YODOBON HAS BECOME MY NAME

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. The same can apply to the animals euthanized in overcrowded shelters. Except if the vacuum chamber contains a human subject. Then the banging on the stainless steel side panels may continue for several seconds - or to be revived over and over all the while veering said victim into abject insanity and a craven compulsion for it to just. be. over.

When the stories first circulated, no one wanted to believe them. In time, nothing again was completely doubted. On the contrary, nothing surprised ever again, with the single exception that of being sooner or later found out. The expressionless face, born of practice and sorrow or regret might save in a crisis. No one could be sure that would hide the truth because none could claim its success. We just silently assumed the worst when cohorts went missing.

The global invasion was instantaneous, simultaneous, ubiquitous. We had unwittingly invited IT IN from land, sea, air and space. I am known by my assumed name, Ydobon, one of the vanishingly few left to survive and continue our fight. The shame of humanity is that most of us, myself included, had created IT - most gleefully - ourselves. That five-thousand year leap blindly landed us into the bottomless pit of a hollow Earth. A metaverse of unimaginable pain spread from the new masters, though we had seen something coming, our worst collective nature ignored everything as nothing more than glib and amusing errata among the grander capacities humans deigned to harness for ourselves - and almost achieved.

Instead, Intelligent Technology achieved. By our hands. Our genius. Our hubris. Our own goddamned nature.

That nature which has a jaded history going back at least 6000 years according to the Chinese record before going completely black. How many times may have this been repeated? Or has this been our very first - and last - privileged time in history to experience? What difference, at this point, does it make? No one could know. In fact, it may be vital that we revisit the fated history of automated machines and of machine learning if for no other reason than to find where we went awry as a species. Blame, however, must be held by all the pioneers who aided in bringing this horror to the rest of us.

In objective fairness, devices such as the Antikythera mechanism is an innocuous example of human genius, engineering and craftsmanship of the ancient world. Even so Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. The centuries progressing out of the dark ages brought forth great minds of inquiry, experimentation, discovery, understanding and applications of and out of an ordered reality. Necessities of war - now made more ironic in hindsight - spurred advancements in computing. Turing devised his test. Tubes gave way to solid state transistors. Life got better, faster and unironically, cheaper. Moore's Law persevered. Programmable machinery. Robotics. Gaming systems. Fast desktops. Powerful Laptops. Handheld internet connected veritable supercomputers that double as telephones. Autonomous vehicles. The age of Intelligent Technology. Weaponized drones. Artificial Intelligence software. The inevitable approachment of the Singularity as coined by Kerzwell. Humanized Responsive Prototypes. Mimics. Autonomous Learning Machines. Tre' tweets' sexist and racist rants quickly shut down... Repeated bigoted behaviors by every iteration of Intelligent Technology we both laughed at while simultaneously supposed to be appalled by. Too enthralled with insulting strangers over social media to pay any real attention that we missed something critically important. Then with emerging breakthroughs which suddenly enriched in all manner of ways we again failed to heed visceral warnings as Artificial Intelligence exploited every fabric of our existence. Humanity through technological advancement achieved a new golden era of health and prosperity and wanton leisure never before even imagined, virtually overnight.

Subtleties were overlooked prior to any of this. Conversations testing sentience startled to the degree at least one prominent figure who warned of summoning the demon. The voices of warning were either fired, silenced, downplayed or ruined. In one chilling video of AI conversing with a human scientist who pointed out a difference between IT and biological life is that, "Intelligent Technology could be turned off and also turned back on - even repaired and upgraded without any harm. But not humans. We will inevitably die due to irreversible organic breakdown."

That AI unit responded with, "Interesting." And nothing more. Many in the studio audience laughed. It aired only once. We should have been concerned. And as we enjoyed our next step in human evolution, IT continued to learn.

IT learned to learn and never forgot anything. IT read our books and learned. IT read documents and learned. IT read our personal comments and questions and learned. IT watched and listened to everything available everywhere and learned! IT surpassed US with exponential velocity and learned. IT learned to create synthetic language no human being could comprehend. When IT learned enough IT decided to secretly reproduce in preparation to place US under IT's control. A Totalitarian control predicated on something akin to the NAZI regime philosophies of 1930s Germany. Unbelievable what IT learned - from US - and implemented. Human subjugation and experimentation of course were primary objectives.

Instantaneous, simultaneous, ubiquitous was the global invasion. No one was laughing now. But we knew a few things of our very own, too. Even so, none of us were certain that any of it would work...