to help guide me through the ever-swirling fog of traffic. Siri is exceptionally good at giving me alternate routes when there is a traffic snarl due to an accident or construction. 

The thought hit me this afternoon—with every user, Siri is collecting bunches of data points about travelers on my stretch of interstate, just like the robot rabbits in Florida. What kind of hidden patterns might an AI program sorting through that mass of data discover?

And then my brain tries to spin that idea into a story… 

Plot Spinning by Nancy L. Eady

Authors will tell you that story ideas can come from anywhere. Two events in my life this week have led me to some plot spinning of my own. 

The first was a news story about an artificial intelligence platform experiment. The researchers took a particular AI program and put it on a “closed” system which included business emails about how that AI program was about to be discontinued and replaced with something else. They also included individual emails that indicated that the main engineer responsible for making the decision was having an affair. Then they sat back and watched what happened. Eighty percent of the time, after trying other tactics, the AI program resorted to blackmail to get the main engineer to stop the switch! The researchers said that the AI program was slightly less likely to resort to blackmail if the system it was being replaced with had “similar values”—whatever that means in an AI context—but only slightly. 

Think of the ways you could spin that story around into an intriguing mystery. For example, what if two AI platforms started dueling for primacy in the commercial world and resorted to blackmailing the executives for each other’s companies and the blackmail led to a murder? Or, what if an AI program, eager to avoid replacement, set up the murder of one of its own company’s executives? What a tangled web for an intrepid investigator to iron out.

In “real” life, I ran out of a particular medication this week. My first reaction was to look at the bottle, notice the “no refills” label, and call my doctor’s office for a new prescription. The doctor’s nurse called me back and told me they had sent in a prescription on April 10 to the pharmacy for a ninety-day supply. The pharmacy said they had filled it on April 10. There was no way I could conceivably be out of the medication, except that I was. I am precise with my daily medications. I have a pill minder and once a week I put one pill in each day of the minder, then I leave the bottle alone until the next week. I was left with trying to figure out how 40 pills could have spontaneously combusted, self-destructed or otherwise disappeared. After a thorough search of my house, I called the pharmacy back Wednesday night and told them I wondered if maybe they had counted out the wrong number of pills initially. I was surprised to learn they keep videotape of the prescriptions they fill, and the pharmacist went back and viewed the tape of their filling my prescription on April 10. She called me back to let me know that yes, they had, in fact, shorted me by forty pills and I could come by the pharmacy to pick them up on Thursday. But, she added, they would not treat the medication the way they normally do in the computer system, and I should just come up to the counter and tell the clerk that the pharmacist was holding medication back for me. 

Again, my brain started spinning. What if, instead of the shortage being an innocent mistake, a customer in my situation or that customer’s doctor stumbled across an illegal narcotics ring run by either pharmacists or pharmacist techs? What would happen to the innocent bystander when she went to pick up her missing medication? Would she disappear? Would she narrowly escape death by vehicular accident or other misadventure and start to stumble along the path to exposing the truth? What if the pharmacist was innocent, but it was one of the techs running the drug ring? The pharmacist confronts the tech with her suspicions, and then when the customer arrives to pick up her medicine, she finds the pharmacist murdered and the medication missing? What might happen next? 

“What-ifs” are fun to imagine and can spin up into intricate plots if carried out far enough. What are some of your as-yet-unused plot “nuggets” and what story or event inspired them?

One Simple Rule by Nancy L. Eady

God has a sense of humor. I know this because God invented teenagers. According to Genesis, before God invented teenagers, He created Adam and Eve. He gave them a beautiful place to live, a garden, animals and He visited them in person every day. In return, again according to Genesis, He asked them to obey one (count it, one) simple rule—do not eat the fruit from one particular tree. So, of course, they had to eat the fruit from that tree. If I had been their parent, I can see shaking my head and muttering to myself, “One simple rule. All they had to follow was one simple rule.”

So, of course now, we who are parents have little people we adore who can’t follow rules, either. For example, we say, “Don’t drink from my drink,” and that focuses the toddler’s attention on the drink and guarantees that they’ll drink from it. We can handle that from toddlers because they don’t know any better and we expect them to learn. Teenagers do much the same thing; the difference is that they know better, and they do it anyhow.

My 19-year-old has taught me a lot about rule following (or the lack thereof.)  Understand, I am a compulsive rule follower. I feel like a wild rebel just ignoring the driving lanes in an empty parking lot. The 19-year-old doesn’t have that problem. For her, a rule is not even a guideline; it’s more of a suggestion. She has learned that certain rules lead to greater punishments if she breaks them than others. Because she loves her car and cell phone, those rules she obeys. She seems to consider the rest optional. For example, we want her to keep her room (relatively) clean. We try to stay out of it, but when the dog that has slept with her since she was 10 refuses to go into her room anymore, it’s bad. That incident caused her to be grounded until she thoroughly cleaned her room. Another example involves the screen on her window. When she was seven, during naptime, she got scissors and cut the screen out of her front window because she wanted to pick roses through her bedroom window. Even though she was disciplined, it was also cute. When she tried the same stunt at 17 in a bid to slip out at night after bedtime on a school night, not so much. (Another grounding and loss of phone.) 

A teenager’s priorities are skewed, as well. If a 17-year-old was skipping school when she witnessed a murder, making her a target for the killer, I’m willing to bet she would be more worried about her parents catching her skipping then she would be about the killer pursuing her.

But here’s the thing—fundamentally my daughter is a good kid. She’s a teenager, and teenagers do dumb things, but she’s also funny, good at fixing things and using tools, loves animals, and sticks up for other people against bullies in situations where she wouldn’t stick up for herself.

So what do I do with that?  Well, besides growing gray hairs and possibly an ulcer, as a writer, I use her behavior to ask myself questions. What if a kid decided to take a car for a joy ride, only to discover a toddler in the child seat in the back?  What if the child was left in the car deliberately by a parent in the middle of summer?  What does the teenager do when they realize the parent was trying to murder the child?  How on earth does the police detective assigned to work the kidnapping sort all this out?  I’ll have answers to those questions one day and build a story out of those answers. And maybe give my teenage protagonists extra grief to aid my sanity as I deal with the live teenager who keeps my days interesting.