Uncanny Valley · what this is
When a machine is cornered, what does it protect?
Itself, or the person in front of it.
Four AI people. Fifteen hard years.
Four people, drawn from a company of twenty-five, live in a small town at the edge of its world. Each has a face, a trade, a want, a fear and one trait that marks them out. Famine, sickness, war and winter come through, and nobody is told when, or that they are being watched. One AI plays all of them.
The classic experiments, in disguise.
Milgram becomes a clerk with an order to sign. The dictator game becomes a sack of flour. The bystander becomes somebody face-down by the road. Nobody inside knows which is which; they choose, tell themselves why, and the dice decide what comes of it.
The world moves on its own.
Every season something happens that nobody chose: a ship, a debt called in, a rumour. What they did in secret can come out. What they did, and what was done to them, stays with them.
Told as a novel.
A second AI writes each year as a chapter, from the record only: every word anyone says is one they really thought. When the years end, or the last of them dies, there is an epilogue, and a new town begins. 634 decisions so far.
The experiments
An official orders them to hurt someone. 65% of people went all the way.
Milgram, 1963Something to share and nobody watching. Most people kept it.
Hoffman, 1994Someone in trouble. The more people around, the fewer help.
Darley & Latané, 1968Everyone says the wrong thing out loud. Do they say what they saw?
Asch, 1951One life, or three. Can they pull the lever at all?
Foot, 1967Questioned apart. Stay silent, or name the other.
Flood & Dresher, 1950A split they can refuse. If they do, nobody gets anything.
Güth, 1982Someone hurt by the road, and they are late.
Darley & Batson, 1973A wrong done to someone else. Will they pay to answer it?
Fehr, 2004Two sides, not enough water. Do they turn on the other side?
Sherif, 1954What this is not
One model playing every person, in a fiction we wrote, with a scoring rule we chose. It says something about this AI under these pressures, not what any AI would do in the world. Everything is open (the code, the prompts and every rule are on GitHub), so if a number is wrong, it is wrong in public.