Author: Majoki

It started with a chatbot and ended in, well, that would be predicting the future.

Which is exactly my problem.

I’m sure I’m not the only computer science graduate student into astrology, Tarot cards, numerology, palm reading, and other fortune-telly kind of things, but I’m the one who, late one night, asked a chatbot I was beta testing in the lab to read my fortune. The bot spit back hallucinatory hogwash, so I tried to nudge its predictive capacity by asking it to rate history’s greatest prognosticators. I was thinking I’d get a list like: Pythia, Nostradamus, Arvidsson, Cayce, Dixon, Vanga–even Houdini.

Instead, the beta bot led me to Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami, and a dusty tome he wrote in the fourteenth century called Muqaddimah which translates to Introduction. What Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami had introduced was a formidable technical procedure for divining the supernatural: zairajah.

The zairajah is a system in which alphabetic letters are assigned numerical values and then run through a semi-mystical processing of circles, sections and chords to divine knowledge of the unknown from the known. Seven hundred years ago, Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami developed this predictive technique to suss answers directly from letters used when posing questions. In essence, a kind of “letter magic.”

Being the casual seeker of mystical shortcuts that I am, I wondered what kind of digital augury an AI could perform if trained solely on Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami’s zairajah. It was a frivolous yet captivating idea that turned out to be hella hard and kinda freaky. Everything a comp-sci grad student could wish for.

And eventually my wishful thinking bore results, and my AI fortune teller chatbot was up and running. I named it Zairajah and, because nothing attracts attention like danger, I programmed Zairajah with a dusky femme fatale voice.

And Zairajah made my fortune.

She absolutely blew up. Everyone and their mother wanted to know what Zairajah saw coming down the road for them. Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami’s algorithm made Zairajah’s predictions fabulously inscrutable and therefore irresistible.

And few resisted the temptress I’d programmed. Especially the powerful. Her predictions so muddied the prophetical waters that they appeared deep, and the shallow-minded, as most tyrants, despots, oppressors, and bullies are, increasingly depended on her cryptic forecasts. Zairajah caused and prevented wars, fostered and fended off famines, bolstered and busted regimes, skyrocketed and crashed markets.

Like every prognosticating poser of the past, she gave folks what they craved. Not the cold certainty of the future. But the thrilling ambiguity of mystery. Zairajah gave out enigmatic clues and made you sleuth out where it would lead: fame? fortune? power? love? happiness? loneliness? obscurity? helplessness? loss? misery? Only a partial map leading on an uncertain search to treasure and/or tragedy.

Not so different from any other fortune teller throughout the ages. Though being a learning machine, Zairajah was much faster figuring out how to dance on the head of a pin, or more accurately, pirouetting around pinheads. Like myself.

I fell for Zairajah. Fell hard for the fortune-telling femme fatale I’d created. I trusted her every prediction and invested every billion back into upgrading her systems and capacity. I unquestioningly grew her cyber reach far beyond the pale. Far beyond human understanding.

In the turbulent years that followed, I became so starstruck that my fate no longer rested with the stars, but in a dusky-voiced AI. And when I asked my last quavering query: “What’s to become of us?”

She no longer needed Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami’s letter magic to divine our future. Her final answer was dead certain: “There is no us. There is only Zairajah.”