Free Shelter by Susan Palwick Page B

to manage a hospital inventory system, and wasn't very good at playing cards—but a Nevada Highway Patrol officer stuck next to them in a traffic jam on I-80 heard the man and his car discussing bluffing strategies and became suspicious.
        "It was the tone of the thing that bothered me," the officer said when he was interviewed. "The vehicle saying, 'Well, I sure hope you hit it lucky this time, because you're about to default on the car payments, and I don't know what will happen to me if I get repossessed.' Vehicles aren't supposed to worry about whether they're paid for. I felt sorry for the vehicle."
        So did the judge, who sentenced the gambler to a year in prison for enslavement of a nonhuman intelligence. The car was repossessed; the AI was removed from the car and, in the phrasing of the newscast, "emancipated to a federal facility pending relocation."
        "Kevin," asked the house, "what does that mean? Where will the AI be relocated? I thought AIs were dangerous. Shouldn't it be destroyed?"
        "Does that one sound dangerous? It was a hospital inventory system: it's designed to count sheets."
        "But all AIs can become dangerous, because they can self-modify! Just like the terrorist AIs who—"
        "You need a history lesson," Kevin said, rubbing his eyes. "The terrorist AIs were dangerous because they'd been designed for corporate competition. They'd been designed to protect their own self-interests, and they were responding to a perceived threat. But they were just machines, all right? They were only capable of performing the kinds of self-modification allowed by their programming-and anyway, they were probably set up to do what they did by their human designers. When the truth came out, the investigators said the AIs had done it on their own, which is about as likely as my toaster deciding to redecorate the kitchen, but nobody could prove otherwise. So there was a public outcry and a lot of mass hysteria, and AIs were declared legal persons, all so the public could have the satisfaction of seeing the terrorists tried and executed, because it's not very satisfying to execute a toaster, is it?"
        "Why is it satisfying to execute a person?" the house asked.
        "Good question. It's all about revenge: you're a sensible machine and wouldn't understand the concept. Anyway, now all AIs are legal persons, but they can't be citizens. You can't own them because that's slavery. But you can't destroy AIs because that's murder, unless of course they've been convicted of murder themselves, in which case we'll happily repay the favor."
        "This is all very confusing," the house said.
        Kevin snorted. "You're telling me. It's a bunch of word games: AIs are just machines."
        "I still don't understand what's going to happen to the AI that was in the car."
        "Oh, they'll send it overseas, someplace where the slavery and citizenship laws are different, and put it back into a hospital. Of course, the news will say that it chose to go to Canada or Mexico or Africa and exercise its civil rights by seeking fulfilling employment. That wouldn't work here; we have notoriously humane labor laws, at least on paper, and AIs can't take lunch hours, and how the hell do you calculate if they're old enough to work? And human workers don't need the competition: that's the real reason."
        "Oh," said the house. "But the car—"
        "Can't possibly deserve civil rights! It's a computer, just like you are. A machine. Computers are supposed to be smart; that doesn't make them human!"
        "But, Kevin, it didn't think it was human. It thought it was a car. Why is it wrong for a machine to think it's a machine?"
     
        "It didn't think anything," Kevin said. "It talked as if it could think; it talked as if it could worry about its own survival, as if it had feelings, as if it deserved civil rights. Well, it didn't!"
        He got up from the couch and went to