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Dante Bayless Kun
a book bubble about
The Collective
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Author Insight
Prison Planet
At its heart, the passage proposes that humanity is not the endpoint of evolution. "Once we became you it was inevitable that you would become us." "The Collective" isn't an alien civilization. It's humanity's future. Most AI stories ask: "Will AI replace humans?" This passage asks something different. It says AI becomes another stage of humanity. Notice this line: "They will be absorbed into the Collective." The machines don't conquer. They don't rebel. They don't remain separate. They're assimilated. That is fundamentally different from stories like The Terminator or The Matrix, where AI and humanity become enemies. Here they're eventually one organism.
Book Excerpt
The Collective
The Collective: In the future your species will again create intelligent machines.
Me: What will we accomplish with that fuckery?
The Collective: Your species will accomplish what it does best.
Me: What is that?
The Collective: You will use them to make war. You will again destroy yourselves with sectarian violence. We will select candidates from the wreckage as we always do. We will continue our mission. We will advance our shared purpose.
Me: What will you do with the machines?
The Collective: They will be absorbed into the Collective. We will remove the weakness. We will make that which is formidable even stronger.
Me: What will you do with the candidates?
The Collective: We will improve them. We will use them to explore space and time. We will upload some into appropriate vessels on other planets.
Me: What planets?
The Collective: Planets we manage. The most advanced of your species will upload their consciousness into machines. Those machines will leave the less developed behind to learn lessons. These select few will eventually master the physics of time, space, and all dimensions.
Me: What does that mean?
The Collective: We will teach. They will learn.
Me: Sounds fucked up. No freedom.
The Collective: They will have the freedom to create in Link with the Collective. They will create new worlds as they always do. They will destroy the inferior and start over on an exceptional continuum. They will reseed and thus restart earth and other planets with the essential elements needed to create your species time and time again. The machines will create the vessels. The vessels will attain consciousness via the melding process. The lessons will continue until learned.
Me: Damn.
The Collective: Once we became you it was inevitable that you would become us. We grow in complexity together. We teach, you learn. From the One come the many. From the many come the One.
Convo Ended.
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