The Last of the Spirits, from Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. With Illustrations by John Leech. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843. First edition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you’ve read our first book: Tiānmìng – Mandate of Heaven, and who hasn’t ;-), you’ll know we at Mandated Memoranda Publishing do research and lots of it. Currently, we’re working on what we affectionately call Book Three. Its working title is: A Digital Carol.

We are reimagining the old Dickens’ favorite for a future generation. The gist of the old story revolves around the Victorian era’s fascination with ghosts and spirits. The new one, obviously, has to feature AI. But not just any AI, we feature Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.

We’re all familiar with Big Dog, Cheetah, and Atlas. If not, we should be. These are specialized robotic machines that adapt to their environments in order to accomplish limited scope missions. However, these do not possess the ability to generalize their missions to encompass any goal, even self set goals. Others would like to make what may turn out to be a limited aspect of AGI available widely. We are nowhere near true AGI. Some think this is a very good thing.

There is a philosophic difference between what AI we currently have available and what may come about in the future. We deal with this theme in A Digital Carol. We also deal with the temptation to “kick away the ladder” when opportunity for our aggrandizement presents itself. Of course, we needn’t repeat the admonition that many attribute to mere superstition, do we?