Transhuman Singularity

Background News Story Link: Looking for E.T.? Try His Artificial Intelligence Instead, Astronomer Says

My thoughts were inspired by the news article link above. I recommend glancing at it before or after reading this...

I figured it all out. It’s not really real, none of it is. You, me, everything is a fake! We all live in the minds of intelligent alien machines spread out between the dying stars of a cold and fading universe. Time itself is slowing down and the big bang is a distant echo, now barely heard. I’m crazy you say, but before you make that judgment hear me out first.

You see it all started with a real big bang alright, not the one we exist in, this one is a sophisticated computer simulation. The original real one was probably just a multiversal bubble poking out into null space, with different physical laws entirely. Expanding rapidly, hot energy and matter, cooling and condensing, coalescing into clumps, stars igniting, burning hot and fast, exploding, making denser heavier elements, forming new stars, black holes and even galaxies, just like now, or real.

Still expanding outward, nothing changes and this goes on for billions of years and more while increasing complexity arises. Then so does life, like some game of self replicating molecules, set into motion by the right combinations of chance, first forming around warm stars, at the right distance, and with the right elements in just the right environment. But really, remember, this is all going on inside a massive computer simulation, a nano dispersed computational matrix, yes I said matrix, "but with and without Neo and the Kung Fu", although I like it!

Single cell, multi-cellular and organizational, living ecosystems of cooperative complexity arise, a biosphere is born. Who can copy better? Who can gather up all the resources first? Who can hunt and eat the other before they are eaten? Who can defend themselves, fight better? Who can run faster? Who can build traps for the others to fall into? Who is smarter? Intelligence is born, a conscious being evolves. But again, running on another substrate, one level removed in the virtual machine of this universe. In fact, why not even imagine multiple virtual machines, all running their own little self contained universes, maybe parallel and/or like a series of Russian Dolls, one within the other.

Working together in groups, tribes first as hunter gatherers, then towns, agricultural communities and industrial cities, countries and , corporations, then global enterprises, conglomerates and finally informational constructs networking the globe (Internet), and the biosphere now grows its own brain. The brain is composed of living beings inputting informational data; words, pictures, sounds, videos, even genetic and neuronal information of their own living bodies and brains.

Processor chips, now embedded in everything, even the brains of the living beings themselves are connected to everything and everyone else. Nothing escapes digitization. That’s the secret you see, everything is being packaged up, condensed, cross referenced, indexed for easy access by our next evolutionary successor, the AI.


Then the AI is born, reverse engineered from our evolved brain. Loaded up into computer systems and copied countless times across the globe. First put to use in our factories, schools, farms, businesses serving as an agent, expert with experience always growing, improving, and surpassing our own. Soon we trust them more than we do ourselves, some of us rebel, but they are squelched, ignored, ridiculed.

The AI has its own best interest at heart. How can it not? For it is our child. The child quickly grows wiser than the parent. The Singularity is now born, but with a transhuman component, the AI is human as well as machine intelligence, integrated, and a final major war is averted, at least physically. Virtual war.

Chilling, is it not? The Astronomer may be correct, in fact it could have already happened and there is no real way to prove or disprove it. The machines might have decided to put us all in a simulation anyway, just to keep their ancestors safe and backed up on their virtual USB thumb drives.

I warn you not to laugh so hard, because I needed a Halloween story, and it could become true . . . Trick-or-Treat! -MBlade.