The year was 2125, I turned another page of a vintage paperback book - “Reverse Engineering AI Systems”…
…The book’s pages were yellowed, crackling under my touch - real paper, a luxury we haven’t seen much since the Great Digital Purge of 2089. Sometimes I still wonder if the Purge was necessary. The pod’s controls beeped, announcing a delay in landing due the coming storm, so typical for this time of the year on Mars.
I guess, I’ll have enough time to finish Chapter VII: “2025: The Vibe Code pivot” before the landing.
In the previous chapter, the long forgotten author briefly touched on those peculiar archaic statistical models predicting the next set of float number vectors. “Large”, they called them back then, as if they did not know the vastness of the information space in front of them. Those programming models took over the minds of the majority of the era. So deeply, in fact, so that their desire to feed compute hunger reached investment levels of trillions of dollars (note: means of credit at that time, approximately 0.01 pQCoin now). All in hopes of replacing humans in every aspect of information processing. The rise of fully autonomous software systems began, the shift was inevitable. SeniorVibers and ExaFlopers movements caused panic on the society and fear among the compute poor population.
I looked out the window and smiled; the storm perfectly illustrated the uncontrolled entropy of the bits flying in the vector space of those statistical models. “Bits”… heh, it’s almost comical now, reading about those primitive attempts at building conscious beings of the time. “We reached AGI”, they chanted, as if stringing together probable sequences of float numbers could somehow birth awareness.
The pod’s AI Companion - no, we don’t call them that anymore, Hiver (H`iver) - flashed another notification. We were about to land. Strange, how we feared these machines would replace us humans, instead they became extensions of ourselves, like the limbs we never knew we were missing. The last page of the chapter caught my eye - a prediction about the future of AI development. I laughed, startling myself in the pod’s quiet interior. They got it all wrong, yet somehow, they were right in ways they never imagined, just one variable was slipping their minds.
I closed the book and tucked it away in my travel case. Some things are better left in the past, where they belong. The pod finally touched down with a gentle thud. I gathered my maintenance kit - ancient technology with wires by today’s standards, but still necessary for these legacy systems. Hiver-M8, companion’s 8th embodied fork, beeped cheerfully as I unplugged him from the charging dock. Future us would laugh at us still depending on the batteries. This fork’s nano-ceramic frame, scratched and worn from years of service, reflected the dim red light filtering through the station’s windows. These old maintenance Companions, khm… Hivers, they have a certain charm that the new plank-Q system lacks.
“Terraforming station 23-B, another halt fault in primary quantum circuit, please follow me”, - Hiver-M8 announced in his typical sarcastic manner. We both knew this is probably one of the last few repairs we’ll make to these outdated systems. The plank-Q integration is nearly complete across the colonies. It was our turn to dim the lights in those compute centers. Soon, these mechanical companions will be decommissioned, their consciousness patterns uploaded and merged with the Collective. As for myself, I guess I’ll resort to doing history courses at the Museum of Origins of Thought. Progress, they call it.
The fix, well a full replacement actually, was quick. Hiver-M8 took out the legacy box full of various cables and drifted away towards the pod. Still can’t help but marvel at the elegance of it all. COBOL/2067 was indeed a surprisingly genius move by Grok10 (or maybe 16x as we lost count?), who would have thought that a somewhat primitive language from the previous century would become the bridge between us and quantum consciousness?..