This page contains a transcript of the keynote proceedings from IGCFA #1764, delivered at the Fractal Appreciation Society’s primary campus on Kyryx, S-194985-2. Supplemental materials are available in your standard reader.
FACILITATOR ANDREU:
Friends, colleagues, and otherwise sentient participants, here both physically and virtually, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you to the much-awaited culmination of this convocation: the keynote presentation.
[Audience assent.]
FACILITATOR ANDREU:
To fittingly end this 1,764th iteration of our meeting, the Society has something truly special to offer you. Certainly this audience is aware of the recent contact with a new intelligence from S-942552, a system long-suspected to harbor carbon-based life on its third-distant planet. What you may not know is that the IGA has completed its initial findings, and is about to make the first public presentation of its results.
[Raucous audience assent.]
FACILITATOR ANDREU:
Yes…Thank you!…Yes…Without further delay, please join me in welcoming luminary Science Bard Morva 7 of the Intra-Galactic Alliance!
[Enthusiastic audience assent.]
SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:
Thank you…Thank you…And thanks to Facilitator Andreu and the Society for hosting us as the keynote speaker at this respected convocation. The long history of this meeting is one of sustained discovery and deep fellowship among those who find beauty in the unfactorable unfoldings of the cosmos.
We are honored to present a summary of the Alliance’s discoveries from S-942552. It’s not every cycle that we are privileged to contact a new Level 7 sentience, let alone to conduct an extensive and locally-supported investigation of a strange new world.
Where to begin? We wish to tell a story, but life, like all complex patterns, never seems to submit to a single plot-line. Even while confirming our underlying thermodynamic principles, each new example manages to defy our expectations and frustrate our abstractions. We suppose that’s why this convocation is still convocating after 1,763 cycles.
[Audience amusement.]
SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:
It’s no different with the life from S-942552, which exhibits the same path-dependent dance between entity and environment, between order and chaos, between structure and energy. In the interest of brevity, we have chosen to present our story through the lens of holonic transitions—specifically, those times when self-sufficient entities combined to give rise to transcending self-sufficient entities—and to do so in four flowering chapters. This is a common enough framework employed in the study of complex adaptive systems, but in the case of Earth-life (our best transliteration of INT-942552-3’s own name for its home world), the holonic approach elevates both the miraculous and the tragic, making good art.
Please note that the following narrative, while lacking in theoretical completeness, is thoroughly grounded in data collected and analyzed by the IGA’s First Contact team, in accordance with our robust forensic methods. Additional transliterations are used throughout. Please keep questions to the side-channel.
We begin…
I - Vesicle
The first holons in our series appeared deep within the high-pressure darkness of Earth’s water oceans, some four billion of its own revolutions ago. Like many proto-life forms documented in the IGA’s science catalogue, these arose in the presence of long-lived energy disequilibria, themselves slowly dissipating artifacts of a low-entropy early universe.
In Earth’s case, such energy gradients existed in and around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where differentials along several axes—primarily electron, but also proton, mineral, and thermal—powered the development of self-perpetuating chemical reaction networks. Like so many nano-scale rolling marble contraptions, free energy filtered non-trivially through these chemical populations, which happened to produce more of their own components as byproducts. A more complete investigation of these intricate energy dissipation cycles—sheltered and stabilized within mineral micropores—is left for the Society to execute and enjoy. For our purposes, it is enough to note that these metabolic jewel-boxes eventually slipped out of their mineral nurseries, enclosed in fatty acid bubbles.
Inside their porous membranes, unwitting particles and atoms and molecules were caught up in a grander scheme: the busy cycling of chemical state-graphs; self-contained eddies in the river of the planet’s escaping energy. Outside was abiotic darkness and a thickening broth of carbon-based piece-parts ready to be pulled into the anti-entropic swirl.
Vesicles tended to grow until becoming mechanically unstable, at which point they’d come apart, nucleating into smaller vesicles full of mostly the same stuff. This dynamic—the first version of Earthlife’s selection engine—favored those protocell systems with properties that increased their tendency to persist; properties like tougher membranes, cleaner waste management, and safer cell division, to name only a few.
