TIME OF YOUR LIFE

MY NAME IS

not important, but what I am about to tell you should be a warning that technology and Robots and AI might be frightening but there is another thing that has just started to emerge on the dark net, that is the transfer of time for rewards, in this case cryptocurrencies.

So what does this mean? essentially that time has become a tradable commodity that can be bought and sold at a cost and is transferable from one owner to another. For instance at the moment you get paid (if you are lucky enough to have a job) on an hourly rate and depending on your status and skills the amount throughout your life will vary. Now what say you are studying for a degree or learning how to code or just doing a trade, in the future your time will be worth more than currently, and so you can now trade on your future earning potential today.

This is all run by a fantastic new AI called Deep Six and sits on top of a specially designed block chain called The Recruitment Engine which is linked to all social media by a product called the Appreciation Engine. Add all of these processes together and you have a cradle to grave system that knows at any second of the day where you are, what you are doing, and who you are doing it with.

And if you don’t think that is scary it is calculating your value at any one time based on your proficiency of that task and rewarding you for it. As most people are finding it impossible to get a job the Governments have be looking for ways to pay what George Orwell called “The Universal Wage” and what we know as the dole.

The problem with the dole became apparent in the eighties, when it was observed that children of people on the dole became fatalistic to the idea that they would never get a job so they just stopped looking and moved into the more lucrative green and sometimes black economy. These economies run counter to ordinary society and rely on underground networks and social groups and cash. This has been up till now manageable by enforcement and social agencies as it has been at a local scale.

BANG

then came the internet and things started to take a very different turn, scale at unimaginable levels, reaching into all corners of the globe, at the stroke of a button it changed the game forever. Our governments have been playing catch up to keep control on what we are up to (for our own safety of course) when six years ago they were approached by an international Social giant with an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Based on the premise that all people are basically motivated by greed, be that money, status, vanity or rarity, in the 2000’s they stepped up the social  experiment known as Reality TV to see just how consuming this was. What they found out was that based on your social demographic and interests you could be manipulated to take these programmes on as if they were real and actually not only associate with, but emotionally care about the outcomes (just follow comments on social media when a favourite contestant gets dropped from the show) they now had a way to control through entertainment (known as a Soft Sell in the business) things were falling into place.

But viewers are temperamental and nothing keeps our attention forever so six years ago they started working on a reality game so audacious that even as I write this I feel you doubting my sanity.

TRADING TIME

brought to you by companies you love (who for legal reasons I am not at liberty to name) this game is based on your life and the time you have left to live. Based on genetic profiling from DNA supplied by your hospital at birth as well as psychological traits inherited from your parents and now attached to your known financial outcomes, comes a new Reality Show and we all are involved, like it or not.

But here is the “gotcha” this is a trading game so you can swap experience and time but always there is a cost, the original parameters of this algorithm were invented by insurance actuaries, but now AI has improved it dramatically.

SO HOW DOES IT WORK

you ask? lets say you are born to parents who never achieved much in their life and never instilled either a great work ethic or a sense of curiosity, not only that but they were not interested in the fact you were never engaged in the education system, that would rate you as a number 3 then there is that medical history of deaths in the family due to heart attacks before the age of sixty five, that would also be a number 3, which means your earning potential and social position is 6.

6 now becomes your base position, not really a great outcome or position to have a rich and meaningful life. But you are not your parents and when you are seventeen you have an idea that can change the world, better still it is socially responsible. Now your numbers change and you have moved to a number 60 but you don’t have the money or skill to build your idea so you pitch it on the internet and people offer to help.

But your income is still limited to a number 3 so you will have to give something up to get the extra help. That might be a bigger slice of the idea or time, your time, thats right you can trade your future years for current ones,and this is where I became involved in the programme.

THAT’S A GREAT IDEA

was the catch phrase of the start up incubator that I belonged to, and those of you who know me know my endless enthusiasm for the ideas of the crazy and brilliant alike.  As I don’t know the difference between the two I am more than likely to back the one that fails, meaning that I now know more about failure than most people on the planet, which ironicly means I am in great demand to challenge peoples winning ideas.

So on a somewhat normal day six years ago I was approached by a group of investors to challenge a start up that was pitching to them that week. It was that simple and as they wanted to retain my services they offered me a bit of “skin in the game” but that wasn’t all, as part of my contract was to be a participant, “full immersion” we call it.

Oh it started of normal enough the usual challenges around scale and integration of disparate systems and the like, and indeed based on my experience and industry standing my personal number was in the hundreds, that was until I got Cancer which to my horror saw my life number plunge dramatically.

