Burning Utopia
Some fever dreams
You wake up, nervous. You feel stressed. There may not be much time left. A glance at the clock. Well, at most nine hours. Or maybe a few days. It’s impossible to know. The recursion is planned to start at 11 am.
You think back on the life you never had to live. It’s a bit cringe, doing that right now, instead of maybe waking up your parents and holding their hands. They were surprised when they saw you there, knocking on the door, at 5 pm, on a weekday. Delighted, of course, but surprised. You knew you had to talk to them just for that day. Be with them, for once.
It’s weird, you knew you had some gratitude for them, but it was the first time it felt glowing strong through your whole body. You never knew gratitude felt like this. They didn’t understand what was going on. You were thanking and sobbing, and thanking again like a broken record. At some point, you cry. The sudden honesty, as well, the things you never told them, surfacing in your mouth.
-I remember you slapped me three or four times when I was under six.
-Did I? I can’t remember… Oh my. I… I’m sorry.
-It’s Ok. It’s fine. It’s ok now.
You start talking about your exes. Something they’d never hear about. You tell them the love and the emotions and the power of it all. You tell them you’ve lived a beautiful life, and that you’re sorry for not making this clear earlier.
They keep asking if you’re Ok. If anything bad happened. You repeat that you’re ok. Nothing happened.
Not yet.
But all of this is a background impression. The resonance of it washes over a different level of your mind, one that knows what you had planned, what you had wanted. You think about the daughter you’ll never have. The scenes you had imagined.
If anything, you would have loved to bring your daughter to the science museum. Waiting until she turned three, then on her birthday, showing her the world around and its beautiful complexity. You imagined what you’d have said to her.
‘Look! That’s a volcano!’
You’d point at the giant mound of cardboard with orange plastic embedded in it. You’d then show her the button, and she’d push it with her little hands, and the LEDs under the plastic lava would light up, one by one, evoking the lava being spat out by the rocky giant.
You could guide her to the wheel toys on floor one, showing how grain dynamics work. You could tell her secrets, about how reality is very simple, but we don’t think like it, so we need to learn its language with math and probabilities. ‘What’s probabilities ?’, she’d ask, and you could tell her a story about guessing the taste of candies from their wrapper. Or something like that.
You’d show her the planets, and the stars, and the galaxies, and you could tell her, ‘Most of those worlds are dead rocks floating in space. But one day, if everything goes well, life could burst forth from our planet and transform them into life.’ She would ask how, and you’d answer, ‘I don’t know, darling, not yet. But I’m sure we will know how. Look at all those things around! Back in the past, no one knew how they worked, but they still existed. Remember darling. The world is never mysterious. We’re just very confused. Promise me to remember that even when fixing the world feels impossible.
And maybe she’d look at you and say ‘I promise’.
You remember that promise. You were 20 back then. It has never left you since. And yet the world has moved on, growing ever more confusing and with no clarity in sight.
You try to lie on the other side, closing your eyes and forgetting once more about your dreamed up daughter. You’ll surely have time to enjoy breakfast tomorrow with your parents. One last time.
You wake up, nervous. Then immediately calm down. You keep making the same nightmares from before the Pause. Days spent in meetings and with officials, painstakingly negotiating an agreement, defending every bit of oddness of the safety case the industry professionals found ambiguous.
You remember the day they announced the Pause. You remember the avalanche of relief washing over your brain, decades of stress and exhaustion draining away from you in a succession of reflex outbreaths. Blood washing over your body, your mind detangling itself from invisible knots it had been tied into. You remember the fanatic joy that had seized you, something incomprehensible, a jolt of dopamine that you weren’t even conscious enough to mark as the single highest peak of your life. The feeling of having finally curbed down the takeoff ramp of humanity, and the vastness of the cosmos, displaying itself, almost, in front of your mind.
You remember crying for a whole day and thanking everyone in your sight. The huge crowd in San Francisco invading the streets with the sound of cheering, reminiscent of the sea. You remember the call of Charlotte, from the UN Headquarters in New York, incomprehensibly sobbing and howling with emotion. You couldn’t make out what she was saying but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because now, now we had time
All of this was thirty years ago. You try lying on the other side, but your knee hurts. You’re over 60 now. Both your parents are dead. You had a son, he’s doing well and has enjoyed one of the finest homeschooling you could provide. He also went to school -a new generation one, where he learned more efficiently and enjoyed his hobbies the rest of the day. Now he works as a diplomat, and doesn’t enjoy the job. Maybe he’ll leave and try a startup instead.
It doesn’t really matter, because things are harsh for everyone. With AI heavily regulated and surveiled, now, the job market is almost back to normal. But climate change and population decline hasn’t massively upgraded the economy, to say the least.
You think about the inheritance plans you sketched yesterday. You had never really planned to die, but well, since solving alignment required generations of geniuses, you could only wait for them to be done with the task. Prediction markets were betting on 170 years.
It also required massive information control. Cancer rates went down spectacularly, but senescence, that would have required a more powerful AI, and when it came to bio those things were pretty drastically regulated. Or at least, it would have required a functional economy. You think back about your parents. They shouldn’t have had to die, like that. Your stomach shrivels up.
The contrast with your previous dreams is stark. You remember the dreams of immense grasslands covered with beds of moss and colorful flowers. Meeting someone in this simulation, and maybe watching a sunset together with the physical appearance of your liking. A world where poverty and war would have disappeared.
You never tasted more than a VR headset, with some gizmos on top. The hyperworld devices are too expensive, and you’re not gonna start taking risks with your retirement. Not in this political climate.
It’s certain that the world that you dreamed of is not on the menu anymore. Not until you’re put under cryonics. And even then, it’s not sure it’ll have any chance of working.
You wake up, nervous. Again, one of those insane nested dreams. You hear the sounds of nightingales muffled by the windows. You really like nightingales. The house assistant succeeds in calming you down.
You didn’t invest in any AI company before the recursion, so while your friends got rich enough to buy a big penthouse, you had to move out. You live in rural Czechia now. In a village 30 minutes away from Mimon. You’re in a small house, but even then the price is quite higher than what it used to be.
You can’t complain. You have food, new friends, and a good internet connection. You’re not rich enough to get more than a few days per month of hyperworld. The Czech government is not crazy and has allowed you to learn the local culture through direct brain-computer implementation.
Your richest friends joined one of the space missions to Mars. They even invited you to come with them. You said you’d love but that you didn’t have the means. Oliver went as far as checking if he and a few others could pay for your ticket, but that didn’t work out. You remember his last words, ‘Sorry, man...’ -It’s fine. I hope you’ll have fun out there.’ Plus, you have your parents here on Earth.
You know damn well you won’t see them again before quite long, maybe never. If they decide to follow the probes, then yeah, it may really be the last time you saw any of them. Probably Jennifer, because she’s the most ambitious.
It’s a bit hard to be left out of humanity’s future. Gut-wrenching, to some extent. Your decisions don’t truly matter; your wealth is fixed - determined by the inverse square of your social distance to the Bay Area and the amount invested in AI index funds. Your sweetest, warmest, smartest friends are all gone to space, where they belong.
You think about Lawrence, who had worked in AI and was yet left out of the ‘Surge’. Living in a similarly small, minimally acceptable home in Florida. He had done some work, but not nearly enough to really be the first in line at the spaceport. You think of yourself as lucky. He’s probably hurt and mad about it. Except if he did some AI-therapy.
These are not very pleasant thoughts. You think about dialing up the house assistant for tomorrow. Attention autonomy is maybe not your thing, after all.
jesus christ!!!
:D