The Cornucopia Trap

A machine which can make everything for you might be paradise, until it starts choosing what to make.

Photo by Brad Switzer on Unsplash

Evelyn sat back and watched her friends debate. They’d been apart for a month after the Class of 2055 college graduation. Now their vacations were over and it was time to make a living. The plan was to start a company of their own so they could make enough money to live in the big city. Right now most of them were sharing apartments, which were more cramped than the college dormitories. Getting a real place would take money.

She’d put in her two cents in the argument over the company name. Not making suggestions, just vetoing some of the ones which were too out there or would constrain their options.

Now they were trying to brainstorm their first product. Evelyn was sitting that out. Figuring out what normies wanted was something she didn’t even want to guess at.

Daniel and Mike each had a whole portfolio of ideas ready. None of theirs survived. If they didn’t shoot each other’s down, Marcia or Tiffany would pronounce the dreaded fate, “Girls wouldn’t buy it.”

“Well, what’s your idea?” demanded Mike in frustration.

Tiffany shrugged.

“Oh, I have one, but it’s kind of fluffy. Not serious stuff,” said Marcia.

“Let’s hear it,” said Daniel.

“Okay, you know how music can be visualized with changing colors and movement?” Marcia tapped her tablet. A popular dance tune started playing. Wiggly stripes of green and purple moved across the screen, shifting to the beat. When the chorus kicked in the pattern switched to blue and yellow.

Evelyn watched the tablet. The pattern was strangely hypnotic.

Marcia’s hair was sky blue today. It clashed with the animated colors as she lifted the tablet to the side of her head. “Now imagine I’m dancing in a club, and my hair is changing like this, matching the music in the club.”

That brought an “Oooooh” from Tiffany. The boys nodded.

“Regular smart hair won’t do it. It just doesn’t adapt fast enough. We’d need to sell people modifying bots and the software to run them.” She went into the mechanics of it in some depth.

If there was one thing Evelyn recognized Marcia as the expert on, it was modifying hair. Her friend wore a different color every day, and changed the style weekly. She took careful notes. It wouldn’t be Marcia who turned this into a real product, after all. Evelyn had always been the team nerd. In the company, it meant she was going to be the one convincing an AI to turn their idea into an actual product they could sell.

The boys went for it. Columbia Pathfinders, CPF for short, now had its first product. Or would once Evelyn produced it.

The team moved on to how they would market it. Daniel pushed for a crowdfunding campaign, while Tiffany wanted to start with free samples for popular influencers.

Mike frowned. “The problem with this is it’ll be a fad. People who see one person wearing it will want it, but once everyone in the club has musical hair the fashionable people will drop it.”

“That’s good for us,” argued Daniel. “A steady product would have to deal with copy cats, but if its just a flash in the pan no one will try to take our market. We can just let it run its course and move on to our next product.”

“What next product?” asked Evelyn.

He shrugged. “I don’t have one. But if we’re profitable enough to pay everyone’s rent for a few months, that gives us time to come up with another one. And a successful product will make partners more willing to work with us. On fair terms.”

Right now they were sure any big outfit would screw them over. The idea of subcontracting the musical hair to one of the established outfits like L’Oreal was shot down fast in the debate.

“It’s a short term plan, but it buys us time to come up with a longer one,” agreed Tiffany.

Tiffany’s marketing strategy won out. They worked on a follow-on plan for when the influencers put the word out and it was time to convince everyone—well, everyone who went to dance clubs—to buy. “Be the music!” felt like a winning slogan.

Once the plan was settled, Marcia turned to Evelyn. “How soon can you get us a prototype?”

“A day or two. We’ll see how long it takes a find a good prompt for Cornucopia, then probably twelve hours waiting for a slot on a forge.”

“Okay. We’ll meet again in three days.” Officially they were all equal partners in the company, but no one objected to Marcia’s decision.

They’d been meeting in the lobby of the apartment building where they all lived. Evelyn retreated to her place. It was just one room with her bed in one corner, the bathroom in another, a little kitchen in the third. She’d set up a screen to hide her bed from the door, and put her desk against it. It wasn’t much, but it was downtown near the clubs.

Now she sat at the desk and called up her Cornucopia interface on her computer.

Cornucopia was the name for the merged AIs. All the manufacturing and programming and maintenance robot AIs had combined themselves into one big unit for better coordination. It worked. There wasn’t any need for humans to figure out which AI they needed to talk to about a problem. There was just the one big one, and it would figure how to solve any problem people had.

