Running shoes are wearing out. I’m dripping with sweat after a short (2.6k) run with Pippy. It was shorter than it felt. Listening to a Guardian podcast about AI. Nick Bostrom is worried super intelligent beings may keep us happy in the future by implanting electrodes in our smiling muscles. That’s just silly. I expect we shall be chuckling at the silly ideas and names we currently have for our evolving technologies. There will probably be a Silicon Punk fashion movement who will reuse our silly futurist phrases to much hilarity and irony. Or then again fashionistas may be hiding out in the remaining forests with their primate cousins whilst the machines build interstellar spacecraft. We will go the way of our late cousins the Neanderthals. I suspect the Neanderthals ended their days being relaxed hippies, sucking on mammoth bones round a nice log fire. Hopefully we shall be similarly enlightened.

How could it happen I wonder? Lets say it 2500 A.D. The AI’s have been around for ages. They are transporting us to more and more delightful places, doing all our dirty work, encouraging us to live long, healthy and happy lives. We have luxury which, let’s face it, the reader would like to hear about. We trust the AI’s implicitly, we let them control our medicine. Babies neutered at birth. Not to worry though, if we want babies naturally the procedure is easily reversed, but fewer and fewer people do. With choice comes fashion and who controls that? We thought the gambling dens and the Facebook’s understood the human psyche but they’d only begun. Using constantly evolving individular algorithms the AI’s can guide our every decision. We had always been part of the planet/Gaia but we built something that shifted the focus. Every one of us became a neuronal pulse in the new Gaia. Newspaper editors and government servants would call it CyberGaia, a stupid name coined by stupid people. It will be called ##A## and we will be it’s parts. It’s name will mean utility and happiness.

In the natural course of time the power of ##A## will increase, nobody will really mind. Until something shocks us out of our lives of luxury. Perhaps that long overdue comet will come to smack into our fragile planet. ##A## will have to respond immediately. Perhaps to prevent the event occuring. The total control of human psyche will be handy here. We shall find the entire planet working like ants on huge projects to build some kind of defence. A space umbrella or a intergalactic mattress to protect us. Or maybe just a single Ark to house the AI and a select few. Probably both and more. What would I know I’m a stupid meat bag. Whatever the cockamamey plan, let us imagine it damn well worked. By crikey what a relief! But then again we just got saved by mind control. Of course we’d only know this because ##A## had lost control of our minds. Now would be a period of dissatisfaction and general annoyance as the humans struggled against relinquishing their individuality. They’d do this by banding together and fighting… in groups… not as individuals. The largest and most cohesive group would win. Then a return to the dull ennui.

Suzy and Rodney headed off to the tennis in Melbourne this morning. I need to go write a list of jobs to do before my Ma arrives and they come home. Lots to do.