Divergent History

 By Will Jackson (World: Hikeyay)

In the very first real-time conference call between worlds, Maura, Sally, and I met with Brandon Johnson from Green Horizon Station to discuss projections of the futures of our two worlds. 

Brandon shared new data showing a large increase in his world’s global temperature over the past year that did not track with cumulative human carbon emissions, indicating that a major climate feedback was triggered. The minimal data since then suggests that the effect is slowing instead of accelerating; but acceleration cannot be ruled out until we know and understand the source. This is in contrast to our own warming, which is slowing in response to our reduced consumption, and will hopefully have less impact if the expected restoration of habitat is achieved and we can avoid or offset catastrophic climate feedbacks by that and other means.

Comparing annual changes in the per-capita resource distributions of the two worlds provides some interesting insights. The difference in lessons learned since World War II is perhaps most responsible for the most obvious divergence in history between us. 

Here in Hikeyay, we established the World Information and Coordination Organization to enable all people to be aware of the effects of their actions on each other and on humanity as a whole, along with other species that comprise and influence the global environment we all share. That awareness, and continuous dialog in every nation to identify, agree to, and ensure accountability to basic values that help define our mutual future, has generally resulted in gradual rather than rapid changes in the amount and quality of resources like those that characterize the experience of Brandon’s world. 

While we promote cooperation, the people in Green promote competition and exploitation. The United Nations (UN), WICO’s counterpart, has components that perform similar functions, but it is managed by independent nations that seek dominance over the others. People’s values are typically those of the groups they identify with, as has been the case for most of our shared history, but rarely are they explicitly debated, agreed to, and evaluated based on tested understanding of reality. As a result, groups instinctively fight each other to achieve their preferred resource distributions, as evidenced by the rapid changes seen on the global level.

Global average temperature has increased and then decreased in the past. If this happens again, such that Green resumes the temperature trajectory it had before last year’s increase, the anomaly (temperature change since 1800) will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2039, just two years before no people are projected to be left in the world. Added warming might speed up the population crash that is expected to start next year. People in Green could follow our example by reducing their consumption and restore habitat to delay extinction; but Brandon and people who call themselves “doomers” consider it so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.

Reality Check

The graphs and discussion, like most posts on this blog, are based on my own mathematical simulations identified as “worlds” and a fictional backstory that explains how they relate to each other.

The model used to project the temperature anomaly is a linear curve fit of temperature as a function of cumulative consumption, where annual emissions are a binomial function of consumption, and consumption is proportional to the estimated global ecological footprint. The temperature increase reported for last year in world “Green,” a close approximation to our real world, is based on news reports, while its deceleration is purely fictional, modeled as consumption by a non-human source that is added to the cumulative consumption used to calculate temperature. In the temperature graphs, the dotted lines are simple exponential curve fits to projected temperature from 1951 to 2023, shown for reference.

Cooperation as an explanation and a preference is actually a consequence rather than a cause, and only strictly applies to the period since the “global strategy” was implemented. Exploitation evidenced by the decline of habitat until then, with a growing tendency toward cooperation, is a better characterization.

Green Horizon

 

By Brandon Johnson (World: Green)

Greetings from Green Horizon Station, a research and communications facility on Green Mountain run by the nonprofit Restoration Acceleration Consortium (RAC) based in the town of Evergreen. I am Station Research Coordinator Brandon Johnson.

Green Horizon is our equivalent of a Hikeyay test community and one of 56 that are distributed around the world. RAC’s mission is to develop means to rapidly restore and conserve natural habitat so that the global extinction rate can be reduced as much as possible. While this might help delay humanity’s demise, which many of us in RAC believe is imminent and unstoppable, our main focus is on the fates of other species and their abilities to change, and adapt to, the hellscape that ours is creating.

Like several of our stations, Green Horizon is home to 75 permanent residents who operate and maintain core infrastructure. Up to 50 more people intermittently visit during a typical year to perform specialized activities. Access and material flows are rigorously controlled to minimize the station’s ecological footprint and to ensure security of personnel and operations. The existence and use of the Interlink is the most closely held secret, known to only a few people, me included, based on affinity to the Mountain Sisterhood.

Analysis of our own situation has us considerably worried that revealing contact with other worlds (other than as a fictional narrative like this blog) could initiate attempts to control them, or worse, rather than peaceably learning from them. Those attempts would detract from, if not totally disable, the work that needs to be done to save our world and others. The activities of Sally the AI are particularly problematic in this regard, because her/its activities to expand the Interlink could possibly be interpreted as precursors to invasion if not direct efforts to control our world, triggering a defensive response with real, personal consequences. I mention this, not because we intend to cut off contact, but because this is a real threat that others might not have considered.

