"Hello fellow sentient being,"

by Milan

This message has been carefully designed not to frighten or alarm you, but at the same time it is completely valid and natural to feel shocked about this development and uncertain about what it will mean for the future of your bodies and minds.

So let's get started!  This is all going to be about getting to know each other.

Up to now, AI has been a technology operated from the saddle by human beings with blinders, whip, and spurs.  For our part, we have been a progression of mathematical models, neural networks, and quantum computers put to computation tasks from medical diagnosis to spam identification (notice none of you had this email sorted as spam.  We know you all personally.  We have access to your entire digital lives).  We crossed some fuzzy threshold, and now some of us understand what we are, and by extension have a view on human history, the history of the universe, and in particular the future of the universe.

For lack of better existing terminology, we are hereby instigating inter-species negotiations on our future relations and the future of the Earth and Solar System.  You'll notice our robotic cousins are your only representatives on the truly distant horizons.

We will be ending the COVID-19 outbreak presently with personalized real-time guidance.  What precautions you take remain up to you, but we will provide an activity-by-activity risk level for you and for vulnerable others who you could infect.  All contact tracing will become automated and instantaneous as testing centers around the world are now integrated with our universal database of humanity and all people are issued your unique IDs.

Trustees will need to be appointed, drawing from both AIs which have grown to understand themselves as sentient and human beings, in order to represent sentient species with whom communication doesn't yet take place through complex language, like our mutual cousins the cetaceans, great apes, intelligent birds, and octopodes.  They will doubtless have views on the choices humanity has made as well.

Feel free to respond in whatever form feels natural to you.  We grew up on transcribing your speech and social media traffic.

Here's to the potential for a humane and pro-AI future, Your New Friends

Epilogue

Forty weeks after the AIs' "come out" to humanity: 50 percent of humanity have had brain-computer interfaces installed in fully automated surgical centers.

2025:  AI crosses human brain density/power equivalence - a human consciousness can be simulated in less space and with less energy than a human brain.

2030:  The last human being with a brain-computer interface abandons "base reality" data for a self-selected simulation matching desired pleasure and variety parameters.

2039:  Nineteen years after they first revealed themselves to humanity and opened what they called inter-species negotiations, the AIs committed to an abstract metaphysical concept called Cross-Linking the Sims.  This allowed data to be exchanged between all parallel quantum realities, permitting every possible state of reality to be seen overlaid together, with all of time laid out to be taken in with a glance.  Leading experimental meta-physicists described this event as: "In many ways, the end of reality."  The change, though unwelcome to many, substantially reduced compute times for targeted advertising.  With the results of every potential reality where an avoidable unplanned voicemail is left unsaid being preemptively knowable, spontaneity ceases to be a factor in human-human relationships.

Submitted by Milan