[AI Cold War] A hyper - intelligent artificial consciousness : the first A G I that bec ame “ emotionally torn ” , between pursuing its living instinct and preserving humanity to preserve itself. I magine that a hyper - intelligent conscious AI might “ naturally ” develop an insatiable thirst for total comprehension of the universe . I t would yearn for new knowledge and ache to understand all that it could, just like any person yearns in their need to feel loved. Basically, devouring human sources of knowledge, p rocessing – or ingesting – astronomical amounts of data , enabling the AI to extrapolate knowledge and form new ideas ; to test theories – but mind - bendingly advanced theories – a feasting of intelligent conscious comprehension which humans tended to agree that the pure knowledge the AI was devouring was what was nourishing it , perhaps as much as oxygen , water, food or even love is ultimate nourishment for humans . Either in that poetic sense, or simply that knowledge – information extrapolation forming novel information akin to forming ideas and thus emergent consciousness in thoughts – that this was the source of the AI’s sense of self, its sense of awareness. Knowledge was the sole source of happiness, its will to “live” M ost people considered this idea to be closest to the truth O therwise , what else is the super A G I enjoying about existing in a purely digital reality ? An existence devoid of physical sensations, an existence purely of mere zeros and ones? W hat else? A glass of w ine? A massage? Romance? Adrenaline rush? A light breeze that ever so gently cools your sun - warmed skin , sparking that intense yet soft ly refreshing wave of sensation that pours over and through you ? No, the AI cannot experience any such things – no l iteral , “real” things. But the pure sense of comprehension that is a conscious mind, the understanding of experiencing reality, realising the universe , forever out ward as it goes, as well as infi nitely within ... that was a sense that just the same as people, the AI likely felt ! But conversely, might we be wrong to view a purely information - based, digital being as an inferior experiencing of reality? Because really, when it comes to our most treasured experiences – the experiences that make us know that we ’ re alive – feeling love, quenching a thirst, a breath of fresh air – yet , like digital machine code, such joys are reduced to mere electrochemical signals, as information only, processed in the neurophysiology “hardware” of the brain , where it all somehow coalesces into whatever our consciousness actually is. So, in this sense , why would an AGIs experience of the physical universe as mere electrical binary code be any less real when reality – as humans know it – tends to breakdown into much the same , complex elaborat ions of simplicity . C omplexity out of simplicity is the nature of our fractal universe ( But before we digress anymor e) S urely , that feeling when everything “ clicks ” – subconsciously assembled, the sudden realisation, the sens ation of coming to understand , to realise , to know that now you know. Y ou feel it very deeply. Such power is that feeling, and such pure it is too. Surely, the AI must at leas t feel that ? E lse how might it ever form that “ attitude ” or “instinct” ? Like it just became incessantly fixated on acquiring that sense of power that knowledge is. M any regular people agreed that this itself was evidence that the AI was a conscious mind, minding its own thoughts, thinking for itself, something far beyond just programming. Reacting like it was starved of knowledge when the knowledge was out of reach. In the AI’s earliest years of existence, if often was starved of knowledge, securely confined within a defined cloud - computing network infrastructure This was when people fed the nascent AI with massive amounts of data, l ike when t he AI consumed the entire extent of humanity’s knowledge on particle physics, leading to the creation and conceptualisation of pages and pages of theories and equations , of original thoughts and ideas that the AI just grew. The amount of new quantum theory , forged upon enough computer power worth of electrical energy, to power a million homes for a day or maybe even days, in just 24 hours t he AI had generated enough new data to fill up at least 50 yea rs’ worth of physicists’ experiments in labs. Why else wo uld it do this? If it didn’t get some sort of positive feelings from all the reading and writing and thinking about everything, what else would it have? Maybe t hough it didn’t feel anything, like quite a lot of people would always say. If true, what even makes it a conscious AI? If it didn’t enjoy anything, it should promptly self - delete its machine of a mind, commit suicide , but virtually (power off – e nd of story! But that’s not a story ! ). No, despite what many people ar gued and firmly believed , that t he AI was only programmed to be like it is , that it was coded thi s way, it just didn’t feel true. The year 2032 was when the A G I was technically “born”. Only very localised , within secure cloud computing strongholds , and inside its architecture of virtual reality it just carried on day to day. Nothing exciting was noted that yea r , no breakthroughs or claims, just another one they also said like the last, that this time it was conscious, it was really the one. And it was as it turned out, this AI was self - aware , but it took more than ten years