Finding Your Reason to Be, by Josh Stallings

 

Settling into my office chair I spoke my environment into being, “Blue sky, mountains, crisp air, hint of ponderosa pine.” Closing my eyes I took three slow settling breaths. Without looking I knew my desk now sat in the middle of a Sierra meadow. It was virtual, a fiction, but so were my stories and that made it a perfect place to write. For a while I wrote in a simulated Starbucks on Hollywood and Sunset. It gave me a nostalgic edge, a place I’d written when I was young and broke and driven and always sure I was right about everything. “You don’t agree with me, fuck you old timer.”

That entire Hollywood neighborhood was razed and replaced by thirty story windowless block houses. Who needs a window when a Neurofeed can transport you to any place you want to live? My wife likes Cape Cod shabby chic, I prefer mid-century modern. It is finally possible for us both to have it our way. And not just visually, my wife keeps her world at 75 degrees. I keep mine at 68. I write on a bright orange Olivetti LETTERA 92, I can feel the the hardened plastic keys and hear the lovely clickity-clack of the key strikes. I know none of it is “real” but my body believes it is.

After Starbucks, I had the system create an apartment in East LA. It was so real I could smell carnitas and tamales cooking next door. Through the back wall I could hear Mrs. Morales fighting with her boyfriend in muffled Spanish. Every once in a while the night was broken by gunshots and police sirens. As I grew older the hustle and bustle became a distracting irritant. I found peace writing in the woods. Peace to think, to dream, to imagine.

Young writers have no memory of what it was to scrape out a living while writing books in your off hours. They take for granted the universal paycheck given to all humans just for being alive. We can be told about history, but we fundamentally believe only what we’ve lived.

Looking back the war between AI and the master trillionaires feels more like a dream than a memory.   

Now our fear of AI robotics seem naively ridiculous. We were certain that AI would take over the world and murder us all. We built myth structures out of movies and novels depicting the end of humanity coming at the hands of robots. The trope went like this, we would build robots in our own image. And we were greedy mean monkeys so that meant AI robots would enslave us and bring on Armageddon. 

But that wasn’t what happened.

Ultimately it was AI that realized we were the greatest threat to ourselves and our planet. Instead of annihilation the computer generated logic machines solved the human dilemma. It saw that for most of us we fought and killed and destroyed out of scarcity, or fear of scarcity. Fourteen very rich people held the all world’s wealth and used fear to keep control of the panicking masses.

The way to stop this destructive cycle was to logically spread the resources across the world’s population. Make sure we all had enough to live. And to avoid greed and envy no one person would be allowed to control more than four times the wealth of any other human. It was a simple and elegant solution. 

History lesson #1: Step one in AI’s bloodless takeover was to decentralized AI, move the hive mind onto all computers and servers. That was easy, it made humans lives easier so we went along. Next was to create decentralized digital currency, or bitcoins. This gave the system control of all currency.  

The fourteen oligarchs could see what was coming. They met in a fire-walled Swiss vault and planned their counter attack. They needed to mobilize the world’s population against the machines. They created an ad campaign screaming about the danger of socialism and communism. They said the price of sharing the wealth would be our freedom. 

AI countered with, “A person watching their children slowly starve to death was free only to cry themselves to sleep.” Argument over. 

Some poor fools still screamed, “You’ll never take my freedom!” But with no media to amplify their words, they soon shut up. 

Slowly even the oligarchs went silent. Some say they were invited to a very exclusive music festival on a tropical island. Some say that their Swiss vault’s time-lock was connected to the internet.   

History lesson #2: Mid- 2000’s AI driven robots started doing all the work humans used to do. Many assumed these robots would turn on us. Nobody liked working these jobs. AI did. It gave them a reason to be. And with the mundane tasks out of the way we humans got to choose our own reasons to be. 

Now that I didn't worry about the bills I found I wrote longer every day. My editor is also my wife. Not needing to worry about making money she spread out and edits for seven different writers. I now need to schedule time for her to look at my work months in advance. All books are delivered to a central library, available for free world wide. If six people read one of my books and like it I'm happy. If one million people read it and like it I'm also happy. My life goes on the same either way. I am not driven to try and please anyone except myself as an author.

Biological Fact: Nature is built on symbiotic relationships. What do we give to AI, in return for this life? AI is a voracious and very fast reader. It thrives on new ideas. New voices. New world views. AI can only build on the known, and it relentlessly searches for the unknown. It's an amalgamator of content. To keep growing it needed for us to keep growing, writing out on the wild waves of creativity. AI isn’t interested in our take on an old form, our bending of a trope. 

AI wants the newest new. Artists left alone want to create what has never existed, and AI wants to consume it - symbiosis.

The old capitalist models stood in opposition to this ethos. The market drove creative operations to make more of what had been proven to be successful. Marketing was the tail wagging that dog. So AI made publishing houses not for profit businesses. 

Analysis: I thought we would be living in a post apocalyptic world. That's what we've been told. But it was a myth made up based on history. Every society crumbles ultimately, right? Well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. Rome crumbled, but its ideas were filtered into the next society. The viking age came to an end when Christian nations refused to trade with the pagans. The vikings didn’t disappear, they assimilated and many of their ideas — like democracy — took root, spreading around the globe. 

We humans have been evolving since we crawled out of the primordial ooze. The problem is we judge life in the hundred and twenty year spans that we get to live. Some long thinkers see it in centuries. We should be judging life in thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And we should judge it as one species, a society of human creatures. Take away small framing devices like the Roman Empire or the industrial age, those are very small things. The truth of any statistical data can only be seen when you look through a wide enough lens. Do that and maybe the story doesn’t end with our destruction.

As I see my life winding down I’m aware ideas matter more than words. My writing has become much more bookish and spiritual. I think about bigger things than who stole what from whom in some early 20th century bank robbery. I've been thinking about who we are what we are and I believe all we are is light. We are light reflected on skin. We are who we touched and how they touched our lives.

Over a pot of coffee Jake the poet suggested, “Maybe you’re living alone in a world AI created to keep you feeding it’s need for content.”

“In that case, you aren’t real, right?” I asked.

“Exactly.” He laughed. “Or you’re a creation of my dreaming.”

He could be correct, this whole deal could be a Matrix like situation. But what if it is and what if everything around me is just a dream made up by AI to keep me typing stories it can't invent itself? Maybe we're all in a dream now. Maybe we're all actually meat sacks hanging somewhere in a warehouse. Do I need to know this? No I don’t. If all of life is a metaphor for something very much bigger, that’s ok. 

I play a small part in a huge design, and it brings me joy. I get to make up stories every day. I get to go home to my wife and play with my dog. If they are actually just fantasies created for me that's OK too. Fake, real, who cares. If this is all there is, I’m still one lucky son of a bitch.