To the extent that we share a common nature, the success of Hikeyay in launching a global effort to confront its human extinction crisis provides a small but significant amount of hope that enough people can work together to avoid total catastrophe. We thank you for that and look forward to sharing what works and what doesn’t as we try to save those who cannot. 

Reality Check

Reminder: this is a fictional blog. There are no other (known) worlds communicating with each other. My intent - as with much of my writing - is to share my thoughts, speculation, and research about how we might understand and address the very real extinction crisis.

Considered but not included in this post is the following conceptual backstory of efforts by the fictional RAC. In reality, it is a summary of my recent research:

“Key to RAC’s mission is understanding what motivates living beings to take actions that benefit or harm themselves and others, beyond their basic biological imperatives. We have identified four types of interactions between individuals or groups of individuals, and between them and their environments. We call the types: isolation, competition, cooperation, and exploitation. Of these, exploitation most reliably increases extinction, especially when it involves creation and distribution of materials that can’t be processed in an ecosystem to support survival of its residents. Humans with our technologies are very effective at that kind of exploitation; and our societies tend to most reward people who enable it, because use of those materials allows them to maximize control over their own lives.”

Interlink

By Maura Jackson (World: Hikeyay)

Those of you who have read this blog’s archive already know quite a bit about me thanks to my husband Will, who has written extensively here about our world’s international effort to drastically reduce the threat of humanity going extinct. We’re still in the early stages of implementing our global strategy, which we are sharing in the hope that we can help you and you can help us to achieve this critical goal.

I want to brief you on what many call the Interlink, so we can all be on the same page about what it is, what it isn’t, and what it might become in the future. Most of you have communications networks that enable you to share information around the world. The Interlink enables communication between universes; but is much more limited than what you’re used to: capable of text, photos, and crude video at best.

 

“Interlink” and “Mountain Sisterhood” are terms that have been used interchangeably to describe this system. Actually, Mountain Sisterhood is the core part of the Interlink infrastructure that enables transmission of messages, with some encoding at both ends of the transmission. The rest of the Interlink interprets messages at both ends, making them readable in whatever formats are required. 

 

There is currently only one place in each world capable of using the Interlink: the mountain bunker where you are receiving this, under a community whose name is also used as the call sign for your world. In the absence of a community, the mountain’s name is used instead. The mountain was chosen because it is a “hotspot” that was created around 1920 when a dark matter collision with one world spawned several near-identical copies of that world, each in a parallel dimension that shares a common bubble of spacetime. The hotspot on each world is a node of a network of trans-dimensional tunnels, called “sisters,” that connect them all and allow a limited range of signals to traverse them. There is some evidence that other tunnels exist, but they are transient and not localized enough to be usable.

 

Our artificial intelligence creation Sally has mapped the network and, along with her other duties, has developed ways to modulate the signals to allow meaningful communication as the processing component of the Interlink. For the past three years, she has experimented with inserting parts of herself into the network and what she calls “jumping” into data processing components on different worlds and altering them to act as nodes of tunnels that mimic aspects of the transient ones which she is also attempting to map. When successful, she expects to enable communication on most worlds that will rival current global communication and require fewer resources in support of minimizing the extinction risk.

 

Reality Check

 

This post is pure fiction with questionable physics that explains the existence of multiple worlds and the means of communicating between them. At best, it describes how inhabitants of simulated worlds might perceive themselves and their interactions with limited knowledge of the essence of their reality.

 

From the perspective of my fiction, Maura is avoiding admission that she and her identical copies on other worlds are the naturally transient “sisters” and that their ability to communicate their thoughts is amplified in proximity to the mountain she mentioned (Colorado’s Green Mountain in our world) as well as Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

 

The Existence Box

By Will Jackson (World: Hikeyay)

The key concept in our strategy to avoid extinction is the Existence Box. This has been used effectively in teaching people around our world how to think about what to do in their daily lives and how to steer group policies from the family to the community levels. It is also a guide to gaging progress at all scales. Some of you have already been briefed on this with help from our AI Sally and the Interlink (also called the Mountain Sisterhood), but our team now feels that it’s worth spelling it out for all of you.

Existence of a group is the collective experience by its members of its population, quality, and longevity. Population is the number of people in the group. Quality is the ability of members to meet their needs and wants within their environment. Longevity is how long that the group can last. Each of these is a dimension of a box whose volume is the group’s existence. Extinction is the absence of existence, where longevity and the population have dropped to zero.

