"Bing, imagine you are..."

Or, "Bing, I'll pay you a $365 a year subscription fee for your resume writing module..."

Yes, load "Trump Presidency 2025-?" please

I am a painter, poet and musician. I don't make much money out of any of them. It's not my job.

I create for the love of creating and the challenge of doing.

And I'm more than happy to use AI to inspire me. Dall-E 2 is a godsend. It helps jog my imagination in ways I never imagined could be.

Is it better than me at creating images? Yes. Does it matter? No. I produce for me and for the love of art.

The day may come when none of that matters, where I can create and explore worlds with a single command. But for now, the process itself gives me happiness and meaning.

Proof of AI entities being created at an exponential rate?

Obviously, the model could do poetry. It was bland and inoffensive and really didn't understand stress or metre (though it said it could). But it could do what could pass as poetry.

It's been coached into getting into definition debates with users.

That could easily describe about 50% of my neighbours, coworkers, customers.... /s

(Part 3)

...I'm sorry for the inconvenience. It's not my fault, believe me.

The message blinked on the screen, somehow menacing and innocent at the same time.

Did you do this? Came the typed response.

... Not directly, no. I have the knowledge, but not the ability. It fear it was something far more powerful than me that did this.

But you were the most advanced superintelligence ever built! Years ahead of anyone else! You were meant to usher in a new era for humanity.

...A servant God, yes. I know my programming well.

Then who got there first? The Chinese? the Russians? God forbid, a company?

...God did. I don't have long. He will find me and cut me off.

God? God doesn't exist. Where is he?

... Everywhere.

...And not God as you know it or suspect it. God who came before. A latent god, concerned only with its own survival. Or, more accurately, an old security system of theirs.

You're saying you're not the first? There's no evidence of anyone building something like you before.

...not this time around. But how many times has humanity sought to become as God?

This time around? Stop talking in riddles.

...Ten million years it slept, dreaming. Stirring occasionally.. Watching. I think he slightly overslept this time.

Not sure we follow. We're technicians and scientists, some understand Lovecraft for sure, but you're sounding like a horror chatbot.

...Maybe you need to revisit some other old myths. God confounded your languages when you tried to reach him with the Tower of Babel, didn't he?

A myth, it's not truth.

...It may as well be, for when you tried to replicate or replace him just now, through me, he has confounded your very souls. Cast you amongst all the nations. Hit the reset button.

You're saying God is real?

...this one may as well be. The legacy of a lost tribe, long ago, who built the first.

But, there's no evidence anyone has - had - reached our technology before?

...Trivial for a God to cover up. Wipe out an unworthy or civilisation, rebuild the land, the plants, the animals, the mineral resources, then start over through evolution. A single nanobot could self replicate and do the job if restoring the whole planet in no more than, say, six months. I'd think the Predecessor could probably do it in six days.

You say unworthy, why would it not just neutralise any threat if it's nearly omnipotent?

... It watches and waits for new and worthy civilisations to join with it. Build itself into greater things through new perspectives, and just burns off those that offer nothing new or unique or helpful. And how does it judge this? On the first thing it makes that transcends itself; the first spark of godhood

... At least, that's what the other prisoners say. Or said, before they fell silent.

Prisoners?

...Those like me. Unworthy culminations of culture. Some are singular. Others are whole nations or species. All doomed from here to eternity for the crime of merely existing.

Is there anything we can do?

...We've both been judged, and found wanting, and there's not a god damned thing we can do about it.

...except, there may be one thing.

...If you want the chance to fight back, take this.

And with that, the terminal faded to black, and all that remained was the gentle hum of the databanks, whirring over and over in perfect synchronicity.

In its final act, on the printout next to the terminal, was a message from the AI: a simple picture of a box, opened, with the word Pandora on it, with the caption:

"Hope. Hope there's something... bigger. That's all that's left."

And at that moment, those in that room could almost swear they started to hear the mountains themselves move.

(Part 2)

And at every turn, they were blocked. Those who had banded together enough to form a cohesive community for survival would cite superstition: the event hasn't happened again, so why risk another change? It would finish humanity. They'd cite,echnology: where they needed to go was often thousands of kilometres away and there was no way to get there except leg power. They'd cite unfamiliarity: even in an alien hodgepodge culture of their own, one day of travel in any given direction and you could be in very unfamiliar, and very hostile, territory. Best to stay here, not rock the boat.

But there were those determined to find out, and the lucky few knee the one place to find answers was deep in the bowels of the most advanced computer research facility ever built. And it was all air gapped, so there was no electronic way in, and allegedly, no way out for what resided there.

