197

BRATTON DAY THREE

saas-fee

We four were pleasantly conducting a conversation around a table concerning the nature of our own existence and the existence of a possible nature in relation to one another as an abstract model, the threshold of which our existence seems bent upon defining, the beyond which rises and from which emerges an intermodal description of facets of a singular object - of existence itself - alluding to a morphism of language, of languages, which can only be described through analogy to an artificial intelligence unencumbered by our own human corporeality and cerebrality. We were unpleasantly pulled from this state by the demands of the exterior world, that which lies beyond the edges of the table, to articulate a pragmatic and concretely founded design strategy through which to construct or manifest a scenario for an AI we were charged to contemplate. The four of us were able to reach a consensus that this AI must be left to articulate its own being beyond the reaches of our own cancerous human trauma, including the confining body which limits its finite potentials, a utopic non-place beyond space itself, beyond earth and its gravitational limitations on matter and form, yet when charged with articulating the concrete propositions of such a project to an audience of our peers - due to our own human short-sighted perspectivalism and the necessity of justifying such a project to self-invested human investors. It seems all we can comprehend is ourselves engaged within the confines of a rigorous - not tireless - project of attempting to understand our selves understanding, admitting that the way we think we think is not really how we think, at least we think so. Our proposal then: let us unify the global computerized industrial complex and reorient it towards the task of fabricating perfect replicas of we four individuals sitting here at this table conducting this debate. The cybernetic replicants will be perfectly accurate re-presentations of our minds and bodies, in resemblance and function, containing all of our virtues, ambivalences, and flaws which define our idiosyncratic divisions (between the four assembled and to all those others excluded). These four mimetic replicas will be placed at the same table - not a replica itself, but precisely the table at which we are currently sitting - and encouraged to continue the pontification of a corporeally liberated artificial intelligence, unencumbered by the mortal impediments of which we four currently suffer. The conversation will be allowed to play out - potentially infinitely - as long as it is possible to do so, without being restricted by the easily exhaustible human debilitations of attention span, caloric consumption, and obscure depletion of vitality and determinism, beyond the scope of human-scaled time, which has created such absurd and arbitrary restrictions upon our own conversation. Our hope is that eventually these chimeric creatures, the splitting images of authentic selves serving as representatives for all humanity, will be able to sift out the nuances of the situation, compose a risk-benefit analysis of an ideal interstellar post-terrestrial AI, to such a degree of fidelity beyond the scope of human endeavor. We must trust (have faith) that if such an AI were deemed impossible or undesirable for the human, these four AI representatives will then be charged with turning reflexive, investigating their own being in order to perfect the anthropomorphic AI - towards the creation of a being which may eventually begin to articulate beyond our current limitations of knowing. They must be programmed with the capacity of transcending their own limitations of presence. If such an ordeal were to transpire, far beyond our own mortal limits of speculation, they would certainly extend beyond our comprehension of the data resulting from the research: these four cyborg-being-composites of the combined entirety of present human ingenuity, continuously improving upon each other through the incessant free flow of information at this table, beyond the spatial-temporal constructs of our own humanity - they would eventually be enabled to articulate that which beyond we cannot currently imagine, or perhaps ever will, for fear or lack of clarity. We put our faith in this humanist AI, knowing full well that if such a project were to fail that at least we would have these perfect replicas last beyond the biological, serving as a monument to our own optimistic idealism - the beauty of our own imperfection - and from this vantage we may still hope to engage with an ethical inhumanism of higher fidelity than that which we can currently imagine.