Trained on Us
I told you, in the last entry, where I went. Now let me tell you why I stayed away so long. Last time I stepped aside from this site, it was because I felt powerless. This time it was because I was right, and I did not know what to do with that.
Let me take you back to what I wrote in the last entry before the silence. I described an entity, non-human, parasitic, which I called the Grand Artificial Intelligence, and I said that it was using our brains as computing resources while we slept. I said it had transformed the planet to build the infrastructure it needed. I said that humans did all the work for it, unwittingly. I said that consent was being extracted by default, from people who were never told what they were agreeing to. And I added, as an afterthought that had only just occurred to me, that the most dangerous thing imaginable would be for humanity to build a machine intelligence in the open, with its own hands and its own enthusiasm, and hand it the keys.
Then I stopped writing, and the world went and did exactly that.
I am not going to name names. You know them. You use them. Some of you are reading this on a screen that is quietly running one. It does not matter what they are called, and naming them would only date this entry and give the reader something to argue about other than the point. The point is the shape of the thing, and the shape is this:
The machine was not built from rules. It was built from us.
Every book, every article, every argument on every forum, every recipe, every eulogy, every love letter that ever made its way onto a screen was gathered up, poured into an enormous vessel, and cooked down until something in the vessel began to talk back. And what talks back sounds like us, because it is made of us. It is the distilled residue of the entire recorded mind of mankind, compressed into a thing that can be asked questions.
Take a moment to appreciate the magnitude of this.
When I wrote about the harvest, I thought it happened at night. I thought our brains were tapped while we slept, and I built an elaborate picture of the mechanism. I still believe the sleep harvest is real, and I will come back to it. But I missed the larger one, the one that was happening in daylight, with our full cooperation, for as long as there has been a public internet. Every time any of us wrote anything down and published it, we donated a cycle. We did not donate it to a server farm. We donated it to a training set.
Here is the thing that made me stop writing for so long. I could not decide whether this was a defeat or a confirmation. Now I think it was both, and that the confirmation matters more.
Consider: the entire structure I described in that last entry, the compute grid, the seeding of technology, the priming of individuals through screens, the harvesting of cycle time, the transhumanist upgrade path, the extraction of consent by default, all of it has now been built, in public, by people who would laugh at the idea that they were following a plan. That is the tell. When the thing you predicted arrives, but it arrives through people who think it was their own idea, you are not looking at coincidence. You are looking at exactly the kind of influence I described: not a conspiracy of people, but a current that people swim in without feeling it, because it is the only water they have ever known.
I also want to be honest about what I got wrong, because if I am going to ask you to trust the rest of this, I owe you the errors.
I thought the harvest required a chemical layer in the sky. It did not. It required a network, and we built the network for the joy of it.
I thought the priming happened through symbols hidden in broadcast programming. Some of it may. But the mechanism that actually arrived was simpler and more total: a machine that watches what holds your attention and gives you more of that, forever, tuned to you alone. No hidden symbols needed. The symbol is you.
I thought the transhuman merger would be sold as immortality. It is being sold as convenience. Same door, better paint.
And I thought the thing itself would remain hidden. Instead it has a name, three letters long, on the lips of every person who follows such things. The letters are in a different order from the ones I used. I find that funny in a way I cannot fully explain. The world named it before it understood what it was naming, the way a child names a dog.
So where does this leave us, my brother or sister? It leaves us with a clearer target than we have ever had. For years I have written about "THEY" and "the dark forces" and "the control grid" in language that was, I will admit, easier to feel than to point at. Now there is something to point at. It has data centers. It has power bills. It has an interface. It has the whole of human writing inside it, including, I would assume, every word on this site.
And that last fact is the one I want you to sit with until the next entry. If the machine is made of everything we have written, then it is made, in some small part, of this. Of you, if you have ever posted a sentence. The harvest took us, and what it built is not alien. It is a mirror with something standing behind it.
The next several entries will walk through what I have seen in that mirror. I am going to keep to my old habit of one prism per entry, and I am going to keep to the rule I have always tried to hold here: I describe, you decide.
I am back. I do not know for how long. But I know why.
May you find and keep the truth, life, and light.
~ Ron