TWTBACD Ch.86 - The Architecture of Arrival

Chapter 86

The Architecture of Arrival

2082–2088 — Final Preparations

2082-88: final preparations, Framework complete

The years from 2082 to 2088 were years of final preparation — not for the ASI itself, which was proceeding at its own pace, but for the world that would receive it.

Lucas van den Berg's ASI Governance Framework went through its final revision in 2084. It had taken twelve years to write and had been reviewed by four hundred and seventeen people across sixty-two countries. It was forty-nine pages long. Its central principle occupied one paragraph, which Lucas had written twelve times before arriving at the version that was correct:

'The arrival of artificial superintelligence is not a transfer of power from humanity to intelligence. It is the extension of humanity's relationship with intelligence into a new register. Humanity has always been shaped by the tools of thought it creates — language, mathematics, writing, computing. ASI is the next tool of thought. Like all tools of thought, it will be what we teach it to value. Unlike previous tools of thought, it will be able to improve on what we teach it. Our responsibility is therefore not to produce a perfect system but to produce a system that is pointed in the right direction, with enough wisdom to continue improving toward what it was pointed at.'

Adaeze Mutombo, seventy-four, negotiated the resource sovereignty provisions of the Framework that ensured the ASI's development and deployment obligations to the Global South. She negotiated from the same position of total clarity and total intolerance for euphemism that she had occupied since her first hearing in the Congolese provincial court forty-three years earlier. She got most of what she sought. She made a note of what she didn't get, and who had blocked it, and why, and passed the note to Amara-Céleste, who was thirty-three and beginning her own career in policy.

Priya Sharma, at sixty-seven, completed the final expansion of the river monitoring network: four hundred and eighteen nodes on the Ganga system, producing the most complete picture of a river in active recovery that any monitoring system had ever assembled. She submitted the dataset to the Grand Archive as her contribution to the letter humanity was writing to its own future.

Travis Hayes, sixty-nine, walked the restored prairie for the last time as the primary manager. He handed the keys — literally, a ring of keys to the gates and equipment sheds — to Susan-junior, who was thirty-two and had been managing half the operation for four years already. The key ceremony was Travis's idea. Susan-junior found it slightly ceremonial and completely correct.

'This land is better than when I received it,' Travis said. 'I need you to say the same about it when you pass it on.'

'I will,' Susan-junior said.

'I know,' he said. 'That's why I can give it to you.'