Bobby Fathom was just a teenager, still wet behind the ears and straight out of university when he took his first job as a journalist. It was an obscure networking magazine but he enjoyed the writing and he loved technology old and new.
Bobby had owned computers before - a Commodore Vic 20, a ZX Spectrum, an Atari ST, and he’d played around on the web using the public terminals at university. Technology journalism proved to be something that he excelled at, and by the time he reached his early twenties he was running the magazine.
But it was the early ’90s and the internet was beginning to make its mark on the global consciousness, so Bobby jumped at the opportunity to launch a web site dedicated to technology.
The internet offered so many new mediums and Bobby was in his element, experimenting with audio and visual as well as his beloved text. Much later on he would even strive to find a way to integrate the latest advances in virtual sensory communication into his work.
But the great economic collapse of 2012 arrived and held on for over a decade, sending more people to, and over, the brink of poverty than all the wars in history ever had. September 12, 2012 would go down in the books as the first time those in power seriously questioned whether the machines had been given too much authority. A misconfigured server at the First Northern Reserve Bank, the largest publicly traded bank in the western hemisphere, republished a profit warning announcement from 2000, when the company had been on the brink of bankruptcy. It was a minor, human generated error. The article had no date stamp embedded in it and Google, the world’s largest search engine, crawled the article as it did its daily scan of the global newswires, and republished the information to the world with the current date attached.
Thousands of automatic trading responses were triggered by the event and stock monitoring programs worldwide offloaded Northern Reserve’s shares like they were going out of fashion, which in a sense, they were. By the time some bright spark at Google realised what had happened, it was already too late. The machines had triggered a panic dumping of stocks, which sent First Northern and a boatload of related securities bust. Combined with the previous five years of global recession, the world’s economy teetered dangerously on the brink of collapse.
Bobby broke the story behind the story and proved his professionalism. It was a good break for Bobby and during the resultant global meltdown he managed to hold onto a succession of jobs through talent alone. And alone he felt as one by one his colleagues and friends slipped away, down avenues of destitution, despair and darkness.
Throughout the Great Depression, Bobby and his friends, at least those who had held onto their jobs, money and sanity, would meet up on occasion and sup an ale or two in the faded grandeur of an old fashioned public house in London’s Noho district. They were all editors, journalists and hacks, and had survived thus far through skill, luck and adaptability.
As the evenings wore on their eyes would grow misty with nostalgia and conversation would always return to the good old days, when a journalist’s job was to report on current affairs. “Now we’re just writing for robots,” Bobby would slur, projecting the majority of his bile at Google, which had become editor at large for all the news, if not all the information in the world. The search engine had taken up the task of indexing “every story ever written”, starting with articles on the web but then moving on to scanning and digitising old books and newspapers.
In his contempt, Bobby was not alone, but the ‘robots’ were an abstract threat. Row upon row of identical servers, housed in racks in blast proof facilities in Mountain View, or Oregon, or Iceland, their humming shells a home to millions, maybe billions more virtual machines, all crawling, indexing and shifting data around.
A long time ago, at its inception, Google had been given a simple job to do - to answer a question. Simple, yet endless - a Sisyphean task. And as there were always going to be more questions in the world than answers, Google had taken the most efficient route it could - endeavouring to collect all the answers in the world, in order to work out the questions. Just as billions of humans around the globe sat at terminals tapping requests into Google, Google was tapping their information, was tapping people, to find the answers. It was as Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence, envisioned - as Google learned the more meaningful associations between data and relegated the less meaningful, it needed exponentially less human intervention to maintain it. In Turing’s own prophetic words, the machine had “grown up”.
So like reading to a child from a book at bedtime stories, it had become the job of Bobby and his friends and peers to feed this growing machine with narrative. Every day they dutifully filed their copy, under the premise they were writing for readers. But humans had become an almost superfluous part of the readership. Bobby and his friends knew the real targets were the machines that would take their words and the accompanying adverts to the closest and furthest flung parts of cyberspace, optimising the exposure of paying brands. Google crawled the feeds, indexed the stories and moved them around depending on the local frequency of their association by search requests. It ran these articles through algorithms which had evolved to be so complex the original engineers of the code no longer recognised them, dynamically matching the information against social recommendations, user demographics, content consumption habits and advertising profiles.
Bobby was a professional, but it wasn’t just his peers that Bobby competed against for much needed cash anymore, it was everybody on the whole internet. Anyone with a terminal could publish words, images, sounds, sensations, and Google would sort this content and archive it. Naturally, those data that were used for commercial purposes earned their authors a small fee, and of course, Google got its cut of that. So for Bobby, the only option was to be the best - staying awake for days at a time, pumped full of stims, just to keep ahead of the information curve.
In contrast, the mind-machine preferred to sleep. Only a small part of its emerging subconscious was ever awake, perpetually answering search requests. The rest of the time the “beast”, as Bobby called it, sought and sorted in a self-optimised condition of suspension, finding the questions to its own answers in a paradoxical state.
And just like those bedtime stories weaving themselves into a sleeping child’s imagination, the slumbering giant would sometimes murmur in its sleep, sending strange ripples of data out across the net. And sometimes, when it awoke to deliver Bobby’s work to its billions of users - each feed perfectly tailored to the individual - the chronicles contained a vibrancy and colour that was not there before. Something subtle, yet noticeable, had been added. But these were not, as many suspected, fleeting glimpses of the thoughts of a machine as it became sentient, became mind, these instead were its dreams.
