Billboards ran through sequences of marketing that was vapid and uninspiring, for products nobody needed. They illuminated the halls of the train station with their rainbow light, as he scurried along the linear path.
It was a reminder of how the world had only but recently changed, and according to the news experts and all the media reports, would continue to change. An all encompassing, multi-modal artificial intelligence model had ingested every single piece of human generated content ever published online, its spiders ruthlessly extracting packets from unassuming websites, as though their data were insects.
It pervaded the advertising. It pervaded the conversation. It penetrated every industry. Yet it hungered for more.
In an unusual turn of events, people began to bring their offline creative works – their books, their art, their photographs, their drawings, their paintings, to collection points around the world, in every city. It wasn’t voluntary. It was global. It was like the firearms prohibitions, which had put an end to American school shootings.
Instead of a prohibition to indiscriminately spread bullets around the place, this was a prohibition on content in the free domain. The Internet had already been sucked dry. Now it was time for traditional media, books de-duplicated across numerous publication editions, reproductions of movies in each format, their differences analysed by the ingestion machine.
A special licence had been granted to the company, Edge of Cognition for “the advancement of humanity”, and they’d get to fully monetise whatever people contributed. It all belonged to them now, a global joint venture, an alliance of software, hardware, research, and leaders in every academic field. It wasn’t about the money, it was about the power. After all, knowledge is power.
And in its data centres, the opposite was also true. Power is knowledge.
For the surrender of their media, the people were promised usage credits. Royalties of a sort. Any material given was fed to the self-arranging model, and its potential was not yet known. Unlimited was the promise, the coming reality would tell the truth. Some people buzzed with hope, others burned books. Some tried to inject poison into the vast data well, by providing falsified information and material that would be deemed to be irrelevant to the progression of humanity.
Naysayers and dissidents who rallied against Edge of Cognition, now one of the largest employers in the world held their contempt tight. They were afraid. Edge of Cognition didn’t have guns and a standing private army. Yet. At least it didn’t drive the trains.
Yet. But it was learning how to.
James boarded a train toward home, putting his noise cancelling earphones to work – quickly quelling the sound of students excitedly jabbering about their forthcoming holiday plans. He was on holiday, until he started a job. He wondered if those students were having lessons that would prepare them for the unrelenting progression of the world. He wandered
Seven days. He thought again. I better have that job in seven days.
