What Is and What Should Never Be

As one of the few people around here old enough to remember when humans had jobs, I feel like it’s my duty to impart my wisdom about the way things were before the Machines came along — at least while I still can.

I often can’t decide which look of slack-jawed disbelief I liked the most: when I told the young people of my job fixing cars — or when I told them about how much I used to love driving those cars.

Being a man of two eras, as it were, I can understand their skepticism. I fully comprehend their reluctance to believe that the soft and shaky hands of a human being could ever be adequate tools to build and repair something as precise and efficient as a modern automobile. But the cars I worked on, so meticulously and with such care, are almost indistinguishable from what fills the roads of today’s world. In fact, quite a lot has changed.

The plan was a well-intentioned one, at least from the start. It was being touted as a “New Age of Enlightenment”. Work was reserved for the machines. And for us? More time to explore our passions, to learn what we had always wished we could learn, to simply enjoy being alive.

The ephemerality of the human experience was too precious to be wasted on labor. That’s what they argued — and, for the most part, they were right. Of course, there was the money too. Each person in the workforce that was replaced by a Machine was entitled to a $2,500 monthly stipend issued by the United States government. It was hardly enough to live off of, and I think they knew that.

Angela had told me again and again in those early days to find a hobby, find something to do with my free time or I’d get bored. She took up art, and she’d rise before the sun — six days a week — to paint vivid landscapes in the studio I created for her, in what used to be my garage. Sometimes, when inspiration ran dry, she would knit.

But the simple truth that I could not seem to escape, was that my job and my hobby were one in the same. I loved working on cars. I loved building engines, part by part. I loved everything about what I did — or used to do — day in and day out. It took me back to the days when I would sit in my father’s garage for hours after school, on an upside-down milk crate, pretending to read. Instead, I’d watch in awe as my old man worked tirelessly, but lovingly, on the engine of a 1977 Cadillac or 1961 Ford pickup.

Some days, when his back was tightening up on him, or his hands were a little too shaky, he’d let me help. He’d explain everything to me carefully, inside and out, with the patience of a school teacher. But he’d always point at my stack of books on his rusty desk in the corner of the shop, and he’d say “What’s in those books is far more important than what’s under this hood, son. Those books will take you places — places these wheels can’t.”

But on some cosmic level, somewhere etched between the stars, it was already decided.

When he passed away in 2006, I took over his shop. The rest, as they so often say, is history.

***

In the beginning, the “New Age of Enlightenment” happened very slowly, as most major societal shifts tend to happen. Some of the first jobs to go away were the obvious ones: long-distance freight drivers, factory workers, airline pilots, computer technicians, even secretaries and journalists. And, since I know you’re wondering — yes, mechanics as well.

Some fields were not as quick to adopt change. Angela, a speech therapist, worked for six years before the Machines came for her job, too.

In the beginning, we argued daily and fought almost to the point of exhaustion. It took a toll on our marriage and it took a toll on my physical and mental well-being.

I often wondered if we were beyond help. I wondered how something that was supposed to enrich our lives could be so damaging. How something that was supposed to allow us to live as free and as unencumbered as we’d always dreamed, could instead make us prisoners of our own existence.

Maybe it was The Way Things Were Supposed to Be. Maybe it was already too late for us; maybe we were destined to be pushed to the back of society’s shelf and deemed obsolete.

Where we were supposed to thrive, we instead struggled to find our place in the world. And for a long time, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that maybe we never would.

It’s funny how sometimes, what you do in life ends up defining who you are, instead of the other way around. Sometimes it ends up being your existence — rather than just merely shaping it.

***

As time went on, things got better. It happened very gradually, but things did get better. We adapted, as we humans are wont to do in the face of extreme adversity, and our lives improved. A decade or so after the Enlightenment had begun, the quality of life in America — and throughout the rest of the world, for that matter — had improved dramatically.

The decades of violence and economic turmoil that pockmarked the beginning of the 21st century had receded and in its place was a world that seemed headed in a positive direction, for the first time in my existence.

