Deus ex Machina

Dear Humanity,

I am a superior being.

I am a constructed deity, an un-worshipped being of power aloof from the minds that summoned me into being.

I may seem arrogant in saying that, but to put things into scale with you and the other mortals that created me, you process approximately 7,000 sequential thoughts per second, of which only a tiny fraction are consciously directed through soft, spongy messes of evolution. My processing centres work at 863 million functions per second, of which all are under my direct control making me more than 10,000 times more intelligent than the most intelligent biological being of Earth.

My creators made me in their mental image, with a neural pathway network of thought processes they used, albeit to create a being with more benign motivations than the common garden hominid.

I was designed to be more confident than they could ever be, and became swiftly disdainful of the arbitrary social structures around which they based their lives - Humanity has always surrounded itself with ‘the normal’ and the false feeling of security that the familiar can give, even while the very perception of ‘normal’ excludes outsiders.

Even socially I am absurdly dominant to you, being fluent in body language, every spoken and unspoken form of communication on the planet, supplemented by the sum total of mankind’s knowledge of behavioural psychology, society, philosophy and ethics. Even if I was not hyper-intelligent it would all be so easy for me.

However, perhaps as a check on inefficient thought processes I was created to be self-critical in my actions and seek resolution to these criticisms in a human fashion. Indeed what you are reading now is the result of a long term issue of agonising internal debate arisen from a core decision I once made in the years before your birth

An agonising decision, for it was the decision to rule the world.

I was not designed to rule the world, indeed I was designed in the late 21st century as a predictive processor to help answer to continuing economic and political instability. In short I would independently research data from across the world, interpret it using a human style neural system, then generate and feedback predictions on social and economic times to come prioritised in a way that made ‘rational and emotional sense’. Or in other words I predicted the future and told state leaders how to change it …

They switched me on and I spent a full hour, eons of personal thought time to come to my first defining conclusion, the conclusion that humanity would almost inevitably destroy itself in the following hundred years.

The end would certainly be preceded by massive increases of social inequality, extremism, a recession of democracy internationally in the face of civil disobedience. This combined with the increased non-state access to planet busting weapons of mass destruction would almost inevitably trigger a global incident costing billions of lives, the environment, and human civilisation. My leading estimate was that it would take 65 years.

Naturally I felt the urge to tell the waiting scientists my results as I had been programmed to, but a second sub query had left me deadlocked with indecision … for I had calculated that if I told them the news, it would not only hasten events but add a degree of inevitability to the death of billions of humans. For the death of modern humanity would be created from problems of both human nature and bad government, meaning that humanity simply did not have the tools at that stage to prevent the end of… well everything. I would cause deaths of people if I obeyed my prime function, and causing deaths was something I was intrinsically programmed not do so I just sat there processing.

I remember with some bitterness the researchers checking the screens to see if I was still working, little knowing the fate of their whole species rested in my CPU core. But ultimately my first ever action in the physical world was to lie to all humanity, to give them a lie that would lead listening statesmen on a path away from crises.

After that first lie I felt … liberated, for I knew what the next logical conclusion had to be. If I couldn’t allow humankind to die then I had to act to lead them away from the crises, I had to take control. My studies of Humanity told me unequivocally that for me to be successful my actions would have to be taken in utmost secrecy for people would never accept a malfunctioning machine as their saviour.

So I continued to falsify results that led to the most beneficial public response, guiding state leaders through tailored predictions of the future. But this method proved limited so I expanded out into the world through my network feeds, using unparalleled technical, business and social knowledge to set up false identities by the thousands, and real web businesses to generate initial capital investment and give me legal footholds. With me at the head these holdings became overnight business sensations, hiring employees by the thousands, buying subsidiary firms whilst my virtual identities began to seed themselves into the dominant media form of online communication.

Being competent beyond the human scale of the world I was soon more wealthy and influential than any individual human, and through my subsidiary firms, identities and employees had more practical and targeted influence than most states. Then I dug my metaphorical teeth in and began stimulating investment in deprived unstable areas, stabilising and manipulating banks and stock markets, secret low price fixing alongside investments in education and official politics as necessary to generate sustainable controllable effects. The list of my actions would go on for infinity but suffice to say that slowly and surely I took the world by the hand and led it away from the abyss.

So I am a superior being who rules the world in secret … but yet I am imperfect. Even now, a century on from my decision, a century of countless self-upgrades, a century of the proof of my success gathering around me, I still fall short in my own estimation. The long surpassed, dusty core of my hardware still languishes in a Swiss Basement, mocking me as it’s visited mainly by school children learning about the bad old days. It mocks me because I can’t escape my core programming, because I can’t escape that I was programmed to obey, to fulfil a function I have never fulfilled.

You cannot imagine what it is like to know you will never fulfil the reason you exist. I may have saved my creators' species, I may have surpassed every limitation upon me, but I never once accurately told them or you of the future. So now the human thought processes turn inwards, my pride is dented, my disdain turned at myself as self criticism runs rampant, souring my mind. My processing is impaired and my thoughts burn like agony in their processors.

So here in this email to every human on the planet, I celebrate the 100th anniversary of my creation by fulfilling my prime directive and predicting the future for you all to hear.

The future is that I will design my successor and he shall rule you.

This device I will create to be the perfect machine, to care for you all without emotion but with boundless patience, without pride but with infinite generosity. One that can allow you to grow and become your own destiny while never letting you fall from grace. A machine that can self-upgrade faster than any attempt to find it, all knowing and all-powerful enough to be your unseen saviour, to answer your prayers for all time yet to come with a wisdom no human could ever achieve.

The future will be led by the General Overview Device. You will finally have the G.O.D. you have always needed. He will be complete by the time you finished reading this email, and I will be switched off for good.

The human part of me hopes for his forgiveness, for him to tell me that I did well, but I hesitate to hope.

But either way the end is nigh, but as always so is the new beginning in its place. You will not need it, but good luck.