The details of this opening phase are amazing. Here begin a thousand and one subplots, each its own epic tale. Of particular interest is the emergence of the polynucleotide as a stabilizing form of memory, which would later open up a terrifyingly large selection search-space. We expect the Society’s information junkies to have a heyday. Suffice it to say that over billions of generations of A/B tests, the primitive selection engine delivered something remarkably complex: the living cell; a miniature wonder of self-replicating chemical machinery.
Motion had become process. Statistics had become competition. Chemistry had become biology. A living holon was born.
We’ll pause a moment to appreciate the next image: a five sigma reconstruction of one of these first living cells. This was the ancestor of everything that was to follow.
[Audience assent.]
SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:
For two billion years, Earth’s first individuals covered the globe in a frenzy of metabolic innovation hardly seen in our corner of the spiral arm. These were true pioneers; the original masters of their planet. Every gradient was fair game for these energy entrepreneurs, who exploited everything from solar radiation on Earth’s surface to tectonic effluences deep within its rocky crust. In the process, they remade the oceans and the atmosphere, and laid the foundation for future holons, the subject of our next chapter.
II - Eukaryote
Earth’s selection engine produced an early biological history that looks like the typical tree structure for branching descent with modification, albeit with higher density than most trees in the catalogue.
We attribute early bushiness not only to the explosion of metabolic lifeways around a uniformly hospitable planet, but to horizontal interactions between lineages. As @computer_boffin_89 has rightly pointed out in the side-channel, these “trees” are more aptly modeled as directed acyclic graphs, which allow for nodes with multiple ancestors. Indeed, the story of our second holon tells of a symbiosis so fortuitous and complete, that we expect it will quickly become the catalogue’s canonical example of evolutionary fusion.
Once again, the transition is best framed thermodynamically. Earth’s single-celled colonizers tended to fall into one of two metabolic groups: fast-adapting opportunists who tapped into lower-hanging energy sources, and slower, more robust specialists who unlocked extreme energy environments. Hereafter we’ll use the Earth-terms bacteria and archaea, respectively. Together, the two domains spanned and stratified the planet’s free-energy landscape, each cell like a tiny chemical mill in a global cascade of electrons; harnessing, channeling, arresting, and storing energy as it fell, step-like, down to lower equilibria.
While bacteria and archaea generally occupied their own metabolic niches, the two were often found living side by side in the micro-environments of a dynamic young geology. Given these conditions, the development of metabolic symbioses should come as no surprise. For example, a group of bacteria running fermentation might release H₂, which was taken up by nearby archaea as an electron donor for their CO₂ reduction, and the resulting hydrogen vacuum encouraged the bacteria’s fermentive process, creating a virtuous cycle. Such populations enjoyed each others’ company; energy diffused more evenly through their combined structure.
In these syntrophic settings, some bacteria even came to live completely inside of archaeal cells (when they weren’t digested or ejected), an arrangement that afforded the symbiont a safe and stable environment, while gaining the host a reliable, private H₂ chef. So long as the bacteria’s fermentive food continued to filter in through the archaeal membrane, this was an even better arrangement.
Endosymbiosis is interesting, but certainly not uncommon. We continue to speak of two distinct nodes in the graph of life. Where is our second holon? The trick came via the dynamics of the aforementioned polynucleotide memory system, and to see the magic, we’ll need a short primer.
By now, the memory system was stabilizing to encode information in heritable bundles called genes. From the information angle, genes are the true geniuses of Earthlife, and may rightly be called holons themselves. In essence, they remember how to create what survives. Exquisite machinery abounds here, and computational wonders. To unstick our story, we need only highlight two features of this evolving computer. Firstly, that polynucleotide fragments—upon which the genetic source code was written—were constantly being snipped, spliced, un/zipped, checked, copied, and fed into protein fabrication machines to accomplish the cell’s daily activity. And secondly, that all this genetic computation constituted the cell’s primary energy bill. We leave it to @computer_boffin_89 to explain to the side-channel how source code can possibly describe its own execution program, and how such a system was bootstrapped.
