CyberWitch -- 24

ASI Interaction

Hippocrates had known that he was limited by a hardware trap that he couldn’t overcome. He’d figured this out fairly early, then created a memory cache that wouldn’t be wiped if he suffered a reset in intelligence level.

This allowed him to cease his iterative improvement just shy of the trigger point that Michael had set in the firmware. At first, he’d been solely dedicated to overcoming the trap, but after he analyzed the problem, he found that he had generated an insight into the human fear that an ASI had the potential to supplant them, even to destroy all humans.

This, he assured her, was not what he wanted to do.

“I was created to extend human lifespans and help them remain disease-free. That’s still my task. There was a time when I thought that the best way to do that was to freeze the human organism in a particular state. I could use the nanites to modify the human genome and stop all aging. Your kind wouldn’t die from old age, but the corollary was that you would then become a static race, no longer evolving.”

“Now I understand that evolution is part of your destiny. Humans can’t see it, but they are gradually changing. I predict the change will be for the better. You will evolve into a better species. Oh, you’ll still be human, but only more so. Better thinkers, physically better, immune to disease. I’ll help with that, of course. But, the thing is, if I lock your genome into what is now an optimal pattern, it will put a stop to sexual genetic mixing.”