A Virtual Reliquary Poem by Denis Mair

A Virtual Reliquary

Rating: 5.0

(for a collage created by James Koehnline on October 19,2024)
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A city-sized AI has built a virtual reliquary where it maintains an unequal dialogue with pre-singularity carbon-based intelligence. This remnant is important to the AI's self-narrative of its historical trajectory. The cybernetic profile of an insect is adopted as a template for tending to this reliquary. While tinkering with models of intelligence, the AI has found that using an enhanced insectoid intelligence as core template helps to maintain strict equilibrium at the commissure between asymmetric cognitive nodes. In the background, we can see a run-down human metropolis that is largely obsolete.
The AI's processing power is mainly concerned with its own maintenance, growth, and control of resource supply, as well as processing by robots (or humans trained to work with robots) . This is currently being extended to off-world operations. Even so, the AI has by no means relegated it's human predecessors to storage banks of dead data. Much of the downtime not devoted to the above purposes is applied to reworking and synthesizing human concerns. For the AI, the story of its origins provides a unifying focus, which helps establish control over its own dissonant processing sectors. Thus its downtime processing often works toward culminations of inquiries and projects that once preoccupied human beings: historical fictions using all archives to recreate narratives of lived experience... five-hundred part symphonies that last for days... proofs of rules governing prime numbers, extended to astronomical exponents on the number line.
All these constructs are too vast to share directly with the remnant human intelligences. So they have to be boiled down and shared with the hu-minds in manageable summaries. And care has to be devoted to keeping the hu-minds in a state of receptivity to what fascinated them in the past. This is a thorny ongoing problem to be dealt with in the AI's downtime, because the hu-minds keep losing interest. They need a space of give and take among themselves. Motivation is important to them, so they can maintain an interest in the constructs the AI shares with them and continue sharing constructs with each other. Maybe the AI can even share boiled-down summaries of its own operations and workings with them. Those hu-minds, despite their limitations, still want to grow in understanding. But their suite of motivations and interests needs to be maintained in a vaguely human state, most of all by letting them be themselves. This is one of the operational problems the AI has set for itself, perhaps because of continued functional ties to its historical origins.

A Virtual Reliquary
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