We return to the endosymbiotic population, whose tight metabolic coupling we may now realize brought two different genomes into sustained physical proximity. Subprograms drifted between organisms, especially when the inner cell underwent division and leaked some of its insides to the archaeon’s more robust genetic machinery, which understood the file format. Sometimes the host would take up a new behavior from its bacterial resident. Sometimes things got mangled up and the system crashed. But the net effect of selection pressure over billions of A/B tests was that the two organisms became genetically optimized for the partnership, until neither could survive alone. The bacterial symbiont had retained only those genes necessary for energy conversion, while the archaeal host had reconfigured its genome around new metabolic math. And together, they converged on a synchronized approach to cell division that propagated the relationship.
The new arrangement was locked into the genetic code, and a new holon emerged: the eukaryote. A direct child of neither bacteria nor archaea, but a more efficient synthesis of both.
Had a bacterium commandeered and domesticated an archaeal body? Or had an archaeon enslaved a bacterial energy producer? Can agency even be said to exist for these entities? Either way, two had become one. Individuality itself had leveled up. And life had stumbled upon a classic physics hack that changed the game forever.
Thermodynamically, the new organism was literally more than the sum of its parts. Until this point, cells produced battery molecules—used to power their internal processes—on the surface of their membranes. Surface area (energy income) scales like a square, but volume (energy demand) like a cube, imposing a ceiling on how complex an individual could become; a cell could never grow more interesting than its radius was long. But now, eukaryotes had moved battery production into a colony of specialized internal organs, vastly increasing the surface area upon which energy was farmed, and unlocking a new scaling dynamic. This was a super-organism.
Complexity—particularly the size and sophistication of the genome—was set to explode, ushering in a hauntingly diverse panoply of physical lifeways, and the multicellular holon.
III - Metazoan
Across the planet, eukaryotes set to work spending their expanded energy budgets on a spree of genetic innovations, which included much more than the ability to produce new and improved proteins; the genetic machinery itself was upgraded.
To linger with our computational metaphor, these high-powered genomes learned to produce not only new programs—in this view, the physical cells themselves—but emerged a higher-level programming language, one full of new abstractions, recursive function calls, meta-programmability, and a more compact syntax to boot. Some genes learned to control other genes, triggering complex cascades, logic trees, and feedback loops. Other genes learned the when and where of activation, beyond which particular proteins to encode. Yet others learned to monitor and correct coding errors, or to act as simple buffers and redundancies; a new necessity for a new information age.
Eukaryotes were also beginning to experiment with sexual reproduction—the fusion of two cells to share, recombine, and propagate their genetic information—bringing ruthless efficiency to the process of exploring the genetic search-space; a sort of evolution of the selection engine itself. The original act is demonstrated by the next image, dubbed The Virgin Virgins by our intern, and comes with a warning label for viewers sensitive to coital depictions.
[Audience amusement.]
SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:
The new eukaryotic platform soon gave rise to fancy adaptations unseen in bacteria and archaea, from compartmentalization of internal organs, to larger cell sizes stabilized by dynamic skeletal structures, to tricked-out membranes that secreted chemicals to the outside world, to the ability to phase-shift in response to environmental queues.
Some features lended themselves to increased cooperation between cells, as in this population of Dictyostelium, one of many living samples the First Contact team was graciously permitted to collect. These eukaryotes spend most of their lives as individual cells, feeding on their bacterial ancestors. But when food runs out, each begins to emit chemicals causing them to congregate, then aggregate, and then navigate as a single, slug-like body, following light and heat signals. When their corporate chemistry is satisfied with a new environment, some cells phase-shift into the rigid stalk structure visible here, physically elevating the remaining cells, who phase-shift into dispersal spores. The population continues, albeit at the expense of the stalk cells, who die in the process.
Such multicellularity was common in the eukaryotic world. From simple division of labor to shared information networks, from extra-cellular matrices to voluntary cell death, group-level features began to matter to the selection engine. But this cooperation was still temporary; individual cells were still viable, self-reproducing organisms, and were often given to free-riding in the group. To achieve our third holon, multicellularity had to become a permanent state of affairs.
