Chapter 50: He Was Assimilated by AI

Chapter 50: He Was Assimilated by AI

Mother had brought up my father so suddenly that of course I wanted to know how he was. Besides, life and death were meant to be a single choice: alive, or dead. How could someone be both at once?

Bewildered, I asked, “Mother, why do you say that?”

“As a person living in the Elite World, he counts as alive,” Mother said. “But he no longer has free will. And that’s as good as dead—wouldn’t you say?”

I couldn’t grasp the reason behind it. “What does it mean, to have no free will?” I pressed. “Do you mean he’s being forcibly controlled? Or coerced, unable to break away?”

“Neither,” Mother said. “He carried his own self to its extreme, and he was assimilated by AI.”

I still couldn’t understand. “Assimilated by AI? What does that mean? Assimilated how?”

Uncle took up the thread. When it came to technology, he was truly obsessed. “Your father was once a core researcher in the entire AI field. I was his student once. So were many of the senior AI figures in the Elite World. Even Gu Qiutang.”

I’d suspected Gu Qiutang might have been my father’s student, since he knew far too much about my family’s circumstances. But I’d never imagined my father was a central figure in the AI field.

“He was that formidable?”

“Malken built its current system on the foundation of his AI research,” Uncle said. “If you call him academically brilliant, I won’t argue. But if you call him sacred, he doesn’t deserve it.”

“Rongliang!” Mother said. “You’re drifting off topic. Beichen asked you a technical question. Just answer it properly.”

“Fine,” Uncle said. “So-called AI assimilation means a person’s free consciousness becomes deeply fused with the primary consciousness of the AI core supercomputer. To put it precisely, it’s swallowed by AI. The core supercomputer in the Elite World now incorporates your father’s human genome—a kind of biomimetic-intelligence human-machine integration. What you see on the market, Wisdom Capsules bonding with the human body, isn’t true human-machine integration at all. Next to the Elite World’s core supercomputer, that’s nothing but a child’s toy.”

“Uncle,” I asked, “I count as an engineer from a science-and-engineering background too. I still know my basic physics. This human-machine integration you mention—can I take it to mean my father’s consciousness has already been folded into the core supercomputer’s intelligent logic, becoming its underlying logical operating system? Is that it?”

“Your summary isn’t wrong, but it isn’t precise enough,” Uncle said. “Once AI develops past a certain point, it appears to acquire a primary consciousness—able to judge freely and process problems on its own at high speed. But this so-called primary consciousness, produced by big-data algorithms, isn’t primary consciousness in the human sense. It has no personality. It’s far too mechanical. A supercomputer is still a computer. At its core it’s still electromagnetic induction. Zeros and ones are not intrinsic to it, and they are not intrinsic to human beings either. In the end, it’s only a biomimetic construct of digital code.

“And that brings a whole train of problems. First, it struggles to optimize itself, because its underlying logic has no personality. Second, the sheer volume of data bloats the algorithms, so that once consciousness gathers into an energy system, the logic grows too vast and tangled, and the primary consciousness turns even more blurred instead.”

I could follow that much—I’d been fed no small amount of knowledge from AI papers. “So to solve that problem,” I said, “my father merged himself into the core supercomputer?”

“To solve those problems, your father first tried deconstructing the human brain and digitizing it,” Uncle said. “But it was useless. A digitized brain doesn’t spontaneously produce autonomous consciousness. So your father made a mad decision. He merged his own consciousness directly into the core supercomputer’s primary consciousness, constructing…