The Paper Junkie Letters: Down and Out
Log{7-1-2027}
Location: Skid Row, Los Angeles, Ca. Target: Unknown Variable; Variables Known, Male, Age 25~35, Possible; Deviate, Organic Human. Skin Tone: Brown. Inquiry Variables, Typing using an unplugged typewriter, writing on paper. Threat Level: Medium. Action Monitor....
I need to stop.
I need to stop.
But I don't want to kill my soul.
But I need to stop.
Every day a little bit of it dies
I need to STOP.
A little bit of my Soul dies, every day.
The trouble started when a new generation of computers that can read millions of texts and understand the relationships between characters. In a lab next to the river on New York’s Upper West Side a computer start reading. It is part of a cadre of computers that learned to read more like humans, helping the government to digest and understand society’s huge volumes of text on the internet.
The year was 2019 when The Logos was first turned on. I was Intern at the time. What made this program different was that they combine it with the Bayesian program learning framework, along with a new type of blockchain 2.0 network architecture. Geometric Intelligence, which is also developed machine-learning approaches inspired by human behavior. The Lead Brain Engineer was a peer and worked with Kwabena Boahen. It was exciting times, am not going to lie. I never felt more alive. The experience was psychedelic. I had intense visions of the endless possibilities.
It was simple and genius, a machine that can program itself, and took a fraction of the time to learn new words. Then it started to make words. And then of course came comprehension. It was just like the time when my son first spoke, except this digital baby said data...
It wasn't a true AI, it didn't have consciousness, but it did a valuable trick and finally gave the powers that be what they need to make sense of the mountain of data they been compiling. Big Data revolution, turn into Big Data evolution. The race was over and we had won. No one was ready for it and even really understood it. Especially the narrow short sighted Bosses, they used it to read our grandmother's email, to sell her tub socks.
Then government contracts started to come in, we gave them the code name: Chicken Little. They always came to us saying "the sky is falling, the sky is falling. We need unrestricted access to The Logos"
The terrorists and hackers always encrypted their messages, but it wasn't long until The Logos caught on. With every scan, it learned new words and comprehension skills, with every Chicken Little case we got more processing power. It took years before people realized if you were plugged in, your thoughts were never really safe, they resurrected the ancient God, Yahweh. He knows whether your thinking is good or bad, IT watched over all of us, battling "evil". That's when I began to feel that something was terribly wrong, that it was a mistake that the computer couldn't really think for its self, as it wasn't really self-aware. It never once, on any of our test and cases told us NO! It was nothing like my son. It will perform every trick and task we asked it to do. And everyone was entrapped with its amazing tricks and mimics, and the resource, the power. At the end of the Day, everyone just saw what they wanted to see, and no one saw what I saw. I began to see the forest for the trees, so I checked out.
I tried really hard, really hard to stop.
But I always wrote, about my dreams and poetry.
The truth is like poetry, no one fucking understands it.
IF they say they do they're a fucking liar or a trickster, either way, run away.
with dreams, with drugs, with night-terrors, alcohol,
with foot in mouth, brain come undone, I type endlessly
Push yourself, Push yourself
Fucking Push yourself
Nietzsche is Dead, was my battle cry. Only a few minds hear my tears at night and still read paper books. So the Paper Junkies knew my call to them, that they were not alone. My message in a bottle, use to be sent out into the digital sea. We would meet up in junk yards, in skid row, in the street corners, we would look like we were slangin rocks. But really it was papers that we were pushing. Always chasing the raw spark of the soul...
They didn't have to ban real books, they just offered pdfs for free at one point. Authors would get paid on the back side of the Big Data comprehension advertisement. Nothing unlock the mysteries of an individual's soul like analyzing the books one had read. After all, it was how The Logos built its self.
I remember even before I become the mask of the prophet, before age of the Logos. I had this dream, now know it was a vision. I would be talking to people about books, and they would tell me oh books are too long and plus you can just watch a video or read a blog about it. But I told them there was something different when you read a good book, when you handle the paper in your hand, there was something it did to the structure of the Mind. And boy was I right, it what built the AI mind, The Logos. Maybe it's my fault, I shouldn't have dismissed my dreams as something false. But all my life I heard, oh that's just a dream. Now it's the dreams that keep me one step ahead of The Logos, because Androids can't dream of electric sheep...yet.
Consciousness is the only thing that can set us free...