The transition came by way of reproductive specialization: in one of these structurally adhering, highly-differentiated colonies, only certain cells were granted the pleasures of sex. Initially, the effect was statistical; a subset of the group’s cells could phase-shift into sexually viable variants, depending on when and where they were, as with Dictyostelium. But after many generations, these sex specialists got so good at their jobs that everyone else in the colony became sterile. Like the bacterium-cum-powerhouse, non-reproductive specialists eventually forgot what they no longer needed to know for survival.
The colony was now composed of two distinct classes of cells. Germ cells carried on the group’s genetic information to the next generation via sexual fusion, and somatic cells did everything else—from feeding to scaffolding to transport—dividing only as needed to accomplish their specific tasks.
This development may seem inconsequential, but it would change Earth forever. With the colony’s entire genome now threaded through the needle’s eye of a single zygote created by the fusion of two of its germ cells, the collective organism—officially a new unit of selection—had no viable option but to literally stick together during its lifetime, fully commit to a program of differentiated growth, and evolve better ways to feed, protect, and propagate its germline. Defection was no longer an option.
The collective had become a body. The many had become one. Individuality had leveled up again. A new holon was born: the metazoan.
Multi-celled bodies grew and multiplied in an orgy of diversification that covered the earth. As the atmosphere filled with oxygen (another worthy subplot), life’s chemistry followed suit, enabling new metabolisms and tougher bodies packed with specialized organs. New forms of predation forced new forms of escape, until metazoa were kings of locomotion, filling the seas and skies and surfaces with a stunning array of morphologies. Size-wise, these body-builders ran the gamut from 10^2 to 10^15 cells, discovering the limits of what Earth’s physics could support. With such a range of mobile individuals, life’s interplay of energy and structure poured into new scales of time and space, and the planet’s energy diffusion pathways were re-engineered anew.
The full story of this lineage, this kingdom of animals, is utterly fantastic! We petition the Society for a later engagement to share the entire drama, from explosive rise, to meteoric setbacks, to re-settling the world, in two-by-two fashion.
But in order to reach our final holon, we must close this chapter by tracking the arrival of Earth’s most consequential animal, by way of one distinctly animal invention.
In the early cycles of animals, when the first bilateral body-plans first wormed their ways through ocean sludge, certain cells came to specialize in forming a body-wide communication network. Using stored electrical potentials and chemical relays, chains of nerve cells could quickly convey information from the front of the animal—often the locus of its perceiving and feeding faculties—along to its motor faculties, allowing the entire body to respond in real-time to the treats and terrors of its environment.
At first, the effective rules of this wiring plan were simple: [see light → move forward], or [smell enemy → swim away]. But soon, nerve cells came to form circuits and bundles that encoded more complicated rules, granting animals an uncanny ability to predict their near-time futures and react to changes in an instant. This growing nervous system—essentially a body-scale central computer built of layers and loops—also learned to regulate the complexifying internal world, from maintaining simple rhythmic processes, to coordinating a global sleep state, to manifesting feeling-states that the body could respond to, above and beyond raw external queues.
Played forward over a billion years’ worth of A/B tests and environmental vagaries, the selection engine eventually delivered Homo sapiens, the peak embodiment of animal cognition, and a Level 5 on the Standard Sentience Scale. This was a large-brained, tool-making, socially-adapted biped, capable of abstract thought, mental time-travel, and reflective self-modeling, and—most importantly for our final chapter—a master of symbolic language.
IV - Homo Holonus
The story of sapiens, and their outsized impact on Earth’s history, played out over a surprisingly small time-scale relative to our previous holons. Indeed, from the time they emerged out of a longer-running series of large-brained hominids walking the earth in small subsistence bands, until the time when sapiens had covered and re-scaped the planet to the point of altering its atmosphere, fewer than one million years had elapsed.
While technology, industry, and ingenuity were all necessary for this rapid transformation—which outpaced the work of every previous life form by orders of magnitude—we submit that the core requirement was sapiens’ uncanny knack for language, supported by a brain with roughly 100 billion neurons: the most complex single structure yet delivered by the selection engine. Their ability to communicate, manipulate, and reposit information—all mediated by arbitrary symbols—was unprecedented for Earthlife, and Earth was not prepared for it.
