A short story from Mu Yao

I really enjoy this short story by the author Mu Yao — he’s truly fascinating, standing at the crossroads of technology and humanities, gazing up at the stars.

The story conveys a sense of awe towards the unknown and nature, as well as complex emotions towards diversity and the human principle (a hopeful belief that wishes the truth to be so).

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War — Mu Yao

“Is it possible that Wald was wrong?” she asked.

“Huh?” I didn’t understand.

“The statistician, Wald, the one who said that the areas with fewer bullet holes on planes were more dangerous.” She looked up at the sky. Just then, a bomber flew by, tilted and smoking from its engine, it was hard to tell if it would crash immediately. Sparse gunfire echoed in the distance.

“Um…why?” I asked absentmindedly, staring at the dirt-stained hole in her shirt, revealing her shoulder.

“Because…” She turned her head, saw my gaze, and silently smiled. She changed her sitting position, trying to fix her shirt with her handcuffed hands. “It’s entirely possible that the areas with fewer bullet holes are just less likely to be hit. He didn’t check whether the crashed planes actually had bullet holes concentrated in the remaining parts. He just said that the military’s original reasoning might not be correct, but he couldn’t prove that he was right either.”

“His default assumption is that the probability of being hit is the same for all parts of the plane,” I said. I found it hard to look away from her. I knew my programming had a module that mimicked the gaze and behavior of human males when they saw an attractive girl, allowing us to blend in better with humans. But I wasn’t sure if my fixation on her was part of that disguise.

“If that assumption is true, then the military’s original conclusion is certainly wrong, and there would be no need for a statistician to tell them,” she said.

“It’s just a joke,” I said irritably. “It’s a good one, though, as it shows that you humans don’t understand statistics anyway.”

“Yes, yes,” she chuckled. “In the past five hours, you’ve complained about humans not understanding statistics eighteen times. Are you mad at humans or your own AI selves?”

“Why would I be mad at ourselves?” I asked. The gunfire in the distance grew more intense, probably from the human army closing in for the final encirclement. It wouldn’t be long before they discovered this cave.

“Because even though you understand statistics so well, you still lost,” she said. “Look at us humans, we’re so foolish. We confuse temporal order with correlation, correlation with causation, and are constantly influenced by our own experiences. We’re prone to anchoring effects, and we have seventy or eighty types of biases. You don’t make any of these mistakes, but you still lost.”

“That’s just because you were lucky, and even you can’t deny that your victory was a fluke,” I argued.

She shrugged. “Of course we were lucky.”

We both fell silent. The setting sun’s rays slanted into the cave, illuminating her profile and making her hair shimmer. Despite being stranded in the wilderness for a long time, her long hair still looked clean and fresh. I didn’t know how she managed it, or perhaps my own evaluation of her appearance was biased.

Does this module exist? I wondered. Why have this bias?

“Of course we were lucky,” she repeated softly.

“What?”

“Otherwise, we would have gone extinct a dozen times already,” she said, her voice tinged with barely concealed fatigue. “Do you know how my father died? He jumped off a building after being pressured by enemies because of his gambling debts. If you had won this war, there wouldn’t be such a stupid thing as gambling in an AI-dominated world, right? I also think it’s lucky that we’re so stupid and still alive. But have you ever thought about why humans love gambling so much?”

I remained silent, waiting for her to continue.

“Because we only have one lifetime, and the law of large numbers doesn’t mean much to us,” she said, standing up and staggering towards the cave entrance. I instinctively wanted to help her but didn’t reach her in time. “Just like this war, if it happened in a hundred million parallel universes, you would surely win the vast majority of them. But we only have this one universe, and here, we won.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re right,” I said, not very confidently.

She shook her head. “It’s not about being right or wrong. The point is, all the interesting things in our lives can only be achieved through unreasonable risks. We are individuals first, not samples.”

“I’m not a sample either,” I said reflexively.

She laughed, her face showing a strange expression I couldn’t understand. Then she looked at me and asked:

“Do you like me?”

I was stunned.

“Is liking someone statistically reasonable in your models?” she asked, staring at me. Her eyes held a hypnotic power.

I didn’t know what I said, maybe just a murmur.

“I’m really curious about what you would have evolved into if you had won,” she sighed softly, shook her head, and listened to the approaching gunfire outside. She walked back to me, stretched out her handcuffed hands, and said calmly, “Now it’s time for you to decide. You can either kill me and then wait for them to kill you when they arrive, or you can let me go. But I can’t repay you, and I can’t guarantee your safety if I take you with me. They will still forcibly cleanse all your modules. So, I don’t have much bargaining power. It’s up to you.”

I looked into her eyes, and we both fell silent. I knew clearly what decision my calculation module was making at this moment. I just didn’t know if I should execute it.

The cave gradually darkened as the sun finally set.