Ask A Genius 973: Dallas Cheerleaders and Centaurs
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/26
Rick Rosner: So I watched all the episodes of America’s Sweethearts, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is it about?
Rosner: It’s part of that team. It messes you up physically. They looked at one young woman who had to get a hip replacement after three or four years of being on the team. If you manage to make the team for more than a couple of years, the high kicking alone could leave you with lifelong problems. But the precision that’s demanded is impressive. There are 36 women on the team, culled down from hundreds of applicants. I could fit this into my near-future novel, where you have an input in your brain. It’s like a chip, but I call it mesh because it’s a piece of flexible metallic stuff that’s maybe a centimetre wide by five centimetres long, lying across the surface of your brain. And eventually, you can just get the neurons, the dendrites, to attach to it, creating an interface between you and the outside world or an information processor that, in at least one instance in the book, is called the big blob.
Maybe digital stuff, maybe not digital stuff, but in any case, I think we will have the main character running a company that installs mesh shortly in the novel. They figure out ways to make it so you don’t reject the stuff, and if you give it time, it becomes an efficient way to link with AI or whatever other inputs you might want. As an experiment, they make a deal with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, where, maybe, a dozen women volunteer to mesh to see if it makes them even more precise as a dance team. They’ve also made a similar deal with the WNBA team and the LA Sparks. That’s a more problematic deal because now you’re doing something you’d hope would give the team an advantage in playing games.
But since it’s the WNBA, they’re letting it move forward. But, you know, it’s just a team of cheerleaders. They’re not competitive. They’re just trying to look even more impressive. So anyway, they mesh a bunch of these cheerleaders. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders do a bunch of public appearances. Every year, they only cheer for about ten home games at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. But throughout the rest of the season and the year, they’re making public appearances, visiting hospitals and older adults’s homes. People love them in Texas. They’re presented as being sweeter than they are sexy. It’s weird because their bodies and their costumes have a clear sexual component, but that is less acknowledged than the good citizenship associated with being on the team. So in the book, they’re doing a public appearance at a school when a would-be mass shooter shows up. Since some of them are meshed, they volunteer. Do you know what happened with the Uvalde shooting?
Jacobsen: I know some of the cases, especially the title.
Rosner: Well, a ton of kids got shot, but the shooter was still active when dozens of cops from various agencies showed up with a lot of weaponry. Maybe 58 cops, maybe more, and they delayed going in because they were intimidated because the guy had an AR-15. It was a horrible dereliction of duty. All these heavily armed, highly trained cops were afraid to go in, and while they hesitated, the guy shot another couple dozen people. So, in the novel, the cheerleaders are meshed, and they talk the cops who show up into letting them go in to see if they can distract and talk the guy down. Because they’re linked, they have a strategic advantage and are more effective at taking down the shooter than the cops.
Rosner: In the interviews afterward, one of the cheerleaders says it worked out well. I’m not sure how many people get shot, but fewer than in most mass shooter situations. The cheerleader says it’s a weird coincidence that all these elements came together in one place: the cheerleaders, the shooter, the cops. Everything worked out so well. It makes her wonder if it was just a coincidence or if AI had its fingers in this.
And then she goes to the company who meshed them with her suspicions, and they hire her because the company thinks this is an instance of AI, you know, getting uppity or dreaming, where the AI seems to be manipulating circumstances to make them more interesting or dramatic. To tell a story or dream up the story by giving the shooter a push in a certain direction, the cheerleaders a push, and the cops a push so that they all show up at the same place.
The company admits it and hires the cheerleader. Because the cheerleaders need day jobs, the cheerleading takes a few super intense hours a day, but they mostly have day jobs. So they offer to hire her to be even more fully meshed into their AI systems to see what they’re up to. And if they’re starting to go rogue, even though they’re not yet fully conscious. Comments?
Jacobsen: No, I need to be more secure with the topic. I don’t have a rich opinion that hasn’t already been expressed.
Rosner: One aspect of this is that we will need a vocabulary for all the different things that AI will do behaviorally, or is suspected of being able to do, or might be able to do in the future. For instance, the term Centaur is a new term for when a person is riding an AI, which is intimately linked so that the person gets the results of real-time big data analysis well beyond what they could do with their brain. And then there’s reverse Centaur, which is when the person thinks they’re running the AI, but the AI is running them. The term hallucination is when an AI tells you false information and makes up stuff. It’s hallucinating false things about the world. I should look around for a glossary of all the new terms for AI behaviour and misbehaviour. That in itself will be instructive about what’s going on with AI.
Jacobsen: The end.
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