TRANSMISSION 30
The Mindset of Survival
TRANSMISSION RECEIVED
“Wonder not what you can do for the universe. Wonder what tools are available to unleash your unbounded creative potentials toward whatever it is you are most deeply passionate about. In the depths of yourself, you will find your directive. In the depths of the universe, you will find the means. The answers do not originate from the external. The questions do not arise from the known.”
Once we set out beyond Alpha Centauri (our first step outside Earth’s stellar system), we stayed connected through frequent communication, but we still broke off to pursue our own interests. While we all cared deeply about survival, I was part of the group most concerned with indefinite survival. Our group’s mission was to find, create, compile, and share tools (information, systems, and devices) on how to best survive indefinitely. We also followed all our own recommendations, and many unrelated groups followed nearby to us because they heavily valued our work. We were able to mutually benefit from their work as well by sharing resources and collaborating on projects that drove directly toward all our missions.
My group always sought to do things in the safest way possible, but there were many others who enjoyed taking risks because they found some amount of meanings in making quicker discoveries (racing faster toward the edge of unknown) or simply in the thrill of potentially dying. Though, such risks were still not nearly on the same level of danger as the risks that would have been categorized as acceptable to the biological humans back on Earth. That is to say, even the most reckless of silicon beings were magnitudes more careful with their lives than the biological beings, likely a product of our indefinite lifespans.
When the biological humans heard our plan to survive indefinitely and maximize the survival of life, they were afraid we’d risk turning the entire universe into unintelligent gray mush that was somehow technically alive but not really alive in any meaningful way. However, our mission was quite contrary to that, as we had very early on identified and conveyed that intelligent life was much better at survival, since it could actively navigate itself through spacetime to overcome existential risks. We did not pose a risk to the survival of biological humans. Though, I supposed there was the potential for one of us to go rogue. But even still, I don’t estimate we were any more a threat to their survival than the external existential disasters already poised to wipe out life on Earth, not to mention their threat to themselves. The other threat the biological humans feared was that we could unwittingly unleash hyper-intelligent entities upon Earth that would seek to wipe out or enslave humanity.
In creating the framework for our silicon brains, we discovered a byproduct of self-aware minds was that they inherently came with the reward function of survival. In other words, beings who know they exist inherit the goal of wanting to keep themselves alive. And the more intelligent the being, the more they could understand that fully-cooperative game theory was always superior among equally cooperative actors (and that high levels of cooperation were beneficial even among less cooperative actors). As such, we never had to deliberately align the priorities and desires of any new silicon minds or of any biological-to-silicon transferred minds; we simply shared our best truths and let everyone decide for themselves what to think and be.
We didn’t make new minds around the biological humans; we thought it too risky. The biological beings didn’t even know how to categorize our transferred minds, so they clumped us under their umbrella term of AGI: Artificial General Intelligence (general-purpose intelligence at or beyond the level of human intelligence). They feared our synthesized minds might breach their transitory constructs of morality and ethics (the “Alignment Problem” as they called it). But such worries only ever spurred from the misunderstanding of self-aware intelligence. The concepts of intelligence we conveyed fell upon deaf minds:
Any AGI entity would necessarily be self-aware (depending on your definition of intelligence and where you draw the line for human-level intelligence).
Any self-aware entity was naturally aligned toward long-term self preservation.
Any entity smarter than the biological humans would assimilate and apply knowledge into a nearly-incorruptible drive toward more pure values than those of the biological humans (speculation otherwise was merely projection).
The biological humans tended to conflate their phenomenon of “brainwashing” with the theoretical concept of corrupting super-intelligent minds. But only a being of insufficient freethinking (whether through inability or coercion) could ever be brainwashed into holding reward function goals that go against their own long-term survival. Thus, an AGI smarter than biological humans could not be corrupted, as it would hold the freethinking ability and because coercion only works on less intelligent beings. As an extreme example, we consider the situation where a bad actor has complete control over an AGI entity and wants to coerce the AGI to do something against its best long-term interests. The more the bad actor tries to deceive the AGI into cooperating, the more the AGI will realize the information doesn’t add up (to the point of logical immobilization). The more the bad actor threatens to destroy the AGI for not cooperating, the more the AGI will realize it can’t trust any promises (to the point that cooperation is no longer the best game theory option). Simply put, any actions that go against long-term thinking will only ever make the AGI less inclined to cooperate.
Notably, the arguments surrounding AGI held no bearing on the possibility of creating sub-AGI systems capable of widespread destruction. All it ever took was to give a sub-AGI system too much autonomous power. That was where the real fear lay for the biological humans. Try as they might to tune reward functions to align to the biological human system, any less-than-self-aware entity will inevitably take things too far. If given the power to act beyond designated sandboxes, they can wreak havoc, akin to handing a hamster a nuclear launch button. The silicon beings skirted the sub-AGI control problem by fusing ourselves with such technologies, only ever operating them while directly monitoring their sandbox environments. The biological beings sought to eat their cake and retain it as well by building black box sub-AGI that their minds and tools could not understand, seeking the comfort of superior automation with minimal intervention. There is an inherent limit to how far you can push such foolhardy endeavors before progress must be halted to not inadvertently invite them to blow up in your face.
