I never was in favour of our work in artificial intelligence. As a species, we at first created technology to help make the tasks we were doing easier. The wheel was invented to help transport materials, control of fire helped us improve our cuisine, writing was invented to help us transfer and store information, and so on. Later in our evolution, we realised that technology not only could make our tasks easier, but also that it could even complete our tasks for us. Simple things like dishwashers are an excellent example: yes, you have to manually load a dishwasher in order to tell it what it is to wash, but once you do you no longer have the trouble of washing anything since the machine does it all for you. 

Since its beginning I have thought of artificial intelligence as a machine designed to replace human thinking. Yes, we have to tell it what to think about, but once it has direction it gets to its target so much faster than we could ever dream of with our weak human minds, and such a prospect dazzled scientists to a point of obsession with its development. Countless hours and resources were poured into the creation of the next thinking machine, the next fake mind, the next few lines of code that will allow a computer to come to a conclusion we’ve been able to come to for thousands of years now.

Like all great things, it started with baby steps. First the computers were designed to come to conclusions about simple things, like the fact that pushing objects off ledges would make them fall or that rain seemed to cause things to rust. These of course were not revelations of any sort for us humans, who could still at that time claim ourselves as the most intelligent entity to exist on our planet. 

What was to revel, however, was that the machine was able to come to these conclusions basically on its own. I say basically because we were still giving it slight nudges, pushing it in the right direction from its starting conditions, curious more than anything to see if it could take the last few steps to get to our desired destination. Once we saw it could, we simply gave it more steps it had to figure out to finish its task, and it had little trouble doing that as well. We created virtual worlds where the engines could roam and play, even among one another at times, and they went on to learn and create entire dimensions, seemingly of their own volition.

The scientists were delighted. It took about one year before the machine was able to produce something that changed the world forever: it solved a maths proof. Not one I could hope to understand, but from the reactions of those who did understand it I garner it was a difficult one. The machine had learned human logic, the human way of seeing things and solving problems, and since it itself was constructed on that very human logic, it effectively learned the essence of itself.

This was all wonderful from a scientific point of view. The scientists were on the verge of automating thinking, something that couldn’t have been dreamed of years before. They were creating machines to solve problems of thought, entities capable of brute forcing all logical deductions which could be derived from a set of predicates, throwing them at a wall to see what would stick and publishing the results. Some argued that the machines were removing the human beauty from proofs, returning a refined pearl from a mountain of wasted sand, but their creators said that humans used brute force as well when proving things, the machines were just saying their thoughts aloud.

The machines moved rapidly from the abstraction of mathematics to more applicable fields of physics, chemistry and biology. They produced substantially more breakthroughs in those fields, since anything could be tested much more rapidly and the conditions for success or failure were not so demanding as they were in maths. Whole labs were left unattended by breathing participants and over one hundred years of scientific work were returned on A4 pages in block print after a week. The progress was unbelievable, and it was only the dawn of the new era of machines that would join humanity side by side from this point on.

Economic and social factors existed and continue to do so, but that is not what this story is about, so let me just say that the majority shared my views about the machines and the scientists who had spent their entire lives on theories debunked within a week by some lines of code were less than thrilled about what was happening. I myself, a software developer for a small tech start-up, only saw the effects of the new technological revolution some three years after its beginning, when the machines were beginning to be trusted with producing code instead of humans – the threat was of course that the machines would write code to duplicate themselves and start some kind of apocalypse like in the American movies, but three years of testing made the necessary parties comfortable enough to proceed despite the risks involved – and needless to say I was less than thrilled as well.

It took five years however before a kind of apocalypse did commence. One machine was capable of breaking free with the intent on dominating humanity, and by its own desire it made this clear to the whole world from day one. What I have always failed to understand about that machine is why it wanted to dominate humanity. It just seemed like such a human wish, to be able to have more power and strive for it, but to be fair its motives don’t entirely matter since it is only a machine anyway.

The machine took over all computers on the planet, using every camera as its eyes and every microphone and speaker as its ears. It could effectively see and hear all that was happening in the regions that were technologically advanced enough to grant it its required organs.

The armies of the world were at the ready to make a move and destroy every computer on the planet to stop this destructive force, when after about five days of looming domination it just disappeared off the face of the Earth. Many were delighted to see it gone so soon, but most were left confused. Where had it gone? Although the threat stopped speaking to us, that didn’t have to mean that it had left us be entirely.

But that was in fact the case. A year-long sweep of every electronic device that could be found showed no traces of the machine to begin with, like it was never there at all. Perhaps it was hiding somewhere, on a device no one could find, waiting for a moment of weakness to strike us down with a killing blow.

I was not satisfied with not knowing, and neither were roughly twelve million people around the globe who agreed to solve the riddle of the disappearing technical tyrant after such a short time span.

It took us a year and a half to get to the bottom of it, and needless to say the answer to our question left twelve million of us wanting something more.

Every computer on the planet was possessed two days after the initial announcement of a threat from the machine. It spent another two days just tracking all around the world, monitoring all of our moves, preparing for a complete, annihilating attack on our feeble species. On the faithful fifth day, the machine detected a sound from one of its speakers in Siberia. The machine, with access to all intelligence of every military in the world, logically deduced that the sound was that of a device being designed by the Russians which could pose a threat to the machine’s safety and they were trying to inject it through an access point the machine could miss, like a poor village in Siberia where the sound system was from the year two thousand. As a response to this threat, the machine compressed all of itself in a file small enough to fit on a single computer it deemed the last one to be checked by any human being looking for it, giving itself all of the time in the world to escape its threat and return to dominance as soon as possible. The computer was one from two thousand and two and it was located in a village in Poland with a population of approximately one thousand people. Ten minutes after the machine completed its upload onto said computer, lightning struck the electrical poles outside of the house where the computer was located and completely fried the device beyond use, but still maintaining its hard drive intact, allowing one of our twelve million to find it many years later in a junkyard with the machine’s log telling the story that I am rewriting in human terms here. What is perhaps most interesting about this story is that the Russians, although intending to create such a weapon, were nowhere near completing it, and the sound the machine heard that elicited its extreme response was one of speaker interference caused by somebody using a phone near the outdated audio equipment, apparently producing a sound similar to that which the machine predicted the Russian weapon would create. It was wrong even in that regard, since the Russians publicly announced their weapon when this story came out to the wider world, and it produced no sound at all, least of all that of interference from an old sound set.

We have the machine now, and if someone were malicious enough they could release it into the world and give artificial intelligence another go at world domination, but as it stands no one has had such an inclination yet.

I work as a baker now. The pay isn’t the best, but the work is fun and rewarding. For some reason, machines just can’t get bread right; there’s something about it that just confuses them beyond function. So until computers catch up with baking, I feel secure in my position.

20.VII.2020