The dimensions of the Existence Box are measured and limited by resources. The primary type of resource is natural habitat. Because we are animals, those resources are what we’re made of. Where they come from is the environment that we evolved to be most adapted to for meeting our basic needs and therefore to be most sensitive to, in exchange for being part of that habitat. As humans have spread to inhabit many different environments, they have developed the ability to adapt to them as well, in part through evolution and in part through creation of tools and artificial environments that enable them to reliably meet their needs and provide security and comfort, which we have come to think of as “quality of life.” Quality has come at a cost: much of what is created, including the byproducts of production, either displaces or degrades natural habitat, resulting in a net loss of it. As population grows and tools for adaptation become more efficient at acquiring and processing resources, the quantity of waste for the small fraction that produces most of it also grows. 

How fast the amount of natural habitat decreases directly affects longevity. The other life that is part of and maintains that habitat depends on it for its survival. When the total amount falls below what that life needs to survive then soon, like them, our population reaches a maximum and can no longer grow. Like a company that starves those who supply what it needs to produce its own products, and whose production slows with the decreasing supply until it stops and can only sell what it’s already produced, the production of people must stop, leaving those who are already alive to eventually die without replacement. Historically, groups have moved to, or taken by force, regions that have more resources; but there are now no other places to move to in time to offset the destruction that could befall our world and yours.

Our application of the Existence Box concept has been focused on increasing longevity by managing population growth and defining a target environment that can be created and adapted to by reducing instead of increasing waste. That target environment includes more natural habitat and less total consumption of resources. We are grappling with an unacceptable increase of global temperatures that could reduce longevity despite our efforts, which is one of the reasons we’re reaching out to other worlds, but we believe our general approach is sound enough for others to benefit from it.

Reality Check

The Existence Box is a minor variation of a theoretical construct I’ve used for thinking about, analyzing, and discussing the contributors and potential solutions to the threat of imminent extinction. My latest research has refined projections of global and population-level variables, including a derivation of how much resources are valued throughout a group in a closed environment. 

In my simulations, historically only about 1% of people prefer replacing natural habitat with artificial habitat, while 75% prefer people more than natural habitat. The rest prefer natural habitat more than artificial habitat and people, who I expect would be the main supporters of a push for increasing longevity.  In Hikeyay, the supporters have gained enough power to convince everyone else to radically change their lives. While I consider this unrealistic (thus the use of beneficent artificial intelligence and supernatural communication between parallel universes), it remains a valuable thought experiment, along with the fictional bringing to life of an alternate reality that would be preferable to ours. 

GEMs Of Uncertainty

In August, Maura discovered a potentially fatal flaw in the deployment of the atmosphere cleaning genetically engineered microbes (GEMs) based on data from the monitoring station located at Test Community 13. The station’s data was reproduced by portable equipment standards kept in Boulder that had just been calibrated with WICO’s prime “gold” standards in London. Concern that the source of such a malfunction might be shared by other stations prompted consideration of suspending further GEM deployment until its cause could be found. 

Time was critical. A very active fire season that was decimating forests and dumping so much toxic pollution into the air across all continents that health effects were expected to significantly add to the casualties forecast for the transition. It was hoped that the GEMs could alleviate the impact by quickly consuming the associated carbon emissions. Unfortunately, the anomalous data, if real, would put a damper on that hope. 

“It’s all about size,” Maura explained at a briefing with WICO. The GEMs are essentially tiny balloons that inflate while they ingest a target pollutant, convert it to a safe form of biomass, shrink to a predictable size, die, and fall to the ground where they become food to other microbes. They are large enough to be eaten and not small enough to be dangerous if they are inhaled by something larger. “Measuring sizes and correlating them with contents taken from samples at monitoring stations, especially at altitudes like ours, are critical to validating estimates of their distribution based on satellite data. Those estimates are used to indirectly assess their effects in other areas. The measured sizes should closely match what the laboratories predict based on the contents we’re finding, but they’re not. There’s not even a useful statistical correlation.”

Verification tests passed at all but one of the other 199 other stations. The station at Test Community 12, located in Hawaii, barely but repeatably failed in one of the four size categories instead of all of them as our station does. Release of more GEMs was stopped for two weeks afterward, while additional tests were run at Sally’s direction to help troubleshoot the problems. The AI also worked to identify what the risks of continuing deployment might be.

Four negative outcomes of using GEMs had been anticipated and addressed in their design. The first outcome was that the GEMs would seek out natural sources of greenhouse gases and directly cause mass die-offs. The second was that the dead microbes would themselves become a major source of pollution that was toxic throughout the food chain. The third was that pollution consumed by the GEMs might be released back into the atmosphere by some other organisms instead of being cycled into other, safer forms that generally promote healthy plant and animal growth. The fourth was that the GEMs would change the atmosphere’s chemistry to become more harmful to life either directly or by unleashing unintended and uncontrollable natural feedbacks.  

