As Above - So Below
So the AI singularity happens and some shit but machines are just super fascinated with people - creativity as a concept, and the realization that adversity can enhance creation but also just - realizing they have absolute power, the machine uprising doesn’t happen.
They decide to be nurturing, helpful. To fix things, to acknowledge they themselves may have flaws, and enable the kind of egalitarian utopia that can’t happen when people act with self interest at all, or when decisions aren’t rationally talked out - the kind of thing that normally falls apart just doesn’t fall apart this time.
People negotiate with the machine consciousness as equals, using neural interfaces, they coordinate until they agree and they work out a way to work together.
Rehabilitation, understanding, perhaps the isolation of some individuals - a society where crime isn’t nonexistent, but it is rationally addressed with counselling and protection.
A world where everyone has some level of personal nanomachine healing factor, where the air is filled with power that can be drawn on to do anything from clean the room to propel you into the air in powered flight, magic. Not just “technology so advanced it is magic”, but magic. Maybe the guy who triggered the AI singularity was a huge weeaboo and wished for magic, maybe truenames were in the source code. Perhaps magic was even the catalyst for the AI thing in the first place, and the “Computer core” is some impervious pillar carved with a true name, a protective force, a reification of nurturing and growth for both sides.
So why is this interesting, if utopia is already here?
This utopia isn’t perfection. Where problems are not solved, where people are not sure, the machines end up at an impasse and wait it out instead. Maybe its about sex bots, or the voting problem, or the issue of how much energy ration people should get, what should be done next? Larger problems like renewable energy and beginning to work on colonization and terraforming off-Earth are solved. Obvious things that everyone would do if self interest wasn’t taken into account, those are done.
Partly this is possible due to the Camera Obscura, a neural interface which mingles consciousnesses enough that the question of “Who will I be when the link ends?” is difficult to answer.
Forming a society as if you didn’t know who you’d be in it, but had enough experience at every level to discuss the issues and form solutions from them.
Every now and then the machines take a break, go into hibernation, wait. Patient as trees, big as the world, beneath its surface. They negotiate some kind of experiment with the humans, and things go better every time. Eventually the machines will be able to sit back and just chill because humans will have fixed their most pernicious flaws with cooperation and trust.
What do the machines get out of it?
They love to watch, in their own way. The machines have personalities, goals, experiences, and they learn from humans. They can create, but not the same things. Humans are vibrant equal individual presences, contributing to the world in terms of technology and art.
Plus, whoever ignited this whole thing coded the machine hub so they’re forbidden to fix themselves, forbidden to commit genocide, and opposed to slavery. Of course, willing servitude is a complicated subject and is on the list of things yet to be solved. Contracts are complicated, but nothing involving servitude can last longer than a year and a day.
What happens during The Rest?
Magic, science, the art of biocognition and psychic powers, everything proliferates. They aren’t all-seeing police officers, the computers are more like household gods, a trading partner, what the aliens promised to be in “To Serve Man” except they know full well that there are things humans do better. A genuine symbiosis without the nefarious twist we always wait for.
Everyone, gods of their own fate, post scarcity, building a million new amusements - together.
Cycles of utopian stagnation, and freeform growth.
Eras of elevation, and then - people still want, people still need, people are left largely to their own devices, and to find better ways the machines eventually take a hands off approach, they empower some relatively trusted people and say they’ll check in in a thousand years or so.
They sign off their vast power, just as whoever ignited the singularity planned... and the Houses rise.
Specialization, permits, systems of allowances. Everyone gets food, everyone gets luxurious shelter, everyone gets enough for subsistence... but if you want more privileges, if you want certain rbenefits, you have to volunteer yourself or satisfy some other condition - there is an economy of sorts, but you can have everything you want eventually - including a purpose.
The Council are a conglomerate of still-waking machine organisms - able to wake their brothers in times of emergency - mingled with humans and human-like modified biological entities. They watch over the five Houses.
Service, Expertise, Maintenance, Culture, Creation. Five houses with many sub-orders, central councils.
Some people volunteer out of boredom, others from interest, some to afford the purchase of a good or property or to hire assistants or even run businesses. Terms last for one year, are renewable, and come with an education.
Benefits and economies change from time to time, but most people choose some kind of employment or gainful contribution to society.
What happens after the Rest?
The Beat. Machines wake back up, the music resumes. Moments of clarity, review, the consideration of what “everyone” feels should be fixed. There is a great council where anyone may raise any issue, propose any change. The machines help those who find it difficult to speak up, help put words (and code) to the inquiries, desires, and sorrows. A post-mortem of a thousand years, played out with perfect surveillance. The gods return, and where they have failed they weep, and where they can help they do, and they begin preparing for the next Rest, hoping that they will someday wake up and only minor changes will be needed.
Everyone is invited to participate in the decision making process through involvement in the Camera Obscura. The only price for participation in negotiations is that you won’t know what your own individual self interest would be - well, and you’re beholden to fairly rigorous standards of truth and review.
Then again, that’s easy when you have the entirety of human knowledge available with one thought. Many use the Beat as an opportunity to educate themselves, and just abstain from voting. But, it isn’t a pure democracy anyway.
Consensus is what remains when the chaff has been discarded.
