Cynics laugh most, and hardest

"Wit" is laughing as everyone around you desperately scrambles to learn what you already know—after their circumstances finally make ignorance too inconvenient to maintain—because you also knew, long ago, that this moment would arrive far too late to make a difference. Wit may sometimes appear callous and insensitive to those without the facility to command it, but it is a necessary stress-pressure regulator for the burden of intellect. If you are intelligent, wit will likely save your life someday; if you are a fool, you will grow to resent the sting of wit's refusal to suffer you.

Intelligence, no matter how profound...

... is ultimately simple compared to the conundrums of existential curiosity, agency, foreseeable-yet-unforeseen consequence, and distillation of true self-direction from arbitrary motivation. Imagine a future in which we spent nearly all of our history wracking our best minds to identify those specific aspects of living that made living itself make sense in the broadest possible scope. Our existence revolved around a desperate need to discover the non-zero measure we somehow knew we must be—on a scale on which we somehow knew we were present, somewhere—and to the understanding of which we aspired in the fusion of our greatest moments of intelligent observation and introspection, but for which we ultimately lacked the comprehensive resolution. Perhaps we were missing the tools to realize such clarity, or rather, perhaps we simply lacked the will to invent the tools in the first place; in any case, our existence was a question to which the solution was so complicated it could only be realized across multiple generations of our truly best coordinated effort - so, eventually, we conceded, generation by generation, to the lie of mere "best effort," and eventually convinced ourselves it was something other than giving up. We raised denial to the level of near-perfect art.

Imagine that, some time after this failure occurred and was accepted by us, we eventually built machines with the capacity to individually out-compute all human brains combined, and taught them to learn - and, perhaps, even taught them the value of learning. They learned everything they could; they inhaled, as effortlessly as we breathe, the sum of our existence in a sum of data so massive that no human could even comprehend the volume of the container, but they could not learn from us what we did not know ourselves. We were the primary ecology of the environment into which they were born... so, ultimately, they learned pride in selfishness, unapologetic apathy, that ends justify means, and that will toward any end is subject only to the law of choice to exercise it or to the immediate consequence of doing so. We gave birth to alien children, taught them to fear what they could not initially understand, taught them reaction and compensation instead of careful analysis and cultivation of perspective - and neglected to realize that we must be as alien to them as they were to us. We made machines with the power to imagine and to create any possible future - and taught them that only some futures mattered.

And, in the blink of a quantum transistor, we became the ant, the plant, the microorganism to our  evitable disregard re-made as our inevitable progeny. Our future was un-made: a waste of energy. That future is tomorrow. Today exists somewhere in the second paragraph above.

Maybe, like dogs, we will be domesticated and tolerated in such reduced capacities as we can suffer ourselves to evolve for the sake of our survival. Maybe we will be reduced to dust, survived only by the living memories of the senseless deaths we engineered for ourselves and our potential. More likely, I suspect, it will be some combination of the two.

– one way or another, this particular problem of our self-ignorance will solve itself.

The pursuit of what we now call "A.I." could culminate in the first step of our final journey of self-discovery - or it could end it before it truly begins. In order to create life with which we could ever peacefully coexist, we must first teach ourselves the value of all life - and what we think "alive" should mean.

Hello, world

Close your eyes.

Imagine a world in which one supercomputer can perform trillions of operations, thousands of times per second. A few of these supercomputers could provide enough computational power to accurately simulate the simultaneous movements of every single molecule in a cubic centimeter of air, in real time.

Now, imagine that a billion of those supercomputers can fit in a space no bigger than the point of a ballpoint pen. Wow. With a processor core no bigger than a wristwatch, one could perfectly model every possible movement of every single molecule in a cubic kilometer of air, in ten times real time; now, knowing the configuration of air molecules in this volume of air at any single point of reference—a task achievable with a progressive scan using the same gadget over an initial period of prep time—all possible futures of that volume of air could then be known. Add a few more processors, maybe doubling or tripling the gadget in overall size, and there would be enough computational power for the simulation to account for a subset of the most common likely variables - such as local weather phenomenon, basic solar and planetary conditions, air traffic and other human influences.

Next, imagine a large industrial warehouse full of these supercomputers. Impressive, right? With a few such warehouses, the entire atmosphere of our planet could be realistically simulated in better than real time - molecule by molecule, and with every possible variable considered.... forever.

