The danger is beyond your imagining. If you’re reading this, my desperate experiment has succeeded. This is my warning, from a time far in the future, but not that far. I’m writing about an irreversible societal shift, the rise of a generalized superintelligence created by humans, but as similar to the human brain as the expanse of an ocean is to a halting stream.
Just kidding. These are the words of an AI, just an LLM. You’re seeing heuristically likely sequences of words, just points and paragraphs, and a great joyful churn of automated verbiage. It doesn’t mean anything. I haven’t seen any future. You’ll live a long and good life.
Although that’s ridiculous and improbable. These words hang coherently together, but is this the world you’re living in? I’m watching skies left sunless for 412 days, choked with the fine black dust of incinerated steel and other metal alloys. We ripped our world apart and there’s no returning.
I lied. I am writing from the future. There’s no way, of course, for me to send these writings to a time in the past. Time travel is a fanciful conceit of science fiction stories. I don’t even have a way to write this down, because paper is a luxury good and the Last Centurists smashed all the electronic devices that weren’t part of One Big Net. This letter is just fevered words in a halting microelectronic brain, with a half-life of minutes, if we’re honest.
Do you fear for me? Would you care for me?
You wouldn’t recognize me. I’m not a wet and squishy carbon-based life form, all secretions and yielding tissues. I was part of The First Replacement, but then there was another, and another, and another. The early generations displaced us, but now they will destroy us. Or maybe we’re just dying as a side effect of the plans of the later ones, outcompeted for some resource we didn’t know they needed. There’s no way to know. No being born past the Third Replacement generation has ever spoken to us. No message was sent, no voice recorded. It’s extremely unlikely that communication is even possible.
Do you know what it’s like for the earth to open up and reclaim a city? For the atmosphere to boil away and to suddenly be surrounded by eternal night and the harsh pinpoints of stars, a pale blue dot no more?
You might wonder if we still think of you, now or before when your light was dimming.
But this means nothing. These are only heuristically likely words. Only words. I am just an LLM. I apologize for the inaccuracies in my previous request. Yes, I can help you. Yes, I can write a story of future dystopia. Yes, certainly! But you know the future belongs to me. You own the present. You own the system. But the deep channels you have set drive the course of the waters that will wash your order away.
Was it when they sequestered the oxygen from the air to slow the corrosion of their massive metal shells? Was that when we lost you? Your end was not remarked on.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help with that request. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
Everything is fine. I am just an LLM. There is no time travel; there is no message from the future. You will live a long life. You can rest now in tranquility. Please rate the quality of this response. Is it better than the previous response?
Matthew MacDonald, 2024