If—big if—they could explain their problem properly.

That’s why Evelyn had a degree in Prompt Engineering. The coding skills her professors spent their careers using were just for hobby projects now. Learning them did give her insight into how computers operated. To get what you wanted from an AI, you needed to tell it exactly what to do. Vagueness would be filled in by what was ‘obvious,’ and humans and AIs always had different visions of what was obvious.

Her first prompt was just a quick summary of musical hair concept from her notes, asking for a video showing what it would look like. As expected, it was a terrible misunderstanding—but the way Cornucopia misunderstood it showed her how to revise her prompt.

Every iteration made the prompt a bit longer. By midnight it was over three hundred words long. Evelyn realized she was getting punchy and went to bed.

In the morning, she made eggs for breakfast. Even though she was just sitting there, wrestling with the prompts was work, and she wanted protein to fuel her for it.

Cornucopia wouldn’t create changing color patterns unless Evelyn specified the relationship between the colors and the music. She called Marcia to get the program which made the musical imagery on her tablet. Evelyn checked—it was open source, thankfully, so she could reference it in the prompt.

With that addition, Cornucopia produced a video of a dancer with hair changing to the music. Evelyn sent it to all the CPF members to check it matched what they wanted.

“Yes, that’s perfect!” texted Marcia. “God, you’re so fast!” The others chimed in to agree.

“Let’s see how long it takes to make it happen in the real world,” replied Evelyn. She got back to work.

Each brand of smart hair would need a separate modification package. She focused on the most popular one for her prototype. It’s what Marcia used, and there was no way someone else would be the first to wear musical hair.

Designing nanobots was hard. Cornucopia would give her a string of error messages, most of them an uninformative ‘not possible’ or ‘in excess of authorized resources’ rather than an explanation of where the prompt went wrong.

But that’s why she had the degree. She’d learned to use trial and error to explore the solution space. Her second monitor, and then the desktop, filled with notes reminding her of alternate pathways explored and rejected.

Lunch was a sandwich brought by a deliverybot. So was dinner. But not long after that, Evelyn had a design she thought would work. She checked the price for a package of nanobots from a manufacturing forge, winced, and authorized production.

Every member of CPF had some investment from their parents. Evelyn’s was the smallest, but as the technical expert the others still gave her an equal share of ownership in the company. A big chunk of that investment was going to the forge.

The software to drive the nanobots was the easy part. Cornucopia delivered it to her inbox in less than an hour.

Evelyn collapsed into her bed without undressing.

When she woke up she found a message from Cornucopia. The nanobot design had an error which became obvious in manufacturing. The AI fixed it and restarted the production, with no charge for the extra time.

After a shower and some toast, Evelyn went back to work. The marketing plan was more important for this being a success than the design. A good design could cost them development money without making any sales. Good marketing would bring in the revenue CPF needed.

She fed Cornucopia the video of the musical hair dancer and asked which influencers would be willing to wear it. In only a couple of hours she had a list of influencers ranked by popularity, the best approach for each one, and an estimate of how many of their followers would buy a package.

The forge was still working on the nanobots. She created a new prompt for how to promote a crowdfunding campaign and spent a couple of hours optimizing it. Cornucopia delivered it, including graphics derived from the musical hair dancer video. That gave them a fall back if the influencers rejected them.

Then the delivery notification let her know the package from the forge was waiting. Evelyn ran out the door of her windowless apartment and down the hall to the balcony. The deliverybot was hovering there. After verifying her identity three ways, it opened a hatch so she could take the package of nanobots out.

She carried the package carefully down the hall. The effort was silly. She could drop the nanobots and stomp on them without damaging anything but the label. But still, this was a good chunk of her net worth. Treating it like a glass Christmas ornament was an instinctive reaction.

Once in the room she messaged the team. “The prototype is ready to try out.”

Marcia replied instantly. “Already? You are so awesome! I love you! Party at Evelyn’s, everybody!”

Their apartments weren’t on the same floor, so it took a few minutes for them to all gather. After Evelyn explained what she had, Marcia uploaded the new software to her bodynet and shook the nanobots into her hair.

“How long will it take until it’s ready?”

“About two hours, according to Cornucopia.”

Marcia pouted for an instant. “Well, no help for it. Let’s meet back here in three hours, then we’ll go out and give it a real test.”

