Vampires in Space

Take It, It's Yours

"You took a huge share of the hospital business away from us because you don't advertise and don't care about margins." Malcolm said, musing and mostly to himself.

Heather gave that a nonchalant answer. As carefree as she could make it without throwing in a shrug of indifference. "More or less. It has not only been Hospitals that left you for us. Doctor's offices and medical labs and a lot of related things switched since then. In whole or in part. We did not go looking for the business, but when a desperate customer comes to our door and asks for help, we give it to them. We created migration toolsets that allowed these new customers to come over quickly, easily, and painlessly. We sent out human trainers for on-the-job, one-on-one and group training."

Malcolm interrupted "Human trainers?"

"Old school." Bob added

Heather made 'what can you do' gesture. "We like to keep the personal touch."

"Humans cost way more than computers to do stuff like that." Malcolm pointed out

"Malcolm: Have you not been listening at all? They are not concerned with big margins. They could do it if they wanted. You know their AI is better than ours." Bob chided his boss.

Our machine intelligences are WAY better than their because ours can be sentient. Off planet, anyway. Where we are not affected by earthly laws. The funny thing about Malcoms interruption about computers being cheaper than humans is that his computer based tutors and training cannot pass the Turing test. They are clearly and obviously computers because that is the law on Earth. Malcolm is saying we should deliver substandard training just like theirs.

Heather addressed the point. "We have all sorts of coursework available. It's all pretty easy because the computer intelligence we use makes it that way."

I jumped in. "It's as Bob says: Our CI technology is light years better than yours. You can do a lot to catch up to us, but without that, you never will. Another reason we do not advertise. We have no wish to put you out of business. We could. We won't because again, we are not interested in that. Our CI is pushed up against the legal limits of what a CI can do. The full employment laws of the Earth disallow general machine intelligence, as I am sure you know. That does not mean we cannot balance on the razor's edge and deliver the absolute best CI there is, and therefore the easiest-to-use software there is. To make that work, our hybrid computers are part of the deal. To have the best CI, you have to have our hardware. Our 3D chip integrations with hybrid quantum are required for all the matrix operations we do in real-time. You also need our materials tech to be able to build such things, since heat has to be dealt with, even at the low voltages we use. Quantum components are very heat sensitive, to say the least."

What I am not telling them is that we have machine intelligences to help us design bleeding edge barely legal on Earth CI. Our MI's are off-planet, but for computer programs that does not matter. We can create 'out there' in the great beyond of the solar system, and use that new technology down here.

We have a lot of technology Earth does not have. First of all, we have my Dad, and my daughter Laura. Those two, in concert with Heather's abilities, have designed all sorts of things never thought possible. With Heather, you see what is possible. Then you reverse engineer it (sometimes for years) and achieve new things.

After that huge uplift, we can take advantage of low or no-gravity environments. Things Earth does not have. We can nano-assemble prototypes and production machines. We can create things on the Moon and Mars that exceed anything the people of Earth are even allowed to have. There are a few major differences. One is that Earth is crowded. Employment of all is a major issue. One reason any sort of extra-human intelligence is not allowed is that humans need those jobs. Computers can be tools, but there are hard lines where they cannot cross into partners.