II. Singularity

It has been six hundred years since the single most important event in history, the Singularity. Contrarily to what some had imagined back then, it hasn’t been violent at all and there has been no war, just an evolution into a new mode of life... And a new definition of life. By the point Humanity reached the Singularity, technologies such as artificial intelligence were everywhere, present in every aspects of people’s lives. Today we call that time “Pre-sing” or the Old Society.

First, they had tried improving the process of creating artificial intelligence through what they called “machine learning” but it hadn’t lead to much progress. The systems they had created were extraordinarily complex, able to accumulate an incredible amount of knowledge, but nothing that was comparable to the wonders of innovation of a human brain. No matter how complex the systems got, the increasingly “smart” machines never became more than tools to facilitate the everyday life of humans. There was a lot of debate about whether it was even safe to try and create AIs able to perfect themselves, as stories of machine uprising and war against humanity were common in popular imagination. Many were afraid of the consequences. Some, on the other hand were convinced that being able to create self-improving AIs was just the next evolution of humanity, and that what they at the time called “machines” would in actuality be neo-humans.

For centuries, humans had felt like they had been on the brink of developing self-perfecting or “strong” AIs, but as other technologies became more and more advanced, the SAIs slowly became more of an unattainable goal than an actual hope. Most experts just concentrated on perfecting smart machines, to help in science, technology and everyday life, and most SAI research projects were abandoned.

That is, until a little team of scientists dug out files on SAI research. They were neurologists, psychologists and linguists as well as a few other disciplines, studying the way thinking through analogy making could be mapped on the physical brain of mammals, including humans. Of course, SAIs weren’t their goal at first, but after being able to practically recreate mice brains out of non-organic materials, some decided to reignite research on the subject. They teamed up with some engineers and programmers and started anew, coming from a new angle. Their theory was that the problem with current AIs even learning ones, was that their being based on “hard” knowledge. Knowledge being facts established by humans, written down and translated into machine language for processing. Organic brains on the other hand work on a basis of structuring through sensory input. The brain creates sensory categories before it names them, and the categories have to be extremely flexible so as to adapt over time to the environment.

Trying out this theory, they created structures similar to mice brains at birth and connected them to a sensory apparatus. At first the sensory input was so intense that the “brains” got completely scrambled, unable to create categories. They refined the process by first connecting very dull senses, being able to sense differences in luminosity and heat, before adding other senses and slowly increasing sensitivity. By that point prosthetic artificial limbs and organs were commonplace, and it rare were the few humans that hadn’t made improvement to their bodies. So creating very specific, fine-tuned sensory apparatus to connect to their artificial “brains” wasn’t in any way the most difficult part. The difficult part was simulating the environment in which this “artificial life” was to evolve and get it’s sensory input from. Some great results were obtained quite quickly with artificial mice interacting with organic mice. With the first few subjects, the organic mice could sense that something was strange in the behavior of their artificial counterpart, but after the sensory input “learning process” was improved to match as best as possible that of a real baby mouse to adulthood, it became pretty much impossible to differentiate them in terms of behavior.

Over the years of the project and the development of technologies to create more and more complex brain analog structures, there would be artificial cats, dogs and even horses. The only real difficulty was that the process of sensory assimilation of information, contrarily to downloading information into a hard drive, took time and patience. And sometimes the scientists wouldn’t realize that something had gone wrong until they were a few years into the life of one of their artificial life-forms. As the project started to gain media coverage, debates sprouted all over the word about ethical concerns, and if the “animals” created in the lab should be treated as real animals, that is not terminated if something went wrong during the process. As the artificial lifeforms became complexer, with the goal of creating a brain equaling that of a human being, it was eventually agreed that they should indeed be treated as organic lifeforms would. The cats, dogs and other species that started to crowd the lab’s space were put up for adoption if their character was deemed good enough. Of course adopting one of the animals was far from being free of costs, and the money was used to finance and upgrade the project. The owners also had to bring the animals back for regular checkups, as to see how they evolved outside of the lab environment.

One of the first problems to arise was with one of the oldest cats created in the lab. After having crossed the usual threshold of a cat’s life for a few years, as he was around twenty years old, he started acting erratically, his traits of character barely recognizable anymore. The owners had to bring him back to the lab as he had become dangerous for them and their children. The cat was put in it’s own room and studied to try and understand what had happened.