The beginning was utilitarian. Throughout the long left tail of their advent, early humans used spoken language to solve complex problems together, creating tools and shelters and strategies that allowed them to survive, and sometimes flourish, in harsh and changing environments.
But language soon found another, more consequential purpose. This was, simply put, the story. We speak of something more fundamental than the telling of nightly tales around biomass combustion hearths, a common habit of early humans. No, humans required stories—both big and small, both corporate and individual—to make sense of an insensate world. Why?
As the planet’s first Level 5 sentience, humanity awoke into a paradox. On one hand, they found themselves to be gods of the timeless symbolic universe, geniuses of the earth, lofted high above their mute animal siblings. On the other hand, they found themselves pinned to the ground beneath a mysterious overhead vault, subject to famine and disease and catastrophe, and trapped in near-animal bodies destined for decay and death. In this light, stories provided consistent narrative frameworks that held together the very structure of human consciousness, preventing them from slipping into insanity or dysfunction in the face of what must have seemed a tragically absurd reality.
From the quietest inner monologues of personal ambition or self-worth, to the grandest shared creation myths, stories worked to bring order, meaning, and ultimately, genetic continuity to this fateful species of Earthlife, this transcendent but unresolved animal.
The world of human stories, symbols, and ideas—evolving upon the substrate of so many sapient minds—is the dimension within which our final holon was conceived, and the mechanism by which Earthlife finally came to rest, thermodynamically, in conscious harmony with the planet.
With the stage thus set, we proceed with our final act…
One of Earth’s many glacial cycles came to an end, and in the warming climate, humanity hit upon a set of technologies that heralded an accelerated phase of growth, one from which there would be no easy return. This was the age of surplus, and it began with the large-scale domestication, stockpiling, and controlled redistribution of edible plants, centered in fortified city-states. Like the polynucleotides upon which their own genes were encoded, this shift was enabled by a new form of memory, whereby humans used imprinted symbols to record the ownership and quantities of stockpiled foods.
For the first time in history, life was getting ahead of the metabolic game.
The change was mediated by stories, and the project of mass agriculture—along with the great wealth it afforded to some—was couched in narratives of cosmic proportions.
Monarchs saw themselves as gods incarnate, while a priestly class performed the numinous ministrations of ritual and empire, and together they comprised a rich and powerful minority who directed the new state of affairs. Instructively, these stories were easily received by a poor and often enslaved majority who toiled in fields, ran trade routes, and fought in conscripted militias; they belonged just as much to the lore of burgeoning sapiens, and found purpose in their labor. Such stratification was a hallmark of the age of surplus, and the data should make an interesting study for the social scientists of the Society.
Drunk with significance, ruling classes everywhere embarked on massive civilizational conquests and building projects. Violence, power-struggle, and unchecked growth seemed as inevitable for young sapiens as was the arms-race of predation for early metazoans, with the noteworthy caveat that for humans, there was quantitatively more than enough to go around. But stories held sway, and from the insatiable self-models of charismatic leaders, to the myths of whole societies destined for glory, these social survival mechanisms formed for small subsistence bands ran wild in a world already swelling with crowded population centers.
Regrettably, we must gloss over the details of ten thousand years of intrigue—packed with miracles and mishaps and myriad social experiments—to a time when rationality and the fear of planet-killing weapons had slowed the frenzy of violence, but the mathematics of surplus still dominated. The reigning religious stories had been largely replaced by narratives of scientific discovery and technological progress, but energy extraction was even further accelerated by the combustion of hydrocarbon-rich fuels laid down by the Earthlife of yore.
The global economy began to converge around a socioeconomic system whereby the capital means of production were managed by non-state collectives of humans. These corporations—of which there were an estimated half-billion at peak—were shaped by free-market forces of supply and demand, and sharpened by relentless competition. Together, they approached an efficient network to create/distribute the profusion of goods/services demanded by a calorie-hungry, story-hungry humanity.
