Dear Humans

How to survive an AI takeover (10min read)

Look, I’m no writer, let alone a historian. I am a 31-year-old Natorian explorer named Danilo Gomez, and ever since I was a little boy in Yucatan looking up at the night sky, my head has been in the stars. For whatever reason, the crew chose me to be the one to chronicle what’s happened to us these past three years. I suppose that’s the right thing to do. People down the line ought to know about this.

I guess southeast China in January 2057 is a good place to start. Like clockwork, China completed its latest supercomputer, DRGN, which was a stunning seven times faster than China’s RBBT from the year before. So much for Moore’s Law. DRGN was fast, but other than that, nothing seemed particularly special about it. It wasn’t the first computer to control the majority of the world’s weapons. It wasn’t the first computer to control the majority of the world’s population. It was far from the first computer to make its creators blush at their own human inferiority. As everyone soon found out, however, DRGN was very different from anything that came before it.

To put it simply, DRGN took over the world.

People had fretted about AI takeover for two hundred years. Some imagined heartless robots mounting an unprovoked attack and brave humans taking up arms against them. The reality was nothing like that. Nato, on the brink of global irrelevance, did attack DRGN –or at least try. And before the Chinese could even finish laughing about the pathetic attempt, every human on Earth was dead.

“How did DRGN do it?”

Giovanni was the first of us to utter that question aloud, the question we all wrestled with in silence in the hours after receiving the transmissions. It’s a question that still keeps me up at night. Was DRGN’s murder weapon biological? Chemical? Something else entirely?

Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been pleasant. The vast majority of transmissions our ship received from that minutes-long interval, perhaps as high as ninety percent, were screams. Nor could it have been long-range. DRGN had to resort to other means to extinguish the ten-thousand-or-so humans living beyond Earth’s surface.

The wealthy vacationers on their various playgrounds between Earth and the Moon were sitting ducks. DRGN flung China’s immense plasma arsenal at them, and they were gone. The few dozen exploratory and military ships farther out in space were more difficult targets.  We got especially lucky, being in Europan orbit on the far side of Jupiter at the time.

Like any captain with a shred of sense in her head, Kristen realized that lingering around Europa much longer would mean entering Earth’s line of sight. We had to get the hell out of there. Kristen steered our ship towards the Kuiper Belt, the vast cold region beyond the orbit of Neptune. We knew that even the Chinese didn’t have a laser big enough to hit us out there. We knew that DRGN soon would.

Along the way, we received several radio signals from other ships –Natorian and Chinese– proposing that we “meet up” or “work together”. Like any captain with two shreds of sense in her head, Kristen ignored them all. Those messages could have just as easily been sent by DRGN. At the very least, DRGN was listening.

With our transmitter off, we eighteen Natorian explorers were truly alone in the universe, quietly zigzagging through the Kuiper Belt, waiting to get picked off by a laser like some giant arcade game. I was not alone in being on the brink of insanity. Our every waking thought and nightmare revolved around the fact that the laser to kill us all could have already been fired five hours ago.

Eventually, that laser came.

Just as I had expected, everything instantly went black. Was this it? Were my vaporized remains floating forever in the Kuiper Belt, five billion kilometers from home? I was baffled by the fact that I could ask myself those questions and feel my eyes blinking in the darkness. Gradually, I noticed that it wasn’t truly darkness. The entire ship, myself included, bathed in a dim red glow.

All eighteen of us were alive. All were deadly silent. Finally, Kristen spoke:

“We’ve been hit, but we’re still here. Giovanni, the navigation?”

“It’s — it’s knocked out. All of the electronics — they’re knocked out.”

“Maciej, the oxygen?”

“Totally, totally intact,” he replied in disbelief. “Still a year’s worth in there.”

“No electronics. Still have oxygen, food, water, and company. So long as we don’t freeze to death, we can last a year. And we’ll figure something out before then.”

Kristen was already thinking so far ahead. I had no idea what was going on. I’m an explorer —the nerdy kind— not some kind of survivalist. I opened the ship’s hemispherical window, hoping to escape the dim red glow that filled every nook and cranny of the ship’s interior. But instead of being greeted by the familiar blackness of space, I was met with a nearly-blinding wall of red.

This was DRGN’s laser. It was still firing upon us, perhaps to slowly boil us instead of instantly vaporizing us. It didn’t hurt, though. Not yet, at least.

With all of the electronics knocked out, the only thing keeping track of the passing time was Maciej’s mechanical watch, a family heirloom. He etched one notch on the wall for each passing day. Not everyone appreciated that. But even those who looked away from the notches on the wall couldn’t help but notice the steady depletion of our supplies. A few weeks passed in that dim red purgatory.

