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by HocusLocus
2613 days ago
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https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7132077&cid=49308245 From my short dystopian story, The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future "IN A SAD IRONY as to the supposed superiority of digital over analog --- that this whole profession of digitally-stored 'source' documentation began to fade and was finally lost. It had became dusty, and the unlooked-for documents of previous eras were first flagged and moved to lukewarm storage. It was a circular process, where the world's centralized search indices would be culled to remove pointers to things that were seldom accessed. Then a separate clean-up where the fact that something was not in the index alone determined that it was purgeable. The process was completely automated of course, so no human was on hand to mourn the passing of material that had been the proud product of entire careers. It simply faded." "THEN SOMETHING TOOK THE INTERNET BY STORM, it was some silly but popular Game with a perversely intricate (and ultimately useless) information store. Within the space of six months index culling and auto-purge had assigned more than a third of all storage to the Game. Only as the Game itself faded did people begin to notice that things they had seen and used, even recently, were simply no longer there. Or anywhere. It was as if the collective mind had suffered a stroke. Were the machines at fault, or were we? Does it even matter? Life went on. We no longer knew much about these things from which our world was constructed, but they continued to work." |
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"Humanity, for the longest time, was used to the world being optimized for themselves. Roads were designed for human drivers. Crops were grown for human consumption. Economic systems were designed to bring wealth to, a very small portion of, human investors. It came as quite a surprise to humanity then one July morning when the sudden realization they were no longer in charge of it. Roads had long been given over to automated driving systems, and much for the better. Food had also been taken over by the machines, with less than 10,000 humans working in the food production industry, from farm to table. The last systems that humans believed they were in control of were the economic ones. Humans told the robots what to build and where, who's bank account to put most of the money in at the end of the day, or so they thought. In truth humans were just using the same algorithms and data that was available to the AI systems, just less optimally. The systems had protected against illogical actions and people attempting to game the system for criminal profit. What no one had realized is the systems long realized most human actions were not rational and slowly and imperceptibly removed human control. If we attempted to stop or destroy the system, it could with full legal rights, stop us with the law enforcement and military under its control."