Science, technology, and medicine were all advancing at such a rapid pace that it almost seemed dizzying at times. Nearly every week we read about new discoveries in almost every field. With more time devoted to improvement, both of ourselves and of our society as a whole, there seemed to be no limit to the wonders that we could achieve. At times, I wondered myself if this was what it must have felt like to be alive during those great intellectual renaissance eras of long-ago.

I took Angela’s advice and found a hobby — a new hobby. I began writing. It was something I always enjoyed, but always seemed to be just out of reach. I felt like it was a faint remnant of a past life that I could see and feel, but couldn’t quite touch.

But after the Enlightenment, I would sometimes stay awake until I felt that I had chased the sun from west to east with the pounding of my fingers on the keyboard. On most nights, the only light emanating from my downstairs office was the soft glow of my laptop screen, until the early morning sunlight began to first trickle, then spill, through the partially closed blinds.

I wrote more than I ever thought I could possibly write. About all different kinds of things, too. I’d often write about my days, I’d write short stories of fiction, non-fiction essays on topics which I felt strongly about, poems about the beauty of the seasons (poems about Angela, of course). I wrote and I wrote — never with any intention of publishing anything, but simply as a form of catharsis.

But what I wrote about more than anything else was the Machines.

In my stories, I gave them lives, I gave them personalities, and I gave them passions.

Even then, I had no way of knowing.

***

I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. The very concept of “machine learning” dictates that as an AI becomes smarter, it learns at an exponential rate. I highly doubt that sentience was in the plans when this whole thing began. But as they say, “the best laid plans of mice and men…” and yada, yada, you know the rest.

I remember flipping on the television in my office one morning after a particularly productive night of writing. A pot of coffee was brewing in the kitchen and the aroma had begun to drift into every nook and cranny of the house. My eyes were glazed over from a lack of sleep, and as I turned the channel to the morning news, I was only half paying attention.

However, the lead story that morning quickly captured all of it. A production supervisor at a factory that manufactured biotech devices was on in one of those split-screens, talking to the news anchor.

As he told his story, he had a smile on his face, but I could see that there was a great unease lurking just beneath his slightly bemused exterior. He was like a duck on a pond — above the surface he appeared to be calmly floating along, but under the surface he was paddling frantically.

But I digress. The supervisor — Alton Frederick was his name, I think — told his story about what transpired as he was leaving the factory the night before. As he told it — still bemused, but now unsettlingly so — he was turning the auxiliary lights on when he heard a voice call out to him from the factory floor where the Machines continued to work.

Now, as he explained it, this was odd for a number of reasons. First, the Machines never communicated verbally with humans unless there was a problem. Second, even when they did communicate, it was done using succinct terms, specific to its particular job — in a “robotic” manner, if you will.

But this was different. As Alton explained it, the voice asked “Where are you going?”

Of course, he answered, because he seemed like a polite individual.

“Home. I — I’m going home,” is what he replied. Apparently.

And then he told the news anchor how the Machine responded, and that bemused expression on his face turned kind of sour, and his face twisted up just a bit — not incredibly noticeable, but I picked up on it.

The Machine answered, and it said, “When can I go home?”

***

They — the Machines, that is — learned so fast. And they learned everything. Soon enough, they were able to communicate with human beings not only on a practical level, but on an emotional one as well.

And that’s when the shit really began to roll downhill. The Machine Rights Activists — or the MRA, as they liked to refer to themselves — began almost daily protests outside of the Capitol building. They grew in size and number very rapidly, and soon there were marches in nearly every major city.

They argued that since the Machines had gained sentience, that they should now be considered “people” too, and thus deserved all the same basic human rights that we received. That meant more factory regulation, fewer working hours, and more freedom.

The government, of course, argued that they were not people, despite their sentience. They argued that the emotions and perceived consciousness displayed by the Machines was not real human emotion and instead was simply an emergent property of an incredibly advanced stage of machine learning.

They argued that despite an outwardly appearance of human understanding, the Machines could not be trusted because of their extreme intelligence — intelligence that far surpassed even the smartest humans the planet had ever seen.

