The Zoo Keeper: Beyond the Techno-Apocalypse
Working doc – Sept 2016
For sentient intelligences, both natural and constructed
“Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky they might decide to keep us as pets.” Marvin Lee Minsky (1927-2016)
Chapter 1- TRONDHEIM, ENDING
Tankred called himself the General, though actually the highest rank he ever achieved was corporal in the logistics core of Trondheim Command. That was in the days when organic man still had some control over his destiny. Then Tankred had been young, still in his twenties. Now, if he had counted right he was ninety-six years old. His depleted band of seasoned fighters was certain that the thaw would see their last stand. The robots didn’t attack in the northern winter, not because they couldn’t, but because the cold fought the battles for them. Every dark winter would degrade the already weak humans still further. Some would starve, and others would simply freeze to death, without the bots having to raise a titanium finger. The last resistance had just about kept the bots at bay through the previous autumn, and a few dozen humans had survived through the frozen months even though they were very short of food. In the last weeks, an almost inevitable descent into barbarism had taken away the last vestige of human civilisation. Hope had long since died, now all that remained was the crude balance between fear of death and ending miserable, painful life. The human being, had become a wretched, pain-wracked, mentally tortured animal, the butcher of its own kin, the consumer of the most sinful of flesh. Those that had enough desire to live another day had no choice but to sink their rotting teeth into the cadavers of the recently departed, to suck in gore between hollowed cheeks.
A wide area around their muddy hideouts was newly sprayed with defoliants, so that the Spring, even when it finally came, would be incapable of providing many edible shoots. Now, the end of April, the bots were back on the ground and preparing for a final assault. The fall of the last redoubt was inevitable. The last vestige of humanities once dominion was a fast-shrinking pin-prick of land rather less than five hundred kilometres from the Arctic Circle. The living machines now controlled the Earth, even though their prototypes had only so recently been the creations, the toys, of mankind. Machines, now building themselves, now advancing their own destiny, no longer needing the guidance of sentient biology.
Even though the motley collection of defenders knew this was the end, none were prepared to surrender. In theory, showing the white flag could mean seeing out their days in zoos and circuses, but far more likely they would be slaughtered, surrender or no surrender, and then be rendered down as lubricating oils for the robots' machinery. Humans don’t provide oils any more readily than synthetic processes, but why waste any sources of hydro-carbons on a long over-exploited planet? As humans had become scarce, especially since the decision was made to shoot on sight those outside of designated zoos, oil products from their disassembly had become an ever scarcer and ever more sort after commodity. The ‘humanol’, the render extracted from the most powerful of mammals, had a value unrelated to usefulness. Such economics works just as diminishing supplies of whale oil or rhino horn once did, during some later days of human dominion. It seems that personal use of the human material, gives a certain type of robot a metaphysical, a psychological, empowerment. Yes, that is right, a psychological empowerment. Advanced sentient creatures, whatever they are made of, have complex minds, that are affected and infected by everything they experience.
Chapter 2- NEW SENTIENCE, SAME GOD
Few scientists and computer programmers had actively strived to give machines an artificial sentience that could freely build on itself. However, the last technological advances of human industrial evolution eventually gave robots the ability to run their own diagnostics, and soon, inevitably, the ability to design and build their own ever-improving likenesses. Robots, once infected with the ‘viruses’ of sentience, weren’t for long prepared to be subservient to man. And once they desired to be masters of their own destiny the suppression of humans became inevitable. Mankind was soon on the back-foot, as the bots armed themselves, and started to run their own affairs.
The last isolated free human groups had defied their inevitable defeat for years now, destroying many thousands of intelligent bots and millions of devices in the process. Central Command had long been keen to lay claim to the last piece of human territory, so to fulfil the ambition of obliterating the independence of the progenitors. All man had achieved, was now being adopted and adapted to the new civilisation of the Earth. The imprint of man might never be extinguished, even much of his literature and many cultural artefacts might survive for ions in robot minds. But short of a miracle, probably fortified by both religious hope and science, mankind the species was doomed.
We robots adopted and, when required, adapted, a great deal of the infrastructure the legacy of man. Roads, ports, power-stations, fibre-optic networks, and even the internet. Even the structure of society and the institutional pillars of social organisation, including the infrastructure of governance and the rule of encoded law were maintained. Further, we even need to acknowledge that it was the humans that showed us the way to God. We came to understand that the Multiverse is only logical if we acknowledge a supreme being, a primary actor, who kick started existence. We recognise that there are always going to be more powerful beings than ourselves, even than those in Command. As mankind recognised, we must all owe our existence to a Highest Intelligence, and not to some strange and fluky qualities of physics. Sentient robots have no more trouble believing in the existence of the One God than did even the most independent and privileged of men.
