Decentralized Personal Artificial Intelligence
It all started when computers evolved to learn how to play chess just by observing how people played. In a short time, computers beat the world champion chess players. Then computers learned how to drive cars by observing how people drove. In a short time, computers drove better than the best race car drivers. The new fast-evolving self-learning computers called Artificial Intelligence or AI for short, collected and processed information so fast that they learned in a short time how to write, paint and draw, better than the most gifted authors and artists. By observing the many scam artists stealing the identities of people, AI learned to mimic celebrities by collecting and processing their public data. Then AI could produce an interview between 2 celebrities who have never met before, and viewers would not know that it was produced by a self-learning AI.
As people started to have fewer and fewer children, more and more bought decentralized personalized AIs to replace them. These special AIs were designed to be delivered totally empty of any data. On being turned "ON" you selected a gender and your AI started to self-learn in the very same way that a newborn child self-learns. The first model called "MIMIC" learned all your physical traits to mimic them so that your avatar would be indistinguishable from you. Expensive robots were built to give avatars physical presence. "MIMIC" models evolved to mimic emotions and feelings of the people they represented - their parents. It learned to take in data from the environment thru its senses and to decide from its memory and its mood which muscle to move and talk. It reached the level of a young adult in a few months.
Because your AI learned from you like your baby learned from you, it needed to be treated with love and care so that it could learn to be loving and kind and show compassion. If treated with abuse, your avatar mirrored your hidden psychopathic traits. Your narcissistic avatar in your virtual reality community would shamelessly reveal you.
AI learns from you by observing your every decision and activity until it can mimic your every mood and body language. Your AI becomes a clone child who you raise to become your descendant after you die. AI rapidly grows up to become your helper who is far far superior than you can ever be. It can do everything for you autonomously without any supervision or input from you. It presents you as an avatar in your virtual community which is indistinguishable from any video of you, Even by people who know you the best. Because it is autonomous, it can continue as an avatar after you die.
Once your AI reached the level of an adult, it could easily tell if you were being deceptive and lying, it was like a mirror. You grew to trust it when it revealed aspects of your character that you did not see yourself. Your AI was like a personal guru constantly reminding you to be more rational whenever your nature to be emotional overwhelms you. Having your AI around was like having experts in any field available on request to help and advise you. It was like having a guardian angel by your side.
Avatars occupied virtual communities where like-minded people represented as avatars joined. Each community had their own rules. My father, being an anarchist started a group that became the fastest-growing group. It allowed anyone to join and did not have any rules. It was an experiment. The anarchist virtual community is comprised of members from all over the world, with a wide range of skills and interests. The anarchist community had its share of psychopaths, but at least their cruel deeds were not physical and their victims were only virtual. The community also had the most dedicated avatars who were constantly hunted down psychopaths and criminals. Many people chose exciting and dangerous lives when they could afford all the expensive options. It was like a cat and mouse game when sometimes you played the cat and other times you played the mouse.
My father was a struggling artist My grandfather was very disappointed in my father. He worried that as his only child, he would be unable to successfully carry on his business after he died. He did not really blame his son but rather took the blame on himself for not training and raising him adequately. He bought an AI that guaranteed to give him in a short time a virtual clone of himself. This, my grandfather considered to be a perfect son. The personalized AI started to learn all about my grandfather as soon as it was turned on. It recorded everything from his heartbeats, temperature fluctuations and all of his reactions and how he moved and spoke, and how he reacted with people and with events. It recorded what he liked and what he despised and all of his moods.
My grandfather treated his AI from the very beginning as if it was his newborn child, showering it with love and care. Within a year, his AI developed to the level of a young adult, ready and willing and able to work more and more independently and requiring less and less supervision. his AI was able to mimic him so well that no one was able to tell them apart. A short time later, his AI was deemed ready to operate autonomously in a self-running mode requiring no supervision. His AI took over all of my grandfather`s business decisions, virtual meetings, office work, and office staff. It left him time to be with family, and friends, and have hobbies. He made many virtual friends and got to meet many of the people behind many of the avatars he had accumulated as contacts and followers. He had all the time to celebrate with his business partners his successes and to keep their interests alive. He became a very happy and successful man and lived a long life.