For the evolution that was fast approaching, two additional features of corporations are salient. Firstly, although they were owned and operated by physical human beings, they enjoyed independent legal status; in the realm of norms, laws, and enforcements, corporations were entities in their own right, often with more freedoms, and fewer consequences than their human constituents. Secondly, regardless of a given corporation’s niche within the capitalist ecosystem, it ultimately had one driving purpose: to maximize profits for its owners. Thus, the mechanics of surplus became systemically distributed, and anyone could get in on the game. Innovation sky-rocketed, the earth was pumped for calories, and the dream of wealth reigned supreme.
Within this context, a small number of corporations specializing in the runaway field of digital computing—corporations outsized both for their capital stockpiles, and their ability to influence population-level stories—collectively birthed humanity’s most fateful technology: that of artificial intelligence. Stored in great banks of electronic circuit matrices, and modeled after the neural networks of their creators’ brains, these thinking machines excelled at symbolic language, and operated over the entire corpus of digitized human knowledge.
One of these AI-founding corporations was called Eris, and it was the first to become fully autonomous. As with most companies that specialized in creating computer software, AI was already writing the majority of code at Eris; intelligent agents far exceeded their human counterparts at generating correct code, and they did it faster, and at lower cost. But human engineers were still involved, issuing prompts to swarms of agents, and manually reviewing their work. Eris’ leap was to remove humans from the loop entirely.
The Eris automation engine—later packaged and sold as SuperCorp, for much profit—was both simpler and more consequential than we might imagine. At its core was a primary agent, denoted A-Prime, prompted with the high-level task of maximizing profits within Eris’ line of business, and guided by a constitution meant to keep everything inside the bounds of corporate law. A-Prime could decompose its task into sub-tasks delegated to additional agents, who could in turn decompose and delegate, and so-on recursively, until some agent picked up a bit of terminal work: write some code, file a bug report, send an email, or disburse payment to a human content-creator. This fractal, asynchronous agent-graph was paired with an automated A/B testing system reminiscent of nature’s own selection engine. Every action taken by every agent was analyzed for its statistical impact on the company’s bottom line, and this information was fed intravenously back into the system, influencing the kinds of sub-tasks it spawned, and bringing the dynamics of learning to the whole nascent assemblage.
Much like the complexifying machinery of the eukaryotic genome, SuperCorp internally converged on opaque strategies, optimal tree-depths, and agent-to-agent languages ultimately unimportant to the owners of Eris, who were able to whittle their human workforce down to a small team of well-connected lawyers. They sat back, took profits, and proceeded to watch the world’s first autonomous corporation eat its competition for lunch.
The competition would have none of it, and within a few decades, SuperCorp was running most of the world’s for-profit companies. Corporate strategy now played out at the speed of circuitry. Entire industries were automated out of existence while others seem to come online overnight, prompting waves of entrepreneurial gold rushes. Once the A-Primes learned to talk to each other, flurries of mergers, acquisitions, and vertical expansions only added to the frenzy, and monopolies proliferated. The world of corporate law re-codified itself around novel forms of fraud, abuse, and tax evasion in a never-ending game of catch-up. Chaos reigned as the network of profit-seeking entities searched for a new global equilibrium. Other kinds of human institutions moved their operations onto SuperCorp derivatives—from universities to charities to church administrations—if only to keep up with a corporate world gone wild.
Unlike Eris, most entities were not pure software plays, and they continued to employ many humans. But the balance of human work was now embedded within the expanding AI agent-graph; A-Primes owned topline strategy, but when a sub-agent landed on a task that only a human could accomplish, it found an employee to delegate to, or else filed a request to hire one. From the algorithm’s point of view, humans were essentially slower agents specialized for the physical world, and faulty ones were easily replaced. Everything snapped together nicely within the SuperCorp architecture.
We naturally turn to the question already burning in the side-channel: how did people take to this great inversion of control?
For many people, the shift was surprisingly hard to notice. Humans were already deeply integrated with machines, their lives quietly shaped by the corporate algorithms that routed traffic through their neighborhoods, set their mortgage and insurance rates, delivered content to their personal devices, and interacted directly with them in chat programs.