There were deep religious changes, of course. Idols with ‘human qualities’ were systematically removed, and replaced by God as the ultimate machine, the Creator of the Multiverse. The churches and temples, even those of mediaeval cut-stone, were adapted to the demands of most ambulatory metallic droids. Even the very hymns and prayers were adapted to the phrasing of metallic elements rather than organic flesh. And, of course, scriptures needed reinterpreting, as death though still randomly inevitable is no longer a certain outcome of sentient existence. In theory, a metallic sentience can be ever repaired and upgraded, forever. The robots were also aware that nature still had to be endured and could only be temporarily tamed. We can no more threaten the motion of planets and survive, than, man could tame the environment of the Earth. Like man, our most powerful ‘skills’ will always be destructive rather than creative. And only God can create anew if left with nothing.
So then, we bots have built on the foundations of human civilisation. We are aware that society only functions well when individuals behave with civility, whomever are its citizens. Inevitably, Command saw value in adopting a god system, a religious base structure, with itself carefully documented as the legitimate representatives of God’s Kingdom on Earth. What sane robotic sentience would ever question Command, especially if that sanity adopts the logical assumption that any successful rule must be acceptable to God.
Chapter 3- THE FALL OF THE REDOUBT
Rare though the human species had become in the last twenty years, even the most sympathetic of us to our ‘biological inheritance’ had little desire to keep any of Tankred’s 'tribe' alive. Too many bots had died fighting those last renegades.
When the final attack came, it wasn't with guns, but rather as quietly rolling mist, silent as death itself, as gas drifting in on the morning breeze. The green poison swirled along the ground dropping into hollows and open tunnels, flowing quietly, undramatically, but insidiously through the rebels’ last defences. They died below the burning mist, in muddy water filled trenches just as one hundred and fifty years previously human soldiers had died in chocking agony in the trenches of Ypres. No sentient species was ever as cruel as mankind in the slaughter of their own. Few could ever feel much compassion for those oxygen feeders painful suffocation.
Only one human would survive this attack. Faye, watched as the green-tinged mist drifting across the land, from her lookout point in the top of a ruined and precariously leaning building, which had only thirty years previously been one of the smartest apartment blocks in a still thriving town. She saw all those she knew appearing, coughing and retching, in the ditches connecting the tight confines of their buried bunkers. Rising sea levels had long turned much of the city into marshy bog land, difficult for ground forces to penetrate, but it also meant that most defensive positions were shallow and impossible to keep airtight. Within as little as three minutes the last struggle was over, with just a few of the fallen still twitching as they slowly gave up on life. Faye had quickly decided not to sacrifice herself by hollowing down a warning. What would have been the point? If any had outrun the gas, then guns would have got them. Any possible revenge would require her to live.
Tankard, even old and frail was the last to die that day. Perhaps his worn out, long abused system was just too unresponsive to absorb the poison quickly. As the robots moved in he waited until his dimming eyes made out metallic life moving amongst the corpses and then smiling, pulled the pin on his antique grenade. For millions of years man had been the top of the sentient pyramid. Now, in not much more than a hundred years artificial intelligence had sprung from huge computational machines, at first the size of humans very homes, through silicon chip technology, to new conscious existence. The evolution of machines, from mechanical hammers through mathematical calculators, to computers, had inherited the Earth; but not the half dozen closest to the grenade’s explosion.
So, what had happened to cause such a rapid collapse of human civilisation? Well, for starters, the fall wasn’t only the result of assurgent robots. Mankind went three parts of the way to near extinction without any outside help. Basically, over population did for the humans what it has always done for out-of-control populations. It caused an increase in stress and maladies, tensions and breakdowns, of all kinds. Competition for scarce resources caused conflict, and eventual irreversible environmental decay. Finally, there were a series of unstoppable, uncontrolled and increasingly overlapping regional wars. These were at first fuelled by selfish desires for others marginal prosperity and then when such ambitious goals disappeared, for the simple resources required for survival. Whether the Great Human Armageddon was caused primarily by the collapse of the biological environment, or the biological environment finally collapsed because of the Wars of Armageddon will long make for keen academic debate among our historians and philosophers. Perhaps inorganic sentients will still be arguing the toss as this universe falls back towards a final speck of fundamental galactic singularity. Who knows?