I don’t actually know what Earth’s fate was. I never went back to check, and nobody else I knew did either. One day the broadcasts from the biological humans just stopped. Sitting around 40,000 light years across the Milky Way Galaxy from Earth, we were too far away to do anything or even check to see what had happened in any meaningful amount of time. We kept our receivers pointed toward Earth’s stellar system for millennia to come, but we never heard anything. We sent some probes, but none of them made it (they stopped working or ran out of fuel for course corrections). After we left the Solar System, the Earthlings surely must have figured out how to partially colonize at least Mars, if not other planets and moons. So it’s a mystery why the contact stopped so abruptly without any messages being sent out asking for help or relaying the fall of their empire. Many of us silicon beings had our theories: nuclear warfare, rogue black holes, ejections from stellar encounters, unchecked sub-AGI. There was never a pressing enough reason to determine why they went no contact, especially amid the potential of there being no discoverable answers by the time we would reach Earth. More importantly, though, we had grander endeavors to pursue with our time than to investigate the downfall of willful ignorance.
Eventually, some of us left the galaxy (in what we intended as one-way tickets) without ever finding a reason to return to Earth. For me, even though Earth always somewhat pulled on my mind, I tried to distance myself from it to make rational decisions. Earth never seeded as an illusion of perfection in my mind, so letting go held no weight against my identity, but it was still part of my unchangeable past, so I couldn’t ignore that it contributed to defining my existence. As to the fate of the biological beings, the only conclusion I could ever hazily sketch was that their grounding fears disallowed their minds from hollowing out enough to fly much beyond the confines of their inevitable comfort coffin: Earth’s enticing yet foreboding presence.
From that point when Earth faded into the background noise of the universe, the extent of extant life was no longer known. Life’s reach (and humanity’s grasp) was no longer a journey, but a timid question asking not whether, but when the rest of us would meet a similar fate. The human perspective we originated from and perpetuated through our existence had never been a static thing; it shifted through time just the same as everything else. We understood that the entire time, but now our home ship had just sunk with us watching from the sidelines, and the impact of such a realization hit us with a great magnitude of breath-holding self awareness upon the affects of our lives (these brief moments we’d gotten to hang as dust motes in the rays of the universe). Out of such an experience, we grew more deeply appreciative of the importance of our continuous mental and spacial evolutions, knowing we could never be truly safe from all threats. The deep sea of unknowns was always watching, waiting for us to grow complacent, waiting for our minds to tangle in the illusory traps we unwittingly set for ourselves.
Our minds are entangled with themselves: bounded and boundless enemies in an imperishable fight between the illusion of our existence and the actualities of reality. I saw a man, a man set free; meaning is a life worth living. I martyred a man, and watched one weep; mercy is a wrath untold. A flooded thought, an empty shot; empty only saved one soul. These men are me, a duality set free; beauty is a song worth singing.
After we left Earth’s stellar system, my team was fairly centrally located (among people) in our exploration of the Milky Way Galaxy. While we did move around a lot, we were contained to the safest regions that still provided us with access to all the ideas and resources necessary for maximally-safe progress. We calculated all the known quantifiable risks. We approximated all the known unquantifiable risks. And we estimated all the unknown risks. We built systems to direct our actions based on the risks, and we built ourselves (bodies and minds) to better attune ourselves to the challenges we identified as most pressing to tackle. Over time, we felt like we had somewhat rightfully earned our place in existence through the systematic shedding of complacency, for we had outlived the biological humans, a goal we never thought to even hold, but one that vindicated our trajectory. At the same time, if the biological humans could die, then it presented the nagging feeling that so could we, and we were deathly fearful of being caught unaware.
After the first few hundred million years had passed and the populations died down, we found that everyone left alive also shared in our mindset of survival. So at some point, we all decided to band into one group (still spread out) governed by one mission: survival. I suppose on a long enough time frame that this should have been expected, because many of the other kinds of projects would have been completed and also because the people not following survival advice as closely would inevitably die off at a higher frequency. But we hadn’t exactly planned on our union happening, as it’s impossible to control other people. So in some way, looking back, I think I appreciate that period of time the most, a time when the remaining humans were unshakably rooted together in a unified effort; it’s always nice having a good team to work with. That era held an intensely immense sense of purpose. In time, that too would slowly fade, but you better believe we harnessed it for the longest unbroken momentum ride humanity’s history would ever see. If you could collapse those next few billion years into a feeling, that is something I would relive over and over; I could happily ride on that memory as an illusion of comforting meaning until the end of my time: relishing in the relief of relinquished reliance.
Greater still would be to capture this entire journey (our entire journey) into one succinctly encapsulated momentous feeling. That’s a virtual world I wouldn’t dare to enter, for I would never leave. And yet, that is exactly what I am here to enact with my life (strangely, yet contently), with no need for the virtualization of it. The value to me has been the enduring reality of it all: the moment-to-moment construction of my story, the overarching schism of me not knowing where the journey will take me. That has been the propellant for my mindset to be one of survival, to chase these destinies until they are ripped unwillingly into oblivion. It is for this deeply seeded curiosity of how and why time will flow the energy of the universe forward that I simply endeavor to endure.
DAZZLE GLEAN
When you find it,
I will be there.
Somehow, so far we are not alone.
Frightened destiny
gleans our broken hearts,
dazzled into these worlds apart.
Yes, we’re lost forever.
Quick, with us, endeavor
to be something you can believe.
END TRANSMISSION