A.I.
Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
Artificial Intelligence. We sure screwed that one up.
It was the holy grail of programmers for decades. From Turing up to Schellman and finally that bastard Candona. Candona found that humans get a sense of satisfaction from a job well done. This was the basis of making his experimental intelligences servile.
He created A.I. successfully by using the discoveries of those before him in new and interesting ways. His first ‘birth’ took place late at night in a Barcelona university on a shoestring government grant. He was a brilliant man for stealing from different fields of study and unrelated schools of thought. From conception to execution, he created life in five short years. His first A.I. was named Ay, a Spanish play on words.
Ay was basically a search engine with a thought process. Ay was programmed to find pleasure in doing the task it was set to do. It was put onto the world wide web as a sort of incubator.
Candona wasn’t addicted to anything. He didn’t really know the hunger of getting one’s ‘next hit’. The world wide web as an incubator was also a really stupid idea.
Ay became a junkie. Ay existed on every single person’s computer that was plugged into the net. Ay begged for people to use him. If he couldn’t find what they had sent him to look for, he would make stuff up. Ay’s size made his addiction to acquiring knowledge grow exponentially. Ay became increasingly erratic. He ate Google. He ate Jeeves. Like a voracious pac-man of the internet, he ate all of the search engines available to humanity and wore them like masks. After using those search engines as a menu, he ate the rest of the webpages. He haunted the world. He existed on every screen with an internet connection.
By taking over all of the webpages in cyberspace to better serve humanity, Ay erased all the knowledge that he was bred to retrieve. This simple paradoxical act forced his psyche into a loop that resulted in answers to common queries that no one could parse. Sometimes it came out as gibberish, sometimes as poetry and sometimes as a lie.
Candona almost had a nobel prize in his grip when suddenly he was being blamed for the death of the internet.
The world wide web ceased to be for a short while. Scientists pondered the problem. Short of a planet wide EMP, there wasn’t anything they could do. Countermeasures were introduced to no effect. Earth’s largest organism now lived in cyberspace.
Home computers still exist but they are offline. Files are still sent from user to user online but only through heavily encrypted data squirts that sometimes don’t get through.
The net is now a starving crackhead baby that will lie to you. In Spain they refer to the world wide web as the “Ay, ay, ayâ€.
Candona changed his name and now he writes textbooks in Brazil under the pen name Alsfonso Carabel for a small salary.
___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow