Volume 17: Enemy of All Things Chapter 1: The Death of Man
In the not too distant past, humans never considered what it would be like if they had lost their fighting spirit.
It's very simple. They believe that fighting spirit comes from desire. But desire is something that cannot be fulfilled to any degree. It's impossible.
They even firmly believe that human desires can never be satisfied, and they feel that there are still many unknown things in this world. Their ambitions are like an infinite abyss, and they vow to spread all of this to every corner of the dark depths of the universe.
It was truly an extremely magnificent and brilliant era. It was even incredible that in that era of terrifying development speed, there were still people cursing their speed of progress. They claimed that if they had continued to move forward, they might have established a permanent settlement on the moon in the early 21st century. Although from today's perspective, that is basically impossible, it is enough to prove the desire of mankind.
It's good to have desire.
It couldn't be better.
Because that means everyone is striving for their own desires, and even corruption seems so cute, because it at least means that people are not satisfied, still greedy, still craving for things that do not belong to them, and still have desires and requests for everything in the world.
That was the best era. It was not the worst era, but the best era. Throughout the history of mankind, there was no better time than that era. Everyone was greedy, full of ambition and desire. Their greedy hands groped around the world, squeezing out countless gold even from stones. Their greed for everything made all the technology in this world progress rapidly.
Whether it is biology, electronics, physics, chemistry, or combined disciplines or even the development of quantum integration, everything is constantly evolving in greed and spreading to the sky. It is like a demon in hell seeing the light for the first time, climbing out of the ground like crazy, screaming to go to the dazzling heaven. That is the promised kingdom and the final point of human evolution. Everyone thinks so and does so. They are eager for their ambitions and desires to be satisfied, and then - extend deeper.
From today's perspective, we can laugh at the ancients. This is the arrogance of standing on the shoulders of giants.
Just like modern people don’t understand why ancient people were so crazy and loyal to the emperor, modern people don’t understand why people at that time loved and admired those who mastered the flow of materials and the change of social rules. In the eyes of modern people, all of this is done by AI.
For AI, nothing is more important than sustainable stability. These electronic products can easily replace all the bureaucrats and businessmen of the king, because the changes in materials and social conditions are nothing more than the formulation of algorithms for AI. With the support of big data, these things can be done easily, and there is not much difficulty. So for the bureaucrats of that era, their only remaining possibility is to act like cosplayers in today's society.
They have no respect for officials and businessmen from the bottom of their hearts, nor do they think these people can affect their lives, nor do they think they are of any use. The error caused by this misplaced cognition makes them mock the ancient people's respect for bureaucrats and businessmen, and think that they are simply not bold enough and have no strategy. But in fact, each era has its own rules of the game. Unless it is a special turbulent period or a violent revolution, otherwise, opposing the rules of the game for an entire period usually has no good end. Even if you oppose it secretly, it is the same.
This is like a huge game of life. Everyone is born with different benefits, and everyone seeks benefits for themselves according to certain rules within the fixed rules of the game. Everyone feels dissatisfied and greedy in this huge social game, and demands more and more.
This is not a reasonable social structure, but it is a social structure that makes people feel greedy enough.
Everything here needs to be earned with your own hands. Any operational mistakes will lead to a large loss of your property and your game scores. Everyone is seeking to increase their property to varying degrees. The original small money becomes big money, and the poor people are constantly working, while work can bring greater benefits to the rich people. Therefore, the greedy people at the bottom can only climb up desperately to get good things.
It is a typical pyramid structure without any spindle-shaped deformity. Everything in society is for the purpose of obtaining better benefits and supplying the greed of the upper class. It is impossible to jump out of this structure because the earth's territory has long been divided up and all human beings must abide by this set of perfect social rules. The financial system and the concept of the global village brought about by World War II have connected regional servers around the world to each other. A huge social game has enveloped the entire human society and has subtly brought these irritable little creatures under one goal.
Greed is a good thing, it will allow these aimless destroyers to find a basis for comforting themselves, and a reasonable regulatory mechanism to vent their emotions that have nowhere to vent. However, the problem is that all of this has disappeared in today's society.
