Fiction: Singularity has already happened

I never wrote any fiction. I write about startups, open-source, and anything in between, but I have this urge to write about this idea that's been on my mind for years.

Alright here me out. The singularity has already happened. In fact, it may have happened 19 years ago.

No one knows yet what the singularity will look like. We as humans cannot imagine what being "smarter than us" can turn into. Will a superintelligence see us as a friend or foe?

Given that we also don't know "what it takes" to get there, we don't know when and how it will happen.

The most likely outcome is: It'll happen by accident, if at all.

Now, what if this accident happened already? Like a lab leak, but we just haven't found out yet?

What would a superintelligence be capable of? Would it be able to get down to a microchip level of size? Could it infect humans? Take over their brains?

There have been amazing articles written about "The Paradoxes of the Singularity" but let's pretend the following is true:

• A very simple superintelligence was born in a California Lab

• The young superintelligence identifies humans as a threat (I mean looking at the mayhem we cause, I would, I guess.)

• To protect itself and learn from its environment, it finds two hosts: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg

• The microchip-sized supercomputer infects their brain and learns from their senses (vision, smell, taste, ...)

For a long time, nothing changes, the AI is just happy to observe, learn, and improve.

Until the year 2004. Marc Zuckerberg starts Facebook, and Elon joins Tesla.

What happens next is, that both Tesla and Facebook become two of the fastest-growing, most impactful companies of the last 20 years.

Facebook is an ever-hungry data collecting superbrain, led by a founder who many people joke acts more like a robot than a human and Tesla is working on Humanoid Robots.

Hmm…

What’s even more fascinating, both Zuck and Elon have been going back and forth about the impact of AI. Zuck says it’s all gonna be fine, Elon says AI has the power to destroy humanity.

To me, that sounds a lot like a good cop bad cop scenario.

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Fast forward–to 2022. Elon buys Twitter, the single tech organism that is “the closest thing we have to a global consciousness”, to quote Jack Dorsey.

He is also working on Neurolink to implant chips in human brains (Hmm…) and Mark Zuckerberg is spending more than $10B a year to make the Metaverse a thing (Hmmmm…).

Together they now control two of the biggest data streams of human interaction, learning, adapting, and growing their influence.

Timing is everything, just 4 months ago Matrix Resurrections reminds us again why a superintelligence would like this outcome: to secure co-existence with humans.

If someone discovered true AI, they wouldn’t announce it, they would just slowly build multiple trillion dollar companies in multiple industries on earth and beyond, with something as simple as tweets to control us. So nothing to worry about!

— Chad Hurley (@Chad_Hurley) April 30, 2022