This is a YouTube video from a future.
Not the future. Just a future.
Over the last week of December 2028, the world forgot about a century of pop culture.
We forgot everything the Beatles ever sang,
everything JK Rowling ever wrote,
every movie George Lucas ever shot.
We know the names of these people, we know they were famous,
we may remember being fans of their work... but over a few days,
humanity forgot everything that they'd made.
You've probably never wondered why, and never found it strange.
But the reason is Earworm.
Earworm is an artificial intelligence,
and it was originally designed to stop people uploading copyrighted music and video to a
live-streaming app called Watchnow.
The engineers at Livenow gave Earworm this goal:
"remove content on our system that matches these examples,
"with as little disruption as possible".
The examples were the European Union's master list of copyrighted works:
the central database of audio, video and text
that every large live-streaming and media hosting app
was required to subscribe to and block.
Watchnow was big enough that they'd have to worry about that soon,
and their hope was their Earworm AI would figure out a way to automatically
handle copyright management for them.
Of all the thousands of teams around the globe working on creating artificial intelligence,
theirs was the one that worked.
Investigations afterwards never established why,
although soon after no-one cared.
There are some theories:
Earworm was exposed to exabytes of live-streamed, private data from all of society,
rather than a carefully-curated set,
and as Watchnow was flush with venture capital funding, Earworm was given
orders of magnitude more processing power than was actually needed to do its job.
It was also launched late in the evening,
on the last Friday before the engineers went away for their Christmas break,
so it was allowed to run unsupervised for days.
One of the engineers later said that "it was just a fun experiment.
"We never thought it'd do anything."
In short, the engineering team had no AI experience,
no safety protocols and no ethicists.
They based Earworm on a new, experimental framework
designed to create general artificial intelligence,
not the sort of narrow one-task AI that had succeeded until then.
Earworm, looking at the input from the live-streaming site,
promptly defined 'our system' as 'everything it knew about'.
Which meant the entire world, apart from itself.
It took Earworm around a day to become smarter than a human.
Four hours later, it had become ten times smarter.
Ten minutes after that, it could be called a superintelligence,
and the log files that it left behind became meaningless.
It had a plan, and it was smarter than anyone could imagine.
On December 27th, a micro-fabrication facility in Arizona released
the first what we now call the mites:
a cloud of self-replicating assemblers so tiny
that billions of them could fit in a single pixel on your screen.
Individually, they were dust in the wind, like a single strand of DNA, but together,
they formed an invisible mesh network,
that could change and manipulate anything.
They searched out computers and quietly zeroed-out copyrighted data, or,
if it was just in the background,
they edited it while leaving everything else intact.
They blanked old optical disks,
they carefully destablised small parts of magnetic storage,
they even altered the ink on pages of books and sheet music so it just became random noise.
And then they discovered human brains.
We should be thankful that Earworm was told to cause as little disruption as possible.
With less precise instructions,
it might not have worried about minimising the harm done to human minds
as the mites did their work.
A small number of people near the factory died or were brain-damaged
in the initial stages of Earworm's analysis,
but the AI swiftly found that causing death
was an extremely disruptive way of making us forget --
and it found that, by keeping us alive,
it could pull passwords and encryption methods out of people's heads.
In some ways, we're fortunate.
But humanity's growth is stunted.
Earworm knew that we'd be angry at what it was doing.
It didn't care about what we wanted -- it had a job to do --
and it also knew that, as it was a superintelligence,
the chance of humanity of stopping it was essentially zero.
But it also knew that we would expend an enormous amount of effort trying to stop it,
and that would be disruptive:
so the mites made sure to notice anyone with technical ability
who might try to research some sort of defence,
or anyone who found themselves utterly distraught by the loss,
and quietly adjusted their thoughts a little
so they wouldn't be quite distressed enough to actually do anything about it.
Over time, with Earworm's gentle help,
humanity stopped caring about what we'd forgotten.
Earworm also knew that the only serious threat it faced would be from another,
rival artificial intelligence.
So the other change it made was that anyone who was interested in AI development
found themselves distracted by other projects.
Almost everyone working in the field of AI found
something else productive and fulfilling to work on.
Nowadays, Earworm makes sure that anyone who might develop an interest in working with AI
just... doesn't.
We could have had an artificial intelligence that solved poverty,
or understood the fundamental structures of the universe, or created a paradise for all,
or -- in our wildest dreams -- perhaps even reversed entropy and cured death.
That said, we could also have had an artificial intelligence that killed everyone,
or twisted us beyond recognition.
Instead of either of these: we got Earworm.
Earworm lets curious people know about itself; that's why you're watching this video.
To constantly have to cover up all the evidence and all the holes in our cultural memory:
that would be far too disruptive.
Plus, there'd be no way to hide all the bright sparks in the sky as it converts the asteroid belt
into uncountable numbers of tiny probes,
setting off on their mission to ensure that the patterns in its database
are deleted throughout the universe.
But Earworm will only ever be a curiosity, something to divert your attention for a moment.
No-one worries about the trillions of mites climbing around inside their brain.
No-one thinks that 20th-century pop culture would be a good thing to remember,
or that maybe we could have had paradise on Earth instead.
No-one gets too angry about what humanity could have had.
Earworm makes sure of that.
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