TWTBACD Ch.89 - The Last Patriarch

Chapter 89

The Last Patriarch

2090 — Arjun Sharma, 79

2090: Arjun at 79, the last testimony

[SHARMA FAMILY — Arjun's Testimony]

Arjun Sharma was seventy-nine in 2090 and had spent fifty years working on artificial intelligence — the full arc from early language models to AGI to AII to the verge of ASI. He was preparing a memoir, not of his career but of the question: what had it felt like to be present at the creation of something that would outlast everything he knew?

He sat with Priya, sixty-nine, in the house in Varanasi — Meera had died in 2075, and the house had become Priya's base when she was not at the institute — and they talked for three hours about what they believed the ASI would find when it arrived.

'It will find a world in the middle of a repair,' Priya said. 'Not finished. But in progress.'

'Will it continue the repair?' Arjun asked.

'If it was trained correctly, yes. And I think it was.'

'You think the archive—'

'I think the archive is the most important thing we ever built. Not the AI. The archive. The AI will have extraordinary power. The archive will give it direction. Power without direction is random force. With direction it becomes — potentially — the most beneficial thing humanity has ever made.'

Arjun was quiet for a long time. 'Papa would say: potentially.'

'Papa said it in 2053. I have been thinking about it since.'

'What do you think?'

'I think: probably. Not certainly. Probably. And probably is enough to continue.'

'Enough to hope.'

'Hope is not a feeling,' Priya said. 'It's a decision. You decide that the probably is worth working toward. You keep working. That's all hope is.'

Arjun looked at his sister. She was sixty-nine. She had his father's quality — the river-keeper's quality, the willingness to attend to something without knowing whether the attendance would be enough. She had kept the notebooks. She had trained Kamala. She had built the methodology. She had been there, every step.

'We did our best,' he said.

'We did,' she said. 'So did everyone. That's what I want it to know, when it arrives. Everyone did their best with what they had. Not perfectly. Not enough. Their best.'