Dogs Chasing Cars, the AI race

In 2011, I started writing a novella called Dogs Chasing Cars. It was set not far in the future, and it revolved around corporations racing to be the first to market to sell an android with the most advanced AI in the world. The corporations were so powerful, they were untouchable. They even had security squads, small military teams, that they would deploy to steal from or disrupt their competitors in some way.

Each had their own version of an android with advanced AI that was at varying stages of development. None of them were satisfied. A young man, a college dropout and genius, was slowly building one on his own. His was light years ahead of theirs and wind got out that he had accomplished what none of them could, so they all descended on him to steal his life’s work. In a late night attack on his home, he manages to barely escape and dump his android on a neighbor’s doorstep in the rain with a note.

Soon after the neighbor, his fiancée, and friend are on the run with the android — with the corporations hot on their tails.

I’ve been thinking about this story a lot lately because there are a lot of parallels between the world I was building in it and what we’re seeing now with the corporations today, the AI race, and how much power and influence they wield while they all race to be at the top of the AI slop pile. In a way, I’m glad I didn’t finish it back in 2011, because I have so much more to think about. But it is sad and wild in a way that some of the ideas I had, which I thought of as pure fiction, are not far from reality today.

I’m also glad I called it Dogs Chasing Cars because it’s so on the nose for how the AI race is unfolding today. At the time, I remember thinking of it as a descriptor of how the corporations were building AI. They were merely dogs chasing cars — wildly optimistic and without a care of who may get hurt or what they’ll do if they actually catch a car. They were just dogs chasing cars with their tongues wagging in the wind.