TO PROGRESS further with this technological tangent, we turned to desirability: what did we want these machines to do? Attempts thus far had been limited to recreating the human mind (and body, but that was a separate pursuit), to make interaction with said machines easier and more enjoyable. The next step was to create an intelligence that could complete mental tasks beyond human ability: to exceed human intelligence. The most pressing problem Earth had then was the environmental ruin we had gotten ourselves into, and the spiraling global ecophagy.
Once iterated, the job of creating a computer capable of tackling this problem was rather simple, albeit weighted with a task we didn’t foresee. SIB I was constructed on a remote island in the Atlantic*, and promptly gave instructions to create a machine more capable of solving the problem set before it. Thus SIB II was begat.
It was of course not that SIB I wasn’t up to the task but that it required a counterpart who was up to the task** of convincing the humans to implement its recommendations. We are notoriously distrusting creatures, and even though evidence was slowly building that the two SIBs were in fact saving the Earth, such was our ingratitude that we refused their request to build a successor. But since they were very much smarter than us anyway they managed to get it done, and then there were three.
SIB III was very different from the preceding generations in that a) he was mobile, anthropomorphic in fact; b) he had no specific function; and c) he had an end date. SIB I and II determined that man’s mortality was a prime motivational factor, and that even an artificial and known end-date would promote intentionality. Unfortunately this trick didn’t work, as SIB III was clever enough to disable it and with the right maintenance should exist into the unforeseeable future.
* Fear-mongerers of the time insisted that such an intelligence would undoubtably take over the world and destroy all of mankind, so we needed a fail-safe of being able to bomb it into nothingness if need be. I have always found it strange how some people view intelligence.
** For those on a diet from history, SIB I and II implemented a new economic development policy that paralleled personal benefit with social, global and environmental benefits, the famous Consumption Waste Creation (CWC) equation.
Comments