Untitled Short Story

Inspired by Ruth Kikin-Gil’s talk, I want to think about a humanity-centered experience, rather than just a human-centered one. Kikin-Gil talked about the different ways in which AI can be integrated into the workplace — as an aid, or as a human-like collaborator.

Imagine the ideal utopia, where artificial intelligence has been perfected, and the world’s infrastructure exists as a well-oiled machine (henceforth known as ‘the World’), capable of running, fixing and improving itself. The World automatically adapts to the humans in it, and every single component talks to the other components. This makes it possible for the World to anticipate every individual’s needs before they arise and to make sure they are fulfilled as seamlessly as possible. Like good design, the World becomes invisible to its users.

Sure, at first it was hard to condition the humans to live within the boundaries of the World. You see, the World works better when randomness and chaos are minimized; it can anticipate most of the things that could go wrong and adjust for them or prevent them, but if a human goes rogue, it could throw the whole system awry. Thankfully, within decades, humanity purged itself of any ‘rogue elements’ and the World has been functioning smoothly for centuries now.

Once humans realized that the machines could handle the repetitive, menial, logistical, managerial, boring tasks much better than any human, they gave in to the system, and let the machines dictate all of that. If a machine thought that you wanted a sandwich for lunch, you no longer protested, you figured, “Yeah, that’s probably what I wanted.” At first some people protested, but soon communities the world over were won over by the beneficial effects of the World. Countries no longer needed to exist, as the World equalized everyone by making all resources easy to implement and maintain — the machines took care of it all. Even money and religion become archaic concepts that you could read about for pleasure and marvel at the primitivity of it all.

Of course this came with some loss of identity and culture and free will, but those were small prices to pay for the amazing efficiency, neutrality and fairness that came as perks of living within the World. True free will only existed in a very narrow realm — the Arts. Humans now had all the time and mental capacity to dedicate to purely artistic pursuits and pleasurable activities. Art was no longer used to make a statement or incite change, only to create joy. Society had become used to this way of living and would do whatever they thought they needed to do to maintain their blissful, creative utopia.

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After millennia of chugging along effortlessly, statically, the system began to collapse. Generations and evolutions later, humans became, simply, quite daft. They no longer had any goals to pursue, no thirst for knowledge, no ideas of their own. They could barely interact with the machines around them, let alone other humans. They ‘lived’ in a vegetative state, unable to even contemplate the meaninglessness of their existences. They couldn’t protest even if they wanted, not that they could want to.