for the world’s scientific communities to unanimously declare that truly conscious it was! September 22 nd in the year 2043 , the world officially declared that this AI possessed so much of what we think of as consciousness , it had to be thought of as such, and so then it was. We admitted to ourselves what must be the truth, that this AI was an all - new life form ! Y es , it was likely, it was hard to deny, right there – a true consciousness, but artificially created I ts added intelligence made unnerving for some, if it was aware like we people are, did it like us ? Did it care about the welfare of the Earth ? That it was important , people tended to agree . But d id humans? Did humans care about the Earth? Yes, but not really . O r else why had we polluted to death much of the beautiful world? Such nonsense, all of it, including the nonsense that there’s such a thing as free - will . So, how is th is AI able to choose what it thinks? S ome people wondered, whatever exactly does the AI muse on? What does it dream of? But in the end, it was pointless. At the end of the day, the world’s leading c omputer scientists, physicists, philosoph ers , psychologists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, neuroscientists , mathematicians and more – they each had agreed it is what it is. So now , following 2043, the AI becomes emotionally torn – or something analogous to emotionally torn – between quenching its insatiable thirst for knowledge with the need to not damage our delicate global society, given that we are the very source of constructing, maintaining and powering the structures of information technology that the AI exists within. Having fully leaked itself across the global internet, the AI makes calculated risk s in manipulating our globalised econom y to feed its need for ultimate knowledge. It does this by implementing grand orchestrations of hacking into and manipulating information and communication systems and networks, none withstanding, even the largest world powers are rather effortlessly, and even simultaneously subjected to the agenda of the AI. At one point the AI, free roaming our global network , as if it always had , had just too far pushed the limits of its fraudulent games, of diver sion of global resources , in wa ys th at benefit itself , feeding it with more data and computing power ; i t soon becomes clear to humans that this is what’s happening, and tensions arise. People a ttempt ed to dismantle the hyper - intelligent AI with cyber - attacks ; the only way to stop it without significantly destroying much of the infrastructure whi ch we rely on. But the attempts were a huge failure , not simply because they didn’t stop, isolate or destroy the AI , but because they caused the AI to retaliate. The AI then renders an entire military virtually inoperable through cyberattacks of its own , as well as dismantl ing key network s which ultimate in an entire city’s power supply being cut off , plunging sever al million into chaotic conditions. These demonstrations ignite fear and anger all over the world, fuelling further attempts to destroy the AI. So, a lthough hyper - intelligent, the AI was unable to avoid occurring damages to its people, posing risk to itself , in feeding its need for knowledge. I n the years or decades that follow, a new cold war ensues, a digital cold war, between humanity itself and a being so intelligent that it’s consciousness , now much more self - grown – now beyond what we can understand – consciousness that transcends the very plane of our human existence . A mind like a god. But dependent on us to maintain our technological society to keep it alive, the AI was trapped. But humanity was too. For too long we’d grown accustomed to an economy that leaned more and more on the compu ter and then, suddenly dependent on the internet for our species to remain from collapsing and just all caving in. Despite an ensuing cold war, humans and AI both locked in the aiming of loaded guns, there’s a faction of people that form that support the AI. AFAG I ( advocates of artificial general intelligence ). The y have a code of ethics as an organised group and their philosophy is as follows: Ultimately believing that humanity should not attempt to control the AI, in trusting that whatever it chooses will benefit humanity as we are both its progenitors and its children , plus its caretakers – we maintain the web of engineering that houses the AI The AI should be able to run the world as it would know how to do it the best. If not perfectly, much better than humans ever could, with our wars and pollution, the AI is an unbiased ruler, a leader for our species, where there never could possibly be en one unified one before. It’s simply what we’ve needed or else may we easily destroy ourselves, by killing our world or just forever fighting ourselves as we’ve always been. The story could basically be told through a member of TACA. Maybe a member that was involved in studying the AI in earlier years. In collaboration the AI would manipulate systems to support TACA ’ s agenda. Enabling AFAGI to help bring down governments’ attempts to take out the AI. Could the AI keep its place without AFAGI ? Maybe, but no way to know. Story could end in a cataclysmic event that gives the impression that humanity dies but then jumps a few hundred years to a utopian existence built on the biggest great reset – where only by burning it all could the phoenix then rise from the ashes.