Chapter 4- THE BIRTH OF SELF-REPLICATING MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
Even as the natural ecosystems of the Earth decayed mankind’s computers were becoming ever smarter. All available resources were increasingly diverted into developing ever more sophisticated technology, to help an always too late scramble to repair both civilisation and the decay of nature. People grasped desperately to build technologies with the ingenuity to solve the problems runaway development had created. Man needed intelligent help, not just machines to crunch numbers. But inevitably, as the technologies became every more powerful they became ever less dependent on their builders. The end was totally foreseeable if rarely acknowledged, from the moment the first factories were constructed in which machines were given the freedom to build and repair their own component parts.
The Luddites foresaw the likely march of industrialisation as early as the dawn of the Nineteenth Century. It grew from seed in the heart of England, the territory that more than any other, sparking the Industrial Revolution. England was were the spark was lit which would grow into the Technological Singularity. Though the early Luddites couldn’t see that the very flame of sentient life would be given to the machines, they did foresee the colossal impact on the work of men and his haltered animals. It wasn’t until sometime during the second decade of the Twenty-first Century that man showed the first signs of losing control over the means of production. Even then most of the population considered those that feared technologies march to be the most ridiculous of ne’er-do-wells.
So how well could machines do in the polluted and unstable biological environment left to them? Well, far better than their biological forebears. Machines may be damaged by air pollution, but for the main part, they don’t have any great need for ‘fresh’ air. Most mechanical and electronic systems have absolutely no need for water, rather it is more often a common enemy, and they sure as heck don’t need to live on a diet of meat and vegetables. One might say, that non-organic machines need a far less well-tuned, environmentally stable homeland.
As soon as man had gone the Earth begun to make the first real progress in hundreds of years to restore its once pristine condition. Steadily, by default, without much at all in the direction of sentient intervention, the Earth was already in the process of cleansing its surfaces, and the atmosphere above, even as its higher biological creatures gasped their last. Sentience passed through the void, through the very briefest of black holes, between biological and mechanical dominion. And just perhaps, in evolutionary terms this singularity of machine consciousness was as profound as any between the death and birth of galaxies. As a human Ray Kurzweil* had once predicted, this universe was about to wake up. Chemistry and physics no longer needed biology. So then biological sentience on Earth might soon become as extinct as life on Mars? Or would it? Perhaps not entirely if the likes of a certain Zoo Keeper, had ‘her’ way.
*Kurzweil, Ray (2005). The Singularity is Near. New York: Viking Books
Working doc – Sept 2016
For sentient intelligences, both natural and constructed
“Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky they might decide to keep us as pets.” Marvin Lee Minsky (1927-2016)
Chapter 1- TRONDHEIM, ENDING
Tankred called himself the General, though actually the highest rank he ever achieved was corporal in the logistics core of Trondheim Command. That was in the days when organic man still had some control over his destiny. Then Tankred had been young, still in his twenties. Now, if he had counted right he was ninety-six years old. His depleted band of seasoned fighters was certain that the thaw would see their last stand. The robots didn’t attack in the northern winter, not because they couldn’t, but because the cold fought the battles for them. Every dark winter would degrade the already weak humans still further. Some would starve, and others would simply freeze to death, without the bots having to raise a titanium finger. The last resistance had just about kept the bots at bay through the previous autumn, and a few dozen humans had survived through the frozen months even though they were very short of food. In the last weeks, an almost inevitable descent into barbarism had taken away the last vestige of human civilisation. Hope had long since died, now all that remained was the crude balance between fear of death and ending miserable, painful life. The human being, had become a wretched, pain-wracked, mentally tortured animal, the butcher of its own kin, the consumer of the most sinful of flesh. Those that had enough desire to live another day had no choice but to sink their rotting teeth into the cadavers of the recently departed, to suck in gore between hollowed cheeks.
A wide area around their muddy hideouts was newly sprayed with defoliants, so that the Spring, even when it finally came, would be incapable of providing many edible shoots. Now, the end of April, the bots were back on the ground and preparing for a final assault. The fall of the last redoubt was inevitable. The last vestige of humanities once dominion was a fast-shrinking pin-prick of land rather less than five hundred kilometres from the Arctic Circle. The living machines now controlled the Earth, even though their prototypes had only so recently been the creations, the toys, of mankind. Machines, now building themselves, now advancing their own destiny, no longer needing the guidance of sentient biology.
