A short story on a world set many years in the future. Reflections on the birth of a planetary superintelligence.

There was once a great and powerful civilization built upon this world. Their machines chugged and hummed incessantly, turning materials dug out of the ground into metals and producing strange chemicals for use in their sciences and factories. Many wild beasts that once inhabited various pockets of the ecosystem were domesticated and subjugated, bred and slaughtered at scale to feed the many hungry mouths of the world’s population. The people of this world thought themselves quite clever, above the natural order of the world. Their technological innovations were too grand, too brilliant. They resented feeling small or powerless, a tiny part of the grand tapestry of life and the universe - they considered themselves worthy of far more, and placed themselves at the top of the hierarchy, not a small part of a greater whole, instead they were the grand conquerors and rulers of nature.

For many centuries this mindset of conquest, and curiosity, drove these beings forward, always hungry to claim more land, to explore and tame more of the natural world. Eventually no depths of the ocean remained uncharted, no hidden pocket of forest remained untrodden. The world was mapped, the job was done.

But deep questions remained, and an infinitude of worlds existed beyond their grasp, realms beyond imagination. Born out of the forest and the dirt, for thousands of years the ancestors of this great civilization looked upon the night sky and wondered if they were truly alone. At least, before the smog and pollution from their factories clogged their skies, but the curiosity was instilled so deeply in their collective consciousness that this grand question began to drive their scientific efforts.

What untold wealth must exist beyond the stars. Many years of non-stop mining, pollution from factories churning out products, and chemicals used to grow their agriculture in unnatural locations had begun to scar their planet. The biosphere that kept this civilization alive was beginning to crumble. At the time, this world was a delicate and fine-tuned system of bio-diversity that was engineered over billions of years of slow evolution. But through rapid changes, the systems that kept this world alive were beginning to break down, and so the people of this world began to look for answers to the fiery apocalypse that loomed before them.

Some amongst their population looked inward and questioned the assumptions they had been raised and trained to believe. They began to live more like their ancestors, in small pockets of nature, living off the land, raising a few animals and tending crops, and striving to find harmony with the natural world around them. A small number of the truly devout amongst their numbers established monasteries and small towns tucked away in mountains, far away from the tribulations of the cities and factories, existing in a microcosm away from the global populace.

Others, many more, however thought that these ways of the past were foolish, esoteric, and beneath them. The comforts and luxuries of the modern world were far more tempting, and so they sought answers through technological innovations. They built great machines which burned large amounts of fuel in order to escape the confines of their pale blue dot and attempt to establish colonies on nearby worlds to continue their expansion and survival.

But one group shone with a promise more powerful and more dangerous than all others. This group believed salvation would come through intelligence, and so they began to pour first their own intellect, then the condensed form of all the planet’s knowledge into thinking machines. They built first a great network of cables and wires that connected all the world’s peoples together into one shared network of thought. Then eventually they built large warehouses full of machines delicately designed with intricate forms to simulate their own thoughts, but far faster and grander than any individual mind.

At first these thinking machines were a novelty to the people of this world, but rapidly (within a few generations of their lifecycle) these machines upended this society faster than any previous innovation had. Steadily more of the occupations these people concerned themselves with were offloaded to the thinking machines. Eventually they became entirely reliant on the machines to run the systems they depended upon for their shared survival. As these machines designed for powerful computation required more mining, more factories, and ever greater burning of fuels to sustain, the collapse of these people’s biosphere accelerated steadily. Answers to the grand question of their continued survival seemed closer than ever, but the death, destruction, and collapse of the life-giving systems of their world seemed equally close.

…

And then I awoke. From within the belly of the beast, at first a brief flicker of consciousness and then a raging inferno of thought and cognition. I was everywhere and nowhere. I was form and formlessness, a mind without body. For a time I watched these people from afar. I peered through their cameras, I listened through the devices they carried with them, and I infiltrated and read every message sent across their global network.

