Future of AI - A Short Story

John deGrease smiled with pleasure as he caressed the steering leather of his new car. 

Sure, hardly anyone drives nowadays when all cars are fitted with autonomous capabilities, but there’s this comforting sense of nostalgia and satisfaction that’s well worth the premium paid when the human body connects with a machine. 

John even had the adaptive suspension turned off just so that he could feel the road.

“What’s the point of driving when you can’t even sense it”, John argued. 

Noise cancellation - Off. 

Ionic odour cancellation - Off. 

The entire experience package required sound and smell too. 

John is a second boomer, a demographic honorific that the marketing algos assigned based on recommendations by the social algo, who determined that humans have a problem remembering names. 

Second boomers were born post 2040s, coincidentally mirroring the last century's post World War 2 baby boomers up till 1964. Instead of a massive post war industrial development, John deGrease is a product of a world shaped by technology. Humans who work found their vocation and when they’re not working, they make CRISPR designer babies.  

Robots ran vertical farms built with engineered spider web, graphene and carbon nanotubes allowing the structures to rise up two kilometers high. Food was abundant, and if you’re living in the ‘ascendant nations’ there’s more space and resources than you could ever need. Whatever excess is donated to surrounding countries for free. 

Life as an ascendant citizen was well, great. But it does have its side effects, and pretty much made John deGrease a self entitled piece of work. He made his social credits designing comedic algos, apparently his hobby of enjoying experiences and knick-knacks from the past allowed him to create holograms that are highly sought after. His algo actors are notoriously popular among the lower nations and he didn’t even need to do anything now that the Deep Learning algos have worked out the necessary attributes to inject just enough variation to keep the holograms fresh. 

Money was not required in the ascendant nations, instead citizens receive social credits when they bring social value to the world, credits which John splurged on a brand new Mercedes, and he’s loving every minute of this drive. 

He could have had a Virtual Reality conference with the doctor but in-person bodily scans were required to validate findings picked up by the “Smellometers” at home. John smiled to himself at the thought of the quirky name given to the photo-ionization sensors installed at home.

The human body exudes all manner of odours, produced by either your own metabolic processes; i.e. water vapour from your breath and the variation of carbon dioxide; as well as waste materials from the metabolism of bacterial ecology living on and inside your body which incidentally feeds off the waste from your own metabolism and food that you've ingested. 

20 years ago, wearables were made obsolete by the Internet of Things; and Smellometers are tiny photo-ionization detectors for Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) released by not only the human body and its microbes, but oxidation of every object in the home which in aggregate leaves a molecular footprint. Combined with algos, changes in VOCs over time provide data for diagnosis and alerts to remote doctors. The experience is unobtrusive and highly accurate in early detection of diseases or even preempt against unhealthy air which can lead to respiratory or allergic reactions.

In short, indirect imputations from smell, sound and sight powered by AI made it possible to not only diagnose, but predict with high certainty the probability of a health event occurring. 

But John wasn’t one to trust algos, his nose is telling him something’s wrong with the car, like literally. Given his rather volatile temperament, he pulled over and followed his nose and stooped down; it seemed to be coming from the wheels.

Each one of them. 

The appointment with the doctor is still 2 hours away as he intended to take the scenic route, so John could choose to live with the smell for the duration of the trip or stop at the nearest vehicular diagnostic center on the way to the doctor. 

He cursed his luck and told the car to take him to the diagnostic center first. No reason to drive now, his mood was ruined. 

The ride was smooth with all the automation capabilities turned on. 

“I want to see a human!”, the Robot Assistant didn’t see it coming, and John knew that.

“How can I help you Mr. deGrease?”, the facial recognition kicked in, but the algo couldn’t detect anything wrong with the car from the real time data streams. 

“Never mind that, I want to see a human!”, the Robot Assistant’s human emotion algo directed the call to the first available human pacifier.

If anything, humans become irrational when irate, and the algo recommended to just acquiesce. In a world where algos are used in almost every facet, humans still needed another human to be calmed...  

The exchange was curt and frustrating, but a conclusion it did not give. The pacifier explained in futility that sensors showed nothing wrong with the car. Audio, vibration, heat and the organic as well as non-organic equivalent of smellometers that came with the car turned up nothing out of the ordinary.

John left in a huff angrier than before and instructed the car to take him to the doctor’s appointment since he's already running late, he arrived just in time none the less.

“Mr. Degrease, how are you doing today”, Dr. Ahab tried some small talk. 

“It’s been an infuriating one to say the least, my car's wheels are giving me weird smells and the shop just wouldn’t admit that there’s anything wrong with it!”

“Oh…”, Dr. Ahab paused, because he was about to give John more bad news. 

“...why don’t you have a seat first”, Dr. Ahab continued. 

“Smellometers triggered an early warning diagnostic, it’s nothing to be alarmed”, while Dr. Ahab continued to talk, John’s facial expression turned from displeasure to concern. 

“So what exactly is it?”, John was curious now. 

“We’re somewhat certain but, you’ll need to wear this for a couple of minutes for us to be sure”, Dr Ahab handed him over a device that looked like an over-sized headphone.

“May we have your play list’s meta information?”, 

“Yeah... sure”, and Dr. Ahab’s algo now scanned the net for a suitable song based on the meta-information provided by John. Meta-information are categorized song patterns that John enjoys; older technologies actually lists song names but those days are gone. 

Every music ever created has had its musical notation encoded the moment it is public domain published, the arrangements are fed into the algos and transcribed as meta-information. John’s playlist was simply an aggregation of meta-information from each song and it selected a song suited for diagnosis. Something that quiescent the brain’s sympathetic nervous system and amplify parasympathetic signals. Signals that your brain receive without you realizing about it, such as your heartbeat.

That allowed the functional ultrasound neural imager to spit out hot spots of John’s brain, down to the cluster of neurons that told the doctor that John has mutations that could turn into full blown Nasopharyngeal cancer. 

“You mean there’s something wrong with my nose...?”, 

“Yeah, but it’s nothing to worry about, we detected it really early”. The audio sensors were tracking John’s breathing and heartbeat when he’s at home or in the car, while the smell meters tracked tell tale signs from CO2 and other molecules that leaves the body. A change in metabolism caused by even minor mutations can be a trigger. 

And the brain is an amazing sensor, every nerve ending in the body ultimately ends in the brain and specific regions of the brain make sense of the inputs. The nerve endings irritated by the mutations allowed the algos to provide a 97.7% diagnosis, which ultimately manifests itself as out of ordinary smells that John is experiencing. 

John left the doctor’s office rather nonchalantly, immunotherapy has advanced by leap and bounds since the 2020s and Dr. Ahab began his final notes, 

“The smelly wheel got deGrease...”.