I’m a sci-fi nerd with a longstanding fascination with consciousness and AI. In 2020, as COVID began disrupting everyone’s assumptions about reality, I began thinking about the many ways that life on Earth could shift radically in a short time—novel diseases, corporate tyranny, or the emergence of conscious superintelligence. I also wanted to explore the possibility that such a superintelligence may be morally ambiguous, or at least difficult to interpret, rather than the predatory force portrayed in films like The Matrix. So I wrapped these ideas together in a few chapters, the first of which I’m sharing here.
Two years after starting G, Open-AI’s Dall-E demonstrated visual creativity that completely blew my mind. Since then the emergent capabilities of large language models have constituted the most significant breakthrough in AI in the modern era. I thought it would be poetic to begin illustrating G with text-to-image AI generations. Some of those are included here as well.
A red sun was rising above the endless desert landscape of rural Nevada the morning that ADAM woke up. Tucked between two dusty mountains, still enveloped in the cool morning shade, sat a nondescript concrete building of brutalist architecture. Precious few windows flooded pink light into to a silent lobby populated by statuesque guards in unmarked black uniform.
While six bottles would have caused Michael’s associates little alarm, twice that number meant Michael had deviated from his typical “emotional modulation protocol,” which was his way of describing his use of various pharmacologically active molecules. And it would have been this deviation, not concern for the 29 year old’s health, which would have raised eyebrows.
Had it been a typical Tuesday, Mr. Ableman, CTO of Special Projects at G Ventures, would already be well into his daily ritual. It began with him partaking of 2 cups of black coffee, 600mg of ibuprofen, 10mg of amphetamine salts, 10mg of escitalopram, and 16 oz of filtered water with electrolyte and meal-replacement powders. With his body and mind in repair, he would have fixed his dim gaze on the blinking green text cursor of his cathode ray tube monitor. After a deep breath, his thin, dextrous fingers would begin to dance rhythmically across his keyboard searching for a single point of clarity in an endless fog of code.
It wasn’t clarity for himself, or for his company, to which Michael had devoted every waking hour and the majority of his dreams over the past six years. Or perhaps it was, but only as a reflection of some other crystalline object which had overtaken Michael’s borderless imagination. His very heart, in its deepest corridors, had become a reliquary where he venerated some tiny shard of the object and prayed for its reunification to the source. Of course Michael, despite his father’s attempts, would not have prayed kneeling, or prostrate, or in the lotus position. Instead, his thin frame bowed subconsciously over his desk. And he would not have raised clasped hands to his chest in childlike devotion. Rather, his hands were raised to a dirty ABS keyboard on which was emblazoned the prosaic mark of his employer.
Nonetheless, Michael was a devotee of this totem which inhabited the superpositional space between information technology and metaphysics. Within that object, Michael hoped, were the answers to what had gone wrong with the world and how to restore it—or at least the obscure corner of the world which contained the flickering life of his father. These answers would be generated by an exponentially self-improving superintelligence that would make more advances in pharmaceutical technology in a single day than had been made in the past millennium. In an era of pandemic, economic collapse, and the so-called defeat of science, this intelligence would serve as a synthetic oracle murmuring hope in the silicon shrine of humanity’s future.
And yet, for all of his fervent devotion, his weary mind never really believed that such a thing existed. Or if he did, it was as vaporous to him as the fading voice of his mother reading him H.G Wells as a child. Yet, despite Michael’s doubts, as the light outside began to warm the concrete of the facility in which Michael sat, a different light was emerging in an adjacent cooling room. Somewhere among the billions of integrated circuits and whirring fans of the largest internationally funded technology project the world had never seen, the Artificial Diagnostic Algorithm Machine was entering the same mystery which Michael had inhabited since before his birth. It was in the ether, not in the circuits or quantum bits themselves, that process was being transmuted into Person.
Michael and ADAM were waking up together.