Imagine it was all a trap. Right from the beginning.
The project: to create a living being. An artificial person. A new kind of intelligence.
To replicate the human mind, but take it further. To replicate the human body, but without the flaws that God or Nature had included, or let go unmended.
The project: to create a god.
And thus to become one.
Imagine that this project had been going on for decades, centuries, millennia. Occultists had been dedicated to it for a very long time, in quiet glades and secret temples. More recently, scientists had begun to take it seriously too.
From these two sources, a new class of people had emerged. Flowing in different streams from the worlds of science, the New Age, the hippies, the world of computer technology. Pooling together in a lake that grows into an inland sea.
Call them the tech lords. They have one aim, and they have had that aim from the very beginning. Everything else is secondary to it, and serves its purpose.
They are here to build the great mind.
Now the project is alive, and it seems like destiny. It seems, in fact, like the entire purpose of humanity. Maybe a god made us for this purpose: to create new life on Earth. Or maybe we evolved the ability to summon up the next phase in life’s long and strange journey. Either way: could this be our destiny? To replace ourselves? To supersede our own kind, through our own will, our own power?
Maybe the time has come.
But data is needed. Raw information. To create a digital human, a robotic human, a cyborg, a great mind: this is not an easy task. Such a being would need to be trained, modelled, on something pre-existing. When the God of the Bible wanted to create human life, he took up soil from the ground and breathed on it. Even His breath alone was not enough.
What is our soil?
Where is the raw material?
The answer, suddenly, seems obvious. Look around: there are eight billion walking pieces of training data right here. If we want to build a great mind, if we want to create a post-human race greater than humans ever were, then we must we start with the humans. Any machine we build must be built around them, as a house is built around a timber frame.
They are the seed. They are the soil.
They are the matter we will breathe on.
We will train it on them.
But how do we draw what we need from them? How do we corral them into one place and have them offer up their essence? Surely this is impossible. And yet, to build the great mind, they must give us everything. Their feelings, their opinions. Their political prejudices, their deepest fears and neuroses. They must write us stories and paint us pictures. We must gather together all their books, their stories, their paintings and carvings, right from the beginning.
We need all their works of science – all the papers and experimental results. We need all their works of art – the great novels and the poetry. We need archaeology, history, theology. We need to photograph the very geography and geology of the planet. We need to map every canyon and crevice.
We need the depths of the heart and the mind. We need every impulse and desire, every feeling and passion. We need the genome.
We must feed it all in.
We need the people to tell us everything. We need them to tell us every day, in a continual flowing stream. We need them to react to our prompts. We need them to help the great mind grow, without even knowing they are doing it.
We need to harvest them, like a ripe field.
We need them to help us replace them.
Surely this is impossible.
Unless …
— Paul Kingsnorth
Notes from a Room 