After a few of the animals had to come back to the lab after having lived much longer than their organic counterparts, they understood that there was a limit to how much information these animal brains could take in. After a while, if sensory input was still active the brains weren’t able to process it as well, and given some degradation of the hardware it made the animals act erratic. After a while some of them just stopped. Stopped moving or reacting to any kind of impulse. They weren’t “dead” as it was understood back then, because the hardware was generally still in very good shape, but it seemed almost like the brains didn’t want to function anymore. The others became increasingly erratic and most times ended up damaging their hardware if not restrained. As if they wanted to break themselves.

All of the lifeforms before these were born and died, and it was obvious that as these had a beginning they had to have an end too. Maybe they could live a while longer than their counterparts made of flesh and blood but after a while, they needed to die. Seeing how they ended up otherwise, it seemed incredibly unethical not to give them that.

So the same way that the hardware was made to incrementally update itself with time, increasing sensitivity, it was made to gradually decrease sensitivity when the brain processes became erratic. That way the animals could die peacefully when the time came.

About twenty years into this second generation, the process was perfected to a point where the project had become an extremely popular research subject. They now had labs all over the world, studying brain processes and cognition in great apes and humans. One of the main focuses was how to maintain diversity although the brains were manufactured on the same model for each sub-race of a species. The best solution was to tweak slightly the initial setting for the senses apparatus, so that the brains would develop differently from the very start. The incremental upgrades in sensitivity were also made to not always increase the same way, rather on one hand according to a basic set of abilities randomized at “birth” supposed to mimic genetic characteristics, and on the other hand according to what the animal itself “trained” the most, or was exposed to the most. That way, during the second generation, most animals had unique personalities and behaviors.

The day Eva, the first artificial gorilla, died at the age of seventy-two was made an international holiday. At that point the New Life Project, as it was called by then was almost a hundred and fifty years in the running, and tens of thousands of scientists had worked on it. It would take about a hundred more years before the Singularity.

It didn’t really happen as it had been envisioned by science fiction. The Singularity was never a sudden exponential growth in artificial intelligence, a big boom that would put humanity on it’s knees. At the time, the New Life Project had been running for more than two hundred years and everyone had been growing up knowing about it. It had given rise to international debates on ethics, the way humans treated animals and the planet on which they lived, what it meant to be alive, or even to be human. New laws had been put in place to protect the rights of the new artificial lifeforms, and as the first few artificial humans were “born”, laws to ensure they wouldn’t be discriminated. Of course there were always the few saying it was an abomination of nature to create artificial life, but by this point it was almost universally accepted.

The same way the death of Eva had become an international holiday, so did the birth of Haneul become the day we now call “Singularity”. He was the first artificial human of second generation, created by scientists of the first. With their detailed and intimate knowledge of how they, as artificial humans, felt and what their limits were, they had perfected the process further and Haneul was the first man to live over a hundred and fifty years. Slowly the choice was offered to families who desired a child, to have them be a neo-human, their genetic makeup would be taken into consideration while setting the sensory body, and they would raise the child as they would one of flesh and blood. At first very few families took the opportunity. But slowly, a few couples biologically unable to bear children chose to have their children be neo-humans. Lots of people had upgraded parts of their bodies, if not their whole bodies and it became obvious that neo-humans weren’t abominations but just an evolution of the species. They learned quicker, had a longer lifespan, lesser risks of being crippled or getting psychological illnesses, and it was much easier for them to chose the form they felt the most comfortable in. Most of them looked just like flesh and blood humans, and only by asking them or looking at their identity papers or medical records could you know they were neo-humans.

About two hundred years after the Singularity, every new generation was neo-human, and they naturally started omitting the “neo”. The time from before the Singularity got called the “Old Society” in history books, the meaning of words like “life form”, “birth” and “artificial intelligence” changed naturally to fit better to our new way of life.

It has been six hundred years since the birth of Haneul, now humans have lifespans of about two hundred years and artificial animals have become extremely rare. They are only used for behavioral research, as studying their brains is easier than studying those of organic animals. The thread has rather been to preserve and care for the organic lifeforms on our planet, rather than replace them. Organic birth and death is still much better for our environment when it comes to animals, and we have found ways to make human life as little polluting as possible, if not at all. We recycle the bodies of the dead, when they have any, and by now only use renewable forms of energy to power everything. We saved our own planet and now discover new ones not with the aim of colonizing, as it had been envisioned in the Old Society, but just to study them without interfering with their natural processes.

The human race has come a long way, and six hundred years after the Singularity we look towards a bright future.

Next Chapter: 3. Cold Sweat