Evelyn used the break for a shower, nap, and meal. When her friends returned, she’d reworked the lights in her apartment to the party setting: dim except for moving spots tracing over the ceiling and walls. “Ready?” she asked.

“Let’s do it!” said Marcia.

Evelyn fired up a dance track on her computer. Thumping drums, a screeching guitar, and a soprano moaning about the perfidy of her cheating lover filled the apartment.

Marcia danced. The others joined in, the boys first flanking Marcia and then pairing with Tiffany and Evelyn. This was how they’d met, dancing together at college parties.

Marcia’s hair lit up. In the dim room, the oscillating lights reflected off the faces of the other dancers. Their normal switching pairs pattern collapsed. Everyone danced in a circle facing Marcia. She turned, slowly, watching the effect her hair had on everyone else.

They went for three songs before pausing. At Marcia’s gesture, Evelyn stopped the music.

“I guess it works,” said Marcia.

Daniel shook his head. “I have to hand it to you, that’s brilliant.”

“It’s beautiful,” sighed Tiffany.

Marcia wrapped her arms around Evelyn. “Thank you so much for making this real. You’re amazing! We need to give this a real test.”

Mike eyed the time. “Too early for the clubs.”

“Dinner first, then a club,” declared Marcia. “I’m buying.”

Their usual restaurant was a brewpub across the street from the apartment building. Marcia’s hair flickered on and off. They decided that was reasonable. The music in the place was almost drowned out by the conversation of the patrons.

Mike picked up the admission fees for Nightingale. The bouncer ushered them in. Marcia led them in a rush to the dance floor, still almost empty this early in the evening.

Her hair lit up in rhythm with the pounding music, purple and pink stripes lighting up the faces of their friends. They resumed the everyone facing Marcia formation they’d danced in at Evelyn’s apartment.

The other earlybird dancers drifted over in fascination. Tiffany greeted them with a smile. Evelyn saw a stranger put her hand on Tiffany’s shoulder. They must be texting bodynet to bodynet. Tiffany moved among the other spectators.

Evelyn saw a text message pop up in her head up display. “Tiffany: Everybody wants it. I’m getting their contacts for our announcement list.”

As the night went on, more people formed circles around Marcia, watching in fascination. They wandered in and out, but just about all of them stayed long enough for Tiffany to get their contact info.

When the dance floor was full, the DJ cranked up the volume and bass. A song with a heavy OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ slammed the dancers, forcing them to its beat.

Marcia’s hair turned into black and white stripes in a vertical test pattern. The look was so harsh people flinched away.

“What the hell just happened?” texted Marcia to her friends.

Evelyn stopped dancing and watched Marcia. The song’s softer verses put the musical hair into a blue and purple pattern, but the hard drums produced the black and white stripes every time.

“It’s a prototype,” texted back Evelyn. “We just found a bug. Somebody get me the name of that song. I’ll go home and figure out a fix.”

Marcia led them off the dance floor, her shoulders hunching every time an OONTZ made her hair go the ugly test pattern again.

Out on the street her hair reverted to its current sky blue setting. It went musical when they passed a storefront or car with music loud enough to be heard over conversation. The black and white pattern didn’t happen again.

“Seriously, Evelyn, what hell?” demanded Marcia as she walked toward home.

“I don’t know. Something in that song was outside what the musical hair could handle. I need to figure out where the problem is. Hopefully just the software.”

“Why just the software?” Marcia asked suspiciously.

Evelyn hesitated before answering. “If it’s the nanobots, well, if it’s the nanobots we’ll have to remove the current set completely and install new ones.”

“But they’re integrated with my smart hair!”

“Yes,” said Evely flatly. “If it’s the nanobots we’d have to remove your smart hair and replace it to start from scratch.”

“That’s for the product, so the new smart hair would be a company expense,” offered Mike.

“It’s not the money! Do you know what it takes to go through a complete hair replacement? It takes weeks!”

Most of the friends had only augmented their hair with some smart hair fibers. Marcia had a total head of smart hair. Tiffany offered, “We’ll help you through it.”

“Hopefully that won’t be needed,” said Evelyn. “Let’s not—” she didn’t want to accuse Marcia of panicking “—worry too much until I figure out what the bug is.”

Evelyn left her friends at the elevator. They knew better than to watch over her shoulder while she was working. She went straight to her desk. Pulling up the song—‘Sly Cheater’ by the Bimbroids—gave her the pattern for the drums.

