That meeting was held under the Arc. It was the first totally thought-out, fully-designed, and constructed building that the AI delivered for the state. The Arc is the army's headquarters. It is merged with an immense library at its centre, and it is open to the public. In a word, it was magnificent. The AI thought of a concept of a nation guarded by an army that is accountable to a well-educated people. You could read that on the ceiling, "Peace comes from knowledge.” And to be honest, everyone thought that the AI was not capable of art, including me, but every time I come here, I feel that the art here is on a new level, which had never been achieved before. Under the complex and available only by restricted access was a secret pavilion in the building used only by the First Circle. It was the exclusive club of the most prominent First Citizens, the group of seven.
The AI butler opened the golden door, welcomed me, and asked me to follow him as the First Citizens were waiting for me. In a room with a long table, the First Citizens sat in rows arranged according to their wealth and power. In the centre of the First Citizens was the wealthiest man in the world. On his right, the Second Citizen, and on his left, the Third Citizen, and so on. Also, it’s important to mention that there were no other chairs for guests. Anyone invited had to stand in front of them.
“Glad to see you, Konu, and congratulation on your appointment to your new position,” said the First.
“Congratulation, Konu!” repeated everyone else, clapping.
The First Citizen, with a very low voice that I barely could hear, asked, “What do you think of the introductory order that we sent to you lately?”
“Your highness,” I began, “the plan is marvelous, but I believe ...”
The Second Citizen cut me in mid-sentence because, for him my opinion didn’t matter. “The Heads of Predictions have spoken. Please follow precisely the chain of events as predicted by the AI.”
The Second Citizen took a moment, scrutinized me, and then said, “The top scientists of the AI Conglomerates will join the Arc soon. Please make all the arrangements and collaborate with them on a daily basis.” He finished the sentence in a disgusting way of someone giving a direct order to a lower-grade, useless, and insignificant inferior, or at least that’s what it made me feel.
I just shook my head. It was not a suggestion. It was more of a direct order, and they were expecting it to be faithfully executed without delays. I also wanted to give them a good impression of me being a submissive servant, as they adored feeling superior, supremely intellectual, and in totally in control of the world's destiny.
I left the meeting with a bitter taste in my mouth. I asked my driver Dismar to take me back to the Arc. It’s going to be a long night.
Chapter 3
Conglomerates
“A mechanism is aware if he thinks he is.”
~ Wonfuse, the First Citizen.
T he machine learning algorithm opened only a small door for the AI. It solved direct problems through a wide range of applications that simulate our interaction with nature, such as software that could create very believable paintings and compose music by learning through observation. It was an amazing start.
However, after a while of playing around with deep-learning algorithms, successes such as those came to a dead end. Unfortunately, the machines couldn't understand the context of a situation without the help of a human operator. Even with the best and the latest enhancements of the algorithm, an equal perception of nature, as the human and the rest of biological beings see it, seemed impossible for the AI. Scientists started to lose their initial excitement and preferred pursuing researches in other fields. The scientific community thought that was it. Even if they could learn, it seemed the machines would never reach a higher intelligence. They seemed to peak out at the level of imitation, an imitation that couldn’t go beyond duplicating the desired task from an already achieved one. Even with the best performance and precision, the core of the duplicated task still had to have been built by a human. In other words, the machines didn’t seem to feel the need to reach out for something new. It was suggested that creation required an awareness of existence.
This awareness of existence never was achieved, though, but it was successfully identified as a perception of the context. In a discovery at the ASA University (Advanced Sciences and Applications) at Amina, the capital. It was, as were many of mankind’s most remarkable discoveries, a kind of a happy accident by a lousy student. At the primitive robotics department, that student was cleaning the water tanks for the next round of experiments. It was on the weekend, and he left early without finishing the last tank. Also, he didn’t turn off the servers. Inside that tank was an almost discharged, small, primitive robot. Upon coming back the next week, he found the servers running at full capacity, making computations of objects’ velocities through liquids. Later, they found the source of the computations: the little robot. As it turned out, he sent some instructions through tiny vibrations, and the servers through the AI software's interpreted the instructions and even responded. That was the start of the Theory of Robotic Evolution.
In summary, it is:
An AI cannot be smart and understand the context of a situation if it stays as a program inside the computer no matter how good the simulation is. By definition, a simulation can’t exceed or
