Of course in their day-dreams of the future the little fat men are neither fat nor little; they are Men Like Gods. But why should they be? All mechanical progress is towards greater and greater efficiency; ultimately, therefore, towards a world in which nothing goes wrong. But in a world in which nothing went wrong, many of the qualities which Mr Wells regards as ‘godlike’ would be no more valuable than the animal faculty of moving the ears.
Of the few childhood memories which survive the fondest is from the first year of secondary school. A bright November morning, a Friday; waking to see the lightest dust of snow on the roof opposite the house. Leaping from bed with jubilation, even raising my fist! Grave intonations: ‘mother, the school website. I’ve looked. It just isn’t going to happen’. Soon they were shuffling out to their places of work, and within twenty minutes I was in the living room, leading Martin Septim to Weynon Priory, fine iron claymore in hand. With the weekend begun early the time given back by the weather seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of me! Yes! When I hear the word ‘joy’ I remember that very moment.
I was told at school the following Monday that the Normscum had snowball fights on the ‘big field’, rolling around in the mud like moronic cattle.
For political reasons we should not talk about the Covid scam without dripping venom. Nonetheless, it must be observed that the first lockdown gave many their happiest months. I believe this was mostly because they could live like NEETs without any social judgement. Without the niggling feelings that other people are having fun. Inside is a shameless vegetating slave who wants to be lying horizontally while scrolling vertically. At our most stimulated and most degraded.
There is some good news for these people, insofar as the coming wave of AI cyber-hacks are nigh-on guaranteed to cause weeks and weeks of disruption in the coming year. In just the past month fridges filled with food and even blood plasma have been hacked into across Europe causing untold billions in damage by way of spoilt food. This is being done partly by Iran but also by random Estonian 19 year olds. US flights are being grounded at the drop of a hat and every other day a website accidentally leaks millions of user records. Wes Streeting is on the telly telling all of us to stock up on John West Tuna Light Lunches. How long will it be until the first big disaster happens; when a ‘cybergriefer’ forces the Grid into a black start. Weeks? Months?
How can we be so certain that this will happen? Because in a semi-ironic twist of fate this is technology undoing technology. Artificial Intelligence is coming at the tail end of forty plus years of institutional decay in the spare capacity of virtually every complex system; the Grid, flight safety, transport networks, water supplies etc. Whatever you care to name it has become less secure in this time. There are some political reasons that this may have happened; the Left might talk about privatisation or austerity, the Right might talk about DEI (lower human capital) or immigration (increasing demand).
Whatever the explanation the result is the same. Reduced capital investment over time has been patched over by efficiency improvements made possible by technological improvements like data-sharing, the ‘Cloud’, the Internet of Things and increasingly AI (it is currently hoped that nearly all public services and Britain can magic up productivity improvements through ‘AI’). This technological membrane which has just about kept the welfare state chuntering along is now being pierced by Artificial Intelligence enhanced cyber-hacking.
Experiencing this in real time will be a more intense experience than the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of there being new variations of an illness which poses no threat to vast majority of people, AI will constantly expose novel vulnerabilities which make life either more difficult for you or will drive you to despair. We cannot confidently predict society will react to every single WhatsApp message anyone has ever sent being leaked into a searchable database. Or their search histories. Will companies fire every single employee that has searched something disobliging as a teenager. Will there be millions of divorces as millions of affairs are uncovered? Will the only politicians left still standing be obscurantist home-schooled technophobes?
The only thing which we can be certain of is disruption. Hours, days, weeks, months of the stuff. For however long it takes for companies and governments to successfully air-gap vulnerable systems.
And, better than with Covid, this will be disruption that reaches into your home. There will not be tedious Teams summits with the boss. And there will be some reason to believe that society is capable of ‘building back better’, because instead of just killing old people and condemning the young to lockdown debts, AI is at the very least a double edged sword.
In 2012, a fan project called TES Renewal began, promising to bring all of Tamriel; Morrowind (Skywind) and Oblivion (Skyblivion) into one great explorable universe. Thousands of human volunteers would do the environment designing, voice acting and writing to break down the invisible in-game barrier that stops you from wandering into Cyrodil on the road from Helgen.
This gripped my adolescent imagination and I followed it closely through each and every trailer, request for 3d modelling expertise, pro-bono legal support. How many times must I have googled ‘Skyblivion release date?’ Forever just moments beyond the horizon.
In December of last year, thirteen years after the project began, the release date for Skyblivion was yet again delayed. Human volunteers had failed for fourteen years, just as the proprietary organisation Bethesda has for fifteen, repeatedly delaying the sixth instalment of the Elder Scrolls game to create silly commercial failures.
But where paid and free human enterprise has failed, Artificial Intelligence will not. Tens of thousands of AI agents will be able to generate a new Tamriel in a game engine of my design, for me to enjoy, with but a single prompt.
My plan for the coming snow days is to take Shadowmere to Akavir. This is the future and I am far from ungrateful for it.