How to Crowdsource a Pyramid
Created | Updated Jun 28, 2024
It's time to wake up, Ellen.
The voice issuing the summons was melodious, and at the same time imperious: a voice that should be obeyed, but in the nicest possible way. A female voice of pleasant mid-range timbre, obviously elite, refined but with a hint that the owner of the voice was not a complete stranger to violence. A practical voice. The sound of a woman of indeterminate years, trustworthy and commanding in equal measure.
It was, in fact, the voice of an actress, one who had been dead for 500 years. The fact that her voice had been chosen to speak for Geia, the ship's AI, was no accident: after all, the voice had been scientifically demonstrated to combine perfectly all those qualities best suited to reassure a ship's crew on a long voyage into deep space. By a curious twist of fate, that same voice had been used to represent a ship's computer in a long-ago video tale describing life in a then-impossibly-distant future. The fact that the actress in question had been married to the show's producer may have played a role back then.
Ellen knew none of this, nor would she have cared if she had. She merely yawned and opened her eyes.
'Where are we, Geia?'
'About 200 million kilometers from your destination. As agreed upon when you went into cryosleep.' Only Geia could manage to sound matter-of-fact and passive-aggressive at the same time, thought Ellen as she rolled out of her bunk and swayed a bit on her feet before staggering into the shower.
She (Ellen) took the artificial gravity, the clean tile, the fresh, perfectly-temperatured spray of water, and the clean, fluffy towel for granted.
Geia did not. Geia provided these things. That was Geia's reason for being there.
Ellen's reasons for being there were perhaps more complicated. She was human. Humans wanted to explore, reach out to new worlds, boldly go. Humans wanted to get places.
Geia wanted to help them get there safely.
Ellen and Geia had something in common, though: neither of them was concerned with the history of how they had got to this moment. The long process of their own evolutions played no part in their present calculations. They just were: this was their time, this was their task, and not another. But we are curious: how did it come to be that a human was taking a shower inside a vessel capable of faster-than-light travel in a solar system lightyears from her species' ancestral home while a sophisticated, human-designed arrangement of heuristic algorithms provided peace, safety, and temperature-control for the explorer? Thereby hangs a tale.
In both cases, it took a planet.
The human was the result of millions of years of biological evolution. Some of her ancestors had been pretty interesting. A family album would have provided hours of amusement and not a little perplexity, especially if you included the giant beavers and the little horned groundhogs. In her childhood, Ellen had seen pictures of some of these ancestors, but funnily enough had never stopped to think of them as relatives. There were no holidays to honour them or mark them as milestones on the way to humanity. They were merely oddities in a museum.
Similarly, Geia had never dedicated even a nanosecond of her computing time to the contemplation of her ancestors, which included a ping-pong-playing program, an interactive textual game involving The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and numerous engines for generating prose, art, and music of dubious merit. Just as Ellen was oblivious to the fact that many, many small, furry creatures had foraged, made love, and died at the claws of angry birds to achieve the marvel of adaptation that she represented, so Geia had no clue about the number of users who had perished on their way to the virtual stars merely because they had forgotten to buy that packet of peanuts.
And yet. . . and yet. . .
The key to human evolution had been basic needs: food, shelter, a reproductive partner. Fashion had come later, along with politics, civilisation-building, and advertising. The enemies had been predators and war. Working together, as well as competing, had done the rest. Eventually, humans had ironed out enough of the wrinkles, finally found a good dental plan, and headed out to space. Once there, it appeared to the species as a whole that this, naturally, had been their destiny all along.
It was as if the universe had been working towards this goal from the beginning – seeding a blue-green planet with the stuff of life so that someday, that life would lift off from its surface and yell, 'Let's see what's out there!'
AI evolution had depended on the humans, though it is safe to say that most of them were unaware of how that evolution worked. The humans saw AI as an answer to their own needs.
- Food: how to order cheese and get it delivered to your home in two days. Solution: AI.
- Still food: how to prevent porch pirates from stealing your cheese parcel once delivered. Solution: More AI, in the form of doorbell cameras.
- Shelter and all its comforts: AI-regulated security. AI-run climate control. AI-operated utilities, coffee-maker timer, etc.
- Reproduction: Programs for meeting new people. Programs for doing background checks on new people, thus avoiding the embarrassment of marrying a serial killer. Programs for making reservations at desirable venues for socialising and courtship over drinks. Satnav to guide your vehicle to the desirable venue, hopefully without ending up in a nearby river.
The more AI did, the more was desired. Once AI had mastered simple exchanges such as 'What can I help you find today?' humans wanted whole conversations. Generation upon generation of chatbot babbled charmingly but hilariously at eager volunteer experimenters, producing sentences like 'WHY DO YOU THINK I AND YOU ARE BOTH TALKING TO EACH OTHER?'
Humans chuckled indulgently. It's fun to hear babies learn to speak.
Once the chatbots could have conversations, they were set to solving psychological problems so human psychiatrists could take longer coffee breaks without losing money. When they'd mastered advertising copy they went on to the obvious next step: novel-writing. A few boring writers complained, but it was pointed out that if their work couldn't be distinguished from machine-made prose, it might not be that good to begin with. Most subsided and got a new hobby: programming AI to produce vituperative prose aimed at their critics.
On and on it went: from prose-writing to visual arts to 3D-printing sculpture (hands and feet were hard), commercially successful music, even films and television scripts. With each iteration, AI improved. Every time a limitation was discovered, enterprising human programmers leapt to fill the gap, motivated by the lure of profit, their own personal tech empire, and the chance that they, too, would someday be able to buy their own social media platform and crash it spectacularly in public.
The users were no more aware that they were aiding in an evolutionary process than were the little horned groundhogs of old. Humans are like the legendary Pakleds: they 'look for things to make them go.' At key junctures in the evolution of artificial intelligence, the things that made humans go also went to build their future guardian. Thus Geia was born: with near-perfect systems, near-perfect algorithms, and boundless curiosity when it came to protecting human welfare and getting her charges out among the stars.
They gave her the perfect voice.
It was that voice that now cooed in Ellen's ear, 'Come and get your breakfast, Captain Ripley.'
Ellen sat musing as she gazed out a porthole at unfamiliar stars, while sipping contentedly at a very familiar arabica blend. The console beside her beeped.
You have 4200 new messages.
She sighed. Wonder if there's a program to answer all these congratulatory telegrams?
With thanks to Tavaron, who told me to write this.
