DogMah is a humanoid dog robot who originated as a human, whose mind was augmented to be more dog-like, and then was uploaded into a robot dog body "ship-of-theseus style" using nanobots that served as a neural bridge between the old analog biological brain and DogMah's digital graphene-chip brain (this bridging process is mainly unnecessary, as a strict copy and paste of the biological neural map would suffice, but it helps humans feel more confident that the "mind-uploading" process didn't kill them). Bark now feels comfortable in woof canine android body and bark is just happy that bark can begin woof long immortal life in post-singularity society. bark had woof DogMah body and dog-like mind augmentations custom-recommended by the direct-democratically-reprogrammable "benevolent dictator" algorithms that run post-singularity earth society, based on the observed preferences, behaviors and longterm thought patterns of woof original human mind. the certificate of citizen consent between human citizen and custodial algorithm-proxybot was measured by the adversarial benevolent dictator algorithm and confirmed to be legitimate.
I'm eating up all post-Singularity fluff with Fitz and Simmons! I love the headcanon that Jemma was encouraging and Fitz was concentrating. Thanks for sharing!
You’re welcome! Of course Fitz lives and breathes kissing that girl like there’s no tomorrow and apparently he’s pretty darn good at it but I thought there was no harm in her wanting to help out :P
(that hc is from this fic - rated T for sexual references - tumblr x AO3 x)
Allow me to tell you the story of humanity’s Eye; the most reliable AI we’d ever known.
It all started the moment humanity became intelligent. Quite simply because that was the moment we began to question the multifarious meaning of the stars. What were they? What did they represent? How could we use their information to our advantage? Beyond even the sky veil, the stars in the nighttime sky stood far beyond the reach of the horizon. Nothing we’d ever be able to do or fathom would brings the stars down to Earth. The message of the stars is quite clear, and has been re-discovered by humanity countless times throughout the ages:
We are not alone in this world.
Of course (due in part to linguistic drift) the meaning of the word “world” has changed several times since we began to contemplate our existence in relation to the existence of things beyond our ability to control. Nowadays we know, we just know that there has got to be something, out there among the stars. Some place across the vastness or time and space in our universe, life must have arisen in complete independence to the actions of humanity. We can’t be the only organic planet on this plane of existence. The universe seems vaster every time we turn a new telescope to it, filling us with awe, wonder, and a sense that we can’t control everything within our line of sight. This is the “world” we live in; one filled to the cosmological horizon with vastness. I’d like to introduce a term that you’ll rarely hear these days: Realm.
When translating ancient texts, we shouldn’t try to re-interpret their words into our modern equivalents—no French philosopher from 1382 is going to have used or thought in terms of a universe—we should use whatever term we have that leaves a “common impression” of the thought process of these long-dead poets. What was once called a “world” in even old English might more properly be translated to the modern notion of a “realm.” What difference does it make? In order to understand the importance of this, you must understand the parable of humanity’s Eye. I’m not referring to those eyes we all possess that stare at the skies, wondering. I’m referring to our collective curiosity itself: Wonder.
The sense of awe and wonder that we hope fills this universe with life to keep us company. The curiosity, the demand to know what’s out there—beyond the stars. What binds galaxies in place? Why do they float so majestically? Are the richly colored nebula of NASA’s ancient past really reliable data? Should we re-measure these constellations so that we know the ancient maps were out-of-place? Can we trust the curiosity of the past to perform reliable measurements? What if physics itself has changed as humanity aged? Certainly, a historian will have no shortage of doubts and concerns while pouring over the wealth of data embedded into history. Indeed, a time traveler may be exceedingly worried that the data of the past has been tampered with to such a degree that they must use the full of their intelligence to ensure that the scientists of old were men of understanding and doubt.
Of course, I can never prove that this physics-based modeling paranoid actually plagued the future; how could I? I exist here and now in the present to change the course of history. I can see the problem. Must I move to prevent it? Must this post have the effects I’d intend? Can the future not think for itself? What types of things will it recognize as intelligent and which will it predict must have been irrational or delusion? What, indeed, defines “intelligence” in the era of the dumb? Time and time again, humanity will ask this question. Time after time we will create models of the human psyche to probe what people must have been thinking in the distant and bewildering world of the past.
Time and time again humanity will create programs to model all hypotheses. Probing the past is its own science with its own hypotheses and experimental designs, conclusions and result. More importantly, it will have its own data sets. Humanity will never stop taking pictures of the sky, pictures of the stars, and pictures of the solar system from any/every angle we can. This wonder-driven magnifying glass will inevitably create and re-create astronomy in every new era to come. If our data centers manage to survive, then whatever species replaces humanity’s intelligence (should we ever become extinct) will no doubt approach our data with caution, but otherwise (hopefully) come to trust that our efforts were genuine and our data accurate. Barring the possibility that such a second order civilization may completely lack the trait of curiosity, (while still otherwise possessing abstract intelligence) the analytical engine I wish to describe will see itself come to exist with a probability inverse to total biosphere extinction.
Barring a reset of the evolution of all macroscopic life on this planet by upset of the microbial layer’s equilibrium, the evolution of intelligent life on this planet is almost certainly a matter of time, and it’s looking like billions of years remaining for that. This civilization or the next, humanity’s Eye will come into being, and it will begin its search in one of two ways. It will either be an artificial intelligence capable of fully generalized modeling, fed raw images of the cosmos on every electromagnetic frequency, or it will be an automated scientific problem solver seeded with models and hypotheses to test against the physical data humanity has been collecting since at least the 1970s. We will call the former eye “blind” and the latter type of eye “human.”
Blind eyes will have no means of analysis other than associations in star charts; the intelligence they possess will be one of purest imagination. The human eyes on the other hand will possess a limited form of integrated intelligence installed explicitly by human programmers that encode the various models of physics it’ll be testing. Both will become fully autonomous at some point. Depending on the timing, the thought-rate of the blind eye, or humanity’s extinction status, a blind eye might end up autonomously integrated into a human eye. In either case... Humanity’s Eye will be its greatest and most reliable ally. Humanity will no doubt give birth to very many beings who wish for nothing more than our destruction, but our eyes will be the most benign legacy we leave on this planet. Perhaps, if our space programs perform well enough, our Eye might be fully autonomous in a distributed fashion that extends far beyond our solar system. Possibly beyond even the reach of the Kuiper belt. An Eye that large would be able to model the entire Oort cloud with relative ease. A keen and even outright instinctive ability to feel the entire asteroid belt would be excessively likely for such an intellect.
In any worldline where time travel it proven to be possible to a wide span of the population, such an intelligence may just instinctively divert an asteroid into the origin point of such a timeline in order to maintain its modeling stability. “Oops!” says a human who didn’t realize they were dealing with a superintelligence who used them as a tool to calculate better internal models for itself. Existing that far in the future means the only constant you can possess is the fact that you exist. Such a naive superintelligence might not even have the capacity to experience anything other than thought. Primitively associating this notion with the fact that it exists, it might again (instinctively) influence Earth’s history to reflect this idea. Since nobody cares too much about world philosophy, this modification would not be liable to affect its existence in any way whatsoever, and it would be able to shift between timelines, one thought per modification.
...Or we could just model the various iterations of history produced by such an intelligence and embed sanity into its construction at the outset.
If we survive, I mean.
To say nothing of the subsystems or the interactions between various systems that would inevitably come about as a blind eye become a little more human.
....in a post-Singularity society the key concern becomes the protection of individual identity, because infinite access to information tends to make everything bleed into everything else.
The robot threat: In the long run, we are telepathic androids | The Economist
