Beige rocks over beige earth, Augustin walks and, being one of those for whom the horizon lies on the ground, shades of beige he sees. “Remember that time I dove into the ocean to catch that pearl you had spotted?” Ian, framing his words with wide and quick gestures, asks his twin brother. Augustin, contracted elbows and hands in his pockets, follows the way, not the overwrought words. Ian, the older twin by four minutes, touches the nonchalance of his brother by the shoulder, “Remember that time I dove into the ocean to catch that pearl you had spotted?”. “You almost died”, Augustin lets an answer escape between his teeth. “It was the biggest pearl ever!” Ian follows his goal. “It wasn’t a pearl”, Augustin insists. “It was!” a pattern arises, “Pearls do not die!”. “After all those years, you are still angry?” Ian slaps his brother’s shoulder, “Do not blame me, I told you, you should have given the pearl to that girl of yours!” Augustin blinks one eye, “Nah, she wasn’t the one”. “Who cares!” Ian almost screams, “the pearl got rotten anyway!”. “That is my point. Pearls do not die”, he claims, once again having to repeat the same answer to his narrow-minded brother. After a blink, his eyes spot a brighter beige in the soil. Without taking his hands out of his pockets, he lets his right foot nose it.
“A lamp!” Ian screams to his brother’s foot before jumping right into it. He grabs the lamp, cleans it, and raises the object against the sun. The clarity challenges Augustin vision. “A genie!” Ian exclaims. The spectrum murmurs, “Who found me?” Ian expresses his sincere belief through an exclamation, “I!”. Augustin’s eyebrows convey his knowledge that he had done it. The genie, practical as any disembodied being, proposes a solution. “Instead of the usual three wishes to one person, I will concede two wishes, one for each of you. So, my advice is, think wise and-” “I want to have everything that I wish, whenever I wish”, Ian jumps with his answer into the middle of the genie’s sentence. “You wish it. You get it”, the genie concedes. The spectrum and the brother now look at Augustin. He calmly says, “I want to have the right wishes”, to what the spectrum concedes before disappearing. Augustin looks around only to find no sign of Ian. He has no desire of knowing where did his brother go.
The sweetest fig travels in the hand of a charming woman through the warm waters of a pool to find Ian’s mouth. Years go as fast as the breath between sentences when one instantly gets everything one wishes. Or so, Augustin supposes before he, after five years without any contact, enters his brother's palace. The once mirror looking twins now look like complementary opposites, the bouba and the kiki. Ian, enjoying the lack of sufficient reason characteristic of every excess, has barely moved ever since. “May I offer you something to drink, brother?”, he states in a fluffy voice, “Needless to say, you can have whatever you want.” Augustin anwers that "Water is fine." His perfectly exercised outlooks and wise desire discharged a feeling in Ian with which he had long lost touch, envy. He reacted accordingly, “A wise choice, indeed. I offer you the purest water of the purest source, a taste immaculate as a mother’s kiss". “Good choice”, Augustin agrees. “Well, what can I say,” Ian chuckles, “No one in the history of humanity had their aesthetic pleasures as trained as mine.”
A cup of crystalline water materializes as Ian raises his hand. Looking through it, the sharp silhouette of his brother becomes much wider. Ian confesses to himself “It is a trap!” Augustin does not move to grab the water. “Forget it”, Ian continues, “You would never understand how hard it is to refrain when you always have what you wish.” Some minutes putrefy until Augustine, with a suffocated voice that appears to rebel against his appearance, reveals the only thing he envied among everything his brother ever possessed and enjoyed “But, at least, you could have changed your wishes.”
[This fable started as an idea to convey the importance of getting things right before getting things, which suits the EA approach. However, as it developed, it went on to contemplate also a potential problem of only getting what is right, inspired by Bostrom’s “all-work-and-no-fun” dystopia. As such, the characters were thought to represent either Narrow AIs that can allow us to get whatever we want, or a General AI that determine what we should want for our own best interests.]
