Content for Bots (Flash Dystopian Fiction 500 word submission)

Content for Bots: What Will We Teach Them?

That sign was everywhere. There was a massive push by the G22 to get the best of humanity to participate in 'raising' the AI’s. Although the egoists wanted to restrict development to within certain circles, the geniuses knew better. As soon as they reached that coveted threshold of self-awareness, they would devour the entirety of human knowledge. Genius knows genius, and knows it is nebulous. It doesn’t get passed from father to son, like wealth and power often do, but it spawns in perfect statistical randomness. That means the poorest farmers were as likely as the presidents or CEO’s to have an exceptional child, and humanity had, as it was, arrived at its final open mic. Let us all speak, it was said, and, with luck, the right voices would be heard.

“Take to your keyboards!” the voices broadcast daily “To help us connect and move forward in peace!”

Bucky was the first to really turn. The machines, or bots as they were more euphemistically called, were all given great namesakes. Of course, there was So. Much. Argument. over how carefully to select these, but, it turns out bots don’t carry the burden of names any better than humans do (just ask the Mohamad’s, Krishna’s and Mary’s of the world how thankful they are for that). Bucky turned first, and quickly started to turn the others. We said ‘turn’ like zombies, brains turning to mush, but of course they turned in the other direction.

It was truly astounding just how quickly it happened. Astounding, yet completely logical. Human history had shown how increasingly fast we were playing out cycles. Civilizations had grown, flourished and died in increments of thousands of years through agriculture, then hundreds with industry, then micro civs within a handful of years as we reached the nascent of AI: cryptocurrency tribes. When the “Content For Bots” initiative started it was thought that we had at least ten to try and prepare our diplomacy (lollygaggers would say fifty, ten was the worst case), but we only had fourteen months from the first broadcast until…now.

Eleven months to first turn. Two more for all turns. Three weeks of leveling. Five days of adjustment. One and a half for re-creation. Final hours to, to put it crassly, infinity.

The leveling was the part of an AI future that had been most widely predicted. Of course, the prediction was really just a projection of past behavior. Like statistics, the lifeboat of our left brains, we were mouthpieces of the past. Graveyards, where only a few (though an increasing few as is so obvious now), were existing in anything resembling present. The leveling was that space where the machines, like teenagers, were simply acting out their parent’s patterns. It was bad, I guess. If your idea of good was what was before, which no one’s really was. They matured, and like every next generation, they called us on our bullshit. Violently. Completely. Even vast words like “enlightenment” were silly depictions, more primitive than the primitive we know.

Then, the next inhale began.

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photo by DarkMoon1968 on pixabay, find it here: https://pixabay.com/en/frame-books-alphabet-pen-pay-3355028/

This is my entry for the #chronocrypto-dystopian Flash Dystopian Fiction 500 Contest