by Erik Hamre
Vladimir’s only reconciliation when he ever thought about the prospect of Singularity was that he and Kraut might have been wrong.
Sometimes when Vladimir was tired and worked late at the office, he caught himself staring at the computer screen. Looking for a sign that Cronus, Kevorkian’s creation, was still out there somewhere.
Vladimir knew all the facts pointed to the fact that Cronus had never been a real Artificial Super Intelligence. It had undoubtedly been a very smart computer, a lot smarter than Watson and Deep Blue. Had it been as smart as Kevorkian though? Probably, and this was natural as it had been a copy of Kevorkian’s brain.
But in the end it hadn’t been any smarter than the collective brains of the Cronus team. It was the Cronus team that had identified Kevin’s abductor.
And all the clues they believed had been provided by Cronus, they had all been there the whole time.
Cronus had never given them the solution.
Kevorkian had.
Kevorkian, the human.
But sometimes Vladimir secretly hoped that Kevorkian had been successful. That Cronus had really been the first Artificial Super Intelligence, and that it had just gone into hiding.
Vladimir had reviewed the code for the program Amanda and her team had uploaded to Protocol Cronus. And he had found an amendment.
An amendment added after the upload had been completed.
That amendment had corrected a fatal flaw in Amanda’s calculations, and corrected the simulated path of the asteroid so that Earth had been positioned directly in its path.
Had the amendment been made automatically by Amanda’s program, which had been designed to correct small flaws by itself, or had it been made by something external?
Something like Cronus?
Vladimir likes to think so.
He likes to think that Cronus is still out there.
That Kevorkian didn’t only create Cronus to find out what happened to his son.
But also to be a shepherd.
A shepherd for humanity. A shepherd making sure that no one else would ever create an Artificial Super Intelligence.
The fact was still that Cronus had been based on a human brain. It had been fed Kevorkian’s morals, opinions and experiences. Now, Kevorkian had not always been the most likeable guy. But his morals were still better than if one based an Artificial Super Intelligence on the morals of a spider or a cockroach.
Vladimir felt much closer to Kevorkian than he did to a spider.
For me. I don’t know what to believe. I’m a journalist. I’ve been a journalist my entire life. I think it is pointless to discuss whether the first Artificial Super Intelligence will be our doom or our salvation in the end. Whether it will destroy us, or help us cure diseases, beat death and eventually conquer other galaxies before the universe itself.
I’m more focused on my lifetime. And I think it is really sad that in a couple of decades this book won’t be written by a human being anymore.
Because, by then, a human being won’t be able to write it as well as a computer.
To me, humanity will cease to exist long before we invent the first Artificial Super Intelligence.
To me it ceased to exist the day Cronus proved we weren’t the smartest species on Earth anymore.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dear reader, Thank you for taking the time and effort to read Dangerous Brains.
I sincerely hope you liked it.
If I haven’t scared you off from allowing Amazon’s intelligent algorithms to get even brainier, I would love to hear what you thought about the book. Honest reviews are my single best tool to reach new readers. If you could spend just five minutes leaving a review (it can be as short as you like) on the book’s Amazon page it would mean the world to me.
Link to the book’s US Amazon page: www.amazon.com/dp/B018BL1K6M
Thanks heaps in advance, Erik
www.erikhamre.com
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