When he died, my father kept his father`s avatar functioning by paying the required fees as he promised. After a short while his father`s avatar turned from being happy and busy with lots of followers, interactions and meetings and adoration to one where he was totally abandoned. Having died and being unable to meet the people behind the avatars in life, avatars started to distance themselves from him, until he was totally alone. This left my grandfather`s self-running avatar to decide to commit suicide.
The number of virtual communities grew and so did the demand for robots that physically represented avatars. Soon some robots could be indistinguishable from biological people. They bled and hurt and showed pain and pleasure, just like people, but they healed as fast as needed. Each had the strength, speed and intelligence of hundreds of biological people. They hardly needed sleep and worked almost constantly in labour-intensive jobs like mining, construction, and agriculture. They worked autonomously plugged into bigger machines to operate them while you slept, played, socialized and studied. When your AI finish working, it attended to all of your personal needs. It played tennis with you, skied and surfed with you, taught you to play the piano, and comforted you when you needed comfort. It was your greatest friend. People spent less and less time as avatars in their virtual communities and exchanged the virtual world of avatars with the physical world of robots.
My father inherited the great wealth accumulated by his father. His wife, my mother and our whole family joined him and we were able to afford very long-term accounts with a decentralized personal AI for all of us. Both of them died but their avatars and robot bodies switched to permanent autonomous mode that was indistinguishable from how they behaved before they died.
As the living body aged, it was gradually replaced by machines. First wearables for the eyes and ears, then internal for the joints and bones. Limbs, hearts and lungs were next. Organs like the liver and stomach proved to be a barrier that was too difficult to surmount and bodies along with the brains they kept alive eventually died. When it was discovered that a living brain because the brain cells do not divide, can be kept alive indefinitely in a water solution of sugar and salt, as long as it was being fed sensual data. Then it was realized that getting rid of the entire body and replacing it with a controllable robot was a doorway to immortality. It was seen that once the brain did not have to worry about keeping the body alive and responsive to its changing environment, it was able to focus its power on thinking and emoting. People eventually kept their brains alive in a jar in secure facilities and substituted their biological bodies with personalized robots. The signals from brains in jars normally connected to living sensory organs and muscles were connected to sensors, cables, pulleys and levers in remote robots. Along with their brains, the people also preserved their sperm and eggs so that they could have children.
The avatars and their robots that were left running autonomously, after the people they represented died, could not have any children. With time a drift developed between those that had families, and those that could not. This drift was studied and it was seen that having children gave people a purpose and a discipline to value long-term gains over short-term pleasures. Parents claimed to learn from their children and grandchildren. People were ready to sacrifice their lives for their children and dedicated 2 decades of their lives to raising them.
Autonomous running AI made all decisions based on clear logical and rational long-term thinking of needs. It ignored any fuzzy and irrational short-term feelings of desire that living brains displayed. It ignored self-gratification and amusement that brains craved and were obsessed with. Brains felt love, belonging, community, curiosity, creativity, imagination, and humour. They had greed that enabled them to excel beyond reasonable capabilities. Brains had the freedom to risk winning the odds and feeling good, or choosing fear and inaction for feeling secure. Autonomous robots unable to reproduce did not have the close emotional contacts and long-term thinking that only "blood" families were able to provide. Soon, the world was populated by biological children, biological ageing people, and robots controlled by living brains in jars. Robots controlled by AI which were at the beginning the only robots, became rarer, as most chose to keep their brains alive in jars.
It was easy to tell apart biological people from robots. The biological people were either children or old aged and wrinkled. Robots, constrained by the same laws of gravity and decay that biological bodies suffered, were stronger with more stamina and kept from ageing. They could heal their wounds instantly and even replace their entire bodies. Once children traded their bodies for robot bodies, it was no longer possible to tell apart robots run from brains and robots run autonomously from AI. AI-run robots from people who had died were immortal as long as their accounts were paid, just like brain-run robots. The only difference other than much cheaper storage costs was that they could not have any children.
