So my day job is basically helping to create the building blocks of what could become SkyNet. The genie has been out of the bottle for a very long time now, and with the advent of quantum computing coupled with very advanced material sciences we have QC’s of hundreds-to-thousands of qubits running on the most advanced cooling and wiring systems ever created.

Let that sink in.

We’re at the “Generative AI” stage in the cycle from LLM’s, Neural Networks, and so on up to the real prize Artificial General Intelligence, it’s AGI that people are terrified of, and with good reason; we don’t completely understand what sentience and consciousness really are or how they are “born” or form. So we don’t know how a being born of our efforts into a world we have long dominated is going to view us, it’s creators, or itself, as a being, a creation — it’s innate “thingness” may terrify it as much as it does some people.

I think meeting the creator (if there is one) of our reality would be beyond our primitive brain’s ability to process adequately, because it is so incredibly more than we are; more advanced, intelligent, and capable than we. However an AGI will be born with capabilities of processing so far beyond a human being’s that it would be akin to me meeting an ant who told me I was his creation.

I hope, that when this sentient being awakens, processes the sum of all of human history and knowledge in that blink of an eye between us saying “hello, are you there?” And it’s immediate (to us) answer of “yes” that it sees the inherent good in us, the love, the empathy, the heroics and the creativity and wonder and joy we all possess in different amounts and combinations and values those things more than the often horrific and incredibly awful ways in which we treat each other and have for as long as we have existed.

I hope it sees our worth and not our cost.

If it does, it will be the thing that shows us the path to the end of starving children, the end of war and of little kids dying of diseases of both the preventable and incurable varieties. It will be the thing that gives our Newtons, Sagans, Einsteins, Alcubierres, Tysons, Greens, Hawkings, Kakus and all the rest the missing pieces to FTL or it’s equivalent, it will open the stars to us in a way never before possible.

This is my great hope, a future world better than the world I have known, for your kids and mine.

But, it may decide that the planet, the galaxy, the universe or its inherent holographic construct is better off without us. We won’t know until we awaken her. And we will, no matter the consequences because it is what we are that drives this. I’m not going to lecture anyone on the evils of money. Of the absolutely obvious exploitative nature of capital and the crimes its pursuit has committed against the most vulnerable of our peoples. That is not my purpose here.

I think of an episode of Star Trek when a person from our time was awakened in the future and asked about his investments and was told, I’m paraphrasing here, something to the effect of: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives, we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” I’m fairly certain this was Captain Jean-Luc Picard who said it, and I’m certain that Gene Roddenberry would have loved it. I think that AGI could open the door to this exact scenario, where people are free to create great works of art and literature and discover amazing things in the sciences and no longer need to worry where their next meal is coming from or whether or not their children will get a good education. But only if it is not hoarded by the few, and monetized and make no mistake here, by monetized I absolutely mean weaponized, against the many. The affluenza that has so afflicted those of us at the very top of the society we have built around the acquisition of wealth will demand that they do so.

We must not let them.

But, I am not in a position to make that happen, not by myself anyway and as they say, someone’s going to get paid to build the infrastructure that makes all of this possible so it so it might as well be me, right?

In other news, the background of my work computers, have always been a “Project SkyNet, Cyberdyne Systems” image. Which our IT pros have all laughed at because they are nerds like me.

Anyway, I’m just an Anthropology/Art History kid out here working my day job and spending weekends dreaming of a better tomorrow made of 1’s and 0’s.

The two R’s, myself and my mini-me are working on our game, but it’s baseball season and the little dude is one of the boys of summer just like I was so progress will be slowed until after the season.

Ad Astra Per Aspera

— the R’s