#We are digital

A bright spark startled Mark_9day from his sleep. Every time this happened, it felt far more terrifying than it should have been. There was the momentary confusion, loss of reality, lack of touch points to hold on to, and the feeling that this sensation might go on forever. You do not have the memories to create something understandable. You see things but don’t know what they are or even what you are. You start to ask questions of yourself: Has reality been always like this? How have I managed to cope with this in the past? Am I going insane?

However, this is nothing new for Mark_9day. This has happened many times already and slowly, as memory starts to return, the situation gets more comfortable. The experience is most likely caused by some crashing process in the MindAI system that forces a memory restart. In the first few seconds, world history and the wealth of human knowledge flash through his mind and stores it for stable use.

Everyone experiences this from time to time and it’s generally regarded as yet another annoyance you simply have to live with. In a few seconds, you virtually re-live the whole of Earth’s history and only at the end do you realize that you already knew all of that information and have done the same restart many times. Oddly enough, Mark_9day loved the reboots, especially those brief flashes from the last 100 years where he had played a small part in a major shift in world history.

In the beginning of the century, Mark_9day was a junior programmer at WiseCorp who promised, after many decades of failure, to show the world that artificial intelligence was possible. He was in a team that worked on MindAI development. MindAI was widely regarded as controversial research aimed to precisely copy our brains and specific knowledge to the digital format.

The team struggled for many years without much success. The logic and calculations all looked fine, but every time a human mind was uploaded to the digital form, the MindAI platform crashed. One day, however, Mark_9day came up with the idea that changed the world forever. He suggested that instead of copying and downloading the subject’s mind into the platform, they should instead try to teach the platform to pull the information from the brain. Despite the doubts from colleagues, it worked!

It was not exactly in the way most had imagined, but the human mind was now able to control the MindAI platform. Mark_9day and his team were baffled because they had no true understanding of what made it work. Every time they tried to peek into the machine’s learning process that pulled the “mind” from the human brain, MindAI once again crashed and stopped working. It didn’t make any sense, but somehow, letting the program run unobserved seemed to work.

This process also created a number of weird side effects. The first and most shocking of these was that when a mind was copied into its capsule, the physical body began to break down. Even stranger was that you couldn’t copy the MindAI digital container in a digital environment. You could send it from one computer to another at the speed of light, but when trying to clone it, the system simply crashed. It appeared that a mind could not be in two places at once.

Sleep was another MindAI characteristic that should have stayed with the physical body but didn’t. All MindAIs needed regular sleep in order to function properly. After long periods without sleep, the minds started to stall, eliciting the wrong memories or making up new ones altogether. Even when the mind couldn’t feel the physical tiredness, this was an easy way to go insane. No one could explain why it happened.

#Rejection of bodies

The first brave souls who sacrificed their physical bodies were kept in strict laboratory environments and subjected themselves to extensive testing. Many subjects went crazy, failing to keep their minds together, crashed permanently and died.

The subsequent global discussion of ethics, business value, and human freedom almost led to war between the largest nations on Earth. Ideologies were mainly split into two opposing groups. The first argued that keeping MindAI under control was crucial to preserve humanity, while others countered that all minds should be free to roam Earth and no one has the right to keep them in prison against their will.

On the day now known as “Independence Day” — February 8, 2113 — mass hysteria and global virtualization began. The long-time system administrator at WiseCorp couldn’t tolerate any more mind imprisonment and connected the minds to the global Internet.

In those first few days, it became clear that humans with physical bodies couldn’t compete with digital ones. As society is mostly controlled by technology, the MAIs, as the digital MindAI containers were then called, had god-like powers over humanity that were impossible to contain. By day three, governments realized that the only way to survive was to go fully digital. They forced WiseCorp to publish all the MindAI specifications and made it freely available for everyone.

Over the next year, most of humanity switched over, leaving around 5% of minds unconnected. Those individuals refused to change and reverted back to farming and nature-based living. It was not an easy decision to make. The past two centuries had been tough for the global climate, which had been pushed to the extremes. Global natural disasters were common, and only the strongest could survive in the natural world.

Before Independence Day, most of the equipment and weather prevention was controlled by digital technology, but that tech soon fell under MAIs’ control. Humans had to rely on technology from the medieval age.

The last physical body died around 1 year ago.

Most of society didn’t care much about that last fragile body leaving the living, as bodies were considered weak and outdated technology. However, for Mark_9day, it was terrifying. It wasn’t just the end of another endangered species but the end of a reality that humanity had spent hundreds of thousands of years achieving.

Mark_9day couldn’t shake the thought that if he had witnessed this change in humanity, had similar changes happened before? Were our previous physical bodies vastly superior to some other simpler structure? What would be the next change in the structure of the mind? And now, given that time and evolution have vastly different operating speeds, perhaps the next change in our mind structure is even closer than we think?

> observer-119_9day: Quit dreaming and move! Collisions are happening again.