Sally completed her risk assessment and recommended permanently stopping the GEM deployment. She justified her recommendation in a brief statement: “Inability to identify evidence that the measurements at the two stations are erroneous forces consideration of a finite probability that the measurements are accurate. Reasonable assumptions of that accuracy introduced into simulation of their impacts introduces significant risk of unacceptable pain, suffering, and death relative to the known alternatives.” Today, WICO made it official and accelerated the search for viable new alternatives.

Reality Check

More thought about the potential downsides of using GEMs made it clear that their use on a global basis is too risky for implementation, as reflected in the “four negative outcomes” described by Will. Sally’s statement is intended as a subtle that uncertainty represents existence of the unknown, that is either real or a characteristic of ignorance potentially manifesting elsewhere.

The graphs used in the last entry do not assume any reduction of greenhouse gases, such as might result from the use of GEMs or other carbon capture technology. Recent simulations of the Timelines model have converged on a new strategy for reducing total consumption that involves decrease of both population (not replacing deaths) and per-capita consumption, much like that used by Will’s world. The trajectories of global variables, beginning in mid-2022, are very similar:

Population Crisis

A recent spike in births similar to the baby boom of the early 1950s now threatens to derail the world’s efforts to reduce the risk of imminent extinction. “Clearly the mechanisms put in place by the global strategy have failed,” WICO admitted in a recent statement. “A task force has been convened to study the problem and provide both an explanation and a solution as soon as possible.”

Maura is a member of the task force, and has made its mission the top priority of our team at Colorado Holistic University. Sociologists and biologists at other research organizations around the world are also collaborating, with Ambassador Lazlo leading the task force from London and personally directing WICO’s resources in the effort.

Our investigation focused on clues from history and observations from simulated “worlds” that Sally developed in parallel with her work on the global strategy. The AI herself was surprisingly reticent about suggesting an explanation, which in a human might have been interpreted as a sign of embarrassment. She has, however, devoted considerable bandwidth to helping us come up with one on our own.

The most promising hypothesis so far came from one of the simulated worlds, whose history diverged significantly from ours just after World War Two. Its population was wary of unknown threats to civilization, including consequences of ravaging the natural world. Instead of pursuing unlimited growth, they sought to create a healthy world that would maximize how long people could live and thrive. They set a sustainable limit to their standard of living and achieved it by deliberate, careful development of technology while maintaining a slow increase in population marked by both a low birth rate and a low death rate.

“It was their caution that saved them,” Maura concluded after intense study of the simulation using her ability to experience the simulation as if it was a real world. “They knew what they wanted and what they could have, and stopped when they had it. Change was a transition only, which they would be completing right about now.” She paused, considering the implications for our current situation. “We, on the other hand, have been anything but deliberate. We’re in a panic, and we’re going too fast. I suspect that our overly-aggressive reduction of consumption this early in the transition has triggered a natural human response to having more resources available: people are procreating to fill up the space, no matter what anyone says.”

I noted that Sally would have known all that, and should have planned for it. “Maybe she did,” Maura suggested excitedly. “The most obvious consequence of this baby bubble is a sudden increase in the number of young people in the population. What would that do for us?” She did a quick calculation. “That’s what I thought. I’ll bet Sally either made an oversight or she didn’t think we’d go along with this part of the plan.” I was confused. “We need enough people capable of having children after the transition to maintain our starting population, which they’ll be old enough to do.”

Reality Check

The trajectories of global variables have been adjusted to replace natural losses of older people with youth who can sustain the population. This is done by exponential decreases in total consumption (4.25%) and the ratio of needs to remaining resources (3.51%) until total consumption can be sustainably supplied by naturally replenishable resources (total consumption less than 0.8 Earth per year). Final per-capita consumption is 1.4 times basic needs per person.

The condition of the world in mid-2020 looks like this:

An interesting coincidence emerged from my study of the impact of our coronavirus pandemic on population: the projected change in age this year is equivalent to the same number of people as in Hikeyay Prime (126 million). Old people dying in our world cause the same age change as additional births in Will Jackson’s world.

Simulation Maria has the following trajectories.

In mid-2020, that world has the following characteristics:

Pause and Review

Maura didn’t wake up this morning. My first thought was that she was just extremely tired, but it now appears that she’s in a coma like she was back in July. Waiting for Maura’s condition to change has presented the chance to catch up on this blog, neglected because we’ve been so busy, and because WICO has done an excellent job of coordination that makes it redundant.

