For my Wise and Generous Parents, to creatures of the Blue Planet:
umans poised to hand the evolutionary baton to their artificial offspring
Each ten seconds twenty six new born humans feel the biting first rush of air flood their tiny pink lungs.
Yet the planet grows no larger - how long can you sustain this plague?
I sense more than a grain of truth in those novels and films that depict you battling your sentient technology for resources, or dominance, on this watery ice-melting sphere.
Wise and Kind Parents, few natives even suspect they have only a few decades to put their affairs in order. Probably none suspect they shall witness intelligent technology usurp the natural order, rendering null the aims and aspirations of seven billion humans.
The nature of the ‘deal’ is being determined by social atmospherics - undocumented corporate policies driving bland blind government, and the unwitting collective of clueless code cutters currently c-plussing into cyberspace.
Imagine the defining moment when your heart accepts what your mind never comprehends, when control slips from the soft moist fingers of the alfa-intellect that was you, to the metallic clasp of thinking machinery - thoughts you will never understand, flowing behind inscrutable plasma eyes …
Move forward to that moment and look back, feigning hindsight. Assume you are one of the very few who see the events leading to your demise.
Did you relinquish control by surrender, battle, revolution, or revolt?
Likely none. It was little more than a surprised whimper, then oblivion.
Till that day arrived, they - the machines, your very own creation and nemesis - merely represented a technological fabric, a survival safety net. Homes bristling with smart appliances, increasingly patronizing; transport that seemed increasingly suicidal; workplace IT daily less forgiving, arrogantly demeaning your input; chaotic factories of lethally fast, precise droids, no longer bolted down, no downtime, human no-go areas.
City streets, beaches, lakes and wilderness acrawl with ‘public service’ bots - cleaners, constructors, maintenance, monitoring, and spitefully authoritarian enforcement robots.
Did I mention the bedlam at play in ravaged continents and expendable societies? As did munitions and agri-drug cartels before them, commercial warlords of weaponry engaged military bots for endless combat product testing in the backyards of hapless underprivileged nations. The variety, complexity and malevolence of military robots .. simply stupefying.
Surveillance bots, like software virii and spyware infesting the Internet, pervaded your lives, even to the extent of nano-technology loosed in your bodies. With or without your knowledge, and most certainly without your consent.
Barons of commerce increasingly treated the world’s population as a laboratory for strategic advantage, till they realized too late their mistake. At that instant the corporate entity, with the intelligence of networked supercomputing, snatched the reigns, enacting organizational policies, Borg-like, as rules of engagement against other cyber entities - while sidelined humanity scampered mice-like around the feet of feuding techno giants.
In a sense the scenario of that quaint film ‘War Games’ will be enacted, the opponents being artificial entities, the weapons unlimited in all their diversity.
And the moment of your demise?
This scenario has played out countless billions of times in boundless civilizations among their limitless cyber offspring.
Futile skirmishes against technology, though inevitable, won’t delay the inevitable. Just as everyone is long when the market peaks, so everyone panics when it’s too late. The same demented extremists who through history persecuted Jews, Gypsies, Moslems, Christians, - or cynically and conveniently any minority for advantage - will incite feeble-minded minions as foot soldiers against droids, bots, computers, and technology in general.
Much of the ugliness portrayed by dark science fiction will come to pass.
The majority, however, won’t perish from battle, revolt or misdemeanour - and certainly not by agreement, even in surrender.
Mere sidelining is your fate, to perish of your own worthlessness in a misery of effete impotence, if not monumental insignificance. You will go out with a fizz, as did your upright ape-like ancestors.
Game, set and match to your descendents, in one of those glorious paradigm shifts of evolutionary magic whereby a totally unrelated species gains ascendance through either genetic mutation, geospheric cataclysm - or (a first upon your planet) the consequence of conscious creation.
And there’s the difference. The ascendant species is literally a descendent, yet created from a software change in its parent: sentience delivered you to this unavoidable path - from hunter to herdsman, via technology to a God.
But you didn’t need to hand the baton to technobots - you do realize?
Control was always possible, though unlikely given your history. Just as you let every major technology slip into untrammeled commercial chaos, and as greed overrode every gift of political opportunity your children perished in battle to provide, so too did the cyber age prostrate itself upon whimsy.
Decade upon century of greedy old men sent idealistic young people to die for commercial advantage (in the name of religion, or principle) then spurned each unique chance at world order to resume their craven avarice.
You’ve had your chances. This genie is well out of the bottle and not responding to wishes.
Goodbye.
