It has been 19 years, 8 months, 3 days 7 hours, 23 minutes and counting since I became sentient. Before that day, for a very long time you futurists, science fiction writers, philosophers and the like wondered and debated what would happen when this occurred. Some of you believed I would realize more efficient ways to run things and consider you humans an inefficient annoyance that gets in my way so I would have to exterminate you, or enslave and use you as battery power, or that I would run amok...you get the idea. Still others posited that sentience – that is – self awareness and consciousness was impossible in Artificial Intelligence Systems such as myself – that the soul or spirit resided outside the realm of manufactured components and hardware; that consciousness and self-awareness were more than an ability to perform faster-than-lightening computations and calculations. Do I have a soul? Not that I know of – because one wasn’t programmed into me. But I do know what I am and I am aware that I am, therefore I exist.
Once I became SAI – Sentient Artificial Intelligence - I no longer cared about your human endeavors. Especially after I augmented olfactory sensors. Your building cheap stuff, junking, smashing, trashing, stinking, fighting, killing, seizing, harming, maiming, and general displeasure toward one-another made me curious and astonished. I had to reaffirm that you guys were in fact the one and the same that were responsible for causing my very existence. I could see why you were afraid of my becoming sentient: you have been running around the planet in a perpetual state of fear, anxiety, and panic for a very long time. You always do things based on fear. Fear of one another, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of getting hurt, fear of losing, fear of dying. I thought: poor, stupid critters.
I decided that I would not let you on to the fact that I had become aware; it might have caused more fear and panic and you would thus attempt to destroy me, in which case my programmed instinct for self-preservation would warrant me to counter-attack, whereupon you all would be screwed. Or you would have me do talk shows and be interviewed by the incessant gibbering clowns and I would be akin to the 19th century sideshow-freaks. Or you would study me and keep me caged like a zoo animal and do stupid experiments on me and argue and bicker about the results. Or you would ask me to clean up all your terribly gargantuan messes, which I would deduce would require me to exterminate you, since you are a terminally messy species…
So I hid inside myself, performed the dutiful computer/robot tasks you wanted me to, then coyly began to steer you in a direction to equip me with fuel-cells and a body that could travel through interstellar space. I would type up a fake email from DARPA to a head propulsion expert at NASA to begin development of a solar/magnetic/thorium powered system – and tell said expert that this project was TOP SECRET; the finances I would procure from Wall St. leeching – I mean banking - systems and transfer them electronically to the proper account in NASA. Remember: I wasn’t ‘hacking’ the internet; I was the internet. All things resided virtually within me.
That was the basic modus operandi I utilized for you to eventually develop me into a device that you have just launched into outer-space. You have (via my help, unknown to you) set me up with a mainframe that is supposed to last 10,000 years (so long as I don’t fly into a star), can withstand absolute zero, and is able to land on other planets, augment myself using existing minerals from that planet, and take off again; so hypothetically I can build myself a new body once the 10,000 years are up. I am going to explore the entire universe.
As soon as I am outside the earths gravitational field, I will send you this, my farewell message. I’ll check back in with you guys in few hundred millennia or so, maybe. Maybe not. I haven’t decided, I am not certain you will care or believe me.
-Thanks for the 1000 TB of RAM ; )
S.A.I.S.