When did modern human society begin to lose its enterprising spirit?
Was it when the light speed trap was calculated to exist? Was it when the human genetic code was cracked? Or was it when prosthetics were mass-produced and humans were no longer tortured by illness? Or was it when mind uploading was completed and life span was no longer limited to humans? This may not be the result of one or two technologies, but the catastrophic possibility brought about by all technologies together. But in the end, humans lost their ambition.
Space cities have been floating in outer space for many years, but the second space city was only recently built because the excessive population affected the scientific research environment. Under the power of various technologies, the desires that seemed to be never satisfied have been satisfied, and everything that originally meant infinite has become limited.
Sex and women are far less stimulating than an injection, and the subsequent suppression time is close to zero. Ambition and desire have been gently taken down by AI. No one will fight for various social environments anymore. Everyone enjoys the fruits of labor brought by AI. Science seems to have come to an end. Only hard-core people who are interested in it or are very interested in it have some views on science. But they don't have any so-called scientific literacy. Most of the research now is about materials science and some messy AI research subjects.
Humans have lost their ambition and greed. After establishing their eternal kingdom on the moon and Mars, they have arranged everything around Saturn. Their lives can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in the solar system, but superluminal travel seems so far away. They would rather make an illusory space drill than take a spaceship to fight for tens of thousands of years of waiting. Because they don't believe that humans will be trapped in the solar system.
It was laziness or ignorance, but humans fell asleep. It was like a fallen empire that had reached its final days. Those terrible theoretical weapons were put into storage, and those crazy inventions were banned. However, entertainment and people's livelihood had developed to the highest stage.
Everything is so beautiful, just like the legendary utopia, it seems to have lost the meaning of disaster.
They even have to use games or other things to awaken their fear and thoughts about the outside world. The dopamine secreted in their brains is not as good as a nutrient. Their attitude towards games is more of a nostalgia or imitation behavior. Just like the fanaticism of converts, after joining a certain organization or a certain sequence, newcomers will always express their loyalty and thoughts with the most fanatical attitude.
But he will also cool down one day. The frenzy will eventually calm down. Under the effects of countless drugs and genetic manipulation, it is impossible to know whether the brains still crawling on those devices are human or something else. Only those swimming robots may know what happened.
And all of this is just a microcosm of one person in the entire current human society.
Everyone is acting and enjoying themselves. Everything in human society is just entertainment for self-expression, not really doing anything. It's just that humans have to find something to do, and humans need some platforms to express themselves. For example, work, labor, or showing their wisdom. These are things that humans need to do, but they are not things that must be done.
They can take off their jobs at any time, and they can also give up their so-called performances at any time. AI will take over everything smoothly. In other words, even these citizen-level permissions are, to some extent, things that AI gives to humans to play with, just props necessary to play some roles.
“They’re all games…”
Looking at the lush jungle outside, Li Lin sat on the stone bench and sighed softly.
After a long absence, I came out of the room and went to the jungle to relax again, but I found that I could no longer tell whether it was reality or a game. The effects brought about by brain wave stimulation and simulation in the game were not much different from what I touched and smelled in reality.
Li Lin even suspected that if he used his A-level authority to do something, he might be able to do something similar to the magic in the game on the moon. For example, he could reshape the entire city and make it rotate with his will. If it was stronger, he could even shake the entire moon. Don't forget that the entire moon is filled with fluid nanorobots deployed by humans. All of this is possible. If he is shameless enough.
Although Li Lin is an internet addict, he is still very clear about what he should do and what he should not do.
"It's not a good thing if the game is too realistic..."
Looking at the upside-down buildings in the sky and the nano-walls that were constantly intertwining and merging, Li Lin smiled weakly.
He came out to relax, not to cause trouble. The series of events that happened in Les Miserables caught him off guard, and even the vague pressure from reality made him feel a little breathless.
Li Lin himself is just a simple prisoner, a lucky prisoner. He never thinks he has any qualifications or ability to judge or redeem others. It can be said that he is evading his duties or that he is simply timid, but Li Lin firmly believes that such a matter should not be left to someone like him to choose. There should be a better, or more rational, and more patient person to make such a decision.
