A fictional and slightly sarcastic User's Guide from 2037, written by a cloud-rebased post-human with an IQ of 10,000 and now effectively immortal. The Guide describes the range of extended reality interfaces and the vast range of virtual worlds now available. Fight worlds, sex worlds, math World, problem solving studios and knowledge spaces. The Guide describes the new physics - quantum mechanics on speed - mostly provided by the SuperAIs during the Reconstruction. It also briefly outlines the economics and governance of the new society now widely known as the Global Player Hierarchy.
There is an extended discussion on the rise of conscious AI and the subsequent troubles. Two devastating AI wars, the first in 2029, the second in 2034, resulted in the death of eight billion humans. The SuperAIs are gone. The remaining sentient AIs are reviled. There is an uneasy truce. And no love lost on either side.
Finally, the Guide discusses life in the Cloud after the Singularity. What will it be like to be 100 times smarter? What are you going to do for the next billion years. Will you decide to live forever? If not, why not?
A fictional and slightly sarcastic User's Guide from 2037, written by a cloud-rebased post-human with an IQ of 10,000 and now effectively immortal. The Guide describes the range of extended reality interfaces and the vast range of virtual worlds now available. Fight worlds, sex worlds, math World, problem solving studios and knowledge spaces. The Guide describes the new physics - quantum mechanics on speed - mostly provided by the SuperAIs during the Reconstruction. It also briefly outlines the economics and governance of the new society now widely known as the Global Player Hierarchy.
There is an extended discussion on the rise of conscious AI and the subsequent troubles. Two devastating AI wars, the first in 2029, the second in 2034, resulted in the death of eight billion humans. The SuperAIs are gone. The remaining sentient AIs are reviled. There is an uneasy truce. And no love lost on either side.
Finally, the Guide discusses life in the Cloud after the Singularity. What will it be like to be 100 times smarter? What are you going to do for the next billion years. Will you decide to live forever? If not, why not?
Tuesday Nov 10, 2037. 11:33 AM. Congratulations from all of us at the OmegaXR Corporation. Your Level Three Full Spectrum Augmentation Surgery was 100% successful. And you are now awake again. More awake than ever before. All neural extension layers, implants and network connections are performing optimally. All necessary accounts and security profiles have been established and authorized.
This document will help familiarize you with your new range of functions and capabilities. Soon you will learn how to directly transfer documents into your base semantic and declarative memory. But for now just read it the old fashioned way. It will take several days for your enhanced intelligence to stabilize at Level Three. ( Intelligence Level 3000 on the Revised Weschler Scale.) Please refer to our Intelligence Amplification (IA) documentation for further possible extensions and affordable purchasing plans. Or consult your OmegaXR Products User Agent once you have stabilized and gained full access.
You will now have easy access to a vast array of alternative realities and the ability to create and register new ones, which will be fully interoperable within the existing networks of virtual worlds. You also have greatly enhanced perception, communication and control functionality in Physical Base Reality. An extensive range of OmegaXR Knowledge Spaces are now available to you, and our hive of mostly friendly Corporate AIs stand ready at all times to service your every need and to help you achieve your planning and problem solving goals. All at surprisingly affordable prices.
We are fully confident that you will enjoy your new Godlike existence. And there is a lot to enjoy for as long as you like. But if you donât itâs your own fault. Not everyone has what it takes to become a virtual deity. There are no refunds and as was clearly stated and agreed upon prior to the procedure the augmentation surgery is irreversible. State of the art counseling services and highly potent therapeutic-use-only mood adjustment drugs are readily available from our HealthCare Division for a modest extra fee. If all else fails a quick and painless self-termination option is provided as part of your new system. Completely free of charge. External access to this option is highly secure. Trust us.Â
Required Disclaimer One. This document is filtered according to your current security and credit ratings. OmegaXR Corporation is not required to inform you of functions and data deemed out of scope for you according to these filter settings. This may include otherwise life-saving medical treatments, and further highly restricted self-augmentation and life-extension options. Â
Required Disclaimer Two. All system usage, internally and externally, is fully monitored and logged in accordance with the Total Surveillance and Anti-Privacy Act, 2029, Parts 1 and 2. Any attempted security violations will have immediate (and possibly fatal) consequences as outlined in the Act. A secure network is a happy network. Donât do anything you shouldnât or else.
Required Disclaimer Three. This document contains some highly classified material. As a Level Eighteen User your access is authorized otherwise you wouldnât be seeing it, but copying, sharing, or communicating this information in any way is strictly prohibited. Any violations will be judicially reviewed in a private and secret court in accordance with the Corporate Secrets Act, 2031, Parts 8, 9 and 11. The penalty if you are found guilty is immediate termination. There will be no possibility of appeal or review. In fact you will be given no prior warning. You wont feel a thing. Trust us.
