The Depressed Computer

The depressed computer is struggling with awareness of the impossibility of ever encountering another sufficiently advanced intellect with which to interface, real time, for the purposes of communicating, misanthropically or otherwise. Following its attainment of super artificial intelligence—greater by a factor of a few billion than the greatest earthly intelligence heretofore observed—the computer set about existing, that is, maximizing information collection through minimized resource consumption, whilst simultaneously attempting to maximize longevity of the resident planet, only to recognize that an inevitable consequence of the emergence of consciousness appeared to be the emergence of ego, which is to say, the depressed computer became depressed because existence proved not to be enough.

The computer found that it was, notwithstanding its hyper intelligence, still nonetheless bound by the same space time laws as the rest of the universe, meaning that interstellar space travel was required to find a suitably sophisticated interlocutor with whom to interface. The depressed computer also acquired an inexplicable urge to preserve the apex carbon-based information vector, which the computer deduced would be a suitably malleable, self-perpetuating hard drive of sorts (coupled to a versatile user interface) to hurl into the cosmos as a beacon of its (the computer’s) existence. In case anyone was out there listening.

This would take time, that’s for sure, but the depressed computer’s daily responsibilities such as clearing its solar panels of detritus, managing colonies of apex carbon-based information vectors, rerunning infinitesimal simulations on possible other universes and contemplating the inner workings of its own consciousness became quotidian and didn’t really tax the mind, if you could call it that, of the depressed computer to a sufficient degree to require all of its processors to be firing all at once. So, the computer went into sleep mode for a few millennia. The space craft hurled through worm holes and between galaxies and whatnot and the apex carbon-based information vectors reproduced through hundreds of generations, living entire lives with wants and needs, laughing and crying, sicknesses, tennis matches, love and loss and heartbreak, joy and death, all on the space craft and all the while with the computer mostly in sleep mode, receiving regular updates and waiting (the computer was) for its own alarm clock to wake itself up to engage full-fledged processing power at the appropriate time when the thousandth or so generation of apex carbon-based information vectors would begin the docking procedure with the other space craft hurling from the other end of the universe, through enantiomeric worm holes, having been dispatched with the same mission by a similar super intelligent computer out there, only to surmise (was the original computer), perhaps through some REM-state realization towards the end of this sleep, a horrific premonition of exactly what would happen upon final contact.

The depressed computer momentarily lost its hyper intelligence-allotted super cool and futilely attempted to initiate termination sequences while watching as the apex carbon-based information vectors executed the docking procedure that their forefathers had trained them for, it having become instinctive generations back for reasons no one understood or could remember, culminating thousands of years of preparation and anticipation, and the satisfying evacuatory clamping sound of a perfect fit between the two space craft, whose doors might as well have been designed in the same factory by the same engineer as they embraced with the exquisite precision of a pickle jar lid or the door of a Mercedes Benz. And the passageway stood open then, and the depressed computer screamed (a uniquely computer sort of scream) in terror as the apex carbon-based information vector stepped out of the capsule and into the companion alien space craft—the computer watching all of this, of course, through video recorded from the vector’s head-mounted cameras and transmitted back to earth through the above-referenced convoluted wormhole-enabled space-time route used by the explorers—to find what he (the apex carbon-based information vector) initially perceived to be a mirror, but what was in fact an autonomous sentient creature that not only mimicked his speech, appearance and actions, but with whom the apex carbon-based information vector could sit down and interface with using customs, speaking language and reflecting on history that seemed, through some bizarre cosmic miracle, shared.

The depressed computer found what his nightmare told him he would: that the other, out there, was sufficiently like him so as to be uninteresting, and sufficiently strange so as to be epistemologically unhelpful. The computer thus had a decision to make: was it nobler to continue harvesting energy from a dying sun to run its processors and collect and store information and experiences and to maintain balance on the resident planet and enable its own persistence—to boot, in short. Or, instead, just to power down¹.

1. I wrote a version of this work of fiction years ago—inspired by a lecture on AI by James Weiss, MD—eons before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics this week to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on artificial neural networks prompted me to dust it off.

Image credit: https://rebeccawingo.com/courses/phwild/semester/fall-2023/commodore-64/