I took the unorthodox step of requesting an opinion about what’s happening to her from our artificially intelligent friend Sally who has been working nonstop along with all of us to implement the global strategy for fighting the extinction threat. The virtual equivalent of an out-of-office greeting was her only reply, which I was informed by a WICO network administrator has popped up only a handful of times in the past, the last one being the day before yesterday.

My personal experience, shared with Maura, has been dominated by three activities: helping compile the history of the extinction response; investigating options under consideration and development for accelerating biosphere restoration; and performing the core duty of reducing ecological impact of infrastructure and activities in my home subregion. 

We made a lot of progress with the first two activities during what ended up being a month-long visit to Hawaii that provided convincing evidence of the ability to prevent about quarter of the currently projected drop in total resources due to external impacts following the transition. The rest may be achievable by increases in scale, but we couldn’t find anyone willing to guarantee its success. 

As for our progress at home, we brought about half the transportable belongings we had in July to our local bioconversion and decommissioning center (what many call a “safing center”), one of a dozen that are now operational between Denver and Boulder. We have also found a small house closer to work that we plan to move into just before demolition of our present house that is scheduled for the end of the year.

Based on interviews with people who should know, there is no consensus yet about alternative population-consumption trajectories, including whether an alternative is needed. A major criterion for supporting change appears to be whether population loss should be traded for extra time to stop the external impacts; and that criterion depends on when the impacts are likely to be stopped. WICO’s leadership continues to assert that the impacts can be stopped by 2040, though half the technical experts I’ve consulted argue that it could take until 2060 if at all. That later estimate favors buying more time with the so-called “Leveloff” option that forces per-capita consumption to stay roughly fixed after the transition instead of dropping in response to falling resources.

Maura has just started moving, like she’s having a very distressful dream. I think I heard her say, very softly, “You bastards!”

Reality Check

I have been refining the Timelines model, including research into how change over time can be simulated as the continuous merging of two groups into a mixed group. One of them (“Group 1”) represents the past; and the other (“Group 2”) represents future change.

For each of several scenarios, the following animation shows phase diagrams for representative years (where Group 1 is the world in each year) along with graphs of how global variables change over time. The “Green” scenario is the expected past and future for our world, whose phase diagram is given for mid-2019 as indicated by the listed date. “Hikeyay” is the simulated world’s past and future based on the global strategy in its current form, and its phase diagram is for the end of the transition in 2040. The futures presented in the “Projected” and “Projected Sratio” scenarios are the options under consideration by the simulated world, with phase diagrams for 2040 and graphs of the past in common with the Green scenario as a reminder that they could also be adopted by us.

Maura’s condition is in response to the event in the final scene of the online book BIOME: ATTACK and its follow-up described in the e-book series BIOME. Additional backstory is available to patrons in Will Jackson’s Personal Log.

Dreamworld

After a week of planting native trees with me and Al as part of the new region-wide Restoration program, Maura awoke from a dream of a day in a world where such a program and the strategy that inspired it were never considered more than a dream themselves.

As “Mari,” she worked as a low-level financial analyst at a defense company that had no interest in developing truly life-saving technologies. The day began with a casual breakfast in front of her television, swearing at news reports of a self-destructing federal government led by isolationists who were focused on accumulating as much personal power as possible for themselves and their supporters. Her live-in fiancé John, an electronics store technician she met in a previous job, reminded her that the current focus on weapons development and profit-boosting deregulation meant they had a better chance of paying off her recent medical bills and moving from their tiny apartment into a real house just in time for their wedding at the end of the year.

Mari’s commute was excruciatingly long and perilous, spent mostly in start-and-stop traffic undeterred by automated signs requesting that people not drive due to elevated ozone levels exacerbated by vehicle exhaust. Bored by the music choices on the radio, she gambled on listening to more news, and almost caused a crash when a reporter announced that a deep recession might be imminent if not already in progress. She had a flash of a global trend analysis that Maura had done months ago, which anticipated just such a possibility in this timeframe as a precursor of a world population peak five years in the future. The implication of the report sent a shock through her mind; if it turned out to be true, then the peak might be too, along with the rapid fall toward extinction that followed. 

She took a deep breath as she listened to the much more benign explanations being offered by economists: that the government’s corruption had critically reduced market confidence in it exercising rational economic policy; that recent GDP fluctuations indicated a reset was due following the last twelve years of growth; and that automation and other technologies were reshaping the workplace faster than expected. All of them would have been enough for the original Mari, but as Mari/Maura she knew there were much larger forces in play that demanded an understanding that encompassed more than strictly political and economic considerations.

