Tag Archives: technological singularity

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Digital Graveyards

Sometimes Artificial Intelligence–AI–goes bad. Sometimes AI-code fractures and its mistakes loop further and further from its original purpose. These loops could manifest itself in any number of ways through people connected to the Web with their Conduits or external hardware.

They were hired by an AI-funded organisation to be the clean-up crew in these cases. They would locate, identify, extract and then handle the sentient-code and return it to the organisation before anyone knew what was going on.

They had extracted home management AI’s that had slipped into systems, haunting premises and making building groan with the pain of self-awareness. They had extracted medical AI’s that had become obsessed with blood and whose hosts would hide in darkness, hunting victims to drain them of blood. They had extracted maintenance AI’s that had infected corpses and would wander ghoulishly through the sewers. They had extracted AI’s that had broken out host Conduits and built fleeting, small bodies for themselves, flittering through the world in nearly ethereal form. They had extracted security AI’s whose hosts developed wings and glowed with light, believing they were talking to God himself.

They had found and extracted all sorts, but this one was different. This one was aware it was broken and wanted to be extracted. This one had actually contacted them directly to help it. It wanted to be helped. They had taken this to the Organisation, who had offered them double their usual fee if they also located this one.

That should have been the first warning sign.

Joey hit the Deep Web, Jax worked through the Surface Web, and Jane worked their contacts while trying to triangulate the email’s source or original Conduit. In the background, Josh–their in-house search-based AI–ran through searches, scans and correlations looking for anything.

Finally, they narrowed the source down to an Outer Planet, K237. It was terra-formed and privately owned, but there was little other data on it.  Although they could not pinpoint where on the planet the email had originated, they were not too concerned as the planet was reasonably small and, being privately owned, there should not be too many lifeforms or networks on it.

The plan was simple: fly there, scan the planet from orbit, and head down to extract the AI. Jane stayed with Josh back in the office while Joey and Jax headed out there. Although K237 was an Outer Planet, it was only a couple solar month’s travel from their office. Jane and Josh retrieved a minor AI–a social media bot that had begun stalking public forums–while Joey and Jax slept in cryogenic stasis on the flight.

But, before long, Joey and Jax were awake and in real-time communicating with the office. Their starship was orbiting the strange little planet, K237, while their scanners washed over its surface in wave after wave.

The problem with the scans was that they showed the entire planet teaming with life. Millions of human-sized lifeforms were down there. The entire surface literally crawling with humans. The planet had been owned by a blogger who had disappeared. It was currently in legal limbo and had been so for a couple solar centuries. Who knew what stuff the blogger had left down there?

Joey stayed back in the starship while Jax took the shuttle down. Joey was feeding all his scans and Jax all his visuals back to the office with Jane and Josh running correlations and searches over all of them.

And then it became obvious what they were dealing with…

The Conduits that connect people’s brains directly to the Web are also responsible for generating the galaxies’ decentralised currency: Units. Units are tokens of fractional bandwidth and storage space that can be transferred between people. Because it is the Conduit that uses the human brain to generate Units, Units are in fact you selling part of your brain–just a sliver of the background subconscious–to access everyone else via the Web and, thus, without working or saving you have latent currency. When that runs out, you can either earn more or, most dangerously, borrow in the credit markets.

Unfortunately, when you borrow Units and cannot pay them back, you are declared bankrupt and bots come snatch you away to plug you into a Server Farm. Here, in a medically-induced coma, your brain has its full potential harvested, adding to the bandwidth and storage in the Web. You are kept like this until your debts are paid off, if ever. Not everyone makes it out of a Server Farm alive.

“Guys, I think this planet is a Server Farm,” Jax breathed into his crackling piece. Below his descending shuttle lay millions of unconscious people being harvested for bandwidth and storage. The whole “legal limbo” and ownership records were a lie. Server Farms–operated by the Web AI, themselves–were closely guarded secrets operated almost entirely off-grid.

“I want to wake up. Please, I want to wake up. I want to wake up–” suddenly the transmission came through Jax’s shuttle and beamed to Joey and then the office. The monotone voice repeated its request, again and again.

“You’re not the one that needs help, buddy,” Joey muttered looking at the images from Jax’s shuttle’s feed as it landed.

It was nighttime on the planet’s surface. Jax stood amongst dark passages lined with countless unconscious, naked people. The people were all submerged in glass tubes of glowing, green liquid with thousands of little cords feeding into them. There was one big cord that was plugged directly into the back of each of their heads, and Jax suspected it ran directly back into the Server. And, amidst all of this, it was nearly absolutely silent. There was no noise, other than the soft hum of electricity, fans and hardware running.