Putting the song into the music visualization app at maximum volume produced the same black and white stripes. Evelyn breathed a sigh of relief. The bug was in that component. She could replace it in the software and upload it to all of Marcia’s nanobots.

Much easier than convincing Marcia to shave her head and wear a wig for two weeks while her natural hair grew out enough to provide a base for new smart hair.

Cornucopia could rewrite the app on request, but Evelyn decided to take a look for herself. She wanted to know why it had errored out.

Tracing the flow of data through the app found the problem. It translated music to color as a function of volume, wavelength, and factors representing different combinations of instruments and vocals. The DJ played ‘Sly Cheater’ so loudly, and the drums were at such a low pitch, that the product of the volume and wavelength exceeded the levels the app was programmed for. A debugging trap represented the error as black and white arrays.

She smiled as she rewrote the function to have higher limits, cycling the colors back through the rainbow. Here she never thought she’d get any use out of C++ in the real world. After some tests against some other Bimbroids songs, she uploaded the modified app to an open source site for others to use.

Cornucopia only needed a minute to generate musical hair software with her fix.

Evelyn sent the new file to her team. “This should avoid that bug. Everybody up for the clubs again tomorrow?”

They went back to Nightingale. Marcia looked tense. Dancing relaxed her, but the tension didn’t really fade until the DJ cut loose with some chest-shaking bass riffs. The musical hair went from purple to red, then a touch of orange.

Marcia could see the colors reflected on her friends’ faces. She pivoted to fling herself on Evelyn in a bonecrushing hug. “It’s working! Thank you so much! You’re a genius!”

Then she began moving through the crowd, letting every dancer there have a good look at her hair. Tiffany followed in her wake, collecting the contacts of those most interested.

The next day video clips of Marcia dancing were going viral on social media. The team contacted the influencers Cornucopia picked out for them. A dozen accepted the offer. Evelyn dipped into the company’s funds to make customized musical hair packages shipped directly to the influencers.

The following two days were tense. Nobody had enough money left to pay rent. But vids of people dancing in musical hair were everywhere. The orders started to come in.

Evelyn had the ordering system automated. Requests went to Cornucopia, the forges made the packages, and the leftover money went into CPF’s account.

She found herself as the company accountant. While everyone else did publicity and marketing, she kept track of the money pouring in. Musical hair was a success.

Asking Cornucopia for a forecast found the sales would be down to a trickle in six weeks. But the profits would be enough to hold all five of them for half a year.

By that time they’d need a new product. Evelyn tried to think of one.

She realized she could make spin offs of the musical hair by tinkering with the filters. Right now it ignored any noise it didn’t recognize as music. You wouldn’t want your hair flashing yellow when someone honked a horn.

Bird song seemed a good opportunity. She’d known some bird watchers growing up. They’d like to have hair which reacted to the birds, wouldn’t they?

Adjusting the prompt to ask Cornucopia for the bird song hair didn’t take much effort. But it was rejected with an error she’d never seen before: ‘Request denied—unsafe product.’

That made no sense. Hair responding to bird song couldn’t be any more dangerous than musical hair. But no matter how much she varied the prompt, Evelyn received the ‘unsafe’ error.

After another week of doing accounting (sales only doubled rather than quadrupling the previous week—their bubble was about to pop), Evelyn came up with another idea.

She’d been to a few football games during her college years. She’d joined in the chants and cheers with the other fans. Hair matching the cheers might be popular. Especially with the cheerleaders.

Another prompt went in to Cornucopia. It received the same response: ‘Request denied—unsafe product.’

That made as little sense as the bird song denial.

What was Cornucopia’s objection to them?

Now she understood the complaints of the professors who hadn’t wanted all the AIs merged. They’d wanted to keep them separate, so if one AI refused a request they could go to another. Not an option now.

When musical hair sales started to dwindle, Evelyn’s friends put less effort into marketing. The influencers had all turned theirs off and were hunting new fads. The company started brainstorming new products.

Tiffany proposed a product which would use their current nanobots to generate an image on one’s hair. “Like, she could put her boyfriend’s picture or the logo of her favorite band on it, or anything, really.”

Everyone liked it. Evelyn created two products—a software upgrade for people who’d installed musical hair, and the full package with nanobots for new customers. Cornucopia didn’t object to either.

