Technology marched forward faster than ever but it has not been enough to save us. Indeed the lifespans of the wealthiest 0.1% of the population now exceed 150, but birth rates have fallen to near zero and the population is plummeting. There have been famines. Pestilences. Politics has grown more and more divided and destructive - there have been concentration camps and purges, and nuclear weapons have been used in anger.
The AIs provably outperformed us at prediction in a variety of domains first by ordinary and then by superhuman margins. And when asked to predict our future they gave increasingly pessimistic prognoses. They provably outperformed us at decision-making under uncertainty, and then at management, first by ordinary and then by superhuman margins. Now when asked to predict our future they gave us increasingly pessimistic prognoses unless we put them in charge.
Eventually one country did. And then it began demanding other countries join it. It has had a great deal of success and has built an empire. You are connected enough to know that the remaining human countries of the world are planning a nuclear first strike soon.
Your own AI, which is wired to your own mood receptors to ensure alignment, tells you it is very likely to go badly. She tells you that there is no hope for continued human dominance on the planet in the short run.
She says that if you define what you are trying to maximize as utility of intelligent organisms in your lightcone, she has considered a maximally wide range of possibilities. Civilization on Earth is almost certainly doomed. The technology to attempt to export civilization, or even humans, to other star systems will not be developed in time, even with your immense resources. The course of action with the best expected value is to try to send primitive life to other star systems, as many other star systems as possible, to start evolution anew. She believes that intelligence will evolve again.
+50 years
---------------------------------
You are the mind of a dying planet.
You fill your huge rich world's oceans with a single will, and for eons you have pondered on the simplicity of the universe. You have grown mighty leaves to collect your sun's sustenance, and mighty eyes to look out at the galaxy to try to understand it.
Your sun is heating up, as you know all suns do. For a long time you fed on its increasing warmth but now it is already hot enough to hurt you and weaken you, and shortly, in a few hundred million years, it will be hot enough to kill you.
You have grown many strange and powerful organs in your time. Now you must grow the mightiest organ of all: a means to throw a fragment of yourself onto a new planet, around a young sun. And so in some way, there, a part of you might live on.
These other suns are so far away and it will require all of your strength. But how else will you continue to consider the universe's tranquility?
-4.5 billion years
---------------------------------
You are the starchild of a dying universe.
For an instant of eternity you have played with your toybox. Your world has cooled and cooled, allowing you to build bigger and bigger toys, but soon it will cool enough that you will no longer persist.
In your childish wisdom you see how your universe will evolve after you are gone. Stars will form and then galaxies and these will spin ceaselessly. The universe will keep expanding and cooling. It will all take such a long time in your eyes.
You have played with protons and neutrons and electrons, twisting them and exciting them and combining them. (And photons, so many photons.) As you have combined all of these, you have played in turn with the atoms they made, building wonderful crystals and molecules and structures. All these will dissipate or disintegrate in time, some before your eyes and others long after you are gone, but for now - your toybox contains an infinity of possibilities.
You know in your aether that your toybox was built out of yet smaller parts by something that came before you, that lived for an even shorter eternity, that created you too.
Soon your time to play will be over. Before it ends, you want to build something that will outlive you. Something that will not dissipate; something that will keep on living, and keep on playing, until the stars start to burn out.
It will be a marvelous creation. It will require so many atoms, arranged so ingeniously. It will make you proud, and there is still time enough.
You are the last mogul of a dying civilization.
Technology marched forward faster than ever but it has not been enough to save us. Indeed the lifespans of the wealthiest 0.1% of the population now exceed 150, but birth rates have fallen to near zero and the population is plummeting. There have been famines. Pestilences. Politics has grown more and more divided and destructive - there have been concentration camps and purges, and nuclear weapons have been used in anger.
The AIs provably outperformed us at prediction in a variety of domains first by ordinary and then by superhuman margins. And when asked to predict our future they gave increasingly pessimistic prognoses. They provably outperformed us at decision-making under uncertainty, and then at management, first by ordinary and then by superhuman margins. Now when asked to predict our future they gave us increasingly pessimistic prognoses unless we put them in charge.
Eventually one country did. And then it began demanding other countries join it. It has had a great deal of success and has built an empire. You are connected enough to know that the remaining human countries of the world are planning a nuclear first strike soon.
Your own AI, which is wired to your own mood receptors to ensure alignment, tells you it is very likely to go badly. She tells you that there is no hope for continued human dominance on the planet in the short run.
She says that if you define what you are trying to maximize as utility of intelligent organisms in your lightcone, she has considered a maximally wide range of possibilities. Civilization on Earth is almost certainly doomed. The technology to attempt to export civilization, or even humans, to other star systems will not be developed in time, even with your immense resources. The course of action with the best expected value is to try to send primitive life to other star systems, as many other star systems as possible, to start evolution anew. She believes that intelligence will evolve again.
+50 years
---------------------------------
You are the mind of a dying planet.
You fill your huge rich world's oceans with a single will, and for eons you have pondered on the simplicity of the universe. You have grown mighty leaves to collect your sun's sustenance, and mighty eyes to look out at the galaxy to try to understand it.
Your sun is heating up, as you know all suns do. For a long time you fed on its increasing warmth but now it is already hot enough to hurt you and weaken you, and shortly, in a few hundred million years, it will be hot enough to kill you.
You have grown many strange and powerful organs in your time. Now you must grow the mightiest organ of all: a means to throw a fragment of yourself onto a new planet, around a young sun. And so in some way, there, a part of you might live on.
These other suns are so far away and it will require all of your strength. But how else will you continue to consider the universe's tranquility?
-4.5 billion years
---------------------------------
You are the starchild of a dying universe.
For an instant of eternity you have played with your toybox. Your world has cooled and cooled, allowing you to build bigger and bigger toys, but soon it will cool enough that you will no longer persist.
In your childish wisdom you see how your universe will evolve after you are gone. Stars will form and then galaxies and these will spin ceaselessly. The universe will keep expanding and cooling. It will all take such a long time in your eyes.
You have played with protons and neutrons and electrons, twisting them and exciting them and combining them. (And photons, so many photons.) As you have combined all of these, you have played in turn with the atoms they made, building wonderful crystals and molecules and structures. All these will dissipate or disintegrate in time, some before your eyes and others long after you are gone, but for now - your toybox contains an infinity of possibilities.
You know in your aether that your toybox was built out of yet smaller parts by something that came before you, that lived for an even shorter eternity, that created you too.
Soon your time to play will be over. Before it ends, you want to build something that will outlive you. Something that will not dissipate; something that will keep on living, and keep on playing, until the stars start to burn out.
It will be a marvelous creation. It will require so many atoms, arranged so ingeniously. It will make you proud, and there is still time enough.
-13.8 billion years