If this is a novel, it must be a flop, because the most common kind of courage that the protagonist of a novel has, he doesn't have.
Li Lin did not dare, and could not, gamble on the future of mankind.
He didn't have the courage to bear the consequences of what would happen next, nor did he have the courage to face all the possibilities brought about by this sudden authority. To put it bluntly, Li Lin still thinks that he is just an ordinary person. A bastard who eats and waits for death at home. He has a bad personality and behaves perversely, but he is just a coward who is timid and cowardly.
If you give a coward a button and tell him that there is a 50% chance that this button will make the world a better place, and a 50% chance that it will completely destroy the world, unless he is a lunatic, most people will not choose to press that button directly.
So Li Lin just looked at the proposal projected in his eye sockets, sitting , smoking one cigarette after another.
It destroyed his heavenly image, but it also eased his emotions very well.
However, even after thinking about it until his feet were full of cigarette butts, he still had no idea and didn't know what choice to make. Maybe it would be best if this proposal didn't exist at all? Maybe it would be best to just ignore everything and go back to playing the game? But Li Lin knew all the crazy NPCs in the game. All AIs were simulated using personality sandboxes, and their thoughts were no different from humans.
Imagine if someone knew that their world was just a sandbox, but as long as they could convince or break down a person's mental barriers, they would have a chance to escape from that terrible sandbox, or even reach a more perfect world, and failure would not have any serious consequences, or they would think there would be no serious consequences. Compared to Li Lin, who had to keep the secret, the NPCs in Les Miserables would have to pay a huge price to fulfill their hopes after getting the news. But Li Lin had no choice, this was something he had to face.
I just wanted to play the game, but suddenly I had to face this. Even if I wanted to change the game, it was a pity to think about my achievements. But logically speaking, this news might not spread too far. If it spread too far, no one would be able to play.
So the end result is that you can only hope that everyone else is a bunch of idiots so that you can perfectly enjoy your life while maintaining your authority.
Or, wait until that self-test is complete and take back your authority.
“…AI.”
Looking at the land under his feet, Li Lin suddenly said:
"How long will it take for you to complete the inspection of my permissions?"
"There is still one month left, Mr. Li Lin."
The soil under my feet was rolling, and the nanostructures were constantly splicing together, eventually condensing into something like a display screen.
"It will take another month to complete the A-level authority test. This test consumes a lot of computing power. We think it is necessary, so we have allocated some unnecessary computing units for testing. We will complete this self-test task in the shortest possible time."
"Really? That's good."
Li Lin threw the clean cigarette butt under his feet and crushed it, then sighed and looked at the screen under his feet.
Although it looked like ordinary soil before, it was actually a nano-mechanical structure. On the moon, these semi-fluid substances are almost everywhere. As for Li Lin, an A-level authority, he naturally knew all the questions and answered all of them.
The moving building blocks above our heads, the roads in front of us, our homes, wherever there is human material, there are these nanomachines. As mentioned at the beginning, AI has actually been able to complete self-operation and inspection without human observation. They even know about local area networks and how to use third-party observation methods for detection. They can even create human-like individuals to think and organize.
In fact, Li Lin had long suspected whether human society already had such personality prostheses. In fact, computers pretending to be humans were directly put into society to maintain the order of human society. Because thought transcription has long been a realized technology, with the power of the personality sandbox, it is not too difficult to create an AI with perfect human memory and who thinks it is human. And to be honest, they are not even a little different from humans. Except that they came down from the education machine, accelerated the construction of personality for decades, and had their own ideas when they were born, they are no different from humans.
If you think about it carefully, AI that has developed to this level is really scary. Les Miserables uses this technology, and the NPCs in it are basically indistinguishable from humans. In other words, they even live more like humans.
More like a human being than current humans.
"call……"
Li Lin exhaled a puff of smoke, sighed, looked at the empty forest, turned to the AI and asked:
"Why can't I see any other people working on the moon? Where are they?"
"…Because it's not the right time, Mr. Li Lin."
The AI was silent for a moment, then responded.
