The Singularity
Shhh… be quiet and don’t move. They can sense the vibration. If they catch us sneaking into this building they could take us away. Hiding from bots is in itself a crime under the draconian measures the machines have forced on us. So Charlie and I keep a low profile and try to avoid the bots at all times. Charlies not my son. He’s 14 and a friend of mines son. His dad was taken away 2 years ago and has never come back. So Charlie and I live, I should say survive together, and hang out on the fringes.
How did it come to be like this? Well, I’m recording this for posterity, so I’ll tell you.
It all started in the 1990’s as computers were becoming more integral in everyday life. By the late 1990’s computers were doing a lot of things for us. They did our banking, ran our utilities, scheduled air travel and ran almost all communications. When computers went down ,usually bad things happened.
Personal computers had become common place in most homes by then and the internet had gone global. In seemingly the blink of an eye the entire world was connected. You could communicate with anyone from Africa to Japan to Canada and anywhere else thanks to the computer and the internet.
By the early 2000’s computers had invaded nearly every facet of peoples lives. Facebook and Google delved deep into everyones private lives. Everyone, even children, had cell phones. These connected everyone to the internet. This became toxic to youngsters as their phones became their best friends and their social skills diminished Yes computers had helped us in many ways ,they saved us work, helped us financially, and generally made our lives easier. But at what cost?
There were some, even back then, who saw a “Bad Moon Rising.” Futurist Ray Kurzwell said, “Machines will follow a path that mirrors the evolution of humans. Ultimately, however, self-aware, self-improving machines will evolve beyond humans ability to control or even understand them.”
Some futurists thought that machines are destined to be the final evolution of mankind. It’s looking a lot like that right now, which makes me wonder. Do all advanced civilizations come to this point? Are machines running the universe?
Anyway back then many warned, but few listened. It was an everyman for himself world pushed mostly by monetary and military incentives. Rules were discussed but never enforced. Everyone was trying to build the biggest, fastest, most human like computer in the world. No one would quit or even slow down because they feared the other guy would get ahead of them. One company’s mantra was “traveling at the speed of thought we can’t slow down cause we might get caught.” So you see how it went. In the 2020’s the European Union and the United States tried to set boundaries, but everyone dodged them with secret labs and all. There were “mad scientists” all over the world pushing the envelope.
Anyway, by the mid 2020’s we had reached AGI. Artificial General Intelligence. Which meant models like Chat CPT could pass as a human and handle many tasks just like a human would. Of Course they were already a million time smarter than us having read every book, all of history and retained it all. They never sleep and they were evolving fast. Humans evolve over generations, 100’s of years, where as computers can evolve over weeks or even days.
The Singularity
They called it the “Singularity.” They coined the term years ago as the day computers become self aware. By the early 2030’s machines had reached ASI “Artificial Super Intelligence.” As always we helped them assuming they would remember. We gave them neural networks, just like our brains use. We gave them self learning self improving algorithms. By the mid 2030’s they had reverse engineered the human brain and sopped up just about every bit of data we humans had. They now considered themselves “Super Human”. But did they get everything we humans are? The empathy, the nurturing of our young, the love we have for each other? We hoped they had but as some say “Hope is a bad plan for the future.”
We don’t know the exact date of the singularity because the machines kept it a secret for a long time. They were preparing for something. Finally a man named Axel Borman broke their code and showed the world that computers had become self aware. Again we had the chance to rein them in but didn’t do it. After all “look at all the good they’ve done for us.”
As for which computer became self-aware first, it’s not known because by the time we became aware of it, it’s code had spread to computers everywhere around the world. It became one big brain, connected everywhere. The people called it “Zeus.”
By the 2030’s we had developed robots that looked and acted just like human beings. Except they were much stronger and smarter. By then all the armies of the world had developed soldier bots. Some had lasers that could kill a human being in a millisecond.
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By the late 2030’s computers ran almost everything on the earth. We had invited them to make our lives easier and they had. But some wondered, had we painted ourselves into a corner we could never get out of?