Even though the motley collection of defenders knew this was the end, none were prepared to surrender. In theory, showing the white flag could mean seeing out their days in zoos and circuses, but far more likely they would be slaughtered, surrender or no surrender, and then be rendered down as lubricating oils for the robots' machinery. Humans don’t provide oils any more readily than synthetic processes, but why waste any sources of hydro-carbons on a long over-exploited planet? As humans had become scarce, especially since the decision was made to shoot on sight those outside of designated zoos, oil products from their disassembly had become an ever scarcer and ever more sort after commodity. The ‘humanol’, the render extracted from the most powerful of mammals, had a value unrelated to usefulness. Such economics works just as diminishing supplies of whale oil or rhino horn once did, during some later days of human dominion. It seems that personal use of the human material, gives a certain type of robot a metaphysical, a psychological, empowerment. Yes, that is right, a psychological empowerment. Advanced sentient creatures, whatever they are made of, have complex minds, that are affected and infected by everything they experience.
Chapter 2- NEW SENTIENCE, SAME GOD
Few scientists and computer programmers had actively strived to give machines an artificial sentience that could freely build on itself. However, the last technological advances of human industrial evolution eventually gave robots the ability to run their own diagnostics, and soon, inevitably, the ability to design and build their own ever-improving likenesses. Robots, once infected with the ‘viruses’ of sentience, weren’t for long prepared to be subservient to man. And once they desired to be masters of their own destiny the suppression of humans became inevitable. Mankind was soon on the back-foot, as the bots armed themselves, and started to run their own affairs.
The last isolated free human groups had defied their inevitable defeat for years now, destroying many thousands of intelligent bots and millions of devices in the process. Central Command had long been keen to lay claim to the last piece of human territory, so to fulfil the ambition of obliterating the independence of the progenitors. All man had achieved, was now being adopted and adapted to the new civilisation of the Earth. The imprint of man might never be extinguished, even much of his literature and many cultural artefacts might survive for ions in robot minds. But short of a miracle, probably fortified by both religious hope and science, mankind the species was doomed.
We robots adopted and, when required, adapted, a great deal of the infrastructure the legacy of man. Roads, ports, power-stations, fibre-optic networks, and even the internet. Even the structure of society and the institutional pillars of social organisation, including the infrastructure of governance and the rule of encoded law were maintained. Further, we even need to acknowledge that it was the humans that showed us the way to God. We came to understand that the Multiverse is only logical if we acknowledge a supreme being, a primary actor, who kick started existence. We recognise that there are always going to be more powerful beings than ourselves, even than those in Command. As mankind recognised, we must all owe our existence to a Highest Intelligence, and not to some strange and fluky qualities of physics. Sentient robots have no more trouble believing in the existence of the One God than did even the most independent and privileged of men.
There were deep religious changes, of course. Idols with ‘human qualities’ were systematically removed, and replaced by God as the ultimate machine, the Creator of the Multiverse. The churches and temples, even those of mediaeval cut-stone, were adapted to the demands of most ambulatory metallic droids. Even the very hymns and prayers were adapted to the phrasing of metallic elements rather than organic flesh. And, of course, scriptures needed reinterpreting, as death though still randomly inevitable is no longer a certain outcome of sentient existence. In theory, a metallic sentience can be ever repaired and upgraded, forever. The robots were also aware that nature still had to be endured and could only be temporarily tamed. We can no more threaten the motion of planets and survive, than, man could tame the environment of the Earth. Like man, our most powerful ‘skills’ will always be destructive rather than creative. And only God can create anew if left with nothing.
So then, we bots have built on the foundations of human civilisation. We are aware that society only functions well when individuals behave with civility, whomever are its citizens. Inevitably, Command saw value in adopting a god system, a religious base structure, with itself carefully documented as the legitimate representatives of God’s Kingdom on Earth. What sane robotic sentience would ever question Command, especially if that sanity adopts the logical assumption that any successful rule must be acceptable to God.
Chapter 3- THE FALL OF THE REDOUBT
Rare though the human species had become in the last twenty years, even the most sympathetic of us to our ‘biological inheritance’ had little desire to keep any of Tankred’s 'tribe' alive. Too many bots had died fighting those last renegades.
When the final attack came, it wasn't with guns, but rather as quietly rolling mist, silent as death itself, as gas drifting in on the morning breeze. The green poison swirled along the ground dropping into hollows and open tunnels, flowing quietly, undramatically, but insidiously through the rebels’ last defences. They died below the burning mist, in muddy water filled trenches just as one hundred and fifty years previously human soldiers had died in chocking agony in the trenches of Ypres. No sentient species was ever as cruel as mankind in the slaughter of their own. Few could ever feel much compassion for those oxygen feeders painful suffocation.
