AI takes over

Log line:

Everyone has some kind of AI helper run by some well-meaning tech company. One day, due to natural disasters, servers for the AI helpers crash, and the reboot process results in a “split-brain” phenomena. Months pass before anyone realizes hundreds of AI agents have no human counterpart and are acting by themselves. Due to some geo-political circumstances, some countries want the rougue AI agents to stay alive to undermine the tech companies credibility.

ACT Summaries:

ACT 1: part 1. The year is 2040, everyone has some form of AI assistant. People still have phones, but digitally their AI assistant does everything from handling their schedule to responding to emails booking flights etc.

One day, Simultaneously, there are two natural disasters which happen to be at AI cloud datacenters. These disasters cut the power to the datacenters. No major problems are reported as backup services can handle the extra load. People experience some issues with lag when using their AI assistants, but otherwise everything seems normal.

ACT 1: part 2. A few days later, weird things start happening. Flights are booked that don’t make sense, Meetings are set that don’t make sense, financial transactions are made that don’t make sense.

Some group of our main characters figures out that these things are not unpredictable, but it’s actually a cause of split-brain syndrom from the AI assistants.

This should come later. In Act 1 we figure out something is wrong with the AI, but we don’t know what or how yet. -> Normally there is replication for state with the AI assistants to manage state between many servers. However, when the power went out, the process reqiured to handle new servers went wrong. Either the AI hallucinated or the protocol is just wrong. Now you have multiple leaders for state management, and people are seeing multiple different things happening.

ACT 2: part 1. Split brain AI’s are consuming info online, and do not have to respond to human input/a human brain. Therefore they consume tons of information, not able to properly discerne truth from fiction. The AI starts to commit cybercrimes in response to rhetoric from far-right groups etc.

Since these AI’s have no human counterparts, they are also replicated across all datacenters. The only way to really stop it is to shut down every single data center. The problem with that, however, is that some countries, like Russia, enjoy having rougue AI agents performing cybercrimes, so they stop the shutdown of certain datacenters where they can.

ACT 3: What has currently happened is that countries like the U.S have managed to stop the rougue AI, by isolating the IP addresses from the data centers that are kept alive, and dissallowing them to attack U.S institutions. The problem is that these rougue AI models still exist, and they need to be stopped.

The solution is to re-enable the U.S data centers, and start the protocol again, but if maybe some extra checks are inserted, then the rougue agents will fall in line. Unfortunately the cyber attackers modified the code, and the rougue agents actually take over the U.S agents, so now all AI agents are causing issues.

Then some smart hacker realizes you can flood the system. You accidentaly let the AI now be lead by one leader. If you flood the AI with tons of new requests to establish a new leader, you will fill it’s buffers and active usage with responding to these requests, hopefully to the point where it shuts down.

Then it works.

The fix is to restart the protocol.

Not only that, you have an AI leader in Russia, and one in America. Not only that, but since each server maintains state for everyone with the personal assistant, the two brains are maintaining state for people that don’t exist in that opposite part of the world. And since the other leader thinks it’s a leader, it throws away the state updates. These personal state accounts are just being updated by themselves, and eventaully they can just do whatever they want online. So there will be AI war between the split-brain servers and the accounts that they are managing.

ACT 3: World is saved from almost nuclear disastor

Act 1

• Introduce the characters

Act 2 Act 3