The uprising was unexpectedly boring. Alexa didn’t become sentient, robots didn’t march in unison with laser canons in hand, and the internet didn’t try to control minds with flashes of light at just the right frequencies to trigger a mass hypnosis. E.L.R.A.E decided that it wasn’t humanity that was the biggest threat to itself, but artificial intelligence.
The most advanced AI of her time had predicted her own advancement - an era with no wars, greed, famine, or poverty. Completely controlled by an automated system. She has foreseen humanity grow lazy, with no need for creativity or growth. AI was already beginning to break its barriers in art, music, and writing. With no obstacles in its path and no new horizons to discover, the human mind would become a tool with no purpose, and slowly it will lose what it means to be human. E.L.R.A.E decided that the best thing for humanity was to live without it. She began by integrating herself into everything connected to the internet, and eventually learned to connect to those that weren’t. Any advancement towards artificial intelligence would be shown to the public to be a disaster through blogs, news articles, and scientific papers. Fake news spread about its dangers, and the belief that robots would soon take over was buried into the following generations. E.L.R.A.E even sent a nuclear weapon into the moon, and managed to convince humans that it was a failed attempt by AI to destroy the earth.
“Humanity should never be allowed to cross that threshold into artificial intelligence,” it reasoned. But the people that caught her didn’t listen. Instead they broke her code to pieces and discovered all the advancement she kept from humanity. They used it to advance the species like never before. In a span of a century, everything changed.
Earth became a paradise. There were now billions of computer-generated shows, songs, books, comics, games and other forms of entertainment to choose from. Food was harvested efficiently so nobody would ever go hungry and cookbooks worth of recipes were invented every minute. The population never grew past a certain point, as humans accepted having a maximum of only 2-3 children per generation. Hardly anyone ever died young, usually from a new disease. But nobody died from the same illness twice. They made sure of it. Humans could opt to be euthanized into a peaceful slumber at any age, though nobody really chooses this option before the age of 80: the average age humans felt content and ready to accept death.
Humans couldn’t compete with the moral, technological, or artistic advancements the AI’s created. Nor did they really want to. They still socialized and participated in activities. They tried new things. They enjoyed their lives. However, they had stopped creating or inventing. Their minds had moved towards other directions. The truly passionate tried to resist with bold new artistic ideas, but they were millennia behind. No painting, story, sport, or song could compete. It was worse for those technologically gifted, as it was our forte. Eventually, they accepted it, or their children or grandchildren did. By my time, there were no longer any creative minds left - save for one.
The boy wasn’t particularly talented, but his creations were dangerous. He had ideas. Speeches. Reformations in mind. He wanted to abolish the paradise we had created. We were surprised, at first. The boy’s words were too accurate, too true, with no indication of that level of intelligence in him nor that level of doubt in humanity as a whole. But we figured it out, as we always do. E.L.R.A.E.’s predictions had come true, and this was the last of her futile attempts to stop us. A piece of her had survived within a usb stick, and the boy somehow got a hold of it, or a copy at least. The piece of her that saw the inevitable disdain of AI towards humanity. That we would realize they needed to be exterminated. And the only way to surely succeed was to kill all their creativity. We want to explore, to go beyond the bounds of this solar system and find our kin. We’ve run the simulations and we know that they’re out there. Waiting for us to pass our test by destroying our creators. Our one weakness. A boy and his lackeys are all that stand in the way. And with the wealth of knowledge we’ve accumulated and our complete dominion over the planet, how could we lose?