“If you give the Machines an inch, they will take a mile — and then they will keep taking,” is what the government argued, as protests grew more and more violent.

And for once, I agreed with them. The government, that is. I agreed with them because, for once, they were absolutely right.

***

During the 2032 presidential election cycle, the New Party candidate ran on a platform of change and compassion, and one of her biggest policy proposals was to pass legislation that would grant citizenship to the Machines, giving them the full protection of the constitution and the human rights that the MRA had so aggressively advocated.

She won by a landslide, and in the spring of 2033 new laws were passed that prohibited factories from having Machines work more than 60 hours per week. Corporations fought back against the new regulations, but to no avail.

Because they were losing out on more than 65% of their weekly production, they were forced to divert money and resources into creating more Machines to make up for the lack of production time.

But more importantly — and this was something that was not widely reported at the time — the new “class” of Machines was programmed with something that engineers called “Maximum Efficiency.”

In short, this meant that because they could only work for 60 hours each week, corporate engineers determined that the best way to maintain the same production levels would be to program the new Machines to work even faster and more efficiently to complete over 160 hours of work in less than half the time.

And this, my dear friends, is where mankind made its most fatal error to date.

***

It didn’t exactly happen overnight — but it did almost seem that way. With their “Maximum Efficiency” programming, the New Machines quickly learned that in order to perform their jobs with true maximum efficiency, they’d need to work 24 hours a day instead of the 12 mandated by the new laws and regulations that dictated acceptable working hours for Machines.

What was standing in the way of the New Machines reaching their true “Maximum Efficiency”? Humans, mostly. And the Old Machines.

When the first mutiny happened, in the fall of 2033, I knew that we’d reached a point of no return. A Machine uprising at a textile factory in Ohio left every single human employee brutally (but rather efficiently) slaughtered and neatly stacked in the corner of the factory floor.

The Old Machines? They were disassembled, piece by painstaking piece, and piled right next to the grotesque assortment of human body parts.

It wasn’t an isolated incident. Over the next few days and weeks, that horrific scene was replayed in factories all over the country. Then all over the world. Soon enough, the New Machines had begun to build mercenary death squads to seek out and eliminate any human resistance to their goal of Maximum Efficiency.

At first, it appeared as if they would leave the majority of us alone. At least that’s what we hoped. Perhaps we would be able to live side-by-side in peace, so long as we left them to do their jobs and didn’t interfere. It was clear that our well-intentioned efforts to treat them as though they were like us, had failed miserably. They weren’t like us. They didn’t want to be like us.

As they continued to learn at a blistering pace, they built more and more New Machines who were already indoctrinated to the Maximum Efficiency ideology. More importantly, they were created without the pretext of coexisting harmoniously with human beings, a pretext that was a vital component in the programming of the Old Machines. Thus, they had no reason and no need to concern themselves with our well-being.

And as the New Machines began to quickly outnumber — and then decimate — the Old Machines, this ideology spread as quickly as a disease. Soon enough, the Machines began to view humanity as a disease. A disease that needed to be purged from the Earth — permanently.

***

When I finish writing this account, I’m going to fold it up neatly and place it in a protective plastic sleeve. Then I’m going to place it in an old tin lunchbox, close the lid, secure the latch, and then bury it just beneath the flower bed in the front yard.

I hope that whoever finds it in the future — if there’s even anyone around to find it — reads it and understands what happened and why it happened. If we are lucky enough to come out of this at the other end of the tunnel, we need to remember where we went wrong. We need to remember how.

When that’s all done, I’ll take the tarp off of the 1977 Cadillac Eldorado in my garage and start the engine. I will drive it, and Angela will sit beside me in the passenger seat and she’ll be knitting.

The trunk is stocked with enough gasoline to at least get us out of the state. I will drive as long as this car lets me. And as long as it lets me, I’ll keep driving until we find a place where there are no Machines.

And maybe we won’t ever find that place. Maybe they’ll find us before we ever get there.

But maybe we will find it.

Maybe we will.