I was driving on the highway going home from work one day when I saw a sign. It read Travel Time to the next highway intersection. Always useful information on days when there are delays. I suppose it is useful to see that it is a normal time to get there, but I tend to not pay much attention to that. On this particular day, my slight degree dyslexia kicked in and I read the sign as “Time Travel to Rt – 8 minutes.” I did a double take and read it correctly the second time.

Grinning like cat that sees a toy mouse, I thought, what an awesome idea. What if it was an AI program (Artificial Intelligence) that did this to try to meet it’s objective of moving a large volume of people through a metropolis? When you pass by the sign, a signal is sent at you to produce some kind of entrance into time travel, allowing you to cover the 8 minutes in a fraction of the time.

Engaging me as such a fun idea, I decided I want to write a book about it. The key to the whole concept is the AI program. The term means that the programs can learn through input. Give it an objective, the program will gather the input from sources, then produce the product that meets the objective. It has to have examples to follow in order to design the product. Recent releases of publicly used AI programs have fueled interest, but until now, these programs are vastly misunderstood.

Movies always portray an AI as with a personality, with a human voice, then having her/him develop logic that leads her/him to conclude the human race needs her/him to take over. The Matrix and iRobot are such movies. Love them, but perhaps we need a movie that would show the huge benefit that AI will be to us, because of the way it operates. The program is designed to meet an object, not make its own objectives.

Several things to share about the book without giving it all away. Even though the program has a name, the creator decides to use the pronoun ‘it’, never ‘she’. The program will meet its goals of 5%, 8%, and 10% improvement through learning about current traffic motions, then designing and running trials of its own choosing. And finally, no evil AI program allowed here. It will not conclude that it needs to wipe out the human race or bring us under complete control.

However, wonder what lengths the AI program would go to in order to meet and errant goal that was entered by a character who does not understand the nature of the program? A goal that would be impossible to meet unless…. it learned how to move us through time travel.

Hope that you are having some fun ideas on this Happy Friday. Remember to subscribe on the perspectives page.