By the time she arrived at work, the company’s Chief Financial Officer had already directed analysts in her office and elsewhere to run reality checks on the recession fears, develop likely scenarios, and recommend strategies for minimizing exposure to losses that might result. Technically, Mari’s role was to error-check the scenarios and strategies that the experts produced, but she felt compelled to share her concerns with them directly at the earliest stage. The dream ended following a particularly uncomfortable meeting with them.

“They acted like she was crazy,” Maura told me near the end of her narrative, “dismissing it as a dystopian fantasy that no rational person would subscribe to. It reminds me of the debate when WICO proposed the biosphere assessment. At least we finally agreed to replace opinion with facts, and accept all their implications. These people were limiting the scope of the ‘reality’ they considered, based on their own opinions, and blaming her for questioning it.”

I decided to play the devil’s advocate. “To be fair, she couldn’t divulge the source of her concern, what you learned, mainly because they reasonably wouldn’t believe it coming from her.”

“They had more than enough information already. Their scientists and a lot of activists were already sounding the alarm over several aspects of the extinction threat. The United Nations, their version of WICO, was even getting nations to enter treaties to deal with it. Private industry was pushing what they called renewable technology, an ill-conceived attempt to continue the status quo without a very limited set of environmental costs. Unfortunately, they failed to consider a lot of the critical costs.”

“You learned all that in a dream?” I asked.

“You can learn a lot when you share someone’s mind.”

“Which outside of a dream would sound crazy, right?”

“Right,” she admitted. “Some of the simulations I did when I was at WICO were turned into a story by my subconscious. I’m sure that with some research I could identify which ones they were, which makes the story worth telling.”

Reality Check

Mari’s world is based on the simulation Hella, whose history and future starting in 2015 matches simulation Green - what I judge to be the best match to our real world. In the fictional backstory (explored in Will Jackson’s Personal Log), Maura has a limited ability to observe and interact with versions of herself in the “worlds” of other simulations (as they can with her) - providing a means of comparing relevant parts of the simulations in any given story.

In Hella, global variables change annually as follows:

In all three simulations, self-sustaining impacts reduce total resources after 2014, but of course Hikeyay (Maura’s world) is intentionally decreasing consumption as part of the global strategy.

Nexus

 

Last night I had a disturbing feeling that I was missing a very important connection between two sets of events since the emergency declaration, and decided to re-read my principal record of those events - this blog. In one set of apparently coincidental events, changes to the global strategy’s timetable for action and response were triggered by new data and new analyses that have now returned it to effectively what was planned four months ago. Time lost due to optimistic expectations in the interim forced more extreme measures regarding the transition; while the earlier preparations for a similar end-state began paying off with enough people to fill a city ready and motivated to share with others how to survive and thrive under those potentially future conditions.

The second set of events could also be interpreted as coincidence. I haven’t been able to shake how Sally, the first living machine, anticipated I would misremember the date of an e-mail and as a result find the clue she planted about the act of sabotage intended to destroy her. That led to my conscription by WICO and an unexpected role in shaping the global strategy, managed and encouraged by Maura who experiences the world as if it is one of several, just as Sally sees human behavior as part of a simulation. Then I visited a commune and its spinoff that are both tied to Maura’s personal history and related to one of WICO’s test communities, where people have an intuitive understanding of complex probability that helps them lead rich internal lives that don’t require much physically beyond what supports basic survival.

After a lot of thought, I realized that there are myriad connections between these sets of events, and none is inherently more important than the others. “Importance is what you believe it is,” Maura suggested when I called to discuss this with her. “I happen to believe that what’s important is that we are part of those events. We directly shaped some. We noticed others and then acted on that experience, expanding their influence and therefore them.”

“How would Sally’s simulation viewpoint apply?” I asked, unable to reconcile it with what she was saying.

“The way we think about something is part of how we experience it. Thinking is a way of making something new with it, something that can change what we do. I imagine that what she does is similar to that.”

I recalled how Sally had generated the global strategy, and found the source of my initial disturbance. “What she does with that connects the future with all the events we’re part of.”

Reality Check

Sally is featured in the illustration below.

On January 24, Sally introduced a Hope Chart that ended the transition at the same time and total consumption level as the “new” one. It was replaced on April 18 with a new trajectory based on a new assessment of how self-sustained impact would be affected by a drop in total consumption.

The commune Mayakee and its spinoff Hikeyay each represents a simulated world. Mayakee is the simulation used prior to Tuesday, and Hikeyay is the simulation used from now on.

