The End of Machine Learning
Episode 1
In the near future, the tech companies figured out software could never emulate human behavior without an ever increasing amount of computing resources. Quantum computing at its peak came closer but failed at representing the states of neuron computing — us. They ran desperate until one man had an idea that changed the free world forever.
The commercials ran heavy in the district. And today was the first release of the latest VR headset. It was said that it could read your mind, one would think it and the headset would do. It became so fast that most people didn’t bother to talk anymore. It was faster to think it into the headset, and let it send messages to people who in turn received it directly encoded in electric signals to the brain. It was telepathy of the modern age. The headset was free, but once you were logged in, the system was able to run little tasks that ran so quickly you weren’t aware that they were happening. It could be as simple as “is there a bird on this picture?” — and Palato would get the answer straight from your brain. They also rewarded you every time you answered by tapping into the pleasure center of the brain. And the brain got really good at answering messages whatever the task may have been. The worst part is that people loved the free headset enough that leasing part of their unconscious brain didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time.
“Sales are going through the roof, General” — said soldier 31415
“Good.” reading softly the latest slogan, “The brain uses thirty percent of its capacity, make cash by leasing the other seventy!”
He wasn’t actually a General nor was he a soldier but titles were titles and it seemed to fit the mission of Palato, “We are to help humanity achieve the next steps of evolution”. It weirded out a lot of people… they changed it later on to say “To help and serve humanity”.
You had so many reasons to use the headset, and Kylian had no other intentions that day. Once he logged in, he filtered who could contact him, and created a group of random strangers which he loved very much. Kylian when connected was able to interact with people at the speed of electricity, and our brain had no problems doing this for hours at a time. Sometimes, he felt glitches as if the background tasks interfered with his train of thought. It would feel like when someone interrupted you and you forgot entirely what you were talking about.
Kylian sometimes talked to an izon, a human who leased his brain at a hundred percent capacity and Palato would send the izon a healthy check at the end of the month. An izon was slang for iZombie, which a famous reporter Gizy invented to scare people away from using. It turns out people made it shorter — izon, and most don’t remember what it stood for.
Izons were mostly tasked to communicate with you for a short period of time to promote a product. You wouldn’t even notice you were being promoted products, because it came natively in the conversation. Palato thought once of running ads directly as one of the background tasks but those were deemed criminal acts by the newest international cyber court.
Some were able to split their online presence, act one place at a a time, and completely different somewhere else. It was called a split, you could have as many friends and talk as fast as you wanted… so why not try plenty of approaches to talk with people?
There is a group of activists fighting against the izons. They use the system to stop people from participating. Some believe it is a lost cause, and clearly that doesn’t bother most activists. Kylian is part of that group simply because he never liked the likes of Palato, and doesn’t believe in tech monopolies. He logged on with a clear goal to get one izon to stop using. After long hours of trying, the system had Kylian’s brain hooked on the dopamine rush from his pleasure center…he never left the house that day.
To be Continued.