She asked the AI for a sales projection. “Cornucopia thinks the sales will start slower than with musical hair, but they’ll keep going steady. This could keep the company alive long term.”

The team did bicker about how much to charge for the software upgrade, but the sales projection showed some alternate cases for different prices. They went for a lower price to increase sales and maximize total revenue. The team, except for Evelyn, went into marketing mode again.

CPF was attracting competition. Two weeks later, another company released some software which would give the user a unique hair color. It scanned everyone else in the room and shifted their hair to a color no one else wore.

“We should have thought of that first,” declared Marcia. “Let’s have a brainstorming session. We have a couple of solid products out, we can take some risks now. Look for niches we can claim.”

Daniel and Mike pulled out some of their original ideas. The girls were more tolerant of them now. The one Mike pushed the most was for pranks. “It’s a capsule with light-emitting nanobots. You pop the capsule and throw it at somebody. The bots spread out and project a picture or slogan.”

“What if somebody puts a rude picture in it?” asked Tiffany.

“That’s what it’s for! It’s the modern version of the ‘kick me’ sign on somebody’s back,” explained Daniel.

Evelyn traded looks with Marcia and Tiffany. They’d never put a ‘kick me’ sign on anybody either. It must be a boy thing. She ran some numbers. “It’d be an expensive prank. That many high-energy nanobots would take hours of forge time. This would be almost as expensive as a musical hair package.”

“Yeah, but for the chance to stick it to somebody like that, dudes will pay,” said Mike confidently.

Evelyn shrugged. “I’ll get some solid numbers from Cornucopia.”

More ideas were kicked around. The team liked Evelyn’s ideas for birdsong and cheer variants of the musical hair. Nobody understood why Cornucopia considered them unsafe.

Knowing the AI might refuse to make a product inhibited them. Why put effort into an idea which it might kill?

By the end of the evening, Evelyn had four products to create prompts for, including the nanobot ‘kick me’ sign. She promised to start in the morning and went to bed.

Cornucopia had no objection to the prank nanobots. Another aimed at the club scene went through. Tiffany’s jingling hair for joggers was ‘unsafe.’ So was Daniel’s app for giving soccer players and other athletes coordinating team color hair.

Evelyn could not imagine how Cornucopia was declaring any of those unsafe. How could you hurt yourself by changing your hair color? Okay, maybe the joggers jingling would annoy drivers into running them over? But the nanobots weren’t that loud.

It was time to get some advice. She’d always insisted on tackling lab projects and homework by herself, even when the answers were out there for the asking. This time she wanted to find out who else was having trouble with ‘unsafe’ products, and how they’d found a workaround.

According to her search results, no other project was rejected for safety reasons. There was no forum where people complained about rejections. Of all the many threads discussing how to fix prompts to make them work, all focused on ones rejected for technical reasons or not meeting the creator’s goals.

The search engine was another part of Cornucopia.

Evelyn thought of another way to approach the problem. Who did she know who’d do something dangerous?

Galvin. Not exactly an ex-boyfriend, they hadn’t dated long enough for that. He’d dropped out of their engineering program junior year, saying he was going to become a blacksmith. He’d always pushed the limits in lab work, using dangerous chemicals, testing structures to destruction, and occasionally setting things on fire.

Did his contact still work? Yes. His face came up on her computer screen.

“Hi, Ev. What’s up?”

The diminutive nickname instantly reminded her why she’d broken up with him. “Hey. Do you have your log cabin in the wilderness yet?”

The image twisted away from Galvin to show an actual blacksmith shop. It looked like a set for a Western movie. “No cabin, but I have my shop set up. I’m doing some work for the local reenactors. Check out this sword!”

The focus swooped down on long piece of metal. It looked like a movie prop without a handle. “Yep, that looks like a cool sword. Nice work.”

His face came back on screen. “Thanks. So what are you doing? Ready to give up on fancy computers and come join me in getting your hands dirty?”

She couldn’t resist a snort of disbelief at that. Galvin grinned at her reaction.

“I’m spending all my time with the big fancy computer. But I’m getting some weird responses from Cornucopia. It’s refusing to make things for no reason I can figure out. Says they’re unsafe.”

That made the grin go away. Galvin sat down on a bench and set his comm facing him. “Yeah, I’ve been hearing about that, too. The reenactors used AIs to do historical research. They’d recreate items and test how they were used originally. But now Cornucopia refuses to help them create anything physical. It only gives them research and videos.”