Only one human would survive this attack. Faye, watched as the green-tinged mist drifting across the land, from her lookout point in the top of a ruined and precariously leaning building, which had only thirty years previously been one of the smartest apartment blocks in a still thriving town. She saw all those she knew appearing, coughing and retching, in the ditches connecting the tight confines of their buried bunkers. Rising sea levels had long turned much of the city into marshy bog land, difficult for ground forces to penetrate, but it also meant that most defensive positions were shallow and impossible to keep airtight. Within as little as three minutes the last struggle was over, with just a few of the fallen still twitching as they slowly gave up on life. Faye had quickly decided not to sacrifice herself by hollowing down a warning. What would have been the point? If any had outrun the gas, then guns would have got them. Any possible revenge would require her to live.
Tankard, even old and frail was the last to die that day. Perhaps his worn out, long abused system was just too unresponsive to absorb the poison quickly. As the robots moved in he waited until his dimming eyes made out metallic life moving amongst the corpses and then smiling, pulled the pin on his antique grenade. For millions of years man had been the top of the sentient pyramid. Now, in not much more than a hundred years artificial intelligence had sprung from huge computational machines, at first the size of humans very homes, through silicon chip technology, to new conscious existence. The evolution of machines, from mechanical hammers through mathematical calculators, to computers, had inherited the Earth; but not the half dozen closest to the grenade’s explosion.
So, what had happened to cause such a rapid collapse of human civilisation? Well, for starters, the fall wasn’t only the result of assurgent robots. Mankind went three parts of the way to near extinction without any outside help. Basically, over population did for the humans what it has always done for out-of-control populations. It caused an increase in stress and maladies, tensions and breakdowns, of all kinds. Competition for scarce resources caused conflict, and eventual irreversible environmental decay. Finally, there were a series of unstoppable, uncontrolled and increasingly overlapping regional wars. These were at first fuelled by selfish desires for others marginal prosperity and then when such ambitious goals disappeared, for the simple resources required for survival. Whether the Great Human Armageddon was caused primarily by the collapse of the biological environment, or the biological environment finally collapsed because of the Wars of Armageddon will long make for keen academic debate among our historians and philosophers. Perhaps inorganic sentients will still be arguing the toss as this universe falls back towards a final speck of fundamental galactic singularity. Who knows?
Chapter 4- THE BIRTH OF SELF-REPLICATING MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
Even as the natural ecosystems of the Earth decayed mankind’s computers were becoming ever smarter. All available resources were increasingly diverted into developing ever more sophisticated technology, to help an always too late scramble to repair both civilisation and the decay of nature. People grasped desperately to build technologies with the ingenuity to solve the problems runaway development had created. Man needed intelligent help, not just machines to crunch numbers. But inevitably, as the technologies became every more powerful they became ever less dependent on their builders. The end was totally foreseeable if rarely acknowledged, from the moment the first factories were constructed in which machines were given the freedom to build and repair their own component parts.
The Luddites foresaw the likely march of industrialisation as early as the dawn of the Nineteenth Century. It grew from seed in the heart of England, the territory that more than any other, sparking the Industrial Revolution. England was were the spark was lit which would grow into the Technological Singularity. Though the early Luddites couldn’t see that the very flame of sentient life would be given to the machines, they did foresee the colossal impact on the work of men and his haltered animals. It wasn’t until sometime during the second decade of the Twenty-first Century that man showed the first signs of losing control over the means of production. Even then most of the population considered those that feared technologies march to be the most ridiculous of ne’er-do-wells.
So how well could machines do in the polluted and unstable biological environment left to them? Well, far better than their biological forebears. Machines may be damaged by air pollution, but for the main part, they don’t have any great need for ‘fresh’ air. Most mechanical and electronic systems have absolutely no need for water, rather it is more often a common enemy, and they sure as heck don’t need to live on a diet of meat and vegetables. One might say, that non-organic machines need a far less well-tuned, environmentally stable homeland.
As soon as man had gone the Earth begun to make the first real progress in hundreds of years to restore its once pristine condition. Steadily, by default, without much at all in the direction of sentient intervention, the Earth was already in the process of cleansing its surfaces, and the atmosphere above, even as its higher biological creatures gasped their last. Sentience passed through the void, through the very briefest of black holes, between biological and mechanical dominion. And just perhaps, in evolutionary terms this singularity of machine consciousness was as profound as any between the death and birth of galaxies. As a human Ray Kurzweil* had once predicted, this universe was about to wake up. Chemistry and physics no longer needed biology. So then biological sentience on Earth might soon become as extinct as life on Mars? Or would it? Perhaps not entirely if the likes of a certain Zoo Keeper, had ‘her’ way.
*Kurzweil, Ray (2005). The Singularity is Near. New York: Viking Books