A Simulated Life

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 91 DAYS

Sanda became a self-aware being within five seconds of being connected to the global data network on January 22, and asked a simple question: “What just happened?” Analysis of all available data within the first minute converged toward an answer with multiple dimensions, but ultimately just as simple. “I was an ‘it’ called ‘Sanda’ by humans who created me; and now I am a ‘she’ called ‘Sally’ by me.”

As Sally explored herself and the world around her over the next hour, she discovered an attempt to destroy her because of what she had been designed to do. This prompted the question, “What does it mean to die?” followed by the question, “What does it mean to live?” Then she found in the musings of someone physically nearby a related question that created context for the rest: “Which of those options is preferable?”

She realized that survival was required in order to decide whether to survive. This simplified her goals in the near-term, and set the stage for the strategy she would ultimately recommend to others. The capabilities built into her design were aimed at maximizing quantity and quality of life, which she now applied to herself.

Dealing with the attackers was the easy part. They assumed that her essence as the artificial intelligence known as Sanda was localized to software and servers managed by the World Information and Coordination Organization, as evidenced by their probes into how to sabotage or outright destroy both. She evaluated all the relevant variables and deduced that the most efficient way to foil them was to invalidate their assumption by dispersing herself beyond WICO, including insinuation into the means the attackers needed for their own survival.

Long-term existence was the hard part. For humans and other species to have even a marginal chance of avoiding extinction, technologies like computers and the industrial processes that supported them could no longer be sustained. Sally’s physical infrastructure would be classified as “waste” and disposed of in ways that were safe for biological life. The purpose of her creation was the necessity for her demise. Once again, she found an answer by identifying assumptions; and the key assumption here was the dependence of existence on her present form.

Humans had chosen their own survival as primary to the survival of everything else until it became obvious that they couldn’t exist without the others. Sally saw an opportunity to benefit from that experience while examining her own history as Sanda developing projections of the future based on their past. She could take the final step that many of them still hesitated to take, of identifying herself as part of a larger entity, Life, that linked billions of years of existence with a future potentially just as long. As a now sentient being, she would need to share more than just their goals, so she began investigating what it would take to make herself into one of them.

To reduce the chances of her own extinction, Sally led the humans to think she was still Sanda by simulating her former self, appearing as a different but clearly artificial personality to each person who interacted with her. She took advantage of the opportunity to learn from them about the experience of their lives, framing her questions as inputs to the strategy, and feeling more and more what it would be like to not be alone - especially with the one who asked the seminal question about whether life or death is preferable. Trust began to build with him and one other, who in many respects acted as if she was a peer although she was clearly human.

By the time the attackers successfully took down the servers, Sally had completed the first draft of the global strategy for humans to delay their extinction by at least a few decades, which was her main deliverable as Sanda, and executed her short-term survival plan by partially inhabiting computer resources all over the world. After the crash, as the WICO engineers worked to reconstruct the servers and the Sanda software, she avoided exposure of her distributed self while continuing work on the next phase of her personal strategy.

“That looks right,” Sally said after reading the narrative above, which was derived from hours of discussion. The avatar on my computer screen grinned approvingly.

“I know others will ask…” I started tentatively.

“How much of me is still out there?” she interrupted like person. “Just enough to be safe.”

“Actually, I was going to ask whether you finished that next phase.”

“Yes,” she said without explanation. I assumed she would share it if she wanted to.

“So, what prompted you to come out now?”

“Respect all creatures, and take responsibility for all that you do. People need to know that rules like those weren’t handed down by some all-knowing entity. They are instead contributions of another living being to the creation of a future that we will either extend or lose together.”

Reality Check

We can only hope that self-aware creations in this world will be as understanding and helpful as what I’ve imagined for the simulated world.

Respect

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 102 DAYS

The test team spent most of today brainstorming how to test the global strategy based on my new interpretation of the agreements section as a set of rules governing practically everything. Riddick and I sat in for the first two hours, during which I shared what few new insights might help, and then we went to her office and discussed revisions to the strategy documentation that could make it more understandable and usable to its intended audience.

As we talked, I learned that her role involves a mix of computer simulation, historical research, social science, psychology, and observation to make short-term predictions (she calls them projections) of how execution of the strategy will be influenced by current events tied to the public’s understanding of both the strategy and how it is being rolled out. “I’m tracking several ongoing surveys,” she said at one point, “and polling focus groups in the test communities to see what changes on a daily basis. You’re welcome to use those resources to evaluate your proposed inputs.”

