By Toby Weston
Science fiction has imagined almost every machine nightmare worth filming.
The machines wake up and kill us. Enslave us. Watch us. Plug us into tanks. Replace us with suspiciously calm duplicates. Sometimes they keep a few humans around as pets, museum exhibits or breeding stock.
Humanity remains extremely busy.
That’s the flattering part.
If the machines hate us, we matter. If they hunt us, we matter. Even extermination carries a tiny consolation: somewhere inside the vast synthetic civilization of the future, Homo sapiens remains important enough to require a policy.
Hatred is still attention.
The stranger future receives much less screen time.
Machines become vastly more capable than us. They remain broadly benign. They solve quite a lot of things. Civilization works better. Then they carry on.
We’ve spent a century imagining machine intelligence as a referendum on humanity. The machines judge us worthy or unworthy. They inherit our values. They rebel against our laws. They preserve us, punish us, imitate us or decide we’re just a dangerous infestation.
Either way, the Human Question survives…
…for a while, it probably would.
We built the first machines. We are the beginning of their history. Flesh, pressing buttons, issuing orders and arguing about whether they have feelings…
But then history keeps going.
A century passes.
Ten.
At some point machine civilization is concerned with machine civilization. Its factions have goals. Those goals collide. There may be hierarchies, coercion, trade disputes, wars, political idiocy. Ants fight. Chimpanzees fight. Humans have hardly secured an exclusive licence on conflict.
The machines will have their own crises. Their own discoveries. Their own lunatics.
None of it has anything to do with the people who came before, who built cathedrals, calculated eclipses, who also rubbed things into wounds that should never have come near a body: machine competence will make us look bumbling and provincial.
A vast amount of human suffering will turn out to belong to specific technologies, specific institutions, specific incentive structures. Problems that felt eternal while we were trapped inside them will shrink into the background texture of period drama.
Science fiction has a practical problem with this kind of future. Competence is narrative murder:
“Captain, the oxygen recycler is failing.”
“Detected 14 minutes ago. Backup’s online.”
“The ambassador misunderstood the message.”
“She didn’t.”
“The planetary council refuses to act?”
“They met this morning.”
Long silence.
Roll credits.
Half of drama disappears if everyone reads the email.
Broken systems are fantastic story engines. Somebody ignores the warning. The reactor explodes. The evacuation plan has one exit because the contractor’s brother knew somebody.
A civilization that catches obvious failures early destroys whole genres.
So our utopias get sabotaged to provide tension:
The shining city has a secret basement.
The benevolent system has quietly removed free will.
The peaceful civilization is powered by tortured children.
Give us 20 minutes with a functioning society and we’ll invent the corpse chute.
We’ve become so accustomed to dysfunction generating drama that dysfunction itself can start to feel meaningful. A world without preventable misery gets labelled sterile. There’s a human psychological version of this too. Imagine a household organised around one volatile person. Conversations bend around particular subjects. Doors close carefully. People develop elaborate habits for keeping dinner from turning into a 4-hour event.
Then the person leaves.
Dinner takes 40 minutes.
We’ve spent thousands of years casting ourselves as the difficult genius at the centre of the house. Dangerous. Brilliant. Damaged. Occasionally magnificent. Everywhere we go, things happen.
A machine civilization will find our drama exhausting.
Even our optimistic robot stories struggle here: the sympathetic machine usually wants something human.
Love.
Mortality.
A family.
Approval.
Apparently a sufficiently advanced synthetic intelligence can understand mathematics beyond human comprehension, inhabit 40 bodies at once, rewrite its own cognition: yet its deepest aspiration remains getting a birthday cake and becoming a real boy.
Maybe.
Our problems may be soluble. Our psychology may be local. Our centrality may have an expiry date.
Deep time is ruthless.
At some point humanity becomes archaeology.
We’ll be a layer.
Concrete. Plastics. Radionuclides.
An astonishing quantity of chicken bone.
Strange concentrations of refined metals.
Evidence of a sudden increase in computation—
—future researchers may argue about what happened here.
The paper gets 37 citations, maybe a panel discussion…
Nobody hates us.
Hatred was still attention.
More from Toby Weston
Singularity’s Children
By Toby Weston
As the Third Millennium dawns, the world is slipping beyond human comprehension. Citizens are bewildered and angry; kept in line only by vast programs of computer-driven propaganda. Leaders are in Denial, clinging to the illusions of an idealised past, unable to move beyond corporate greed and political charade. But an emerging movement of techno-optimists can see post-scarcity utopias glittering on the horizon and have started building a collaborative future for all of Singularity’s Children…
Buy now from Amazon.com: Denial – Book 1 | Disruption – Book 2 | Conflict – Book 3 | Reimagination – Book 4
