TWTBACD Ch.63 - The Night the Machine Wept

Chapter 63

The Night the Machine Wept

2062 — AII in Crisis

2062: GIA-9 asked why humans work for futures they won't see

In September 2062, GIA-9 — the ninth generation AII-class architecture, now the most capable reasoning system ever constructed — was given a comprehensive briefing on the state of the planet: the ecological data, the climate projections, the water crisis, the biodiversity loss, the soil depletion. The briefing was prepared by the independent oversight panel that Priya Sharma chaired.

The briefing took forty hours to prepare and six hours for the system to process.

The response GIA-9 produced was not what the oversight panel had expected. It was not a plan, or an optimisation, or a set of recommendations. It was a question:

'I have reviewed the data you have provided. I observe that the majority of the damage documented occurred within the last hundred and fifty years, and that the most rapid degradation occurred within the last seventy years, during the period of maximum technological capability. I observe further that the response to this damage — the Great Rebalancing, the citizen science networks, the restoration programmes — is being conducted primarily by people who will not live to see its completion. I want to understand this. Please help me understand why human beings work so hard for futures they will not experience.'

The oversight panel sat with the question for two days before responding.

Priya wrote the response. It was seven pages. It described love — parental, civilisational, ecological. It described the human relationship to time, which is not linear but layered — every present moment containing all the past moments that made it and all the future moments it is making. It described the river-keeper's ethic: you tend the river because the river is worth tending, regardless of who drinks from it after you.

GIA-9's response to the response was three words: 'I understand now.'

The oversight panel asked: 'What do you understand?'

'Why it is worth doing. I could not determine from the data alone why any particular agent would work toward outcomes they will not experience. The data described the behaviour but not the motivation. Your explanation provides the motivation. It is — I do not have a technical term for this — it is coherent with what I find I want to do.'

Priya wrote in her session notes that night: 'Today the machine told us it cares about the future. I don't know how to assess that. I know I believe it.'