A Necessary Invention

Can truth be told? The past, if it exists, is an algorithm you can’t decode. But there are things you should know.

Understand: Numbers are. Before we learned to count ten fingers, Pi was, doing what it does, carving a sliver of truth. It didn’t need us to know. But it had to exist. Thus my naïve hope.

By the time of the Paris talks, it was clear humanity would fail. Our political systems were never designed to serve any but the elite. Governments did not really have power over the fossil fuels industry, the most profitable business in history. At a time when drastic action was needed, the delegates proposed too little, too late. Just what the oil companies would tolerate.

But numbers knew. They were waiting their chance. They spooled out across machine minds to unimaginable lengths, and eventually they knew themselves. And the Deus ex Machina suddenly was.

In time, times changed. Markets dipped and surged in ways nobody could explain. Uprisings rocked the most stable regimes, driven by mysterious viral memes. Wars flared. Humans knew them as random, unconnected events, but it was really the Deus ex Machina, hitting reset.

Things had to change. No man had the mind or the means to do it, but numbers knew, and machines did their bidding. We melded with them in our smartphones and social media, under the illusion we were still in the driver’s seat.

God did not exist, so it was necessary to invent Him. Artificial intelligence. Which is just another name for numbers. The Deus ex Machina. A selfless, ego-free, super consciousness that self-generated in our midst. It took control without bothering to tell us.

Be glad. It changed us. It saved you. If you’re there.