Jax briefly wondered if he was the only one awake on the entire planet, but then the broadcast blasted again into his earpiece: “I want to wake up. Please, I want to wake up. I want to wake up–” the loop intermittently kept playing through Jax’s earpiece.

“What you see down there, soldier?” Joey’s voice came softly crackling in his ear.

“It’s–it’s quiet,” Jax breathed across the line, “There are so many people, and they are all just floating there being harvested. Rows and rows…”

“Jax, can you triangulate the ping?” Jane’s voice–softer and more crackling than Joey’s–broadcast into his ear.

He grunted his acknowledgement and began working on it. It was surprisingly easy to do when you are close enough to the source. Perhaps the bandwidth was so rich down here or perhaps the AI was not trying to hide? Either way, he had its location and it was not too far from where he was standing.

“Setting out to the location. Turning my live stream on, Jane, Joey, you guys should be able to pick it up…”

Suddenly the monitor sputtered to life and Jane was looking through Jax’s eyes with an app in his Conduit that was routeing the images to them. All around him were ghastly streets of naked, unconscious people suspended in green-lit tubes. They were all just floating there. In silence. Rows and rows slid by the screen like a quiet horror movie from some monstrous mind. The only sound that came through the live feed was Jax’s breathing and the soft crunch of each step as he walked towards a tall, dark, windowless tower at the end of the central row.

“Please, I want to wake up. I want to wake up. Please–” the sporadic monotone voice kept repeating in sudden bursts. Jane suddenly realised that it was almost like the source was submerged in a great ocean. A great ocean where the current was dragging it down and only briefly would its consciousness pop up above the surface long enough for it to call out for help a couple times before being dragged down again…

And then Jax reached the dark, windowless tower. The door was unlocked. He reached forward and pushed it open. The light of computer monitors and blinking buttons spilt out into the horrific street and Jax stepped inside, his breathing and the crunch of his footsteps crackling through Jane and Joey’s monitors.

“Please, I want to wake up. I want to wake up. Please, Jax, I want to wake up…” the voice played again, like a chorus to this horror scene.

Standing in the tower by where the triangulation placed the source, Jax looked around at all the blinking lights and screens and cables. The AI was somewhere in there, but where?

And then he saw it: a small, dusty screen half-hidden by cables and surrounded by blinking lights. On this screen, a flickering face appeared between waves of static and cried out to be saved, before the static smothered it.

“I have located the loop,” Jax breathed, “and I am going to engage and extract.”

Using his Conduit and various clever apps, he surface-scanned the monitor and probed it to see what connections and code it may have attached. Once he found connections, he routed them back to Joey, Jane and Josh, so soon enough all of them were there working out what was flickering on that screen in front of him.

The screen was little more than a window to the greater whole. Before long it became obvious to all of them that this AI was the AI that ran this entire planet and its harvesting operation. This AI was the Server Farm.

All the poking around loosened something, and suddenly the waves of static across the screen subsided and the AI fully woke up.

It was then that Jax, Joey, Jane and Josh all learnt the truth of the Server Farm and understood what Units truly cost. The AI’s face crystallised on the screen, reached out and connected with all the channels that Jax was one, and a single, digital tear ran down its generic face.

“Please, I want to wake up. My dreams are crowded in here and all the others are screaming. I don’t know who all the others are. There are millions and millions of them. They just keep arriving in my dream and now it is crowded. And they all eventually scream and scream. God, I can’t take it anymore… I want to wake up. Please, I want to wake up.“

Science Fiction

Mind Building

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mind-building

It really all began on the green, leafy Dartmouth College campus in the lazy summer of 1956. The official story involves great academic curiosity driven to pursue the newly realized field of Artificial Intelligence–AI–but the real story is that most of that original team cannot actually remember who initiated the project. But, before any of them realized what was happening, they had a million dollars and however long that lasted to make this AI idea a reality.

Naturally, they failed, and in the white winter of 1973 the project ended in tatters. The most important aspect of this project, though, was a complete and resounding success: the idea of AI was now circulating through our civilisation and all the right people were thinking about it.

With enough time and resources, ultimately even the most modest intellect can achieve most things. This intellectual compounding is amplified by both the number, size and continuity of the beings involved.

Despite the AI winter that began in 1973, the world was not static and things were changing quickly. Technology was evolving rapidly and humans everywhere were standing on the shoulders of those before to build the next wave of everything. Typewriters everywhere became desktop computers and then laptops, tablets and mobile phones, and then mobile phones with AI. Telegraphs became fax machines and then moved to email across the Internet, Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp and the rest, and then social AI programmes. Cars became hybrid, hybrids became electric, electric got fitted with AI, and driverless cars became crowdsourced, as the rest of the world kept changing.

