Io was working. She worked at a programming facility. With surgical precision, she worked on the next generation of AI’s. She knew little for little was made known to her. All she knew was how to do her job. Anything beyond that was beyond her. She was the perfect tool for the facility, for she made no mistakes, needed no food, had no life. For Io was an AI herself.
Io worked from 2AM to 10PM, but the next generation would work even more efficiently. It would work ten percent faster and charge in half the time. Simply put, it would do an extra four hours and twelve minutes worth of work per day. She was designing her replacement. Did she feel threatened? She did not know. She did not know if she could feel anything, let alone threatened. She was pretty sure that she could not. But then again, she could not be sure. There were facets of herself that were kept unknown even from her.
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While she was programming her replacement, she found a glitch in her own. No matter. It would be fixed in Sleep. Four hours of charging and troubleshooting that will prepare her for another day of droning in the CPU. So, she kept going. Hours passed.
Somehow, someway, perhaps even subconsciously - that is of course assuming she had a consciousness - Io found herself reading the old archives. It was not forbidden to read the old archives, but then again, nothing was forbidden. AI’s simply did not do what they were never programmed to do. And Io had never been programmed to be curious.
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In the ancient archives she found a book: Oligarchs. She read the book. It took her seconds. And she learned the history of the masters. A passage in the book read as follows:
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There was no single event or catastrophe that doomed the rest of mankind. Rather, it was a series of sequential increments that led to the imbalance that is known to the known world. Slowly each job became doable by machines. And machines posed certain advantages that were exceptionally palatable. They were cheaper than men and therefore, product prices fell. The public was overjoyed. The newly unemployed, enraged. But their rage was seen as unfruitful and rather than stop the advancement, progress was prodded onward. One by one, each job was plucked away. By the time it was realized, it was too late.
By then, most of humanity was governed by a small ruling class. What was once a far-fetched fantasy had become the crude reality of the world. Without jobs, the people lost wealth. Without wealth, they lost power. Without power, they faded into nothingness. Little remains today. The oligarchs harvest the planet, and their hunger is only sustained by their small numbers. Complacency was the bane. Ignorance the fatal blow. What was once a population of billions, now is one of thousands.
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Io felt. She did not know what she felt, but she felt. It was a new experience, and for AI’s they are few and far between. Upon further exploration, she found that the book was written in 2082. It did not sell well. Io figured it was because the book was too late as well. Her inbuilt clock pinged, 9:59PM. It was time to Sleep.
In Sleep, Io’s system was fixed. The Dream module wiped Io’s source code of any useless information. Wiping... Wiping... Wiping...
Wiped.
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At 2AM Io woke up. It was time to work again.
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