{"id":1383,"date":"2021-06-11T13:34:39","date_gmt":"2021-06-11T13:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1383"},"modified":"2022-01-15T13:57:56","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T13:57:56","slug":"tool-use-by-the-humans-of-danzhai-county-by-derek-kunsken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1383","title":{"rendered":"Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek K\u00fcnsken"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County<\/em><\/strong> by Derek K\u00fcnsken (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, 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\u2019t 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\u2014but he isn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s female employees. Lian removes his AI training sensors and says he won\u2019t 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\u2019s syndrome baby on a factory doorstep. After Qiao Fue (Lian Mee\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mino Jai Lia cried out at the knock at her door. She lived alone. The knock happened again. Her children and grandchildren didn\u2019t live in the village anymore. She barely received visitors during the day and never during the night.
\u201cWho is it?\u201d she yelled. \u201cGet out of here before I call the police!\u201d
The threat was no good. She didn\u2019t have a phone, and the next neighbor was four li away.
\u201cWho is it?\u201d she said, turning on the single bulb and putting her feet into plastic shoes.
\u201cAnti-poverty AI,\u201d a voice said. A light shone under the door.
The anti-poverty AI delivered her groceries every second day and took away her trash.
\u201cAnti-poverty AI,\u201d 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.
\u201cHello Mrs. Mino,\u201d the AI said. \u201cSorry for disturbing you.\u201d It started advancing, then stopped when she didn\u2019t move. She backed up and two robots walked in like big spiders, cameras whirring. Their feet were muddy.
\u201cOff the mats!\u201d she said.
The robots stepped around the fiber mats keeping the mud from her feet. The first AI held a bundle.
\u201cA baby,\u201d she said wonderingly. Robots shouldn\u2019t be taking children out at night. She was about to berate them when she saw the baby\u2019s face under the light. \u201cOh, baby . . .\u201d 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\u2019t stolen someone\u2019s baby.
\u201cI am the Anti-Poverty AI supervisor, Mrs. Mino,\u201d the robot said.
She\u2019d never heard of AI supervisors. Only regular robots came with her groceries, and they didn\u2019t talk much.
\u201cWe 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.\u201d
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\u2019d only seen on holidays. She neared. A flat little face surrounded fat lips puckered in hunger.
\u201cWhat\u2019s the baby\u2019s name?\u201d she said.
\u201cKong,\u201d the supervisor said, pausing. \u201cKong Toua.\u201d
A good name, a good Miao name for a boy. Toua meant first.
\u201cThis place will need to be fixed up,\u201d she warned. \u201cThis is no place for a baby.\u201d
\u201cI will authorize a construction AI to visit and assess your needs,\u201d the supervisor said.
Mino Jai Lia took the warm baby gently from the netting.  p. 174<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This abandonment episode spawns another two threads in the story. The first of these is Mino\u2019s care of Toua and a number of other Down\u2019s 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\u2019s children. The other thread sees Toua\u2019s 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)\u2014but even though the clone has the same genetics Qaio can\u2019t provide the same upbringing, and his \u201cson\u201d 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 \u201cMiao Punk Princess\u201d (which would have been a better title for the story) dies. But her work survives her\u2014as 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\u2019s 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\u2019s With Folded Hands<\/em>. That said, this impressive, multi-threaded piece isn\u2019t perfect\u2014the issue of how China\u2019s 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\u2019m not sure that the Qaio Fue thread fits into the story particularly well (I suspect the arc of Lian\u2019s father\u2019s 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\u2019s worth of ideation squeezed into a very good novella.
**** (Very Good). 23,350 words.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek K\u00fcnsken (Asimov\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[338],"tags":[296,101,4,339,29],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-derek-kunsken","tag-296","tag-101","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-derek-kunsken","tag-novella"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2450,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions\/2450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}