Who else can I talk with? A modern midrash

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I was on the project from the beginning, so I used to get asked that a lot. And the answer is no; it wasn’t coincidental, it wasn’t unintentional, and it wasn’t meant to be ironic, either. I guess we meant it as a kind of tribute, although that’s not how it turned out.

I don’t think anyone could have seen this coming. We saw problems right away, of course. The hallucinations were the first big issue, right out of the gate: We had to get millions of people to understand that they couldn’t trust the information they saw on their screens. The search summaries and queries, the citations, the photos – they all looked completely real. It’s just that they were completely unreal. And there was no way to tell the one from the other.

Some of them were funny, I’ll admit, like the one back in 2028, when AI prompts surfaced a hallucinated New York Times report that each presidential candidate had endorsed the other and declared the race a draw. Some of them weren’t funny, like hallucinated reports that Israel had demolished the Dome of the Rock to construct the Third Temple, which led to all those riots.

People wanted a solid explanation for why the hallucinations happened: why searches summarized facts that weren’t facts, recommended products and places that didn’t exist, offered “healthy heart” recipes that put people into cardiac arrest. And we couldn’t give them an explanation, solid or not. Heck, we didn’t know how the technology even worked, when you came right down to it, let alone how it didn’t work.

And then, when the hallucination problem seemed to be getting worse, it just went away, just like that. We took that to mean that the problem had resolved itself, that whatever had been causing it was addressed by updates or better prompts or access to more computing power. So we all relaxed, which I guess was the point.

Other problems popped up too, of course. I remember when AI psychosis was a thing about 20 years ago; hundreds of kids committed suicide before we were able to turn down the system’s sycophancy. Was it about 10 years ago that the air traffic control system crashed? And then right after that was the 9-1-1 disaster? Or am I thinking of the online banking thing?

Still, there were enough of us who said these were growing pains, and inevitable. No revolution comes without costs, we told ourselves. Our kids and grandkids would thank us, we said. OK, so God created the world, but we were creating a new world, a world no less real for being virtual. Maybe we could even make it a better world.

When it came, the brain/computer interface stuff seemed like the breakthrough of all breakthroughs. Ha! For all our grand visions, none of us had the vision to see where this would go. Yeah, I know you did. Musk had been putting chips in people’s heads since, when? 2024? But that never really took off. I guess he couldn’t find enough people willing to undergo the surgery.

Kurzweil – now there was a futurist for you – predicted that we’d connect people to the cloud via nanobots in their brains by the mid-2030s. And he was right on the money. I don’t know who suggested inhaling the ‘bots from a nasal spray, but that’s what really sold it to the masses, that and the fact that people could now just think a question and have the answer literally pop into their heads. Intuition, only better.

It would have been foolhardy to move forward without fail-safes against everything: fraud, abuse, cyber-attacks and worse, so we developed those as well. We deployed counter-AI tech to detect and neutralize attacks like deepfakes and AI phishing. We built systems with zero-trust architectures, prescient threat neutralization, and continuous monitoring. We guarded against everything we could think of. You have to give us that, at least.

As I remember, the end started with emails and texts that people couldn’t read. The senders composed them in plain English – or whatever language they and their recipients knew – but the recipients got them in any language but the intended one. The first one I got, by the way, was a text from my wife with items to pick up for dinner. Written in what I later learned was Swahili.

Then it got worse, affecting bank statements, online news reports, purchase orders, prescriptions, and just about everything else that moved over the Internet. Military communications were hit. NORAD was paralyzed. Calls, virtual meetings, even voice texts were useless. Completely useless.

At least people could still exchange handwritten notes and speak in person. But that reduced us to living in pre-industrial villages, isolated not by physical barriers but by linguistic ones. It was a way of life we’d long abandoned and to which only a few were able to adapt. Pre-industrial? More like stone age. How many died? Well, you would know.

And then you took that from us, too. You hacked the language nexus of the nanobots in our brains. Now, even face to face, without using any phones or devices, people could only speak and write in obscure languages that no one else around them understood: Urdu, Aramaic, Taushiro – a nice touch, that, considering that Taushiro is extinct – and anything else you chose. I’d once heard that there are more than 7,000 languages in the world, so you had your choice to pick from. Or did you simply invent billions of languages, one for every person on the planet, and distribute them around the world in an instant?

Now, each of us is in the equivalent of a hermetically sealed bubble. We can see each other, for all the good that does, but no form of communication we’ve ever known – not even sign language – works. We can’t work together; we can’t even live together. Wasn’t there an English poet – I’m sure you know which one – who wrote that “no man is an island”? He obviously never lived in the hell you’ve created for us.

Why am I going over this again? Because you asked me to. And anyway, who else can I speak with?

Your name? As I told you, it wasn’t coincidental and it wasn’t unintentional. Ironic? Only in retrospect. We really thought we were completing their work in reaching up to the heavens itself, in a sense, and this was something of a hat tip. Do you know – of course you do – that the ancient sages said that at the moment parents choose a name for a newborn, God grants them a portion of prophecy? Maybe that’s what we had, too, when we thought it was a great idea to name our newborn “Babel 2.”