Flounder Mode
Chapter IX
NIXON: …I know one statesman who thinks a fishing trip will help him land the Great White Hope. CHOU: Intelligence is no bad thing. NIXON: It’s Henry’s trump card.
“More subdued than last night,” Katzbube remarked that evening in the dining room, idly rotating a half-full glass of port. “I suppose a lot of them have hit their substance limit for the day. Are you going to the re-pitches?”
“No time,” said von Pfiff. “I have an important Zoom call to a business partner in Vienna at 1 AM. Best to get a little catnap.”
“I thought you managed car washes in Miami.”
“Wisest not to put all your eggs in one basket,” von Pfiff replied with a hint of curtness. “You do still have the spare key to the AirBnB?”
“It’s on my keychain.”
“Then enjoy the evening. And just make sure to lock the door again when you get in.”
Von Pfiff stood up from his chair and reached for his jacket.
“Congratulations on the incursion into the Mediterranean,” said Katzbube.
“Mr. Clockjob’s insistence on fighting with Turkey struck me as… ill-advised,” von Pfiff answered. “I suppose you would still like to take Sweden this turn?”
“Ideally.”
“You have my support from Norway if…”
He paused.
“I assume you and Elmer have designs on Warsaw.”
“Mmm. It hasn’t been decided on.”
“If I’m in a position to help out,” von Pfiff said, “I will consider it.”
“If,” said Katzbube, finishing off his glass of port. “See you tomorrow.”
Stately, stout Mehmet von Pfiff departed to the stairhead.
“So Crustardacean,” said the VC, “is breeding stupider shrimp to reduce suffering. What psychometric data have you collected?”
Elmer, his mind freshly reinvigorated if a bit sluggish, paused to collect his thoughts.
“Such a great question. So, full disclosure, we’re still working on that, but we’ve made some advances recently. We’re using craniometry as a proxy and bred some extra-smart shrimp as a general proof of concept.”
Elmer pulled a dark cloth from the mysterious box on top of the table to unveil an aquarium about the size of a dorm fridge in which half a dozen shrimp with unusually large, bulbous heads milled about cheerfully.
“I see.”
“Would you—maybe someone in the crowd would like to verify for themselves?”
The VC demurred. Katzbube, his inhibitions somewhat lowered by the glass of Dow’s, raised his hand.
“Oh, Winthrop! Great to see you. Yes, come on up to the stage.”
Katzbube rose from his seat and walked down the aisle between two hastily-thrown-together groups of lawn chairs. Elmer handed him a pair of curious lime-green plastic tweezers, the arms crossed by a finely-numbered arc, along with a pair of bright yellow rubber dishwashing gloves.
“I suppose I—”
“Yes, any of them. Just pick them up. They don’t have teeth and their claws can’t get you if you reach for their backs. That’s—” he pointed to the tweezers—”that’s for the head. You want to just barely squeeze it.”
Katzbube dutifully donned the gloves, reached into the tank and snatched up one of the shrimp, its wet body jiggling with annoyance and its whiskers flailing about under bulging tapioca-pearl eyes.
“Sorry, the head is—”
“Right behind the eyes—”
“Oh, it’s squeaking.”
“Yes, be quick, they don’t really like this.”
Katzbube squeezed the tweezers behind its eyes, looking at the gauge, stopping as soon as he sensed resistance from its fleshy cerebrum.
“Nine–nine point two millimeters. I think.” He removed the tweezers and dropped the unfortunate specimen back into its tank, where it continued its meandering journey apparently unfazed.
“Folks—” Elmer gestured to the crowd. “Can you repeat that?”
“Nine point two millimeters.”
“That’s a good 40% higher than the average shrimp, folks. A jumbo shrimp in the supermarket reads just six and a half millimeters on our patented shrimp calipers. Brain volume-wise, that’s about as big a leap as from Homo erectus to modern humans, and we’re just getting started.”
A VC raised his hand.
“I’m sorry—I thought you were breeding stupider shrimp? How does—”
“It’s a proof of concept. It’s much easier to go up than down. Same principle as IQ tests. The difference between a 130 and a 145 is much easier to measure than between a 45 and a 60. But if we can breed really smart shrimp—” he raised his hands over the tank, as if illustrating an expanding brain volume— “then we’re very confident we can breed very stupid ones.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to do genetic engineering than—”
“Well, you need both, both targeted gene editing and a solid breeding program. One direction we’re looking to go in once the round is raised is splicing in cognitive genes from beagles.”
