A Virtual Reliquary Comments

(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.
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