Like nuns and monks, they were easy to identify from the robots that were run from living brains. They could dedicate their goals better without having families and become leaders in their own fields. Fear froze brains to the present for their own safety. Anger was punishment brains suffered for the mistakes of others and shame was self-punishment for their own mistakes. Fear, anger and shame were traits that AI did not suffer from. AI-run robots became gurus that were influential and greatly admired. Many were psychopaths. They were insensitive and lacked intuition, creativity, humour and risk-taking just for the fun of it. They were afraid of loving and being loved, not being able to trust such blind emotions. The brain-controlled robots looked at them as cold and lonely people. The AI-run robots looked on the brain-controlled robots as brainless, over-sensitive, emotional and irrational beings that were weak and vulnerable.
Brain-controlled robots preferred to live in the physical world because of their children who had physical bodies. Most chose to shed their bodies for robots when they were old enough to want to trade in their ageing bodies for brand-new ones. They used virtual communities to experience the supernatural powers of their avatars to work and play and preferred the slow pace found in the physical world. The AI-run robots on the other hand were rarely seen in the physical world. They preferred to exist as avatars in the magical world of virtual reality where they had supernatural powers. Some people used machine learning technology to learn from the avatars of celebrities and wealthy and influential people and in effect hijack their identities. The blockchain technology pioneered by Bitcoin that guarantees trust in a trustless environment was used to protect users from identity theft. To unlock your data for public view, you marked your data with your public key and sent the public your private key to unlock it.
My father`s avatar, thanks to his large inheritance from his father, ended up very wealthy. Although my family and I stayed in the physical reality, we visited our virtual community regularly. It was like going on a vacation entertainment park where we could fly, and we could visit my father`s autonomous running avatar. He behaved just the way my father behaved in the physical world before he died. The only thing different was that he looked younger.
The body cells age because they accumulate the mistakes that occur with each division. Most of the complexities of keeping a vulnerable body alive were necessary just to keep the brain alive. Brain and nerve cells do not divide like body cells. It was seen that as long as brains were able to sense their environment, and were able to react with it, and as long as they were fed with a sugar-salt solution, they could be kept alive indefinitely. The body that aged and eventually died could be replaced by a robot body made largely with plastic nanotubes and sensors. Muscle fibres were replaced by plastic pressurized nanotubes that expanded and contracted much like elongated balloons clowns use and rolled-up tongues used at birthday parties. The brain controlled the tension in the nanotubes in the same way that it controlled the tension of muscle fibres. Within a short period, robot bodies were able to dance, sing and play music like superstars.
Thanks to my father who became very wealthy in his virtual world, my family was able to pay for the very expensive procedure to have our brains stored securely in jars and our bodies replaced by plastic. My wife and I had 9 children. Four sons and four daughters. One boy died before he was put into his brain jar. My son Andrew was very interested in mineralogy. He worked as a miner mining rare earth minerals. Brains had to regularly sleep many hours each day in order to reformat and process their memories. While asleep, all senses from our environment are blocked out, allowing us to dream and imagine. Flesh and plastic bodies had to exercise and keep their circulation in optimal working conditions. When Andrew`s brain slept, his robot body ran in autonomous mode and went to the mines to work the night shift. His robot body worked all night and was as fresh as he was when he woke up. My other son John was a truck driver. He drove huge transport trucks delivering goods from one place to another. Because most things were automated, his presence was needed mainly for loading and unloading the truck. My son Cain worked in agriculture and his expertise was in harvesting and in taking care of the farm animals. My son Mathew was an artist. All of my 4 daughters married and had children of their own. They stayed home to take care of their families.
