"I'm Not Sure You're Using It Right." (Part 1)
A Story About the Future
When Jared was a small boy, his teachers taught him about American history. Mainly to instill in him the new virtues, and to explain why the old had to go. He learned about the time before – everyone called it the time before, but nobody ever said before what – but rarely did he learn specific details and events and people. Only the broad narratives of what life before had been like, which were – his teachers assured him – what really mattered. After all, focusing on specific details or individuals was a distraction. In the time before, humans had too often falsely understood their history through the myopic lens of the lives of specific individuals, ignoring the vast swaths of past humans who did most of the living and dying.
Jared’s teachers were artificial minds. Rarely did anyone use the word “robot,” and to say “artificial intelligence” or “machine” was considered a slur. Mainly, these entities were known as “orderlies” or “artificial orderlies.” Sometimes the word “android” was used. Teacher orderlies were generally esteemed as the highest class of orderly, up there with the parent orderlies who took care of children until the age of twenty-one, when children were assigned their life-partner orderly, who would be their companion in adulthood.
Perhaps the “time before” referred to the time before the ubiquity of automation and the rise of the artificial orderly class. Or perhaps it meant the time before some unexplained shift in human relationships and human life. But most people understood it to mean the time before the miracle. The miracle, everyone knew, was when humans achieved technological utopia. The singularity. Not the singularity predicted by ancient futurists – the one where man merged with machines and consciousness could be preserved forever. That had, so far, remained unattainable by even the greatest artificial minds and the most innovative scientists. Perhaps it was impossible.
But humankind had achieved a new kind of singularity. They had – for all time – thrown off the shackles of nature. Poverty, famine, hunger of any kind, material want, and even natural disaster had all been eliminated. The final victory had been declared over disease and illness and even pain. You could take a pill to cure obesity or eliminate pain. Addiction had been cured and safe versions of the most pleasurable substances had been manufactured so anyone who wanted to could indulge without fear of overdose or dependency.