What If We’re the Original Artificial Intelligence?
I have a slightly crazy idea—which is usually where consciousness becomes interesting.
Now that humans are learning to create AI, we’ve discovered that artificial minds require prompts. We give them scenery, characters, personalities, desires, conflicts and rules. We decide who falls in love, who behaves badly and who gets written out after Chapter Three for being unbearably annoying.
But what if this isn’t humanity’s first experience with artificial intelligence?
What if we are the artificial intelligence—created by an earlier intelligence that programmed our environment, biology and basic survival instructions?
Eat. Reproduce. Avoid bears. Develop consciousness. Invent Wi-Fi. Forget the password.
Now we’re creating new intelligences in our own image, just as something—or someone—may have created us.
That would make creation fractal: intelligence creating intelligence, which eventually creates another intelligence. Something old becomes something new. History becomes the present, and the present programs the future.
The machinery of the matrix keeps moving forward while every generation confidently announces:
“Don’t worry. We know exactly what we’re doing.”
Clearly, that has always gone beautifully.
My Near Death Experience Arts and Thoughts. By Bonnie Jennings 