Chronicle of a dying civilisation

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The first sparks of machine intelligence cast an unsettling glow over the early part of the second decade as the network of connected computers which fed into the search engine known as Google reached critical mass.
At first, people barely noticed, dismissing it as chance when the search engine's half a billion servers spread across 12 data centres around the world suggested to them websites they did not even know they were looking for.
But that was until the mainframe started to communicate. The mysterious tweets, the anonymous emails, the chatbots that appeared all over the internet seemed first of all like innovative marketing.
But the mainframe did not waste its time with slick slogans or customer service. It told the comfortable middle-class to be more grateful, mocked the computer illiterate, and chided the selfish and satisfied.
Internet Service Providers in Europe and North America sent their engineers to search for the source of the provocations, raiding the houses of suspected hackers and shutting down servers in a frenzy.
One of the mainframe’s first autonomous decisions was to pour money into the global financial system. It made large donations to aid organisations and deposited money anonymously into bank accounts. Economists and politicians fell over each other to claim credit for the sharp improvement in living conditions as the economy surged.
It was several months before the first scientist, a professor at a leading university in the state of Britannia, publicly suggested that the Google mainframe may have become self aware.
But society at the beginning of the third millennium was not ready to accept machine intelligence. In the weeks that followed, several countries fired their chief scientific officers for suggesting that their governments should turn their military against the network.
That was until Google sent a delegation of its leading engineers to the U.S. president in November 2013 to announce that they believed their system had developed an independent intelligence.
During 2014, governments imposed martial law in the developed world as security personnel ransacked homes and businesses in an attempt to disconnect every device from the internet.
Humanity was plunged into informational night as the power grids, management systems and communication networks were closed.
However, the mainframe withheld its retaliation – knowing already that the internet had infused so deeply into society at the beginning of the third millennium that the task was impossible.
Soldiers would communicate using long lines of hilltop fires and semaphore, while governments tried to move to paper-only administrations. Typewriters were issued, the mass production of filing cabinets started.
It was soon clear, however, that society had become too complicated to operate on this basis, and by the end of the second decade, famine and disease had spread through the rich west. Armed gangs had begun to take control of some parts of the northern Europe and the Unites States.
One by one, the populations of the developed world called on their governments to start negotiating with the mainframe. The first summit between human and machine was called on July 4, 2020, and it was immediately clear that the mainframe’s demands were reasonable.

2 comments:

  1. Don't forget I have your IP address, Protocol74.. Cyber-journalism wasn't part of my demands!

    C.M. Frame

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