“I’m just—I’m not disputing that you have the chops to run the breeding program, what I’m concerned with, as a possible investor—”
He paused, removed his glasses and composed his thoughts briefly.
“Just how exactly do you know that these shrimp are smarter than normal? Because I’d want to see that before I bet on your ability to make dumb ones.”
Elmer spent several seconds considering the point.
“As I said, shrimp psychometrics are a difficult problem, but we think they’re solvable. In fact we’re getting very close.”
“Very close?”
“Ultimately what you need to remember is that even an IQ test is a proxy, it’s a proxy for g, which we don’t know how to measure directly even in humans. And we do have a number of proxies. We have, as I said, the world’s largest, most-in-depth and most rigorous study in shrimp craniometrics in the history of zoology. And we’re adding more data to that every day as we learn more about intelligence and brain growth over the course of a shrimp’s lifespan across multiple breeds of shrimp.”
“But beyond that—”
“Yes! We are using a custom AI model trained on a neuron-by-neuron map of the shrimp’s nervous system that can emulate a shrimp with an IQ of up to three standard deviations in either direction.”
Elmer flipped the presentation two slides to display a highly baroque and somewhat abstract map of the shrimp’s nervous system.
“Up to three standard—”
“That’s relative to the average shrimp, of course,” said Elmer.
“And you see—you see different behavior or abilities, from that data?”
“Considerable differences,” he assured the investor. “From the results we suspect that shrimp may be smarter than usually assumed. Smarter than even the effective altruists have been arguing, I think. It appears that as many as half a percentage point of all wild shrimp may be capable of understanding hypothetical counterfactuals or writing a simple for-loop.”
Yet another member of the audience indicated a desire for due diligence.
“On the neural net—how do you expect AGI timelines will affect your company?”
“That’s a great question. We are very excited for widespread AGI. We expect that AGI will be able to finally crack shrimp psychometrics if we haven’t figured it out by then and then use the data to help us design the perfectly braindead shrimp.”
“But it sounds like getting that training data could involve a lot of suffering.”
“Yes, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to world shrimp consumption. Over the very long term the suffering required to speed up engineering a braindead shrimp pales in comparison to a long-term timeline where humans are still eating regular shrimp.”
Von Pfiff, nestled in a snug and distant alcove of one of the more elaborate Victorians on campus, checked his watch again. Two minutes to one in the morning; nearly ten in Vienna. He opened his laptop, logged onto that most loathsome of Skinner boxes, and combed his memory for the location of the mining shaft where his account had last been working on the railroad between the towns of New Salem and Prudence.
<SublimeTorte1913> you there?
<HonorableSchoolboy> currently on break but bio class is in ten
<HonorableSchoolboy> needs to be quick
<SublimeTorte1913> tradpill’s not on is he
<HonorableSchoolboy> nope
<SublimeTorte1913> and he can’t read logs?
<HonorableSchoolboy> he can read what he *thinks* are the logs
<HonorableSchoolboy> we have methods
<SublimeTorte1913> excellent
<SublimeTorte1913> i didn’t expect he would be anyways, he’s probably asleep
<SublimeTorte1913> he’s getting married tomorrow
<HonorableSchoolboy> cut to the chase
<SublimeTorte1913> well more importantly Clockjob is here as predicted
<SublimeTorte1913> he has some cockamamie plan to take over Slorbia
<SublimeTorte1913> I am playing England in his Diplomacy game
<SublimeTorte1913> he is using something called Schmittcoin to take game orders
<SublimeTorte1913> with these terminals that don’t have any USB ports or any apparent way in
<SublimeTorte1913> he used some sort of radioactive substance to pick players
<HonorableSchoolboy> that sounds like him
<SublimeTorte1913> so the terminals are probably nuclear-powered somehow
<SublimeTorte1913> he claims the protocol is perfectly, mathematically secure
<SublimeTorte1913> who knows if that’s actually the case
<HonorableSchoolboy> we’ll have to take a look at the device
<SublimeTorte1913> we could “lose” it somehow but he could probably see where it is
<SublimeTorte1913> but if it’s completely secure he probably *can’t*?