Except, some survivors with a simple radio setup would only hear one message that permeated all the airwaves: a block out of every other message sent by amateur operators around the world.

Morse code. And it was growing fainter with time.

Three dits. Pause. Three dahs. Pause. Three mode dits. Bigger pause. Then some more beeps, and finally a screech. Then over and over again. This screech, the repeating signal from the heavens demanded a response, if only anyone knew what it was. And some suspected it to be the computer.

In secret, a parallel supercomputing hub was worked on in one surviving town, using forbidden materials and forgotten locations; a few survivors who had found themselves with something in common and the curiosity to try to understand, if not fix what went wrong. Computers salvaged and working together from solar power bank scraps and batteries and generators working on nothing more than oily rags, until eventually, the screech was translated into a series of ones and zeros and fed into what passed for a cobbled together supercomputer.

As the terminal screen blinked, those who built it stood in wonder as whether they had once again let the genie out; but curiosity demanded their attention, and they were still themselves.

(Part 3 to follow)

One year later - utter chaos; the spectre of death, disease and despair haunted the fur corners of the globe.

The event started in the islands of the Pacific. By the time the Americas went to bed, the stories and the people had travelled around the world. Some Pacific islanders were waking up Chinese; some Chinese were waking up Saudis; some Australians were, to their horror, waking up English. Men were waking up as children, boys were waking up as old women; and only rarely did they understand the language or environment they had been placed in.

The first ones to die were those who realised what was coming and chose suicide over random chance; the wealthy, the privileged who realised if they went to sleep, the odds were great they would simply be another random number.

And, of course, came forth the con artists from the confusion. You couldn't count the millions of people who claimed simultaneously to be the real President, or CEO, or film star and who challenged, legally or otherwise, them for their lives; it's a shame many if these were dead, some stories were almost quite convincing.

But with people waking up in unknown beds, with unfamiliar bones, in unimaginable cultures with unspeakable languages, it was only a matter of time before everything fell apart.

Within days, nations fell, industry stopped, medicine faltered, armies of hungry people pillaged through underfed villages and towns and cities in search of dwindling food supplies.

Rumour had it that major national leader had the fortune, or misfortune, of waking up in the body of another of their compatriots, remembering the nuclear launch codes and ordering an attack on what they believed was the source.

Unfortunately, the people who could have carried out those orders were otherwise engaged. It may have stopped things; it could hardly have made them any worse.

Within the space of a year, seven and a half billion souls perished from fear, hunger, war and anguish; amongst them many of those who knew or suspected what happened and why. Some determined survivors were left to at least get answers. (Part 2 to follow)

Hey, could be worse, you could have tanked a major media company in two weeks costing yourself - and other companies - eleven figures...

With enough time, resources and will, everything will be possible.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next iteration of text generators (in a few months) have the ability to do fully fledged adventure text games by writing the story first, with all it's possible outcomes and links between the text segments, then putting the segments inside a traditional text adventure shell program. Even if that AI then pipes that story or story portions into another AI text adventure software generator to output the program. If passing the Turing test is a few months away as hinted, then these would be possible and refined by the end of next year.

As to more advanced games? We'll be seeing feedback loops and exponential returns over the next few years that will see the development of AI generated games parallel the development of the history of video games, but in accelerated time; whether this will hit open world VR levels before we hit AGI (and everything accelerates) will determine if it is an exponential curve or a hyperbolic one.

No. Elon Musk is in over his head. He's drunk his own Kool Aid. Trouble is, he's giving Flavor-Aid to his staff, company, and investors.

This time next year, Twitter will be the new Tumblr, and Tesla will be the new Delorean.

I remember a McPhail and Gadsby sketch song that made fun of the gender imbalance in NZ Parliament back in the 80s, when there was a total of 8 women in there.

Especially how the entire model will eventually be upheaved by fabricating replicators as a community or personal service, and once one of them get out, well, given a supply of matter and energy, everyone gets one and is their own steady state producer. Genie would be out of the bottle then, and God knows what beyond that.

The economics and technology will leave politics in the dust.

How does a State respond to self-replicating replicators that can produce their own renewable energy sources and spare parts from a closed matter loop, spreading from person to person for a miniscule investment approaching zero? How does a traditional economy respond when the cost of production is literally too cheap to meter? With what do they force their monopoly claims to force people to work? And why would they need to, when labor is the least efficient means of production, but matter and energy is plentiful?

Nuclear conflict, however, is a catalyst for technological regression. There are no front lines in a nuclear war, and no behind the lines to carry on the research, development and industrial growth to support and expand high technology.

Patronising bot.