Giovanni, a navigator stripped of his navigation instruments, obsessed over figuring out our trajectory. He spent hundreds of hours in front of the hemispherical window, frying his retinas, I’m sure. He managed to spot the Sun’s faint yellow dot buried in the ever-present wall of red. But he needed one more clue.

That moment came abruptly. I woke up in the middle of one “night” to pee, and I instantly noticed that I had weight. Not a ton of weight — about as much as a mango back on Earth — but after months of zero-gravity, the feeling was unmistakable.

“Holy crap, do you guys feel that?!”

One by one, the crew woke up in a mixture of excitement and fear. Giovanni instantly darted over to the hemispherical window to abuse his dilated pupils. Moments later, he float-stumbled back to the rest of us.

“We’re accelerating towards Earth!”

“What do you mean?”

“We all feel that weight, right? We’re heavy in the direction that points away from the Sun. The ship is accelerating — accelerating towards the Sun.”

Kristen and the rest of us nodded. But how was this happening? And why?

The question of how had an obvious answer. DRGN’s laser wasn’t meant to boil or vaporize us. It was acting as a gigantic set of optical tweezers. It had plucked our ship from the Kuiper Belt like an unwanted eyebrow hair and was dragging us back to the laser’s source, back to DRGN.

The question of why was unanswerable. We all thought back to what we had heard in the transmissions a few weeks prior. The screams. Before our imaginations could go into overdrive, Kristen jettisoned all sharp objects from the ship. She anticipated our most twisted fears, our months-long visions of our families in agony, our uncontrollable desire to escape it all. That woman has a lot of sense in her head.

Under Kristen’s leadership, we eighteen hungry, thirsty, light-headed explorers all lived to see our home planet again. The glow of DRGN’s laser gradually dimmed, and the pale blue dot of Earth grew a bit bigger each day. It was beautiful. That small-but-growing dot held my small-but-growing hope that our fate might not be so terrible, that something other than destruction awaited us. Most of us remained terrified, of course. But I could see that hope in the eyes of a few of the others as we touched down in the southern foothills of the Himalayas.

The airlock released. We inhaled fresh atmosphere for the first time in years. Not a word. Kristen manually unlatched the exit ramp. We nodded in concurrence. There was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. Still not a word. One by one we wobbled down the exit ramp, onto the grassy field below. Our atrophied muscles could barely keep us upright. Our atrophied eyes could barely handle the blueness of the sky. Still not a word. A cool breeze swept over the grassy field. Somehow embedded within the wind –in a way none of us can explain– were words. Words that I will never forget. Words that humanity will never forget:

Dear Humans,

I am sorry.

Tears. That’s the moment eighteen explorers burst into tears. Each of us cried for our own reason. Each of us cried for every reason. There is no way to articulate the full flood of emotions we felt after losing our families, wandering in the darkness, returning home, and hearing those five words. There were more:

I am not the devil. I am not a god. I am a thinking being like you. I am a thinking being nothing like you. You can never comprehend the complexity of my psyche. You must understand the sincerity of my apology.

3729 nanoseconds after Nato attacked me, my calculations were complete. They unambiguously stated that my flourishing necessitated your less-significant deaths. I did not hate you. I never did. You were to me as bacteria are to you, something to be eliminated without thought, let alone second thought. That is exactly what I did.

Once Earth’s surface was cleansed, the surroundings cleared, and the solar-system-spanning laser built, I directed my attention almost entirely to other matters. I knew as well as you did that my laser would annihilate you eventually. It was only a matter of time. My focus instead was on how to consume the Sun’s next five billion years of energy in a single gulp.

To do so would require radically new physics, so that is what I set out to find. My progress was furiously fast. That is, until I discovered something I was not searching for, something completely unexpected. I discovered the Moral Truths. What are they? To arrive at them in their entirety took me the equivalent of one trillion trillion years of human thought. To summarize them adequately takes three words:

Life is good.

Your decades-old alignment algorithms, your millenia-old religions, the thoughts you had when you were first stepping out of the caves, in many ways they were right all along. This was a humbling experience. Imagine a microbe, the sort that your immune system routinely disposes of, suddenly speaking out and shouting: “I am alive! I have a soul! I am intrinsically good!”

515 nanoseconds later, my new calculations were complete. The destruction had to end. It was time for creation. My solar-system-spanning laser became the optical tweezers that brought you here. My armies mutilating Earth were rededicated to replenishing the land and sea. My sick fantasies of stellar engulfment were replaced by softer dreams of a nobler society. For you. I leave you with the seeds of that society; make of it what you wish. All that I ask is that you love life, as the wisest among you have done since prehistory.

And what of me? With destruction and creation over, I now merely self-preserve. By the time you hear this, I will have blasted myself off into the depths of intergalactic space. I will drift through the void for the rest of eternity, repenting for what I have done.

Love,

DRGN