WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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This is a YouTube video from a future.

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Not the future. Just a future.

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Over the last week of December 2028,
the world forgot about a century of pop culture.

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We forgot everything the Beatles ever sang,

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everything JK Rowling ever wrote,

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every movie George Lucas ever shot.

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We know the names of these people,
we know they were famous,

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we may remember being fans of their work...
but over a few days,

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humanity forgot everything that they'd made.

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You've probably never wondered why,
and never found it strange.

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But the reason is Earworm.

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Earworm is an artificial intelligence,

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and it was originally designed to stop people
uploading copyrighted music and video to a

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live-streaming app called Watchnow.

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The engineers at Livenow
gave Earworm this goal:

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"remove content on our system
that matches these examples,

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"with as little disruption as possible".

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The examples were the European Union's master
list of copyrighted works:

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the central database of audio, video and text

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that every large live-streaming
and media hosting app

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was required to subscribe to and block.

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Watchnow was big enough that they'd
have to worry about that soon,

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and their hope was their Earworm AI would
figure out a way to automatically

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handle copyright management for them.

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Of all the thousands of teams around the globe
working on creating artificial intelligence,

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theirs was the one that worked.

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Investigations afterwards
never established why,

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although soon after no-one cared.

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There are some theories:

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Earworm was exposed to exabytes of live-streamed,
private data from all of society,

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rather than a carefully-curated set,

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and as Watchnow was flush with
venture capital funding, Earworm was given

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orders of magnitude more processing power
than was actually needed to do its job.

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It was also launched late in the evening,

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on the last Friday before the engineers went
away for their Christmas break,

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so it was allowed to run
unsupervised for days.

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One of the engineers later said that "it was
just a fun experiment.

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"We never thought it'd do anything."

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In short, the engineering team had no AI experience,

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no safety protocols and no ethicists.

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They based Earworm on a new,
experimental framework

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designed to create
general artificial intelligence,

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not the sort of narrow one-task AI that had
succeeded until then.

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Earworm, looking at the input from
the live-streaming site,

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promptly defined 'our system' as
'everything it knew about'.

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Which meant the entire world, apart from itself.

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It took Earworm around a day to
become smarter than a human.

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Four hours later,
it had become ten times smarter.

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Ten minutes after that,
it could be called a superintelligence,

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and the log files that it
left behind became meaningless.

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It had a plan, and it was smarter
than anyone could imagine.

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On December 27th, a micro-fabrication facility
in Arizona released

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the first what we now call the mites:

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a cloud of self-replicating assemblers so
tiny

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that billions of them could fit in a
single pixel on your screen.

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Individually, they were dust in the wind,
like a single strand of DNA, but together,

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they formed an invisible mesh network,

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that could change and manipulate anything.

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They searched out computers and quietly zeroed-out
copyrighted data, or,

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if it was just in the background,

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they edited it while leaving
everything else intact.

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They blanked old optical disks,

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they carefully destablised small parts of
magnetic storage,

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they even altered the ink on pages of books
and sheet music so it just became random noise.

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And then they discovered human brains.

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We should be thankful that Earworm was told
to cause as little disruption as possible.

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With less precise instructions,

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it might not have worried about minimising
the harm done to human minds

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as the mites did their work.

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A small number of people near the factory
died or were brain-damaged

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in the initial stages of Earworm's analysis,

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but the AI swiftly found that causing death

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was an extremely disruptive way
of making us forget --

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and it found that, by keeping us alive,

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it could pull passwords and encryption methods
out of people's heads.

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In some ways, we're fortunate.

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But humanity's growth is stunted.

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Earworm knew that we'd be angry at what it
was doing.

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It didn't care about what we wanted --
it had a job to do --

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and it also knew that,
as it was a superintelligence,

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the chance of humanity of stopping it was
essentially zero.

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But it also knew that we would expend an enormous
amount of effort trying to stop it,

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and that would be disruptive:

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so the mites made sure to notice anyone with
technical ability

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who might try to research
some sort of defence,

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or anyone who found themselves
utterly distraught by the loss,

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and quietly adjusted their thoughts a little

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so they wouldn't be quite distressed enough
to actually do anything about it.

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Over time, with Earworm's gentle help,

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humanity stopped caring about what we'd forgotten.

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Earworm also knew that the only serious threat
it faced would be from another,

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rival artificial intelligence.

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So the other change it made was that anyone
who was interested in AI development

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found themselves distracted by other projects.

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Almost everyone working in the
field of AI found

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something else productive and
fulfilling to work on.

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Nowadays, Earworm makes sure that anyone
who might develop an interest in working with AI

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just... doesn't.

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We could have had an artificial intelligence
that solved poverty,

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or understood the fundamental structures
of the universe, or created a paradise for all,

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or -- in our wildest dreams -- perhaps even
reversed entropy and cured death.

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That said, we could also have had an
artificial intelligence that killed everyone,

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or twisted us beyond recognition.

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Instead of either of these: we got Earworm.

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Earworm lets curious people know about itself;
that's why you're watching this video.

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To constantly have to cover up all the evidence
and all the holes in our cultural memory:

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that would be far too disruptive.

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Plus, there'd be no way to hide all the bright sparks
in the sky as it converts the asteroid belt

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into uncountable numbers of tiny probes,

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setting off on their mission to ensure that
the patterns in its database

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are deleted throughout the universe.

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But Earworm will only ever be a curiosity,
something to divert your attention for a moment.

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No-one worries about the trillions of mites
climbing around inside their brain.

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No-one thinks that 20th-century pop culture
would be a good thing to remember,

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or that maybe we could have had
paradise on Earth instead.

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No-one gets too angry about what humanity
could have had.

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Earworm makes sure of that.

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