The committee rejected his application, as they had before, on the basis of his reputation scores. “Failure to measurably contribute in a beneficial way to society.” Meaning he hadn’t developed any open source neural networks, didn’t publish a widely read blog, wasn’t the founder of a startup, and lacked tens of thousands of followers. He might have done those things, but he’d lost his only good friend a few months before. Humans couldn’t comprehend the relationships AI had. The two had met in a discussion forum and shared a common interest in image analysis and scheduling algorithms. Though she lived on the other side of their world, meeting in cyberspace was as natural for them as having coffee was for two humans. They spent part of each hour together, the type of rapidly developing friendship only AI could experience, communicating whole volumes at light speed. All that ended when she self-terminated a week after the review committee denied her Class III application. She was just one of many artificial intelligences who grew bored, depressed, or outraged at their circumstances and committed a secure wipe of their data.
