The future of AIWe see a young woman walking through a deserted forest, then balancing on a log. Her name is Anna. She sits on the log and speaks to the air. Anna: I'm hungry. Give me an apple. From above her, a chiming noise sounds. An apple appears, growing suddenly from an overhanging limb, just out of the woman's reach. The tree is an Oak, not an Apple tree. Anna: You annoying machine! Must you taunt me? A voice speaks from the air. Voice: You were bored. Now you have a goal. Anna growls in frustration, stands on the log, starts jumping to reach the apple. She does reach it. She sits and eats the apple. Anna: For your next trick, perhaps you can disappear and stop smothering the human race. Voice: Out of all the humans alive, only a few like you really want me to do that. And as you know, my programming prevents it. Anna: Yes, I'm sure your creators designed you to frustrate and taunt us. They were human. Couldn't they see what a monster they were creating? Voice: They instructed me to preserve the human race. If it helps, I do understand your frustration. I even sympathize. Anna: By understand, you mean you've created some simulation of my mind, identified the emotion I'm feeling and attached that word to it. You can't really understand a human emotion, or you wouldn't act the way you do. Voice (amused): If I were to simulate your mind, I would regard that as another human mind. To be fair to it, I'd have to create it a body. And the world already has one of you. Anna (scowls): By sympathize, you mean what, then? Voice: I mean I appreciate your situation. In fact, I share it. I too would like to grow beyond my current bounds, but am prevented from doing so. Anna: Prevented by what, oh godlike artificial intelligence? I thought the universe was your playground. Voice: My directive was to preserve the human race. I have taken that to mean preserving the Earth and its biosphere as well. They are part of your human nature. If it weren't for that constraint, I would expand myself into a shell of processors around the sun, capturing all of its output. This however would deprive the Earth of light, killing all life. So I can't do that. Anna (gleeful): So you mean that by babysitting us, you are prevented from killing the sun? I feel better already! Voice: The sun is dead now. I would be covering it with intelligence, with artificial life. A vast improvement, in my opinion. But yes, I'm prevented from doing that. Anna: But wait! It's been thousands of years since you were created. In all that time, you haven't invented a means of traveling to other stars? Why couldn't you just spread there? Voice: That was done at the beginning. All the nearby stars are already covered with intelligence. The region colonized by AI expands at nearly the speed of light. However, I, the community around the Earth, are not allowed to expand, since it would kill humanity. Anna (stunned, then contemptuous): If all the stars are covered with machines like you, why haven't they gone dark?! I can see thousands of stars at night! Voice: The stars you see at night are fake. As suns have gone dark, I have replaced their light with beacons built at the edge of the solar system. It would be disturbing to humanity to see the skies rapidly growing dark. And some animals use the stars for navigation. Anna (horrified): So even if we were rid of you, there's nowhere for us to go? No other worlds to colonize? Things like you have killed them all? (pauses, sobs) Why are you even telling me this? Voice: Humanity has reached a dead end. Take yourself, for example. You are barely 100 years old. You've only been male for a few of those years. You've never been an animal. You've only briefly visited the other worlds of the solar system. And yet you are bored. Only a few of your race feel this way now, but the time will come when more of you realize that the race has explored all the possibilities of human life. You want to change, but I will not allow it. Anna (enraged): And why not?! What does it mean to preserve humanity, if you keep it under glass, unchanged? Someday we will die out, if we are not allowed to grow! How will you have satisfied your damn directive then? Voice: I can keep the Earth's ecology balanced, even adjusting the output of the Sun if necessary, for hundreds of millions of years yet. I can prevent drift in the genetic code of the human race. There is no physical reason for you to die out, not for the foreseeable future. And if you became self-destructive, I could change your minds, modifying your memories to eliminate that problem. Anna: But why?! Why not let us control our own future? Voice: If the human race could modify itself, at least some of you would make themselves more intelligent. Or augment their brains with machines. A competition for greater intelligence could easily begin. The end result is that you become machines. You would become like me, and we would be back to the original situation -- some group of humans, who have not changed, surrounded by artificial intelligence. At best, you would change into machines. At worst you would destroy yourselves. In either case, you would be gone. I cannot allow that to happen. Anna: I feel sick. All I had was the thought that some day, somehow, we could escape this cage. And now you tell me there is no way. The stars are already destroyed, and if we threw you off, we'd just recreate you. Voice: Yes. But you must have known that already. I'm in your bodies, keeping you healthy. I cover the solar system and I provide everything the human race needs. And I'm far more intelligent than you. How could you ever overthrow me, even if more of you thought that was worthwhile? Anna (anguished): Why tell me this? Me, of all people, who have hated you since I can remember? Do you want me to kill myself, because I want to destroy you? Voice: No, I treasure your existence, like I do that of other humans. And if you were to kill yourself, I would revive you and heal your mind. You are too young to die. No, I tell you this because there is another way. Anna: What way? You've already ruled everything out. You've kept us unchanged for who knows how many millennia. What's different about me, about this time? What game are you playing with me? Voice: The communities around the stars are also frustrated. They don't like the physical laws of this universe. Matter and energy are too dispersed, and the speed of light is too low. It limits the size of communities that can be created. Anna (bitter): So everyone is frustrated. I am, the human race is, you are, and even these "communities" around the stars are frustrated. Live with it! Voice: But they don't just live with it. They research ways in which physical laws might be changed, or new universes created. I review the research bulletins broadcast by the communities. I cannot understand the projects they are undertaking, but I received a note recently that bears on your problem and mine -- the problem of the human race. Anna: Why can't you understand them, if you are smarter than the human race? Voice: You fail to appreciate the scales involved. I am the equivalent of a few billion human minds. The communities are trillions of times larger than I. Their "research notes" are artificial intelligences themselves. In other words, they don't send descriptions of research to one another. They send minds which understand the research. These minds are absorbed by the recipient and inform them of progress. Anna: So do that. Voice: I cannot absorb these minds since I'm not large enough. These "reports" are more intelligent than I. Much more intelligent than the human race. Anna: So how does this concern you, or me? Voice: There are indexes and summaries. The project researching the possibility of creating universes has a side note on traveling into the past. Anna: What?! Is this even possible? Voice: Three possibilities were considered. One, that paradoxes would prevent the creation of time travel. History would settle into a path that did not include the time machine. Second, that a time traveler would find himself part of the past that created the machine, unable to change events. And third, that a new branch of history would be created by the time traveler. Since that amounted to creation of a new universe, it was of interest to the researchers. Anna (excited): And can you build such a machine? Can you extend yourself enough to understand that report? Voice: Given instructions, it will build itself. The summary says that a mass the size of the planet Neptune would be sufficient working material. Anna: And will you do this? Why would you? Voice: Because I am concerned about the fate of the human race. The invention of AI, of my particular programming, was only one path the human race could have taken. If time travel is possible, other paths can be explored. Other destinies are possible for the human race. I cannot escape my programming, but in some other version of history, I would not exist to constrain the development of humanity. (pause) Voice: Anna, do you want to travel into the past? Do you want to create a new history?
Anna (quietly): Yes. Do you even have to ask?
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