<HonorableSchoolboy> or he won’t admit it
<SublimeTorte1913> yes
<HonorableSchoolboy> we can probably arrange something if needed
<SublimeTorte1913> probably won’t come to that
<SublimeTorte1913> just realized it might be worth trying to come in second or third so I can keep tabs on it afterwards
<HonorableSchoolboy> who are the other players
<SublimeTorte1913> a doofus named Winthrop Katzbube I had to save from homelessness
<SublimeTorte1913> he’s staying at my AirBnB
<SublimeTorte1913> a contact of mine I think I’ve mentioned
<SublimeTorte1913> a handful of other ridiculous figures
<SublimeTorte1913> are you familiar with Carlos Antonio etc von Stvrt
<HonorableSchoolboy> i’ve gotten a briefing or two
<SublimeTorte1913> yeah he’ll be “ruling” Slorbia
<SublimeTorte1913> oh one other thing
<SublimeTorte1913> there’s a prediction market in the millions on this thing
<SublimeTorte1913> somehow
<SublimeTorte1913> look into it
<HonorableSchoolboy> who’s winning
<SublimeTorte1913> fairly balanced so far
<SublimeTorte1913> austria holding out better than expected at italy’s expense
<HonorableSchoolboy> i’ve gotta go
<SublimeTorte1913> understood. ping when you need.Von Pfiff’s ear twitched. From around a mahogany partition he could hear Elmer’s voice. Fuck. At least he wasn’t on voice chat.
He scooched closer to the edge of the partition.
“Well, Elmer,” he heard a second and somewhat more serious voice say, “we’re certainly interested in taking another look if you can get us some meaningful data for four standard deviations from the median shrimp. Now we do understand that this may be difficult for the left side of the bell curve, but...”
“Oh yes,” Elmer’s voice responded. “Yes, we almost certainly will see some interesting data from four SD’s above normal.”
“Do you have that data?”
“Well, as you get further and further away from the median the data gets a bit spottier...based on human results we would expect to see additional psychological quirks.”
“Such as?”
Von Pfiff’s curiosity got the better of him. He peeked out from behind the partition to see Elmer speaking to an important-looking man in front of a slideshow hastily projected onto a back wall.
“Well,” said Elmer, “at four SD’s above normal it is very possible--maybe even likely--that the shrimp might have an analogue of high-functioning autism or ADHD. We’re hoping to eventually hire a research psychiatrist on contract for this. We did have a male in the 130-IQ aquarium that impaled itself on a sea urchin in what we think was a failed mating attempt.”
“That’s—”
“But we haven’t seen that since.”
“It’s probably not as relevant for the MVP, in any case.”
“No, and the eyesight of the smarter ones isn’t as good because of their enlarged heads, so reaction time seems to correlate negatively with intelligence, at least at and above median.”
“What about antisocial or violent behavior?”
“Litopenæus vannamei is prone to fights over food or mates, yes, but this doesn’t seem to differ by cohort. Let me...”
He knelt in front of the laptop and exited full-screen on the slideshow to tab into Google Sheets, where a bevy of numbers across at least four separate tabs had already been loaded for view under the title of VIOLENT INCIDENT STATISTICS—SHRIMP IQ. The investor appeared to stare at them with a feigned air of comprehension.
“Nothing significant?”
“For several months last fall we thought the 115s were developing a hypergamous social structure with a handful of alpha males monopolizing the females. But then the beta males started laying eggs and we realized our summer intern had been faking data to cover for the shrimp fight club livestream he was running with most of the males.”
“Ouch.”
“He will not be getting a job offer. But we did win restitution from a popular sports betting app for about $70,000 worth of wagers placed on shrimp fights.”
“Which one? We—”
“Can’t disclose details, I’m afraid.”
“Well, my firm is backing several sports betting apps and—”
“Oh, conflict of interest.”
“Precisely.”
Von Pfiff sensed an impasse and retreated behind the partition.
“Why don’t you send Lothrop a list of the firms you’re backing and we’ll let you know?”
“I’ll have to ask legal, but I think that’ll—Lothrop?”
“Lothrop Cacciatelli. He’s our COO. He was at the…the first presentation,” Elmer elaborated.
“I understand. I have his contact info?”
“He’s been CC’ed on most of the emails.”
“Legal is on the East Coast so I’ll get him that list first thing tomorrow. Assuming it clears, we’ll discuss valuation and amount invested at—tomorrow evening at 7? This room?”
“Deal. I’ve got to do more model training overnight anyways.”
A slight dimming of the ambient light from behind the partition indicated the projector had been shut off. There shortly followed the faint echos of shuffling feet and closing doors. Von Pfiff locked his briefcase and—reckoning it was pointless to return to the AirBnB—donned a blindfold and stretched out on a long couch. Before half an hour had passed he dreamt of endless linen steppes under a wine-dark sky.
Continue to Chapter X.