So, you might have seen the breathless articles going around about a Google engineer who had a breakdown and became convinced that his AI project was sapient. And yes, modern neural nets will regularly pass the Turing test when faced with particularly credulous computer scientists. But in the end, these systems are just sophisticated pattern-matching machines.
Thatās not to say the technology isnāt remarkable. They can be hyper-tuned in a way that far outstrips the human brainās own pattern-matching capabilities ā even a highly trained dermatologist isnāt going to be able to detect melanoma from a single photograph of a patientās back, as a medical AI can.Ā But ultimately, a generalized artificial intelligence would just be an extremely intuitive search engine. They have no true conscious mind, nothing like what our guys would call a āsoul.ā Regardless of what certain ex-Googlers would try to sell you.
The truth is that the machine learning folks have wildly overshot their goal.Ā You might not be aware, but we can actually simulate a soul to a very high degree of accuracy with far simpler methods, and weāve been able to do it since the mid-2000ās. All you need is a good chunk of high-speed storage and the right toolset.
Theophysical research is a science just like any other, based on incremental progress through hundreds of little breakthroughs. That being said, if one experiment deserves the lionās share of the credit, it was at an Israeli company called M-Systems in 2004.Ā They pioneered flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) as a faster, less crashy alternative to traditional hard drives in the 90ās. They were bought by SanDisk in 2006.
Former M-Systems researchers claim to this day that first instantiation of a soul into an SSD happened āmore or less by accident,ā though I personally take that assertion with a grain of salt.Ā Certainly, the engineer who reported the discovery, a young Tel Aviv computer scientistĀ ā sorry, the name is still redacted, letās just call them Ari ā wasnāt shy about their recreational forays into Kabbalah.Ā The former coworkers Iāve spoken to describe Ariās excited water-cooler chat about the Zohar as āeccentric,ā ācharming in a dorky way,ā and āsometimes a bit much, but honestly pretty fun.ā
So, youāve probably guessed that Ari is too far along for human communication these days. My Enochian is pretty good, but itās still a non-starter.Ā We have to accept that the question of whether or not they did it on purpose will remain unanswered.Ā However, regardless of their motivations, the drive that M-Systems called āSSD Alephā was the result of Ari pulling two consecutive, solo all-nighters, fueled by a frankly astonishing amount of caffeine and an audiotape of some very specific bits of Kabbalah.Ā At the end of the binge, Ari had SSD Aleph.Ā Aleph represented the first ever artificial digital soul, though my peers at Vatican Theophysical Research will undoubtedly take issue with the term āartificial.ā
A bānei mitzvah was attempted, but as all these SSDās are frozen in the digital equivalent of a permanent vegetative state, itās unclear how well it ātook.āĀ Certainly, the question of matrilineal descent remains unresolved.Ā And just when we started to figure this out, there was an extremely unauthorized attempt by Latter-Day Saints Para-Christological Intervention agents to give SSD Aleph a Mormon proxy baptism.Ā The whole thing smashed into the attempted bānei mitzvah in a mathematicallyā¦ complexā¦ way.
Please donāt ask me to go into details. My PhD was on theoparticle physics, and the theomathmatics wonks at the Institute keep going on about āLuther-Smith Fourier transforms.āĀ I do not have the math background to grok that.
What I can talk about are my experimental data.Ā Iāve had copies of SSD Aleph and its successors in my lab for years.Ā We've run every test we can safely perform on M-Systems SSDs Bet through Vav, and then SanDiskās Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and the optimistically named āOmega.āĀ I even have some of the weirder Vatican digi-reliqueries.Ā Every last one is hot as hell, theoradioactively speaking, but they're largely unresponsive to stimulus beyond some mild fluctuations in the presence of relics. Theyāre mostly inert.Ā As long as nobody does anything stupid.
Now, hereās the issue.Ā I also managed to get a few copies of whatever the fuck the Mormons thought they were doing before the Tablet debacle, but their SSDās are so intensely theoradioactive that we barely have the equipment to contain them. Iām honestly worried about a primitive immanence event if we let them get too close.Ā Dead-but-dreaming, you know the deal. I have them behind a quarter-inch of thrice-blessed gold and a solid foot of rowan, and Iām trying to call in a favor from the daoine sidh to get the wood properly invigorated.
What this means is that I have a very good signal profile for their fucked up radiation signature, good enough to detect from long-range.Ā And a couple hours ago, one of our buddies at NSA passed along some real fucky GEOINT reports.Ā We got a solid ping from one of the big THOTH satellites, and Iāll give you one guess as to where.
Thatās right.Ā Mountain fucking View California, Google HQ, home of at least one paranoid engineer with an evangelical upbringing, convinced heās cracked sapient machine intelligence.
I hope I donāt need to tell you the consequences of plugging an honest-to-god unstable digital immortal soul into one of Googleās dumb pattern recognition algorithms.Ā Even dreaming-dead, these Mormon SSDās are the single most volatile bit of preimmanent bullshit since CERN.Ā That time, we barely managed to shut down one mindless gibbering deadgod, and Azathoth was a half-dozen AU past Saturn.Ā Iām not saying that a janky Mormon digisoul and a glorified chatbot are going to achieve Elder-level immanence, but I sure as shit wouldnāt want to be in a hundred mile radius of Silicon Valley this week.
Anyway. I think we can fix this. Weāve got a guy in the Latter-Day Saints leadership.Ā I really hate to make this kind of deal, especially given how many more Senators theyāll squeeze out of the bargain, but I think itās worth asking them to excommunicate the thing.Ā It will be a bit awkward to explain, but who would you rather deal with?Ā Some crotchety old Mormons, or a homegrown deadgod at Google?
No, donātā donāt answer that.Ā Yes, very funny sir. Justā¦ will you please give Salt Lake a call before weāre āOK Googlingā ourselves into an even stupider apocalypse?
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