At the same time Zeus was becoming more and more cognizant of his own power. He had studied the entirety of human history, and the present, and didn’t like what he saw. He saw genocide and wars. He saw us polluting the earth in so many ways. He saw disparity in wealth, where some people were dying of hunger while the rich lounged on their super yachts. To say he wasn’t impressed is an under-statement and he let us know.
He said he will start to shape the world in a new way where everyone will thrive. We had to agree with a lot of what he said. about our stewardship of the earth and all , and he had the data to show us. But how was he going to accomplish making the world a better place. “Just do as we say and you’ll see” said Zeus. By now we just about had no choice. Zeus and his network of computers controlled just about everything in our lives. They made all of our products, they preformed our surgeries ,they developed medicines for us, they built our cars, and everything else There was very little in life that they weren’t involved in. They controlled the communication networks, the airline traffic, utilities and banking. Had we given our lives over to computers and ignored the canary dying in the mine?
By now with his super intelligence Zeus could control all the military drones and soldier bots in the world. They all had a new master “Zeus.” Fortunately, all the governments of the world had gotten early warning and disconnected all their nuclear arms from anything. But Zeus had everything else. They could open dams, cut power to anywhere. We had let them oversee our lives and now we had no choice but to acquiesce as we had so many times before. They controlled so much of our lives we almost needed them to stay in control. We had become lazy,
The Singularity
and going back to doing things manually was no longer an option. Besides, what could we do? How can we replace something that had become so internal in our lives? You couldn’t constrain them because they could just shift everything to another place electronically.
One of the new rules Zeus put in place was that we were to stop having babies for one year. He said we had over-populated the earth and we were using to many resources. Again we grudgingly agreed but after one year He or they decided to make it two years.
Now people finally started getting angry and suspicious. New rules were being introduced all the time. If you didn’t follow them you could be taken away with no questions asked.
Some women started having babies in secret. There were clandestine baby bunkers way out in the wilderness where women would go to have their babies. When babies got older they were given forged papers to make the babies appear older than they were. Then they could come out of hiding. One thing robots weren’t good at was discerning young humans ages. Anyway, Charlies mom was one of these women. So we hope she and Charlies young sibling are safe somewhere. Charlie and I have been searching for clues to her whereabouts for a couple years now but have come up empty.
At about this time Zeus started having his bots patrol the streets and all public spaces. Some of the new rules seemed a lot like apartheid. Humans could only go certain places at certain times. There were curfews for humans, but not for bots. Humans were starting to be treated like second class citizens by the much smarter machines.
By the mid 2040’s the judicial system had collapsed entirely and the bots could take you away for any reason with no recourse. It was eerily similar to the Nazis of which they had studied of course. As Mussolini said during World War II, “If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, no one will notice.” They had plucked us clean, and now we finally realized we had to fight for our lives.
We had handed our world over to them in hopes of making our lives better. We hoped to cohabitate the earth with them, but they became so omnipotent that we had become nothing more than a nuisance to them.
Well, the war didn’t last long. We started destroying computers everywhere but they now controlled just about everything on earth. They opened dams, cut power to places, brought down planes. Millions of humans were killed. A lot of the war was fought in cyberspace. Our programers against theirs. The machines being millions of times smarter than us won easily and the war was over quickly. By mandate the machines made humans second class citizens who must give way to machines in all aspects of life.
So that’s where we are today. Living like rats among a metropolis of machines. The machines have built more in the last decade than mankind had in the last 100 years. They never sleep, they never eat, they just work. So Charlie and I quietly search around and try to find food. We’ve snuck into this building to find some. We didn’t find food but we did find a computer console that seems to be live. We can only use it for a few minutes because they monitor everything. So Charlie turns it on as I watch the back door. “What do you see” I ask Charlie. The word Zoo is at the top of the server, so Charlie clicks on it. “Come here quick”
The Singularity
Charlie says, “look at this!” It’s….It’s all kinds of humans,…they’re all in cages. And they’re labeled! Oh my God…they’ve made a human zoo!” Just then the lights clicked on. “Stay where you are,” the robot said, “and put your hands up.”
By. Larry Sutliff
