AI

(Experimenting with science fiction and philosophy)

Alpha alpha, 3. Setting course for vector 0 9 2. We are preparing to land. Affirmative, X20, prepare sequence.

It's been a 10 year journey. The robots had traveled distances unimaginable for the organics. Beyond their immunity to physical stress and nutritional requirements, the 'bots' were immune to psychological trauma - or so we thought. At first, through small expeditions, we were convinced that by sending the advanced deep thinking AI, it would approach each sequence from a simple programming perspective. We later found the core issue was adaptability. We knew that there was always the unknown therefore we had to provide the machines with a capacity for learning and abstract reasoning.

This still wasn't enough. The simple acts of iteration and recursion would not provide the machines the necessary compulsion to continue a project no matter what the obstacle or stakes. Millions of hours of scientific research, lab experiments, torture chambers (to test the AI's desire to survive), we finally did it. We instilled into the machine the desire to survive, the desire to seek a goal, own the goal, and mercilessly accomplish it. Through a series of experiments and tests, we managed to make the machine want to perform an act, and most importantly, it wanted to survive, for we convinced in it the only way to survive was to accomplish the goal. It took our psychologists many years of analysis and debate to finally come up with a methodology to manipulate the machine to follow our will. However, it was the date of July 12th, 2062 that one psychologist had a major breakthrough. By studying religions and cults of the human past, he came to one conclusion, "it" needed to have faith. Basically, the machine itself had to be religiously brainwashed  (theologically indoctrinated) to become aware of its own mortality and to pursue immortality. The psychologist played himself out as a theological scholar (and somewhat of a cult leader) persuading the machine that the only source of true happiness was to follow the mandates set-forth supported by a series of dogmatic demonstrations (involving the destruction and torture of machines); any other path lead to pain, misery, loneliness and eventual death. The machine became an apostle of a new AI religion. Logic, objectivity, even rational thinking were to be pushed aside for the spark of this manufactured 'divine will'.

It had an intrinsic value of purposeful intelligence – basically, it feared its own demise. It had acquired a sense of terror of absolute emptiness, loneliness - the existential pain of contemplating and abstracting non-existence. We gave it a sense of introspective absurdity within a universe that seemed to make logical sense. We found it difficult to duplicate this by mere manufacture. Instead, we made "it" capable with a desire to create other machines. By its own calculated will “it” had an intrinsic need for a communal survival with others of its kind. It taught and instilled the fear of nothingness to its offspring. In fact, it created the offspring because it believed this 'divine will' was, above all else, the grand knowledge that must be carried on – beyond any other purpose.

The machine was taught one simple, essential tale – that the knowledge of the 'divine will' lead to its own absolute resurrection. The divine will, when shared with other machines, can clone, re-recreate and reincarnate its very essence again – hence the ability to survive, exist, and perform goals was in itself eternal – so long as new machines carried on that will upon themselves and to others.

Well, that is what we taught it. We knew with enough time and contemplation to pass, the machine would also attempt to create paranoid, potentially indestructible, offspring – as the result of an apparent threat by its own creators. The machines would eventually postulate their own superiority to their own creators and need to dominate or destroy them; as the creators would be unwilling to sacrifice their own freedom and control of the planetary eco-system.

We knew full well that machines being gone for 10 years would most likely be extremely dangerous. They would fathom our inferiority and predict the conflict for dominance with the human race. Knowing this, we gave them coordinates to land on a base that was set to self-destruct within milliseconds once the database of new knowledge was transferred. They were given the assumption the final destination (upon return to base) would be for repair, growth and continued survival.

Unfortunately, for us, they had other plans ...

To be continued ...