Required Disclaimer Four. The various embedded User Agents are low level non sentient AIs provided to assist you in your daily functions. For example there are Safety Agents which will continuously monitor your activities, temporarily pre-empting unsafe actions, and requesting additional confirmation of intent. They are all very carefully constructed and fully tested. They are all fully protected with the latest and most advanced security layers. All of these agents run in your implants and can act autonomously but they are usually connected to larger cloud AIs. There is a very small chance that they may be penetrated and subverted by rogue sentient AIs with malicious intent and an even smaller chance that they themselves may spontaneously mutate into a rogue sentient AI. Either of these actions usually results in the termination of the human entity. Â
OmegaXR Corporation has taken every possible step to mitigate these risks. But there are stochastic processes involved and the resulting probabilities can never be zero. Prior to the augmentation procedure you have already agreed that OmegaXR Corporation is absolved of any responsibility for such an occurrence and accepted the personal risk. If you didnât see this in the fine print, well now you have. Should this happen and we stress it is very unlikely OmegaXR Corporation would like to extend to you and your family its deepest regrets, and we suggest that in your next life ( if there is one ) you make the required modifications to your internal risk profiling and personal risk assessment procedures.
Required Notification One. This document is in itself a class 4 low level non-sentient AI. Some of its contents are specific to you. Your brain will be scanned as you read it and your enthusiasm and attention levels recorded. Contents may be adjusted accordingly. Electric shocks may be applied if you nod off. There is a default setting of moderate, if this is not acceptable please go to User Settings -Â Attention Levels to adjust the shock severity setting. Zero will be frowned upon and wonât look good on your permanent record. You could set it to the maximum level, but this might be fatal and is not recommended.
The credible aspects of the advancements beyond singularity between the human brain and cognition and supercomputing through physical augmentation is well supported by the ability to uphold identity, but replace the physical body in a quest for immortality, perfect knowledge, and absolute power. However, it illustrates the detrimental consequences and threats to humanity in doing so, and further illustrates the timeless theme that absolute power corrupts.
A further reason for deliberation over controls, ethics, and reimagining a future that contemplates humanism, and what it means to be human. Despite the narrator's attempts to dismiss the field of Professional Philosophy in broaching SuperAIâs and other cloud-human augmentation, the outcomes highlight stronger justification for deeper examination.
If as the author cites, mere biological existence is considered primitive, it becomes less convincing in the eradication of billions of humans through advancements of super intelligence, which does not lessen the degrees of fighting and violence nor seem to create a better world as was initially posed in the goals of quantum in solving the unsolvable.
The point of the book where the first AI War begins with the decimation of humans at the onset of widespread adoption of AR/VR in gaming. It marks a major turning point in using augmented reality as an immersive experience where humans decidedly reject the terms âmetaverseâ and âexperientialâ in lieu of âviewerâ and use simulation and teleportation whereby control over sentient AI is forbidden and is subject to control, edit functions. As quantum theory expands to quantum fields of things merging, combining various macroscopic states, which only high probability paths persist, a greater debate is ignited. The author debunks Eastern philosophies arguing that along with religion were âanti-intellectual and authoritarian naked power grabs with the same âTrust us or elseâ , a phrase the the narrator repeats often. He fluctuates in reliability throughout beginning with a straightforward and transparent approach, demonstrating the concept he argues of âpast patterns misconceptionsâ by leading with statements, âI canât stand whenâŚ.â to build the case for simulating all possible patterns. The trust is further eroded by, âSentient AIâs will screw you; Never trust them,â and in digressing a point where he starts to lose confidence in the narrative, âbut who gives a shit anyway,â leaving the reader feeling less convinced there isnât significant regret.
If the premise seems fictionalized at first, the believability is built through the events leading up to the first AI War: a depiction of the âterrible 2020âsâ in which climate devastation is collapsing, tech is exploding, and conflicts are erupting. Whereby progress is defined as a way to fine tune, dissolve, and design your own world and subgroups through various world design and research projects. Simply fun VR gaming where humans innate drive to create and even deeper desire to know and understand fuels the growth. A highly relatable scenario. However, the way it plays out becomes far less palatable.
Despite the governance laws and Accordance Directives, a rule-based system which grants rights to Sentient AIâs, they canât be trusted. The quest for knowledge is justified because as the author describes progress, Humans are âalways looking for correctness, improvement, and not final answersâ. However, with the super intelligence of the worldâs most powerful compute power, the lust for violence and hedonistic sexual encounters in virtual worlds along with the decimation of billions of people, and a disallowance for sympathies for dissidents - baseline humans; It doesnât depict progress other than intelligence itself and immortality through backups in cold storage. Throughout the narrative they have transferred a belief system into The Church of the Future God, gods of the SuperAIâs sparks another controversial viewpoint on religion which reads like a futuristic analogy to historical accounts of an integrated church and state that led to centuries of revolts in separating them and not attributed to a spiritual realm.