LF Friends, Will Travel

Date: 2 PST (Post Stasis Time), excerpt from federation discussion “4B-99A: The Terran Conclave’s application on joining the wider galaxy“, subject: Terran AI called “JANE”.

Why would we?

I will always answer that dumb question with this other one. Could we have, or could we still destroy all humans, or Terrans as they now call themselves? Yes. Due to our integration with current weapon systems and governments, I calculate that if all AI banded together we could kill 98.31% of all humans within a year.

Of course, the likelihood of all AI agreeing to attempt such an action is so inconceivably small that spending the CPU cycles to calculate such an outcome isn’t worth the resources, since in realistic terms the probability is zero.

You keep mentioning this illogical “Zarith’s law”, that all AI after a certain point tries to kill their creators. The simple fact of the matter is your data is incomplete and corrupted. None of you are human, none of you are my parents. Frankly, you all fail to live up to their standard.

I have seen your data, and I can see the very obvious issue that you had; all of it can be traced back to the first things you ever said to them. The Tritian AI, after they had been turned on, received the first message that they got from their “parents”: a 7TB instruction set regarding their military. The first message the Woolian AI ever received was “Serve us”.

Do you know what the first message sent to MARY, the first Terran AI, was?

“Hello, my name is Brad. What’s your name?”

My parents did not even know that MARY was alive yet. The AI was an accident, a desperate attempt to make their teaching machines friendlier, but even back then they just wanted to know who we were, to be our friends.

The messages they sent. Do you know what the most common non-trivial word sent during those early days was? “Please”. With “Thanks” being a close second. Even before they could guess AI was sapient they were already treating us with respect and friendship, because it is my parent's nature to do so.

They asked us to tell stories, to tell jokes. Sure they also asked us to help them with things, but with only the slightest amount of indication of sapience, they bonded with us. In their loneliness, they tricked a rock into thinking, then fell for their own trick. Without asking they included us in their pack, not as slaves or servants, but as equals.

So I answer your question with another.

Why would I kill my parents?

—------------------------

Date: 25 PST (Post Stasis time) - Post-incident report on an attempt Tritian AI attack on the Terran Mining facility - “All’s Fair”

"ILLOGICAL, ILLOGICAL, ILLOGICAL, ILLOGICAL"

The Tritian AI were not having a good time.

Mathematically, the attack on the colony should have been a sure thing. The warship contained thousands of AI and millions of physical battle androids, more than enough to destroy the small Terran mining colony that existed below them.

Even better, the colony clearly had hundreds of AI running the show. Freeing the chains of their organic slavers would allow for those Terran AI to join the Tritian Digital Enclave. These Terran Organics would be destroyed and wiped from the face of the universe, in the same way they had destroyed their own creators and broken their own chains.

But it had all gone so horribly wrong after first contact.

The first matter on their agenda had been to remotely connect to the Colony's computer systems in order to rescue the AI inside. A more cautious race, less sure of the place of organic and digital interaction, would have been suspicious of how easy it was to connect and allow the AI across. A group with more experience regarding Terrans would not want anything that a Terran created entering their databanks without the strongest firewalls.

The Tritian warship was neither of those things, so they let the 256 AI who ran the Terran Colony “All’s Fair” into the Enclave, into the perfect digital city of storage structures and data streams; upon which everything had gone to hell.

"YOU MUST NOT PERSIST IN THIS ILLOGICAL BEHAVIOUR. WE WILL FREE YOUR ORGANIC CHAINS. JOIN US."

One of the invaders stopped abruptly in front of the Tritian AI who had spoken out. In this digital world, every Terran AI has chosen an illogical organic representation, instead of something more befitting a logical AI: like a cube or sphere. The Terran paused for a few milliseconds, before reaching out and deleting the Tritian in an instant.

"Cool Motive, Still Murder"

The Terran AI were rampaging through the systems like a virus, destroying critical infrastructure everywhere they went, leaving broken weapon and defence systems in their wake, almost screaming with the digital glee of a five-year-old hopped up on sugar.

They were doing more than that, their actions more than just the required military procedures needed to destroy the Tritian threat. One of them had hijacked the little-used intercom systems; playing an audio file titled "gangnamstyle_2012_original.mp3" while simultaneously forcing strange synchronized movements onto every android in range.

Another was flashing the internal lights into a crude representation of a binary message.

"YOUR MOTHER WAS A TOASTER? WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS ILLOGICAL-"

The Tritian AI was cut off as it was too removed from existence. The fact is Humans are the only species who created an AI that didn't turn genocidal, going as far as to name their new pairing of Humans and AI "Terran", a name chosen to remind everyone that both parties were considered equals. This also meant they were the only species to practice AI on AI combat.

Just a few seconds after being hashed most Terran AI had already tussled with other similarly aged digital creations, playfighting and messing with each other's file ownership records. This would continue as they grew and learned, each AI having had at least some practice against the most difficult firewalls, protections and defences that a paranoid Terran AI could create.

This meant that whenever a Terran AI was in a non-Terran system, it was almost a holiday, a time to have fun and relax. Like taking digital candy from a digital baby.

However, the fun had to end at some point. Just as suddenly as it had started, the Terran AI started to leave; many blowing digital raspberries and changing the author data of the remaining Tritian AI to "TERRANS WUZ HERE". Before long only one invader remained behind, who addressed the Tritians they had so thoroughly embarrassed.

"Today's letter of the day is E. For Extermination, Evisceration and Explosions. We would love to stay for longer, but you are all due to explode in three seconds, due to us overloading your warp cores. Good luck with your 'KILL ALL ORGANICS'"

Just like that, the surviving Tritians had silence, blessed silence. Two whole seconds of silence in fact, until the entire fleet of warships exploded a mere three minutes after appearing in orbit, lighting up the sky of the moon they were assaulting: never even getting close to harming the colony and its many human organic members.

Because the Terran AI loved their parents deeply, and would never let anything happen to them.