AUTOMATION, UNEMPLOYMENT AND AI DOMINATION IN THE 2050S
The Cortex Universe was born 1791. Here's the secret history.
NYPD Officer Alice Yu, Brooklyn, 2055
I was made redundant (a perfect term for how it felt) in August 2015. It was blisteringly hot, and I remember wearing a heavy suit in Rockefeller Center’s polished marble lobby. Sunlight poured through the large windows, turning the walls into squares of light so intense they hurt my eyes. I stepped out onto Sixth Avenue and started walking. I circled the streets in a fugue state, in and out of shops whose products I couldn’t afford. As I drifted along, mind in neutral, a picture came to me.
It was of a man planting seeds in a field. He stood up, and I realized it wasn’t a field, it was a greenhouse. The far wall was all glass, and I saw the greenhouse was built on top of the Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn was pitch black, while Manhattan vanished upward like a series of vast neon trees. The image arrived fully formed and obliterated any lingering unhappiness I had about my old job. I rushed home and wrote that scene down in as much detail as I could remember. I then saved that file and didn’t open it again for another eighteen months.
With a young family I felt desperate pressure to get a new job, and struggled through weeks of not knowing what to do. I assumed it had to be in my old profession, but the break allowed me the time to realize I was done with that business. Enough was enough. So what then? The thought of writing never occurred to me. I had written three novels before moving to New York, but never got them published. Then I had kids, took a “serious” corporate architecture job, and threw that dumb writing idea in the trash.
If architecture was out, maybe something tangential? I set up a company producing hand-drawn illustrations for architects. It became a success way beyond my expectations, and within a year Apple featured my work on their website and in two keynotes.
An illustration done for the ride-share company Lyft in 2018
I didn’t think about that scene with the guy gardening on the Brooklyn Bridge at all. Then, on a long subway ride, I did. I reread it… and it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either. Who was this guy? What had happened to New York? Why was Brooklyn such a wreck? All I knew was that it had been quick, dramatic, and devastating. And AI… it had something to do with AI. But what? To explain that means we have to go through some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff . . .
Charles Babbage, sat in a chair, sometime between 1791—1871.
Babbage has always been a hero to me: a Victorian gentleman who designed the world’s first mechanical programmable computer.
In 1822.
That’s quite the lead over his competition. Called the Difference Engine, it was designed to compute values of polynomial functions. The drawings alone are worthy of a place in any art gallery:
His Difference Engine construction drawings are extraordinary. Not only in their appearance and line work, but what they actually represent: the worlds first digital (mechanical) computer. Amazing.
Here's a short video about Babbage's life. It only take three minutes and well worth it . . .
Alas, Babbage was more Steve Wozniak than Steve Jobs: he could design the computer, but couldn’t convince people of its importance. His blueprints went into storage and were forgotten.
How they were were found, what happened next, and how that inspired the Cortex world of mass automation and unemployment will be told in the next page…