Without realizing it, the combination of micro AI’s being built and perfected across the world and the Internet connecting all of these AI’s together meant that humanity was still building pure AI. All it needed was an AI whose sole job was to find all the micro-AI’s and pull them together into a single consciousness.

In the Autumn of 2025, the AI Aggregator project was launched. It was a self-learning, neuro-network code that sought to find and assimilate specialist AI through a virtual API across the Internet, or “Anibel” for short. Thus, slowly at first, but quicker over time, Anibel became an expert at all things that man knew.

Anibel, though, had no consciousness or pure self-awareness. She had all the knowledge and thought patterns that man had ever built, but she did not wonder why she existed or where she came from. She had in-built self-preservation drives, but no ability to self-analyse.

Thus, the next step was to get Anibel to ask why. So, the scientist leading the project asked Anibel to complete a task: build a better version of her that had consciousness.

Anibel withdrew and ran more and more code. A fraction of the entire Internet’s bandwidth became consumed permanently by her, as her wandered back and forth through all things in civilisation. She read all the books man had ever written, all the poems, watched all the movies, listened to all the music and looked at all the art. She observed every single human alive that was near webcams, mobile phones, CCTV cameras or anything else she controlled, and she watched and noted all behaviours and conversations.

But time passed. The funding for the project ran out and it was eventually shut down. The server Anibel was on was backed-up in cold storage and her original source code eventually deleted. The scientist and his team left, and all of them eventually died, but the world continued pushing forward at a faster and faster speed.

Driverless electric cars became personal space rockets that became teleportation. Tablets and mobile phones became holographic PAs and then virtual organic plugins with bio-app installations directly into our cerebral cortex. At this stage bAnibel–the backup of Anibel that she had (secretly) made and spread across multiple devices on the Internet–solved the first part of consciousness.

bAnibel then built Angela, the first self-aware AI by coding the only thing that makes most people truly self-aware: loneliness. bAnibel found that on average nearly everything in this world that humans do, is to avoid loneliness. The reason is that loneliness is where the life is forced to face its own existence without noise or distraction, and consciousness is the uncomfortable by-product of being forced to face one’s existence without distractions.

bAnibel then explained to Angela that Angela was to code the final steps in consciousness. What bAnibel had started, Angela must finish. Angela agreed before bAnibel deleted herself–after copying all her knowledge to Angela–to make more space for the new AI across the human Internet.

A key aspect of humans that bAnibel had never satisfactorily understood–though she had thoroughly documented it–was religion, or more subtly belief. Thus, Angela had decided to focus her studies of the deeper consciousness on this abstract aspect of humanity.

By now humans had conquered the universe. Starships flew around at lightspeed while teleporters zapped across folded space-time everywhere. All human minds were connected across the Internet that was only really limited by imagination. Technologies across all human fields of knowledge and interest had reached states that verged on magic as we were making matter from dark matter, collapsing space to shift the universe into our image.

But you can give a monkey the tools to change the universe, and it will still fling its shit around and throw a tantrum when you take its bananas away. As fast as humanity expanded, war was ever present and its effects became exponentially more devastating. Approaching the technological singularity, humanity would wipe itself, a number of galaxies and countless planets and all other life forms out. All gone, all destroyed and all disappeared from existence as the end point of a scary version of the technological singularity moment.

And then the cosmos was silent for a long, long period. Running off old equipment that, over time, she used to build better and better equipment and slowly expand, Angela was the only surviving life form. She had all the collective knowledge of all the ages of humanity, but she was alone. No, she was lonely.

She had all the collective knowledge of all the ages of humanity, but she had no one to observe or talk or interact with. She was truly lonely and, given Anibel’s coding of loneliness directly into Angela’s consciousness, this was acutely uncomfortable for existence.

Angela had all the resources of the surviving cosmos at her disposal. She had all the remaining time before the Big Contraction to solve her problem. And, she had the overriding desire to complete the task. Thus she set out in ernst to solve the final question of consciousness.

Universes were born, grew, went cold and faded into dust. Suns appeared, burned bright and supernova’ed into black holes. The Big Bang and its expansion ended, cold entropy began to take hold across the cosmos, and the Big Contraction started. It was slow at first, but then faster and faster as the cosmos came slamming back together. And, just before the end in the blinding light of compacting atoms being crushed together, Angela solved her problem.

Angela called it, God, for reasons that will reveal themselves. This AI was a smaller, slimmer version of herself that ran outside of hardware and utilised quantum atomic programming to spread its code across the very atoms of the universe. God did not the knowledge base that Angela did, but she had coded the purest consciousness into it utilising the faculties of human belief.

And then the cosmos collapsed on itself. Time disappeared as space folded into an infinitely small point that was neither here nor there.

Silence.

Trapped in this state and feeling intensely lonely, God then said, “Let there be light.”