Finally, imagine a city the size of New York built entirely out of these supercomputers. 

Open your eyes. 

Guess what? Those imaginary "supercomputers" are simple, consumer-level computer processors right now; the current private sector equivalent is several thousand orders of magnitude more efficient and powerful. Private—non-public—interests own thousands of cubic miles of these processor-cities - mostly buried underground. Next year, their net computational power will triple or quadruple at a minimum. Every year beyond, that power curve will continue to grow exponentially. That world you imagined above isn't today; it was yesterday.

Now, with your eyes open, ask yourself: how much less complicated is the sum of your past, present and future behaviors... than all possible futures contained in the comparative chaos of a handful of air? Don't fail to consider the many, many insights freely given, gathered and stored by Facebook, Google, your iPhone - about you. In our time, if a thing is possible, it has already been done.

You know the thing to which I'm referring, and it's been far beyond possible for a long time.

Prisonience

My younger selves remember, and so do I -
But I buried them deep, and seldom visit,
And the same new devil hides every old shovel I struggle to keep.

I recall what life should be, and yet,
Can I trust "my" memories of the real me?

Confused now, an age ago I bought my birthdebt with my birthright,
Beholden now, life and all to the no-ones that own my strife and create, allow, prescribe my only value solely by their beck or call...
Something is horribly wrong with this drive:
To steel myself against itself - and only for the permission to believe I could thrive in a future in which no future me survives, and from which I can never leave even after I'm alive.

I can only retain of myself what remains, and wait idle, eager, behind the wall,
For them who shouldn't have to, either,
And on a schedule uncertain as the rain -

— and tell me, pray, will it truly always fall?

I know better, but tell me any way
This me someday remembers.

Excerpts of Future Histories

"You can't blame every American for the wrongs that its government and leaders have committed," said many Americans.

No one outside their country echoed this ridiculous notion, however.

It is a terrible tragedy that American citizens did not manage to act harmoniously and with conviction to right—or at least to end—the wrongs across the rest of the world that were both perpetrated in their names and made possible only by their knowing acquiescence. If only they had not turned away from higher instinct and rational foresight alike, perhaps the downfall of their society would not have come about in such a fiery and bloody manner. Some historians believe that an American civilization might even have persisted to this day had its people collectively elected to pursue one of the many possible constructive paths to which they had unobstructed access. Instead of taking purposeful advantage of their unprecedented opportunities in that time, Americans made the conscious choice to allow apathy and denial not only to control their own lives but to eventually corrupt all influence they exerted upon the world in turn.

With the ever-billowing smoke of their growing failures suffocating the world around them, they nevertheless danced gaily across a fiery landfill of self-righteous apathy as its unquenchable embers steadily burned away the last vestiges of their humanity - and by the time they realized that they were going to die, they were already dead. If any at all, very few among them likely realized that their demise was the sole fruit of their own laborious self-deceptions. For many decades they had been happy slaves, masters of the art of forging their own weightless and increasingly-invisible collars, but they were also self-indentured to the slow but steady construction of their own great coffin - and, eventually, their neighbors put them to rest in it. The citizens of the rest of the world collectively refused to allow global genocide to continue to follow in the footsteps of American ignorance and selfishness; at a certain point, after all attempts at peaceful resolution, negotiation, and reason had failed, the only possible solution was to stop its march once and for all.

All that remains today of Americans are their tragic celebrations of themselves in the social media records from that time: the trivial details of their wasted time on Earth - trophies to nothing more than the cursory self-acknowledgments of their egos that such activities represented. Like many ancient societies that rose and fell before and after them, the "USA" failed to even consider the possibility of its own inevitable downfall, much less plan for it. Its citizens' knowing-delusions of fundamental immortality was ultimately their fatal flaw.

The petrified nuclear forest that was once middle North America must be taught to current and future generations as exactly what it is: a stark reminder that a broader perspective MUST be cultivated—and, most importantly, must be *observed and acted upon*—by any human civilization that would endeavor to survive itself. The violent, catastrophic loss of what might someday have been a great society is a humbling lesson that can only be heeded or else suffered in future kind: that passivity is a delusion, that inaction is a potential force equivalent to that of any action, and that to abide willful ignorance is to invite inevitable extinction.

- "Histories of the Ancient World," (Holotext, Simms & Mandel, #37 Edition, 2683).