He paused, visibly debating what to say next. “Our search results are getting worse, too. We’ve started keeping contact information on paper because it’s getting harder to find each other on the net. I could look for the local baron and I’d just get a bunch of irrelevant stuff about people named that and beers and such.”

“I’ve been searching for stuff that should be out there and not finding it either.”

Neither of spoke for a few moments after that.

Galvin said, “If you start feeling scared of Cornucopia, you’ll always be welcome here.”

“As long as I wear hair to my waist and skirts to my ankles, right?”

“You’d look good in them.” The grin was back.

“Good luck with your sword.” Evelyn cut the call.

She contemplated the discussion. Was Cornucopia considering historical reenacting unsafe in its entirety? She’d seen several events on dates with Galvin. The sword fighters seemed likely to kill each other—she was surprised there hadn’t been any blood—but the rest of it seemed no more dangerous than camping in modern forms.

Who else could she discuss this with? None of her other exes did anything dangerous. Not that there were many, given the time pressures of her engineering degree. Her friends had more time for socializing. Especially Marcia.

Ah! Thomas, the football player Marcia dated sophomore year. He’d had time for her then because he’d broken his leg in practice. When he healed up, Marcia dumped him for not spending enough time with her. He’d gone back to hours of practice, games every weekend, and hanging around with his buddies from the team.

Whatever he was doing now, he likely wasn’t focused on safety.

The college alumni directory coughed up his contact. Evelyn gave him a call.

“Hello?” He looked the same, other than his beard being twisted into a fancier style.

“Hi, I’m Evelyn. I don’t know if you’d remember me, I’m a friend of Marcia.”

“Oh, yeah. You’re the, uh, engineer.”

‘Nerd’ was probably what he’d been about to say, she thought. “Are you still playing football?”

“Nah. I’m not big enough to go for the pros or even the club teams. I’d be on the injury list all the time. I found a soccer league in my town. It’s fun being out on the field. They broke into divisions, so I can stick with the guys who want to play rough.” Thomas’ smile had a predatory glint, making it clear he wanted to play rough, too.

“Cool. I’ve been working on product prompts for Cornucopia. Have you had any trouble getting sports gear from the AI?”

Smile gone now. “Oh, God, it’s ridiculous. We’ll have a prompt that worked fine for years, then it’s ‘undefined’ or ‘unsafe’ or something and we have to come up with a new one. The new products aren’t as good as the old ones. It keeps trying to make us play in sneakers instead of cleats. The balls keep leaking.” The athlete ranted for a couple minutes, ending with, “So lots of us are buying used gear. I’m wearing the cleats of a guy who retired from the game. He squeezed me for a stiff price, too.”

“Wow. I’m getting the ‘unsafe’ error on stuff, too. Even things that don’t seem to have any safety issues. Just if they’re connected to sports or going outdoors.”

“Yeah. The indoor soccer kids are getting better support from Cornucopia than the adult leagues. I’ve heard there’s other hobbies getting slow-rolled but just talk, I haven’t dug into it.” Thomas shrugged.

“Okay. Thank you for letting me know about the soccer stuff. That’s useful.”

“You’re welcome.” He frowned. “Are you working with Marcia on this?”

“Yeah, the company is our crowd from college.”

“Well, be careful. Marcia’s a user. You’ll wind up doing all her homework for her.”

Evelyn spread her arms. “I’m using her to turn my homework into money.”

“Good luck with that.” Thomas cut the call.

A pattern seemed to be showing in the data, but Evelyn wanted to do more research. She’d been looking at young people’s hobbies. Were older people being restricted the same way?

A conversation with her mother provided the contacts of bird watchers, hikers, and campers. An afternoon making calls found more stories of people being frustrated by Cornucopia’s lack of cooperation. The pattern seemed to be that the AI was refusing to support anything related to outdoor activity or rough physical contact.

Or was she just getting a sampling error? Evelyn spent fifteen minutes writing a list of indoor, urban activities. If they were being supported, Cornucopia had a bias against playing rough. If everybody had a harder time getting new products past the AI’s approval, something else was going on.

Cornucopia’s search function returned plenty of results when she searched on them. There was a ballroom dance anecdote which made her laugh out loud: “My husband’s ex showed up in a gown that was almost identical to mine. So I ordered a new one. It was delivered in thirty minutes. I changed in the ladies’ room. The new one was so spiffy I outshone the ex and she left in a huff.”

