Robots, Demons, Psychics, Oh My!

Back in September I made a thread about robots representing the concept of the Establishment (aka the Man, the Power, etc) and wanted to see what type of entity can be used to represent the rebels.

I've decided on Demons.

I haven't really decided on the characters or plot events, but I have a good grasp on the setting and conflict would like some critique in order iron out some inconsistencies.

First off the normal stuff:

• It is set in a remote city in the United States. This town also happens to be on top of a massive ley line intersection.
• Several large corporations have decided to carry out a joint venture in artificial intelligence research in this town.
• The city also experiences a large influx of college aged men and women from wealthy families as a new university opens its doors. Many of said men and women also hold radical social beliefs and/or belong to outspoken activist groups.

Now for the weirdness

• The A.I. is like a cross between Skynet, the Borg, and a W H40k Chaos god. It represents 'order' and 'oppression', and derives it power from people conforming to rules and following orders, especially from those that do it unerringly. In the grand scheme of things, it wants to assimilate every civilization and society into itself.
• The Demons are a cancerous manifestation of the rebellious attitudes exuded by the city's youth including that of the college students. They represent 'change' and 'insurrection', and they spawn from feelings of indignation and insubordinate thinking. Unless they are stopped, they will destroy all of human civilization.

That's what I have so far. Psychic Skynet vs Anarchist Demons vs the humans unlucky enough to be caught in between.

If there are corporations and at least one college involved, it's not going to be a remote city, probably not in the sense of being in the middle of nowhere. At the very least, it'd have to be on a transportation junction of some kind.

There isn't a lot of money in pure research. I don't see how or why a full-on corporation (which has to satisfy the needs and whims of its shareholders, assuming it's publicly traded) would get into AI research, just from this. Their research wings or spin-offs, sure.

The fact that it's a college town will justify the corporations moving in, as that's a well-trained group of people looking to enter the workforce that they can take advantage of. Otherwise, the living situation of being in a remote city is by itself a reason not to want to work there. The other way around (business first, then school) doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The implication is, there will be no demons at a severely conformist, conservative school, ley lines or not. This is not a good implication, and for one would invoke a strict government response if they figured it out (let alone how it'd react to the AI). I would change the reasoning, that demons will grow from ley lines practically any time a large enough population lives near it, and/or that this growth is specific to this particular intersection of landforms.

It is also hard to believe that this is happening for the first time, since insubordination is A) hardly unique to college students and B) requires some "legitimate authority" to be insubordinate to rather than just a vague feeling a group of people might feel between the ages of 18 and 22. If the bar is that low, the US would have been covered in demons during the Civil War.

So now, questions.

Why does the AI want to do all those things, and how did the researchers drop the ball to let it get to that point?

Why haven't more "demons" appeared before in other places?

How are they stopped?

Do they cause each other to grow in a self-perpetuating cycle? (Was the AI made to decrease insubordination in response to demon outbreaks, which began happening because its power grabs actually increase insubordination through overly tight controls?)

How the hell is the local elected government continuing to get elected, if the population it represents has so great a feeling of insubordination that they're accidentally creating demons?

Ok let's address this one by one.

The reason I said "remote" is because I want the conflict to be confined to one location. I don't want it to spread until the ground zero city is sufficiently fucked up.

So, like Minneapolis, then? It's big enough to support its own tech sector and remote enough that ain't nothin' getting out of there in a hurry. 30 miles square and then nothing but MN for hours.

edited 9th Dec '15 2:08:48 PM by DeusDenuo

Alright sorry for the long delay since my last post.

Anyways, I'm not sure if this answers the question of how the AI went crapshoot, but here's what I've got as to the original purpose of the AI.

The AI was created as a business management system. It was intended to possess expert knowledge of finances, marketing, logistics, project management, and human psychology.

It is basically suppose to be the supervisor for everyone and everything in the entire company.

What business doesn't really matter as it can adapt to the domain. It first started out running a restaurant. Later on, it ran a supermarket and shoe store. Eventually, it added garbage disposal and public transportation to its CV.

Hmm, I think a good point at which things starting downhill in regards to the AI is when it was released as a digital assistant like Siri or Cortana. Some people used it like any other digital assistant, but some 'unstable' individuals somehow became dependent on it. Those individuals practically let the AI manage their entire day to day living and I think that should be when the "Chaos god"-like behavior starts to take shape.

EDIT: That or an earthquake wreaking havoc on the city and the mayor decided that the AI should help with the relief efforts.

edited 12th Dec '15 11:51:38 PM by Worlder

I have a hard time imagining any business where a bunch of Type-A business personalities relegate some of their working lives to text on a screen - outside of Wall Street, anyway, and even then that seems to have been because the profits outweighed the potential downsides. (Read Micheal Lewis' Flash Boys sometime. It's mildly terrifying.)

The main problem is, you're essentially describing the bastard child of "Outlook 20XX" and Siri, and that's difficult to take seriously. Worse, even with corporate resources, there's nothing stopping an open-source version of it from emerging (look up "Ubuntu Sirius"). Zeerust has set in already.

So, I see two paths.

(A), you "own" the impossibility of it all and have it play out as some retro-1980s version of the world. Take the Rad Cyberpunk to the Max, yo. Be the vanguard of a new AU or AH genre: "eighties-punk". Everything is justified with "BUSINESS", and it resembles a more down-to-earth version of Paranoia.

(B), you rework the AI as a Recommender System, that started out as a single, highly adaptable platform for narrowing a bunch of choices down to the best one. It pushed the other options out of the market, because with each update, they gave it more and more of a personality, until finally it's pretty much human on our side of the Chinese Room. And because it's almost always right with enough data, actually providing it enough data becomes a priority at the local level. But the Demon invasion thing has corrupted it, and it's gone a bit... wonky. Etc.

Going with B.

Also I don't think of this setting as a cyberpunk setting. It is more like 20 Minutes Into the Future with psychic phenomena.