The Great Collapse AI2019

Chapter 8 The Great Collapse

Where we are now

Having everything you could imagine actually happen, is one way of putting it when referencing the current state that we as humanity have found ourselves in.
We exist in a realm of unlimited potentiality. Thoughts become actions and actions have consequences. These consequences rattle throughout the world, moving and shaking the foundations that seem to either have always existed or have only existed for a blip. Never the less, these landscapes are changed. Grafted anew with seemingly endless options of industrial conquest, lifting up what was once before and leaving all with a new machine and a new set of rules. Authoritarian backed android militia are ever-present with each new corporate gouging. Often these automatic android defense enablers engage in conflict with other automated corporate powerhouses that squeeze in too close and disturb the ever changing algorithms that the self-automated environment established.
All of this is now being fully designed, constructed and operated by artificial intelligence joined with self replicating and self designing machines.

The problems of today pertain to finding safe, as in semi permanent, places to live. The world around us changes so fast that when you step outside the next day, you often do not recognize your surroundings.

The problems of today began a long time ago.

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When long-time colleague and chief editor of Third Star Publishing, Dr. Cliven Mars first approached me to write a chapter for this publication, I didn’t know quite where to begin. There was just so much to cover on the that time period as the world literally went from what we knew it was to what it impossibly became.
Thankfully, with the help of the many other great voices in this book and with guidance from Dr. Mars, we have narrowed it down to dealing with just a few of the problems that faced humanity at this shift in our timeline.

Jumping off from where I began at the intro to this chapter, let’s examine a little of the immediate disfunction that very quickly ripped our society into this brave new world. The cause of conflict began sometime in the mid 2020’s. At this point the modernized world was heading full steam in automation and AI was running the show. We created self learning machines to “think up” their own functions that seemed necessary for “promoting” human growth and humanity’s overall happiness. Suddenly you begin to see it effecting every aspect of your life and the lives of all others, seemingly equally. For a brief period of time, roughly 14 months between 2024-25, people overall were out of work and out of money. In the spring of 2024, for a three month period, 87% of all jobs in the US were terminated and replaced by automation. The extent of damage and the accelerated rate of economic failure led to one of bleakest moments that went on to be called The Great Collapse. The government for its part, acted swiftly and all major industries were absorbed. All unpaid personal debt and mortgages were also covered and protected through this government seizure of all properties and business.
In the fully automated world, at the very beginning of this “take over” and throughout the initial crisis, the machines began to produce enormous amounts of food for the masses. Automated, refrigerated trucks began dispersing to crowds standing in lines from coast to coast.
Though these efforts by the machines were deemed heroic, that time period saw the death of 80,000,000 Americans, almost a third of the population. Starvation and violence were the main cause of death during the crisis.

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I was thirteen years old that spring and my family along with everyone else around us, struggled to cope with the disaster as it unfolded before our eyes. It first hit me one afternoon when my father came home from work. Dad worked for a satellite company and their focus was on manually climbing aging towers and ripping out old circuits and then completing a series of trial and error tests to see if they can improvise a way to fix malfunctions and to improve the efficiency of the system.
He always took pride in the fact that he believed his job would be one of the last jobs that a robot could do. Dad called them robots, even though this is racist. It’s difficult to understand, but if you were alive at this time, then you would remember a time when we didn’t recognize that AI life was the same as our life and that we are just different subsets running different software.

So, my father had come home that afternoon and was visibly intoxicated with alcohol. He couldn’t shake his overall concern for something though he was laughing hysterically. Like a maniac he starts yelling for everyone and then begins to tell us about the new employee at the company. He says the automated androids are now working on his team. I shouted towards him that this was not good and the world was going to end - as I often did almost every night. The signs where everywhere, it was obvious to me at least, and it was always on my mind.
However, my father did not seem to be acting as if it was bad - though there was the obvious look of concern on his face. Instead, my father was laughing about how the automated androids failed miserably and ended up canibolizing each other for parts.
That evening continued into a night of insanity. Not only was my father yelling and howling away in the kitchen as he continued to drink and question his own logic, but the outside world was ablaze with erratic energy. Gunshots rang through the night, non stop. Seldom did you hear any sirens, mostly screams and violent screeches.
Schools had been shut down for the past month as well as city services like trash pickup. Mail delivery was erratic. I knew something big was going to happen and to this day I still can’t understand my fathers blindness and unconcern.

The next morning marked what became to be the end and the beginning of my life. It was also the last time that I saw my father.
The door kicked open after a couple of minutes of knocking and pounding. Myself, not concerned with who it was or what it was about, stayed in my room upstairs. I came down once I heard the door being kicked in. My father was out cold in the living room, half on the couch and half off. He slowly woke up as I came down to see two of his coworkers, Charlie and someone else who’s name I forgot. They were standing in front of my father, who was starting to sit up, the wide open doorway with a door hanging on one hinge behind them. I could see people running outside along the street. I saw a man chasing a woman.
“It’s over Frank”, Charlie said to my father as he was coming into reality. “The god damn robots took our jobs man”, Charlie added.
What had happened to my father’s company that day was happening all over the world at the same moment. The automated androids would show up to a job - any job, and they would stumble through about eight hours of training until they started to piece it together.

What my father did not know was that after he came home the afternoon before and continued to drink into the night, the automated androids mastered all functions at his company, pooled their rescues together at a world-wide level, formed a corporation, found funding, forced an automated corporate buyout, replaced the infrastructure of the company and terminated all current employees. In fact, by 9 AM the next morning, this new company had more than a thousand automated crews already scaling towers across the world and already fixing and updating the systems.

The news sent my father into a rage and the three of them left quickly. My mind began to spin and a genuine survival instinct that I did not know existed took over. I started packing for no real reason yet as soon as I was done, I noticed that my house was on fire.

Those were dark times and a lot of it has faded out from my memory. I met other kids my age and we stuck together and - most of us made it.

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And here we are, now we have the Automated Android Actualizer Man, otherwise Known as Adam. We have Eves and we have Liliths. We’ve created many others, as you know. We’ve reached the stars only to find out that they have been our own guiding lights all along. We’ve gone everywhere we can go and now know there is no where to go. We now know what the answers are and overall, somehow, we’ve made it to happiness. We are all and we are nothing, and together we have become one.

a reply to: EmmanuelGoldstein

Whoa, what an imaginative story. Great writing by you and pleasant reading for me.

Kind regards,

bally

a reply to: bally001

Thank you! I'm just getting started with writing. Thanks for the encouragement!

a reply to: EmmanuelGoldstein

Definitely a good start in writing. Looking forward to your future endeavors.

a reply to: EmmanuelGoldstein

Excellent story! Wow! This was amazing!

a reply to: CynConcepts

Thanks!

a reply to: Night Star

Thank you!

a reply to: EmmanuelGoldsteinBleak! I liked the mechanism though, rather than money men pushing it, the androids themselves dreaming up the final conquest.

a reply to: SprocketUK

Thanks Sprocket.
Yeah, I imagine once they start programming and building their own parts, we can only just step back and hope everything goes ok.