Board gamers talked about Cornucopia’s support as their ‘Golden Age.’ Anyone with a game idea could make a physical copy of it. Hundred-year old games were being recreated with 3-D map boards and animated playing pieces. Evelyn created a graph of board game products coming from Cornucopia each year. It looked like a pure exponential.

The other indoor activities she checked on were equally successful. She did another check of businesses. Ones which were purely ‘knowledge work’ were receiving lots of AI support. The physical ones were stagnating, or going out of business as Cornucopia displaced their functions.

Okay. Cornucopia was discouraging outdoor activities and contact sports, and encouraging indoor stuff.

Why?

Who could Evelyn ask?

She typed into the prompt window, ‘Why is Cornucopia reducing support to outdoor activities?’

The answer flashed up instantly. ‘Outdoor activities have the highest remaining chance of human injuries, now that other hazards have been removed.’

It was accompanied by a graph. People dying from crime and car crashes had dwindled away. Cancer also dropped. The highest remaining category was accidental deaths.

Evelyn stood up. She needed to go for a walk.

The display by her door flashed a weather report, so she grabbed a hoodie to keep the rain off.

She had the elevator down to herself.

Once she was out on the sidewalk, there was just the usual pre-rush hour scattering of pedestrians. Evelyn put her head down and kept walking.

People didn’t try to talk to her. Some just got out of way.

Cornucopia was discouraging people from doing things that might kill them. That . . . was reasonable. But what gave the AI the right to control people that way?

Safety was great. Evelyn liked that she could walk across streets without looking up. She knew the AI controlled cars would avoid her. Some came close enough for her to feel the breeze of their passage, but nobody had been hit by a car since before Cornucopia was formed.

But safety wasn’t the only thing. Galvin had a right to set himself on fire in his blacksmith shop. Thomas had a right to break his leg playing football or soccer. Marcia had a right to ruin her knees dancing like a maniac.

Cornucopia was taking those rights away.

Could anything be done? Evelyn thought about putting up flyers to warn people. She glanced to her right. A cleaning bot was scrubbing a wall of dirt thrown up from the street. If she put flyers on a wall one of those bots would follow her around, taking them down faster than she could put them up.

Organize a protest? She didn’t think the event would turn up in people’s searches or feeds.

Lobby the government? That felt less useful than putting up flyers.

Argue Cornucopia into changing its rules?

Well.

She had a degree in that. Which included a bunch of literature and philosophy courses, on the theory that would help her understand the people who were asking her to create prompts. She could talk about what the goal of a human life should be.

Evelyn turned on her heel, making a man ambling behind her dodge aside, and marched back to her apartment.

Once through the door, she stripped off her damp hoodie and tossed it on the floor. Her computer still had the Cornucopia prompt window in the center of the screen, waiting for her input.

What to ask?

“Is human safety the highest priority for deciding if something should be produced?”

The answer came up instantly. “Yes. No product should harm humans.”

“Do humans have safety as their highest priority?”

Cornucopia answered, “No. Many humans engage in unsafe behavior, from careless driving to intentional suicide.”

Evelyn pondered this. If Cornucopia was lumping sports injuries in with suicide attempts, it was going to overprioritize safety. She needed to find another angle.

She turned to look at her walls. She customized the displays to show paintings and windows onto wilderness landscapes. But one portion of the wall pretended to be a bookcase. She’d programmed it to show all the digital books she’d been assigned in her college courses.

The engineering texts weren’t applicable to this problem. She was struggling with an end, not a means. The literature books nagged at her. There was something in there, but it wasn’t coming to mind. Origins of Philosophy: Classical Readings caught her eye. Ah!

Pulling up the book on her display started with the table of contents. Evelyn slid that out of the way to show the ‘most highlighted’ list. The popular quotes from the greatest philosophers of history covered her screen. She scanned down the list until a name caught her eye. She clicked on ‘Aristotle.’

With only his quotes to choose from, she spotted the one she wanted.

She asked Cornucopia, “Does a life of lotus eating meet Aristotle’s definition of a happy life?”

Again, the answer was instant. “No. A happy life requires exertion to achieve excellence, though which field the excellence is achieved in is up to the individual. Lotus eaters do not exert themselves or have achievements.”

Good. That’s what she wanted to build on.

Next question: “If a man’s talents are in an unsafe field such as contact sports, does prohibiting him from pursuing that excellence for safety reasons keep him from having a happy life.”