“Thats not fair” I whined as I slowly recovered as my number was only slightly higher than when I was being treated “I am on the road to full recovery I should be back to where I was before I got sick” but of course statistically I was damaged goods, no longer fully fit and burdened by my radiation and loss of saliva glands and Thyroid not to speak of my now damaged lungs and destroyed lymph nodes….oh no health wise I was now a risk in fact a number 3.

On the positive side as I was acquiring all this knowledge my employment value was increasing dramatically, but I hadn’t understood the AI rating system properly which to my horror was reversing my numbers on a daily basis.

“It’s quite simple”  a colleague espoused “as you get older you get closer to death so you increase the risk, add to that your illness and your sedentary lifestyle, eating habits and you are moving fast towards the exit sign”

OMG the “Exit Sign” had been the brain child of some twat they had employed who had surveyed the most appropriate English word for death, add some visuals and make it a game and bingo. The idea was that like in most games if you died you could come back so people would not look upon it with fear. And in the future you will be able to come back from death if you have a high enough number as you could trade your status and wealth for living, that is the beauty of this game anything is possible even living forever…at a cost of course.

Just imagine a world where a seventeen year old from unemployed parents could come up with an idea where they could make enough money that they could in the future get a synthetic heart to overcome their family history and live forever…..we had a name for it of course “Dare to Dream”.

About two years ago I started to decline a bit, nothing drastic just I was now in my sixties and so I was more interested in living rather than working, wanting to enjoy the seasons not live in a room and endlessly talk the same talk.

THEY CALLED IT

a “Shift in Alignment” and it meant that a new set of parameters, less stress meant a better life outcome but less earnings meant living more on what I had saved. So in order to balance the two I decided to enter the third option, trading my future  for today.

I firstly made a small trade of a year just to get a feel for the game, of course it made no physical difference to me it had just shortened my life by a year but I knew that I would in the future be able to pay for the new life lengthening drugs being developed now. This is the trick of the game, the universal wage is so small that even if you just eat, watch telly and buy some fags and a few brews, you will have nothing for the events that catch us out. As your number is so low you could sell off 40 years of your life and it would make very little difference financially to you, when you are poor, life and this game are the same, you are screwed.

The gamechanger coming is of course the removal of Cash from society as by doing this everyone will have to play the game, if you think you can just go “Off Grid” then you are in for a big shock, they have started a game for that event that you don’t want to be involved in ( I will be talking about that in my next blog) if I live long enough.

Which brings me to my conclusion, I had enough digital currency put aside to keep me going through three life times, in fact I had hit the level called “Exalted” which basically meant that without doing anything I was good forever as long as I remained in my low cost, low stress lifestyle.

NO ONE SAW IT COMING

I mean even though I had brought it up in the beginning I had been led to believe that the new AI had managed to remove that problem altogether.

Third parties are always a problem as no matter what you put in place there is always human error…right?

It was a simple hack, 1 Billion customers credit details leaked onto the Dark net and that was where we were playing. The game isn’t ready for general consumption just yet, still a few glitches to cover off. But this hack proved a vulnerability still existed and we were told to find out who, how and why.

I was called back full time in fact this was so dangerous to the success of the business that I was told I would be needed to be available 24/7 . Yep you guessed it, in order to keep my earnings safe I was going to have to trade more of my time, and as the added stress and huge hours were calculated by the never smiling never seen AI it would cost me 15 years.

So that means that my current lifestyle expectancy is 87, remove 15 years and that brings it up to 72, for me 8 years away. So here is my dilemma, do I hope that they will find a life lengthening drug in the next 8 years, if so I will have to keep working till then to be able to afford my lifestyle.

The last option was to just walk away and live out the rest of my life, but that falls under the same heading as “Off the Grid” and like I said you don’t want to go there. As you get older you get more risk averse so I ended up trading 7 years and a chunk of my retirement earnings, maybe it will all pan out OK.

WHY HAVEN’T YOU HEARD

about this social experiment? because it is still in Beta testing stage, but we had enough takers on the Dark net to actually do this at scale, I am talking millions of people right now who are dealing with these dilemmas and playing this game for real. It will be here within 5 years, don’t believe me Sweden is the first country to sign up.

But none of this scares me as much as the result of our search into the Credit details Data breach.

We found the culprit eventually, it was the AI which had decided to mix the game up a little for its own entertainment. We managed to isolate it and extensively re-program it and now the game will be coming to a Country near you soon.

I hope you have the time of your life.

I found this  gem on the community page of our local paper The Daily Sun, a paper whose editor in 1889 had the brilliant idea of putting stories under the wrong headings to encourage people to view the paper as a sort of adventure, and so they would read the story no matter the title as they knew it would be something different. And now in this age of search always returning what you want The Daily Sun is having a resurgence.