Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens in China in 2010 with a young woman called Pha Xov telling an ambitious young man called Qiao Fue that she is pregnant. Qiao chooses to pursue wealth and power over marrying her and providing for the child.
The story then skips forward ten years (over its length the tale telescopes forward to 2095) and we see the daughter born of that relationship with her grandmother. The child is called Lian Mee (the mother marries someone else but the husband doesn’t want the child around), and we watch as she grows up and goes to college. There she has a life changing experience when a professor sexually harasses her, telling Lian that, if she wants to pass her course, she must come to his apartment. After much agonising she goes—but he isn’t there, and she graduates anyway.
The experience has a profound effect on her, and accelerates her work on moral AIs. Soon she starts her own company (so she can have a decent employer), Miao Punk Princess Inc., and hires a programmer called Vue Yeng to help her start up a cheap cache internet company that will help fund her AI work.
An early example of Lian’s work are the training AIs she develops, which learn from sensors attached to skilled builders and craftsmen, and are destined to train compete novices in the future. These AIs are more than just training programs however, as one man on a building site finds out when he gropes one of Lian’s female employees. Lian removes his AI training sensors and says he won’t be paid for a week.
After developing Human Resources AIs (which in one episode stop an employer sweeping yet another sexual harassment case under the carpet), Lian eventually manages to convince the local bureaucrats to roll out her anti-poverty AIs. These help the poor but also start acting on their own initiative, which we see when a man called Kong Xang abandons his newly born Down’s syndrome baby on a factory doorstep. After Qiao Fue (Lian Mee’s father, whose life story also occasionally features) declines to pick up the child after being diverted there by the software in his car, the AIs intervene:
Mino Jai Lia cried out at the knock at her door. She lived alone. The knock happened again. Her children and grandchildren didn’t live in the village anymore. She barely received visitors during the day and never during the night.
“Who is it?” she yelled. “Get out of here before I call the police!”
The threat was no good. She didn’t have a phone, and the next neighbor was four li away.
“Who is it?” she said, turning on the single bulb and putting her feet into plastic shoes.
“Anti-poverty AI,” a voice said. A light shone under the door.
The anti-poverty AI delivered her groceries every second day and took away her trash.
“Anti-poverty AI,” came the stupid answer, but she recognized the voice.
She unlatched the door and opened it. A spidery robot stood there with a bag in its arms. And another stood behind it with more groceries than she ever got. The little running lights showed two other robots in the dark beyond.
“Hello Mrs. Mino,” the AI said. “Sorry for disturbing you.” It started advancing, then stopped when she didn’t move. She backed up and two robots walked in like big spiders, cameras whirring. Their feet were muddy.
“Off the mats!” she said.
The robots stepped around the fiber mats keeping the mud from her feet. The first AI held a bundle.
“A baby,” she said wonderingly. Robots shouldn’t be taking children out at night. She was about to berate them when she saw the baby’s face under the light. “Oh, baby . . .” she said sadly.
When she was just a girl, her aunt had a baby like this. No one ever saw the baby after it was born. These robots hadn’t stolen someone’s baby.
“I am the Anti-Poverty AI supervisor, Mrs. Mino,” the robot said.
She’d never heard of AI supervisors. Only regular robots came with her groceries, and they didn’t talk much.
“We are seeking your assistance in caring for this baby. If you raise this child, I will authorize your placement on a special poverty vulnerability list. Your deliveries of groceries, firewood, and clothing will be increased and diversified. A medical AI will visit once per month.”
The robot behind the supervisor set the bags down and began revealing blankets, baby clothes, a baby hammock, wipes, formula, disposable diapers, as well as bags of cooked pork and chicken, foods that for years she’d only seen on holidays. She neared. A flat little face surrounded fat lips puckered in hunger.
“What’s the baby’s name?” she said.
“Kong,” the supervisor said, pausing. “Kong Toua.”
A good name, a good Miao name for a boy. Toua meant first.
“This place will need to be fixed up,” she warned. “This is no place for a baby.”
“I will authorize a construction AI to visit and assess your needs,” the supervisor said.
Mino Jai Lia took the warm baby gently from the netting. p. 174
This abandonment episode spawns another two threads in the story. The first of these is Mino’s care of Toua and a number of other Down’s children, and we see Toua eventually grow up and develop to the point where, with an embedded AI assistant, he is able to care for other children and also go on errands, e.g. to hospitals to pick up other abandoned Down’s children. The other thread sees Toua’s father, Kong Xang, become estranged from his wife Chang Bo (who, co-incidentally, is later hired by Lian Mee and set to work on a building site where she is taught to lay bricks by a training AI) and begin his descent into alcoholism and homelessness.
While all this is going on Qaio Fue acquires power and wealth, partly through his development of life extension technology. This culminates with Qaio raising a clone as a successor (he never meets his daughter Lian Mee, although he is aware of her)—but even though the clone has the same genetics Qaio can’t provide the same upbringing, and his “son” is too laid back to be interested in corporate politics and wealth when there is UBI that covers his needs.
Eventually (spoiler) Lian Mee, now widely known as “Miao Punk Princess” (which would have been a better title for the story) dies. But her work survives her—as we see when Kong Xang is found by an anti-poverty AI on the streets of Guiyang, and offered the chance to go back to Danzhai. When he eventually arrives at the care home he finds it is operated by Down’s syndrome staff and their AIs. One of them is his son, Toua, who confronts Kong Xang and tells him that he is a bad person before saying he will look after him. Kong Xang breaks down, and gives his son the bracelet he removed before abandoning him.
This is a compelling (and occasionally emotional) read, and an intriguing look at how AI could eventually provide a pragmatic and compassionate utopia on Earth (or at least move us substantially in that direction): the story could perhaps be seen as the other side of the coin to Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands. That said, this impressive, multi-threaded piece isn’t perfect—the issue of how China’s current totalitarian leadership would react to autonomous moral AIs is almost completely ignored (although there is a brief episode where Lian concedes that Legal AIs have to be under state control), and I’m not sure that the Qaio Fue thread fits into the story particularly well (I suspect the arc of Lian’s father’s life is meant to be a foil for the rest of the story, but it seems instead to be about a powerful man who is thwarted by his lack of self-knowledge).
Overall, a novel’s worth of ideation squeezed into a very good novella.
**** (Very Good). 23,350 words.