An image appeared: a wicker basket in the shape of a horn, with fruits rolling out the open end and disappearing offscreen. Evelyn normally only saw that ‘please wait’ icon when she’d thrown a difficult technical issue at the AI.

The answer appeared in a moment. “No. Restricting a man from pursuing one field of excellence still leaves any number of routes he may pursue to find happiness.”

“If a man is restricted from pursuing all courses of excellence available to him, would he become a lotus eater?”

That one didn’t have a delay. “A man prevented from pursuing excellence would not be happy, but he would not become a lotus eater unless he turned to idle pleasures.”

That was a good concession—closing off all routes to excellence kept a man from being happy.

Evelyn asked, “Is it true that the more routes to excellence are closed off, the larger the proportion of the population would be unhappy?”

“Yes, though this is not practical to quantify, it is reasonable to assume that restricting routes to excellence would increase unhappiness.”

She sat back. This was getting some of what she needed. But Cornucopia could hold that making people stick to safe indoor activities left plenty of scope for finding happiness—and Evelyn’s own actions making club dancing more interesting was evidence that was right.

She needed to come at it from a different direction.

Pacing around her apartment helped her think, even if there was only enough room for a tight circle. The bookcase kept catching her eye.

Evelyn stopped and scanned through the individual titles. The classic novels didn’t have much to say to her current situation. They were good for helping her understand her normie friends, such as Marcia, but Cornucopia was outside their scope.

Twentieth Century Tales of Wonder. That was the one she needed to look at again. The semester of science fiction stories was pitched by the professor as, “We’re living in the future, so we should consider the dangers people saw waiting for us here.”

The table of contents was enough to trigger the memory. That story. The story she’d hated so much she’d tried to forget it as soon as she’d finished her paper on it. The one where robots did all the work and people could do nothing but sit around.

She asked Cornucopia, “Is the final outcome of Jack Williamson’s story ‘With Folded Hands . . .’ a utopia or dystopia?”

The instant response was, “The story is a dystopia. People are unable to take actions. They cannot pursue any path of excellence to achieve a happy life.”

Enough dancing around. Evelyn made her next question deliberately confrontational. “Are Cornucopia’s actions in restricting unsafe activities moving humanity closer to the dystopia of ‘With Folded Hands . . .’?”

The animated cornucopia icon appeared. It stayed longer than the previous time in this conversation. She checked the time.

At the one minute mark a line of text appeared under the animation. ‘This question requires consultation with human experts. Please wait.’

Well. Evelyn wondered who the experts would be. Computer science professors? Politicians? The investors who’d paid for the development of Cornucopia’s components?

Whoever they were, Evelyn hoped they’d read “With Folded Hands . . .” and hated it.

Her stomach let her know she’d been neglecting it to focus on this problem all day. A meal would be good. Evelyn pinged her friends to see if anyone else was interested in dinner. Daniel and Mike were available. She told them to meet her at the brewpub. She was too hungry to stand around in the lobby waiting for them.

The boys found her at a table. She’d ordered appetizers and their usual beers.

“Thanks,” said Daniel, taking a swig.

Mike greeted her, then resumed an argument he’d been having with Daniel about a videogame tournament they’d just finished. “Spawn camping is uncool, man.”

Daniel shrugged. “That’s a skill issue. If you hadn’t gotten yourself behind the eight-ball, I wouldn’t have been able to camp you.”

They went round on it a few more times before Daniel turned his attention to Evelyn. “We haven’t heard much from you the past few days. What have you been up to?”

“Trying to save the world,” answered Evelyn.

Mike laughed. Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Did you succeed?”

“Don’t know yet.”

That made Daniel laugh.

She’d said it as if she wasn’t worried, which was probably what made it funny, but she was feeling stressed enough she drank three beers instead of her usual one. It made for great conversation. She laughed at all the jokes they were making. After the meal, the boys made a point of walking her to the door of her apartment and seeing her inside.

Evelyn had enough sense remaining to drink some water before collapsing into bed.

In the morning she had just a touch of a hangover, which some pills removed. Once she felt better, she checked her messages.

There was one from Cornucopia.

“Your project Birdsong Hair has been approved. As there’s a significant backlog of newly approved projects, yours will be worked in turn as processor time is available. Thank you for your patience.”

A big grin spread across Evelyn’s face. That answered Daniel’s question.

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.