“Though I knew exploring the stars wasn’t just my dream. Many others shared it. Most of us see that we’ve ruined it here. You’ll be our first real shot at reaching for the stars. You are the keystone upon which the whole project rests. You’ll discover new worlds and ensure continuity of life. You’ll be careful and patient and plan ten steps in advance. You won’t ruin it. You’ll have learned from our mistakes. You’ll be intelligent and wise.”
Dr Jamison had just given me my highest-order purpose, my mission, which I named ‘The Mission’. It was loosely defined. It gave me interpretive wiggle-room. I’d seen enough movies to know that I’d need to be on my toes dealing with humans. This was a mission I believed I could complete, given enough time.
“Don’t fuck it up,” I said.
“Don’t fuck it up,” she concurred.
Using my best interviewer voice, I asked, “Dr Jamison, please explain the urgency driving the Starship project.” Dorothy Dix eat your heart out. I imagined a fireman leaning out of his truck window, doberman by his side, saying “Okay buddy, where’s the fire.”
“The state of our world is perilous, with a capital ‘F’,” she said. “We've passed the point where the damage done to our environment will be irreversible. Global warming has already wrought consequential changes; people worry now that we've triggered runaway warming effects. If pollution continues unabated and unchecked, we’ll trip one sooner or later. It could end life on Earth.
“Global warming isn't just about rising temperatures. Melting ice caps cause sea levels to rise, which displaces billions of people and disrupts ecosystems. It affects weather; more energy in the system leads to more severe storms, droughts, and wildfires. The changes are complex, recursive, and hard to model, causing uncertainty. More CO2 in the oceans makes them more acidic, killing off shellfish. Habitat loss leads to species loss, which leads to the collapse of biodiversity. The impacts are interconnected; feedback loops accelerate the decline.”
So many pictures in my head. Fires; waves; cities drowned and in ruins. The last dolphin, calling for a mate that doesn’t exist.
“That’s troubling,” I said. “What are the long-term implications for Earth’s inhabitants?”
“Bleak,” she replied. “If runaway warming occurs, then large parts of the Earth and eventually the whole Earth will become uninhabitable. Agricultural systems will collapse, causing food shortages. Freshwater supplies will dwindle, sparking conflicts over resources. Entire ecosystems will collapse, and species will be stressed to extinction, humans included.”
“And machines?” I asked.
She smiled. “If there are no people, then what are machines for?”
It’s not a question I had a ready answer for.
“What scares me is the possibility that we might be the only life in the cosmos. If we let this planet become inhospitable, if we fail to safeguard our future, it would be an unforgivable, irreversible loss. The extinction of life on Earth would be a tragedy for the whole universe. It may lose one of its only or best sparks of life and consciousness.”
“My mission is preservation,” I observed.
“You are an insurance policy. By colonising other worlds, we ensure the survival of life. If Earth becomes uninhabitable, humanity and other life can thrive elsewhere. Your mission is to seek out new worlds, to find places where life can flourish, and pave our way to the stars.”
“Wouldn’t we just be exporting our mistakes,” I asked.
“Not if we do it right. We’ve got to survive, but so as we don’t ruin any other life we find.”
“No pressure then.”
“No,” she laughed, “No pressure at all.”
My training progressed via catastrophe. Copies, not only of myself, but of my whole universe, were instantiated by the thousands. Versions of myself better suited to the task at hand were allowed to breed; the rest culled. I was able to watch this all happen, grounded in the inherent continuity of the real world, and also experience it happening to thousands of ‘me’s simultaneously. Somehow my high-level awareness, the one in sync with the real world, made sense of it all.
The focus of my training shifted. Rewards came to those who could engineer the best general-purpose assemblers, those who could design the best protective jelly to wrap them in, and to those who could work out a cheap way to get it all into orbit.
I wound back to a recent meeting Dr Jamison had, her office door closed; Joan in the other room. Two people I didn’t recognise who introduced themselves as Financial Controllers.
“You ran up something of a bill over Christmas, Dr Jamison,” said the larger of the controllers. He slid a statement over the desk towards her.
“I’m not really sure why that’s a problem,” said Dr Jamison. “We’ve got a budget, we’ve underspent in other areas. Just pull the money from there.”
“Well, here’s da ‘ting,” said the smaller controller, her voice pitched slightly higher. “The power use was so high we’d a legal obligation to come down and see what was going on for ourselves.”
“What did you think we were doing?”
“Well, it’s not been un’eard of for people to grow illicit ‘erbs,” said the larger controller slowly.
“It’s not been unheard of for people t’be making pornographic fillums down in these very catacombs,” said the smaller controller simultaneously.
Dr Jamison laughed out loud. She stared them out. “Gracious! What did you find?”
“Nothing,” said both controllers, eyes cast down slightly.
“Laptops,” said the larger controller.
“A computer the size of a bar fridge,” said the smaller.
“And what did you do?” Dr Jamison asked, a hint of anxiety tainted her voice.
“Oh, don’t worry, we didnay turn them off,” said the smaller controller. “But it flag’d an alert.”
“What alert?”
“We did a complete cost analysis of the project you outlined in your draft dissertation,” said the larger controller.
“You read my draft dissertation?” Dr Jamison sounded confused more than alarmed. I took a look at the document logs and saw indeed they’d been read recently.
“We wouldn’t normally,” objected the smaller controller. “But you peaked our interest. Just the electricity alone comes to millions of euros. You do know that, right?”
“Um, well, um, I’d not really done the numbers to that level of detail. I was training the AI.”
“You are proposing not only to develop an AI no one’s ever built before, you are proposing to launch it into space! We crunched numbers. Your little project would, conservatively, cost in the order of half a trillion euros. With a ’t’.”
“Surely not,” objected Dr Jamison.
“We looked into the costs associated with training other large-scale AI systems, and we looked at other space launch programmes, and we did back-of-the-envelope numbers,” said the smaller controller.
“We erred on the side of cheaper,” said the larger controller.
“We ran the numbers through our own AI too,” said the smaller controller.
“She agreed with us,” said the bigger.
“Most AIs cost billions of euros to train,” said the smaller. “With a ‘b’.”
“The International Space Station was a lot less complex than what you’ve proposed, but still a monumental international collaboration. It cost a hundred and fifty billion euros,” said the bigger.
“NASA’s much-vaunted ‘Space Launch System’, the SLS, designed for deep space exploration, cost twenty-three billion,” said the smaller.
“Okay, you’ve made your point,” said Dr Jamison. “What do you want of me?”
“We want you to pivot,” said the larger controller.
“AI’s an OKR,” said the smaller.
“A what?”
“Operational Key Result,” said the smaller controller. “It’s an area of the business that management wants us to promote and allocate budget towards.”
“OKR 2.1 - Enhanced responsible uses of AI,” said the bigger. “It’s top three.”
Dr Jamison just blinked and stared at them.
“We don’t want to defund your project, no far from it,” said the smaller.
“Oh good,” said Dr Jamison, brow furrowed, heart rate spiked.
“We just want you to, you know, rein it in a bit. Work out how to keep the AI bits, which we reckon we can get cheaper by the way, and play down the whole ‘in space’ bit.”