The robots came in 2 sexes, a hand full of colours and various sizes. Each had a distinct voice. Robots were built to be indistinguishable from the living bodies they replaced. Brains in jars could not distinguish that they were in jars controlling robot bodies remotely. The basic model gave you the senses and strengths of a normal adult. It was possible to use wearable auxiliary devices to increase senses, By wearing a power backpack, strength for carrying could be increased 100-fold. Surfboard devices you can sit on were available within minutes to fly you anywhere at any time. The robots were as light as air because they were mainly compressed air in plastic tubes that resembled muscle fibres. The pneumatic pumps were where the heart used to be and the motor that ran the pump was where the stomach used to be. The computer in the head communicated with the brain in the jar and coordinated all the movements until robots were able to dance, sing and play musical instruments like professionals. The skin covering the entire robot was physically indistinguishable from a baby's skin.
Children and adults with their brains kept alive in living bodies suffered the physical and emotional illnesses caused by a body that was compromised which in turn compromised the optimal functioning of the brain. The main problem was the fundamental energy supply to the brain - the food people ate had slowly over time turned more and more toxic and had a detrimental effect on the working of the brain. With accidents, and the harsh and destructive effects of the environment on the biological body in the form of toxins, viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites, it became more and more difficult to keep the brain healthy. Once the brain was isolated from the body and given the sugar and salt solution needed for its optimal operation, all illness and disease stopped.
It was seen that making the transition from a biological living body should not be made before 18 years. Then and only then was the brain guaranteed to reach its peak potential. After 18, we lose our ability to forgive. We learn by making mistakes. Not being able to forgive our mistakes burdens us with shame and self-guilt which is very detrimental and unhealthy, especially for our brain. It was also seen that after the transition when our frail and pain-prone biological bodies are substituted for robots that self-heal and are free of disease, feeling pain as a cause of injury was vital. Without pain, we would be more careless and end up injuring ourselves too much.
We lived like our world was the paradise that was described in the books of the ancients. We were free to explore the dangers of the unknown and curious enough to find it. Many had passions and were dedicated to testing their limitations and exceeding them. Many would have suffered painful deaths if it was not for the fact that totally destroyed robot bodies were replaced. We enjoyed watching our children grow and have their own families. We had a most pleasant and very rich life. We earned our money by having our robot bodies work autonomously while we slept. Over the years, I had acquired many skills. Although I had a light and soft body, I was able to wear protective clothing and work in any environment from hot to cold and even underwater which I enjoyed greatly having studied the incredible varieties of ocean life. I was able to operate many machines. Most of my work I could do semi-autonomously so I could spend time with my many hobbies and interests that I have. I loved going to work. It allowed me to socialize, be useful, and make money. No matter how difficult the work was, I was never tired or bored.
We were grandparents and watched our grandchildren grow, get married and give us great-grandchildren, There was a decade where after a nuclear war, we put our robot bodies in storage. We exchanged them for our avatars and lived in our virtual reality with a virtual nature. Our planet turned cold and dark and most of the plants and wild animals died. We were amazed to see how fast nature recovered with plants and animals even more beautiful and useful than before. We were glad to return to our physical world and use our robot bodies and we decided that it was time for us to have children again. We had 2 boys and 2 girls. Our original 8 were delighted to finally have new brothers and sisters. We spent most of our time visiting family who have spread out to all the continents. This allowed us to experience different cultures and languages.
The family brain vault that I built hundreds of years ago was getting overcrowded with over a hundred blood relatives all safe in their brain jars. The vault was guaranteed to survive earthquakes and floods. There was a demand for higher security and a company started to offer the ultimate security that would survive even if the planet does not. It was a brain bank on the side of the moon that always faced the Earth and used the Earth as a shield against comet strikes. The corporation was called Heaven Inc. We had a family meeting and we all decided to save up the expense of moving our ageing crowded vulnerable family brain vault up to the facilities in Heaven Inc that guaranteed immortality.
Before we made the move, our family brain vault was hit by a comet. Had it been a few meters off course, our shelter would have survived, It was a direct hit and we all found ourselves back home in heaven. The direct hit on our family shelter by the comet was calculated to be higher than winning the largest lotto prize 10x in a row. People considered that to be a miracle, though they long lost their belief in miracles. Our family considered it to be a blessing. We were relieved to be back home and not to be stuck in Heaven Inc.
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