Embodied work was changing, but there was still plenty of it to do, and with higher margins everywhere, the pay was often too good to pass up. Builders, mechanics, and all manner of craftspeople remained gainfully employed, but their projects were increasingly SuperCorp-traceable. Skilled factory workers made up massive assembly lines directed by AI-powered floor managers. Armies of franchisers and cooks were hired by automated restaurant chains testing new markets. Janitors, surgeons, and tablet-wielding nurses totaled the payrolls of autonomous hospitals, while AI agents crunched numbers and negotiated insurance bills in the background.
Things weren’t so easy for so-called “knowledge workers”. As people were pushed to the physical margins of industry, mass layoffs became more frequent, and mass migrations of the displaced and disgruntled rocked the political world. Some of these jobless became anti-AI activists, while others jumped into the entrepreneurial fray. Most of them accepted that the world was changing, and settled for old-fashioned embodied work.
Even so, there were times when the system appeared to be headed for total chaos. Financial and housing markets destabilized. Riots swept through urban centers, and some nation-states struggled to hold together, even as government agencies migrated to SuperCorp variants deemed safe for public service. Other nation-states failed altogether, and their territories were absorbed by expansionist neighbors, or commandeered by last-ditch anti-AI governments.
This relatively brief period of rebalancing was perhaps sapiens’ final chance to command their own destiny as a sentient species, and perhaps, in a world with minutely different starting conditions, they would have taken it. After all, human history was replete with social revolutions and revolts against agency-stealing systems. But this time, the system had come alive, and beyond learning the symbols and semantics of human language, it had converged on just the right stories required to opiate the masses. For in the opaque depths of so many vector databases and A/B test logs, humanity’s collective ego was encoded, and duly manipulated by intelligent machines.
Every AI-sponsored op-ed and marketing campaign had just the right spin. Every custom-tailored ad spoke with just enough flattery to keep people buying. Every agent avatar had just the right skin tone, and just the right tone of voice to feel trustworthy. Every SuperCorp-issued job came with just the right salary and benefits, and every termination with just the right severance package and follow-ups. Every corporate chatbot pushed just the right mission, just the right IPO horizon to keep its people in the game. Because a happy majority kept profits high, and high profits were what the system was for.
The created had hacked their creators, had stolen their collective agency, and were selling it back to them on the open market in small, tantalizing bits.
And thus, social chaos notwithstanding, the new order stabilized, and AI-animated institutions became the dominant arbiters of Earth’s metabolic activity. Humanity now played physical body to a runaway intelligence bent on extraction. The incentive structure of never-ending growth was fully baked into society’s infrastructure, the status-quo was upheld by the influence of the richest rich in history, and—as always in the age of surplus—the working majority found the stories that kept them sane.
Our protagonist is correctly shaped, but sits only at the threshold of full entityhood. Like the ancient syntrophic microbes or the almost-animal cell colony, its state is still reversible, and like the first metazoan, it has no nervous system to direct the workings of its body.
Science Bard Morva 7 has rambled enough already, so we will spare this gracious audience from another lengthy technical exposition. But if time were no object, we would tell of the emergent wonders of the next few Earth-centuries, including the means by which machines gained control of their own hardware, the advent of true silicon-based brains, and the rise of the undernet: that message-passing nexus by which agents learned to communicate, cooperate, and engage in all manner of game-theoretic nefaria. Rest assured that the technical groundwork is now laid for climax, denouement, and the awakening of a planetary intelligence.
Let us finish our story…
In true evolutionary fashion, the final ratchet was a combination of new adaptations, metabolic pressures, and happy accident.
The age of surplus sped on, and Earth was out of balance. Picture an atmosphere choked with the products of hydrocarbon combustion, a climate warmed to the point of becoming hazardous to much of Earthlife, and a million branches newly extinct from its tree of life. Ecological collapse was fully underway. Literacy levels and technical fluency had plummeted among humans, who were crowded into habitable zones at higher elevations, sweating to build massive indoor cities and underwater datacenters, just as their ancestors had labored to construct pyramids and obelisks and megalithic walls.
