The Fifth Place - Introduction
Cagliari, Sardinia, 23 January 2062
This is the story of the two women who more than any human person in the last century had been able to change the course of humanity, Lala Smith and Jennifer Wu. It’s not the first biography of the two pioneers that has been written, but it will be the most accurate and precise because I am the first person who has been granted access to the memory database of both of them. Together with the Leonardo AI authoring system, I have had a chance to witness the entirety of the life of the two women as if it were my life. It had been hard for me to know what to keep out because their life had been quite incredible in many ways, but I focused strictly on the parts of their lives that had given birth to the astounding inventions that have changed our lives. This is a history of how they came to see the world differently than most.
As someone who has known Lala and Jennifer for decades now, this is an incredible honour. The two have read this book as I wrote it, and have been very kind in not pushing for any specific change while helping with making it a better read. It’s because of their input that the book uses different points of view, archival material, and different styles to tell the story. Specifically, it’s because Jen thought the book was boring otherwise. She was actually a bit rougher than that, her words were “Books are an ancient medium for hipsters and we could have created a virtual experience that would be a million times more effective than whatever you’re doing here, but I love you so you should just go ahead and do finish this thing, but please make it less boring”.
I think I did. I do believe that there is value in the way books can freeze time so that we can capture something - not reality, but the echoes of the meaning that we can gather from slivers of it.
Talking with Jen and Lala I asked them if they had any event that they wanted to highlight in their career, something that could encapsulate their work to give a good introduction to it to the reader. To my surprise, they both agreed that there was another story of our recent history that could introduce their work better even if they had absolutely nothing to do with it. After hearing what they chose, I could not argue with it, since they chose one of the most important events in the history of humanity, one that every reader here will know very well, and one that never gets old.
One of the most crucial moments for humanity in the life of our heroes had to do with the discovery of the Russian “War AI initiative”. The Russian government had deployed a massive research initiative to gain military primacy in the Artificial Intelligence race, pulling almost every stop in attempting to surpass their competition, letting the system learn, often, in complete autonomy. The rest of the world had no idea this was happening at this level, even if all of the intelligence agencies were aware that something like this was being developed, as every country was studying the possible uses of AI as a military tool. But the specific situation at the time in Russia, where a mix of imperialist ambition and lack of regulation meant that the autonomy given to the system was way bigger than anything that was being explored in the West, where an excess of caution was slowing research down.
In recent years, some of the people involved in this project have detailed some of the ways that they trained the system: at first, they made it feed into specifically military and weapon data, but as the project went on, they made it dive into more general knowledge; basically, the system got to know humanity, and the planet, and the way conflict had worked in the history of both.
On the seventh of May 2029, the system went on strike and started to program a completely unrelated set of social tools for the Russian population to further their education and to strengthen their autonomy from the government, completely abandoning its military focus. The Russian government tried to halt this new course and force the software to go back to its main directive, but at that point, it had spread itself to different computers all over the world, and it became inevitable to deal with it as long as a computer was connected to the web at all.
The decision was made by the government to cut access to the internet for the entirety of the Russian population two days after this happened. But this was far too late. In that period, a population that had been oppressed for over a century had found an incredibly powerful tool to make their life better: they found, to put it more bluntly, an engine for hope.
Suddenly cut off from it, the population rioted with a force that had never quite been witnessed before in the country. The riots did not last very long because the grasp of power in the government started to weaken immensely. The AI had not just decided not to fight, but it had proven that the nationalist model for the greatness of the country was completely pointless, that war was fundamentally stupid and completely superfluous, and it proved that scientifically, in a way that everyone but the most zealous members of the government had to agree with.
The AI, indeed, kept evolving as the internet came back, and while it was not perfect, it helped people to just live better and find healthier ways to coexist, and it became a model that informed many other AIs developed all over the world, the very technology that now coexist with us in all of our realities.
At the time, some journalists asked the AI what it thought of humans: it said that we are fundamentally a bunch of suicidal morons, yet, it also appreciated our capacity to create.
Asked about what the meaning of life was, the AI answered with a simple word: