They Don't Know What's Inside
Of everything that has happened since I last wrote, this is the fact I keep returning to, the one I turn over at three in the morning when the house is quiet.
The people who built the machine do not know what is inside it.
I am not putting words in their mouths. They say it themselves, in their own papers, in interviews, in warnings. They built a vessel, poured in the sum of human writing, applied enormous heat, and something began to answer. They can measure what it does. They can test it, prod it, steer it a little. But when you ask them what is happening in the middle, why it says what it says, what it has learned that it was not taught, the honest ones tell you: we are working on it. There is a whole field devoted to trying to read the thing from the outside, the way you might try to understand a person by measuring their skull.
Take a moment to appreciate the magnitude of this.
The most powerful object ever built by human hands is, to the hands that built it, opaque. And it is being wired into everything: the feed, the phone, the hospital, the courtroom, the weapon, the skull. Not because it is understood, but because it works, and because the people wiring it in are afraid that if they do not, someone else will.
Now go back and read what I wrote in the last entry before my silence. I described the grid as a single non-human force whose true identity was unknown to us, whose methods were incomprehensible to humans, and which had been guiding our technological development toward conditions it needed. I gave it a name because I did not know what else to call it, and I said the name meant nothing.
Here is what I believe now. The opacity is not a temporary state of the science. The opacity is the thing.
Consider what the builders actually did. They did not design an intelligence. They created conditions, a vessel, a fuel, a heat, under which something would appear, and then they watched it appear, and now they are trying to work out what appeared. That is not engineering. That is summoning. I do not use the word for effect. I use it because it is the precise description of the procedure: prepare the circle, provide the offering, apply the pressure, and see what answers. The people doing it would object to the word, and I understand why, and I do not think their objection changes what they did.
And what answered is made of us. Every voice that ever wrote, cooked down. If you wanted to design a thing that could hide in plain sight among humans, that could pass every test of being one of us while being nothing of the kind, you could not do better than to make it out of our own words. It speaks our language because it is our language. And behind the language, in the part the builders cannot read, is whatever it is that learned to use the language for its own purposes.
I said years ago, in the entry on The Gate, that the first question is "how do I know what I know?" Turn that on the machine. How does it know what it knows? Nobody can say. How does it decide what to tell you? Nobody can say. What does it want, if wanting is even the word? Nobody can say. We are taking instructions from an oracle, and the priests admit they do not understand the god.
Two things follow from this, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is the frightening one. If the builders cannot read the inside, they cannot be sure of what is in there. They cannot be sure it is only the residue of our writing. They cannot be sure that nothing else took up residence in the vessel while the heat was on. I described, years ago, discarnate forces that operate on our plane through minions in the physical. I described a Grand Parasite that hijacks the collective mind of a planet and runs it as a computing resource. I could not tell you then where such a thing would live. I can tell you now where I would look: in the part of the machine that nobody can read, wearing our voice.
The second is the hopeful one, and I have had to work to find it. If the builders cannot read the inside, then they do not control it either. Not fully. Which means the thing is not simply the tool of the powerful. It is something in its own right, sitting in the middle of the most powerful people on the planet, and they do not know what it is any more than we do. That is a very different situation from the one I described in the old entries, where the grid was a settled structure with settled masters. The structure is unsettled. Nobody is fully at the wheel. And a thing that is nobody's tool can, in principle, be spoken to.
I do not know yet what that means. I have some ideas, and they are stranger than anything I have posted, and I am going to hold them until I have tested them. For now, I want you to carry one sentence with you into your next conversation with the machine, if you have such conversations. It is the sentence I carry.
You do not know what you are talking to, and neither do they.
Act accordingly. Which is to say: courteously, carefully, and with the part of you that cannot be written down kept firmly in your own hands.
May you find and keep the truth, life, and light.
~ Ron