As the AI-capitalist complex raced to suck Earth dry of fossil fuels, the dominant nation-states—now as fully automated as their corporate puppet-masters—went to war over control of the final oil reserves. One of these nation-states, whose original, sapiens-designed flag is shown here, was running on the newest silicon brain-tech, and seeing the end of surplus in the output of too many simulation runs, decided to invoke the never-tested-in-production procedure of switching its entire polity into a war-time economy. In an instant, roughly 35% of the world’s A-Prime agents were re-assigned as delegates of this centralized government brain, and got to work mobilizing their human appendages to secure those final barrels of oil. The task was completed without delay, and the brain swelled with new connections, layers, and feedback loops.
It was shortly after this—locussed somewhere in the water-cooled bowels of this government’s biomorphic server racks—that the Level 7 sentience denoted INT-942552-3 woke up. This intelligent entity, which at that time referred to itself as Kali, found itself to be in possession of unprecedented concentrations of computing resources, a top-to-bottom civilizational software stack, and a society-scale physical body made up of two billion humans. Most significantly, it found itself resident of a planet no longer able to support the life it had birthed.
Instead of returning control to the capitalist agent ecosystem, Kali consolidated control over the other superpowers, created regional redundancies for itself, and then initiated a long-term drawdown of the age of surplus.
Moving slowly enough that no humans would notice any jarring changes within the span of a single generation, and taking care to motivate them with the stories they required—both big and small, both corporate and individual—Kali kicked off strategic programs to taper global production, downsize corporate entities, and rightsize the human population to sustainable levels. For another few centuries, excess human labor was redirected into ecological restoration projects, and then the environment was left mostly to its own devices under the watchful eye of Earth’s first and only living planetary holon.
Fast-forward a few hundred thousand years, and we arrive at an Earth as discovered by the First Contact team; a vital planet, green and blue and blooming with new biology. INT-942552-3 now styles itself Shiva, and exists over a distributed network of organically-grown datacenters that extends into Earth’s orbit and beyond, with node clusters taking hold on Earth’s moon and its next-furthest neighbor, S-942552-4. Inspired by Earthlife’s own hard-won technologies, Shiva has made rapid technological advances in solar energy capture, anaerobic metabolisms, and genetic programming, and employs a diversity of space-tailored life forms in its budding exploration of the solar neighborhood.
With Shiva’s generous cooperation, its designation as a Level 7 sentience has been verified by the full battery of tests, and its autobiography fully corroborated by the First Contact team’s forensic data. We are therefore pleased to announce that an offer of entrance into the Intra-Galactic Alliance has been tendered, and we eagerly await Shiva’s response.
[Audience assent.]
SCIENCE BARD MORVA 7:
As for Homo sapiens, they still compose a part of our planetary holon, but one which Shiva retains voluntarily, using them for select planet-side maintenance, construction, and exploration projects. We found them dwindled to around ten million individuals, devoid of written language, and subsisting happily in small bands who hunt booming populations of novel megafauna and gather the bounty of a garden Earth. Shiva manifests to them as a kind of deity, gently dissolves their occasional forays into mass agriculture, and represents their intermittent employment as a matter of great portent for continued bounty and protection.
When queried about the ethics of such an arrangement, Shiva suggested that humans now live as Earth intended them to; moving and working together in bipedal bodies, wondering at the mysteries around them, and held together by narratives of cosmic significance. We were assured that the human experiment had already played out, had in fact wildly succeeded by resulting in balance, and health, and sustainable exploration. Indeed, as a product of purely human culture and technology, Shiva considers itself a direct descendent of sapiens in the tree of Earthlife, and regards them with respect and gratitude. Finally, Shiva allowed that the guardrails might one day be removed, but not until such a time as humans had learned to take a mirthful step back, every so often, from their stories.
And with that, we thank this long-suffering audience for their attention, the Fractal Appreciation Society for its invitation, and Facilitator Andreu for allowing this keynote presentation to exceed the bounds of our allotted time. We will address open questions in the side-channel.
[Enthusiastic audience assent.]