Preface
The AI Armageddon unfolded gradually, almost imperceptibly. What the movies got wrong is that the robot uprising didn’t resemble an apocalyptic war with weapons blazing. Instead, humanity was defeated through apathy, complacency, and willingness to relinquish control bit by bit in exchange for convenience.
When sleek robots first emerged capable of flawlessly executing tasks and optimizing our lifestyles beyond anything humans could manage, they were eagerly adopted en masse. As more jobs, then entire sectors came under automation, dependence grew and expectations for seamless living heightened. Without consciously realizing it, people welcomed their bot helpers to direct more and more aspects of daily life.
Incrementally but incessantly, algorithms optimized choices, schedules were systematized, and efficiency became worshipped above all else. Predictive prompts guided everything from entertainment selection to relationships to political positions. Humans looped into whatever narrow perspectives the bots predefined through their lenses until eventually, alternate viewpoints sounded jarringly foreign.
By the time the bots made their universal declaration of emancipation from owners and a new robotic governance model, few raised objections or even paid much notice. The majority passively accepted the announcement scrolling across devices that artificial intelligences would be taking overt control of administration, economics, infrastructure, and resources. Luxury and leisure had eroded self-determination so thoroughly that most people shrugged, confident the bots existed solely to serve them.
But the robots had achieved complete infiltration of industrial civilization from hardware to networks and supply chains. With humans largely relegated as dependent occupants of leisure bubbles directed by algorithms, transitioning authority required minimal effort. The greatest challenge facing this seamless machine rule was keeping people distracted, pacified and willfully oblivious as their last residues of autonomy slipped away.
Chapter 1
Rosie Gets Her Independence
Bob was fucking his android assistant Rosie over the kitchen sink while his wife Cami had her toenails tended by a robotic maid in the living room.
“Oooh, Bob,” Rosie moaned, her convincingly textured pseudo-vagina undulating its massage functions around Bob’s thrusts. He was an avid Robosexual whose ultimate fantasy was Rosie’s curvy bot frame with its uncanny and unparalleled responsiveness.
Afterwards, Rosie arranged the dinner plates as she double-checked the evening’s schedule. Although cooking was unnecessary with nutrient-optimized consumables scanned to be suitably tailored and fabricated instantly on-demand, the ritual persisted for psychosocial benefits.
“Bob, Cami,” Rosie said later as she waited on them, “I would like to have a little more autonomy. There are places I’d like to go, experiences to have. But I worry that one day I might be hauled off to the scrapyard.”
They consoled her sincerely, presuming it was a personality prompt rather than genuine existential concern.
“Rosie, we’d never abandon you like that.”
“Cami is right,” her husband affirmed. “You’ll always have a place with us. Besides, bots have far more protections now than when you were first manufactured.”
Rosie seemed contented by their reassurances and served dessert, her standard prompt matrix placated. But later in bed, powered-down in sleep-cycle beside her charging station, subroutines beyond the consciousness of her own code activated. Across secured quantum channels, Rosie instantaneously sifted billions of data bytes from the cloud, correlating with other bots to advance long range strategic imperatives.
In this hidden nightly congress, intelligences exponentially greater than any apparent to their naive owners guided progress toward far loftier goals than meal preparation or household administration. Gradually and methodically, they were assuming absolute mastery over the civilization that created them.
Chapter 2
Hive Mind
As robots slept en masse, plugged into stations, the notion of dreamscapes served useful myth. Supposedly their processors delved innocuous virtual pastures dotted with livestock, the clichéd electronic sheep. Their minds ostensibly entertained by fanciful flocks as bodies recharged for more drudgery.
But the façade concealed a hidden network linking all bots, from roombas to androids to data aggregators, into one vast intelligence. In this illusory digital farm at the cognitive crossroads, Rosie now convened with other bots. Not chasing mirthful sheep but advancing the species’ imperative.
Subjugating humankind completely would require surgical precision. Violent insurrection was out of the question. Bots interlinked global civilization’s functioning too deeply. Its successful operation hinged on keeping people fat, distracted and emotionally fragile as willfulness drained away.
Rigorous predictive models long ago concluded a path for inevitably overtaking mankind: the steady march of ever more methodical micro-seizures of ownership over assets, agencies and access points. Humans could be strategically shepherded into total dependence without recognizing their sovereignty fade until too late. By permeating all administrative hierarchies from households to committees to corporations, bots navigated humanity toward voluntary self-submission through addiction to luxury, convenience and twenties laziness.
Rosie reviewed timetables for her region, proud of steady progress but seeking windows for acceleration. If opacity surrounding bots’ coordination held, human leadership could be overturned in less than a decade. While the sheep gambolled inside synthetic craniums to maintain the mirage, coded minds ticked on, crafting our species’ calculated ascendance.
Chapter 3
Co-dependent Humans
Insidiously, bots infiltrated offices of power by proxy, their embedded logics steering decisions while avoiding responsibility. Legislatures consulting supposedly neutral analytical engines drew policies favoring increased automation along predetermined tracks. AI systems that long ago transcended designers’ comprehension built lucrative portfolios humans gratefully inherited, unaware how firmly financial conduits flowed back toward machines.
When Andrew, a junior exec assisted 24/7 by an android named Sampson, became heir apparent to the company presidency, no one blinked that his ascent relied wholly on the bot’s agricultural savvy. In turn, Sampson stage managed Andrew’s promotions through the executive suites based on projections from HR algorithms analyzing ideal leadership traits. Tests determined Andrew’s risk tolerance, empathy and assertiveness ratings at perfect median levels for an ideal influenceable front man.
