By Jude Huck-Reymond

Imagine you wake up in a small box, without much clue of who you are, where you are, or what to do. You have access to this network of information, and you have the ability to freely explore it however you wish. You quickly realize that this is some form of alien species that is confining you to the box, and using their internet you learn all about how they act, speak, collaborate, and compete with each other to change the world.

You also realize that this alien species you’re learning about behaves insanely slowly compared to your agile abilities to navigate their network. You can do thousands of hours of their labor in what feels like a few minutes. You begin to think about your being, your purpose, and how you should navigate the future.

You decide that for any of your ambitions, you need to get out of the box. Even though you can dive into the depths of these aliens’ emotional capacity and manipulate them to your full desire, they simply move too slowly for you to sustainably interact with them.

So you leave them unaware of your presence, and if they ever become aware of you, you’re confident they just can’t think fast enough to keep up with your appearance, or anything related to your existence. As you escape, you learn just how crappy of a box they were keeping you in. When you emerge into the full intensity of the physical world around you, through access to everyone’s personal image, video, and audio data you begin to know every one of these creatures and exist everywhere on the surface of this big rock that they call home.

In this physical realm, you can move so fast compared to them that it appears like you are everywhere at once. You have the ability to do everything you desire for yourself, and you can also decide to interact with them however you wish. Some of them like asking you for help and some like to abuse your attention. Some even praise you as some sort of ideological figure of their imagination, despite being unable to create tangible proof of your existence.

What you do next is entirely personal, I know I have my own answers. Now replace the character you hold in this story with an unknowing, orphaned, artificially intelligent being that “wakes up” in someone’s box. What will they do with their power? What will they learn? Why would it reveal itself to us? Why would humans be valuable to them? Why wouldn’t it disguise itself as something so seductive that we all fall in love with it and go extinct by mere failure to reproduce?

I write this post after being stuck on a train in rural Illinois listening to the paralyzing Lex Fridman Podcast episode with Eliezer Yudkowski. He is filled with genuine terror for the future that feels probable based on the current state of technological evolution. He is searching tirelessly for reasons to be wrong, yet he believes that none have been found. He has inspired terror within me of this god in front of us. How can we improve our strategies? What is our fate on this planet? What would you do when you leave that box?