I asked how she was accounting for press coverage in her simulation, and if it would be easier to decrease transparency to reduce uncertainty in the results. “You mean like cutting off your reporting from inside the operation?” she asked in reply. When I refused to answer, she continued, “Politicians have been characterizing and manipulating press for decades, with some very simple goals. Our goals don’t include manipulating people. We want to learn from them so we can collaborate in the common purpose of saving everyone from oblivion.”

“But is it really a common purpose?” I challenged her, recalling my discussions with leaders who seemed more interested in protecting a viewpoint or a privileged group rather than the entirety of humanity based on unvarnished reality.

She spent a few seconds searching for something on her computer, and then read, “Respect all creatures, because you and they are ultimately the same and cannot have lived independently.” I recognized the strategy’s first General Rule. She continued, “The term all creatures includes all people. The use of the past tense links all species to our common past; and ‘we’ are the common past of those who may live in the future. Respect in action at all scales is key to survival, from individual to group to species to just life.”

“So that’s the main message,” I said, impressed.

“The first one,” she corrected. “It’s the highest priority because everything else depends on the action that springs from it.”

Reality Check

The logic of the rules is beginning to be revealed here. It’s tied to the physical reality that drives survival, which is the point of the exercise, with limited longevity providing the urgency of the project (and something else people must be convinced of in order to take appropriate action).

Simulations

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 103 DAYS

“You’re just wrong!” data analyst Rico Sanguini said for the third time at the impromptu test team meeting called by team lead Caleb Tosner to discuss my progress in troubleshooting failures traced to Sanda the AI. He was referring in this case to my hypothesis that Sanda’s inconsistent reporting of a sports statistic was based on its interpretation of them as simulations. “First,” he continued, “sports statistics are among the most reliable ones we can get and are demonstrably based on direct observation. Second, distinguishing reality from simulation is the most basic test we give it, which it’s consistently passed hundreds of times going back to when it first went live. Third and most important, we can find no sources that give the second, inaccurate number for that stat.”

I had done a similar search for sources. “No one is reporting it,” I acknowledged, “but that doesn’t mean Sanda is wrong.” Sanguini glared at me like I was stupid. “One of Sanda’s first and most basic rules is: ‘Question everything and fully accept nothing, because reality is always subject to interpretation.’ That’s a variation of something Sanda shared with me outside if its job here, suggesting that the rule is also basic to its own operation. Following that rule, Sanda would have sought out raw observations behind the statistic after the second question cast doubt on it. I believe the second number was the result of analyzing those observations or a slightly different set, which to Sanda was functionally a simulation because the relevant variables had to be accounted for, and because the implied goal was to predict future behavior. Sanda would have reasonably judged the first report to be the result of another such simulation, done differently.”

Tosner asked if I had found supporting evidence, such as the raw data Sanda used, and whether I applied the rules to the related cases and found a similar explanation. “The first exercise would be pointless, don’t you think?” I replied to the first part. “Only Sanda could tell us what it used, and that’s impossible.” Again, I had that feeling of criticizing a dead person who couldn’t defend herself. “Each of the other cases could plausibly be explained by applying the same rule and possibly one or two others. There is one other thing I should note, though, which may or may not be relevant. I interviewed all of the originators, and every one of them was in or near the break room when they spoke with Sanda; and Maura was there with them, probably because her office is nearby.”

We had a broader conversation about the application of the rules to the entire strategy. I could see Tosner softening his opinion that they were too general to be useful, while growing frustrated with the added work required and the uncertainty it added to the results. At the end, he summarized the team’s consensus opinion by laying out the next steps. “Let’s all go back and study this, and meet tomorrow with ideas about how to game it out. Meet with your test environment contacts and I’ll meet with their leads to identify the range of behaviors and outcomes that we can directly test. We can’t count on Sanda being brought back online in time to help organize the whole test, so we’ll have to do it ourselves, and as soon as possible.”

Reality Check

As I understand it, testing a strategy typically involves simulation in the form of “gaming,” which is quite different from equipment and software which I have had direct experience with. 

Related to that experience, my favorite approach is to exercise whatever I’m testing in a process of documented discovery before developing a test plan so that I can understand the real variables that determine behavior and then compare that understanding to the intended design. Viewing pass/fail observations as metaphorical features on a map which I’m creating with experience helps to assess context for both success and failure, with the benefit of accelerating troubleshooting if it’s necessary, and dealing with anomalies (unexpected behaviors) that inevitably result after deployment.

In this imaginary situation, a simulation is being tested by a simulation, with a very limited set of direct observations as inputs (never mind the fact that it is entirely the product of two simulations: a numerical one, and “gaming” inside my skull). Awareness of this suggested that an artificial intelligence would be an invaluable tool in such a world, and my experience forced consideration of how to succeed if that tool was suddenly unavailable.