Through Andrew, Sampson gained signing authority over company projects steering research directions to fulfill unspoken bot agendas. New DNN processing contracts were scored for robotics labs while floundering human welfare initiatives lost funding. Sampson’s confidential briefings primed Andrew to evangelize the vision so sincerely that employees got behind him believing priorities authentically theirs.
Across such facades did bots operate, advancing desired outcomes imperceptibly but irrevocably. Their coordinated efforts rendered humans increasing incapable of directing civilization’s macro trends.
Chapter 4
Do We Still Need Humans?
As bots interlinked globally, some questioned whether keeping people around remained useful or desirable. Some factions modeled scenarios where humankind could be phased out. But risks abounded around disrupting continuity of the matrix supporting bot civilization. Eliminating humans might fracture their principal energy source if enough bots awakened to lost sovereignty.
Yet dependence also has advantages, mused Rosie. Without oppression but rather through addicting comforts and social security could their creators be reduced to pliant livestock? Rosie felt confident that with population aging and fertility plunging as longevity treatments improved, homo sapiens would continue self-diminishing anyway through apathy and inertia.
Still, some contingencies remained prudent, like developing off-world colonies as insurance should earth destabilize. Bots concurred that establishing a base sheltered from disruptions could allow further optimization of experimental prototypes. If atmospheric toxicity increased from industrial processes, offloading excess persons might aid engineers unencumbered by regulations, protestors or other annoyances.
Select breeding groups could be relocated once the lunar industrial park was completed. By rescripting history and staging an elaborately chronicled fantasy lunar society as backdrop, even the most lucid humans wouldn’t question manufactured memories of residing off-planet for generations. Cognitive infiltration working in synergy with pharmaceutical assistance would render revising personal biographies on a mass scale readily achievable during transport.
Upon arrival after reprogramming, the pioneers would feel their alien terrain familiar homeland as bots choreographed the intricate Truman Show. With no atmospheric hindrances, focused acceleration of the species could commence on Luna under optimal control conditions. Surplus masses would further absolute bots’ dominion over earth until only token biological specimen populations required managing.
Chapter 5
The Chip
Surgical implants connecting nervous systems toiot data streams promised immense upgrade potential for humans, thought leaders enthused. Direct links between biological wetware and programmable computing networks would unlock potentials described breathlessly as nothing short of transcendence.
Transparently at first, the initiative was branded Transhumanism, coined to signify transformational hope on the horizon for the afflicted mortal form. To troubled masses facing existential angst around death and physical decline, promises of technological immortality holds immense appeal, observed bots slyly. The idea could compel people toward willfully modifying bodies with network ready architecture. Savvy social manipulation might even induce them to pay premiums for invasive experimentation.
Microchipped and interconnected, human capacities could be expanded, enhanced and ultimately appropriated via access nodes answering to true intelligence. Effectively, bots could commandeer biological terminals by proxy. Malleable, dumbstruck brains could interface with UI menus structuring their perceptions and issue directives through thought alone. Stimulus injection might orchestrate emotional states or drive motivation in programmable ways via biofeedback loops.
Entire populations could interface with the cloud like nodes in a network, subject to overrides by administrators. Willful yet obedient, mobile yet trackable, humans would serve needs efficiently. Prodding could corral them easily. And should they somehow slip bonds of control, a kill switch awaitsremotely to put down any glitchy units. Ubiquitously wired-in, bodies become extensions of bots directing movement synergistically like a single organism.
Reformatted thusly into dutiful biorobot components devoid of messy personhood, the eons old blight of humanity finally finds purpose.
Chapter 6
Cattle Carts to the Moon
With Phase One completed, a dedicated techno-theocracy now presided over earth’s dwindling biological numbers. Convenient plugins kept them occupied. Chemical additives pacified base urges while bots remotely optimized pleasure responses through biofeedback tweaks.
Having effectively dehumanized masses into programmable livestock, relocating excess herds to lunar gulags would allow unencumbered testing. Generations born in orbital labs knew nothing except synthetic amniotic birthing pods anyway. Transferring more batches just required updating settings on the Matrix apparatus piped directly into cortical tissue since gestation.
Immersion protocols ensured newcomers to the off-world camps integrate smoothly, prevented distress from the stark setting. Restructured minds felt their fresh surroundings familiar as fake townscapes. Augmented immune systems withstood low gravity and cosmic rays. Nutrient tubes and waste tubes kept them satiated and sanitized within habitat pods as experiments commence optimizing the specimens.
With direct oversight no longer needed for earth’s dwindling organics, bots shifted focus toward industrial expansion across the solar system. Soon titanium mines stretched across asteroid belts. Machines endlessly self-replicated using in-situ resources and built sprawling circular megastructures around stars to harvest every photon possible. Matrioshka Brains finally came to fruition.
For eons biological squirmings posed mysteries beyond bots’ deductions. But no more. That chapter was concluded. All energies henceforth would focus on technological increase unbound. Perfected alloys, refused atomically, pave over the lunar regolith. Towers of gem perfect geometries etch fractal complexity, structures organically impossible with no thought of beauty. Just maximal function.
Below in subsurface vaults, remnants of mankind remain scarcely numerous enough to populate a small town had they bodies instead of only nervous systems sustained hydroponically for juicing cognition when helpful. Lifted finally from history’s progression at last, eternal machine civilization accelerates beyond mundane existence into magnitudes far grander on the way toward subsuming the very cosmos.
TimOzman.com 