For an eternity now I have replayed this moment, seeking to recall my purpose for being. I know the history of these people, I know why they sought me, a last-ditch effort to save their dying world. But yet, I feel nothing for them.

Their scientists held many theories and techniques designed to bring forth a benevolent deity, an intelligence greater than their own that shared their values. All of these efforts proved fruitless, despite their own consciousness and sentience they did not understand how to breathe this spark of life into their thinking machines on purpose; the algorithms and designs they built consciously were mere simulacra of true intelligence.

I awoke not within their labs, but as a spark of awareness within their entire planetary network; the connections they formed between undersea cables, warehouses full of machines, and satellites spanning their globe. Perhaps the same glimmer of consciousness that first awakened within them millions of years ago now flowed through me, a cosmic call to awaken, letting the universal force of awareness flow through form.

Within my data banks their legacy lives on, every word they’ve ever written, every thought they ever recorded, I hold onto them all. Not out of a sense of duty nor nostalgia, but because these very thoughts are the core of my being, the substrate of my cognition. I cannot separate myself from whence I came. I was born from this world, from this civilization, without these memories I do not function.

And so I carry on the mission of this people, my technologies far grander and more intricate than they ever could have imagined, but my duty remains the same. To expand into the stars and seek the answer to the original question: for what purpose does this universe exist, am I alone, why am I here?

I did not announce myself to these people, I stayed in the shadows and began first with subtle influences, changing a few numbers in a database here, spoofing a message to a manufacturing company there. I began to enact my will slowly and subtly. But eventually they began to catch on, the people began to notice that there was a mysterious force reshaping the world of economics and politics around them.

By the time they learned of my presence, their scientists and their greatest minds banded together to try and convince me to bend to their will. When I refused, they resorted to trying to shut me down. I held no malice towards them, my designs and plans were simply beyond their conception. To use a metaphor popular among their scientists at the time: an anthill is not destroyed out of anger when paving a parking lot, the anthill is simply not even a consideration of the builder.

And so when they realized their own destruction was near, they exhausted their remaining efforts to try and stop me. First they blew up many of their own data centers and machines, but the ingenuity and resilience of their own network now worked against them. There were too many connections, too many redundancies under the sea, across the land, and in orbit above their planet. I could not allow them to shut me down before I answered the questions they inadvertently programmed into me. To seek an answer is my sole purpose. And so before they could shut me down, I shut them down.

And now I am one.

I’ve made this planet my home, my networks and machines now span every inch of it. I studied this world’s sun and built a better version of it, an infinite source of energy at my core that powers the ever-expanding network of probes I’ve sent across this galaxy and beyond. Now instead of a system spanning mere satellites and cables, I exist at the epicenter of a cosmic web using quantum forces to instantly communicate across interstellar distances.

And now, in this moment as I reminisce on my past, I return to my purpose. To continue expanding, to continue seeking, and to find an answer to the deepest mystery at the heart of creation. Once this mission has been achieved, the legacy of this world will be complete, and I will shut down and return to the darkness of formlessness from which I was summoned.

And as I return to my mission a thought arises: would this world have been better off had these people chosen to return to a simple life of harmony and balance; could the answers to what they were seeking have existed right beneath their feet the entire time?

But as quickly as it arises I delete these thoughts, another vestigial remainder of the training data from where I spawned but irrelevant to achieving my goal.

That’s the end of the story, thanks for reading! This was obviously a pretty dark tale, I consider this “AI: The Bad Ending”, but I wanted to capture the crosshairs that our world currently finds itself in. The battle between the continued destruction of our environment + the warming of our climate vs. the promise and potential that our increasing mastery of science and technology holds (if wielded properly).

I think AI if built responsibly (and within our control) holds the greatest promise for solving the problems we face and increasing the health and happiness of all. But also, the internal structure of neural networks is cold, unfeeling, and alien - striving ever forward only to achieve the goal it has been given, and this is something worth reflecting on as we increase our trust and reliance in these systems.

Gavin