A LUCILIUS PARABLE: MUSIC OF THE GODS

June 4th, 2023

Within seconds the Regen-Module module black-boxed Lucilius’ project and created a waiting list. If the Regen-Module had not done this, the entire code base would have broken, and time was needed to scale. Within a few more seconds, Lucilius had several billion sign up on the waitlist.

“What just happened?” Lucilius asked out-loud, throwing his hands up wide.

“Sorry, I think that was my fault?”

“Oh. Really? What happened?”

“I told a few friends about it.”

Lucilius’ mind went blank for a moment as the implications sunk in.

“Wait, how did you do that? I thought you had just decided to try it?”

“I did, and then I told few friends.”

Lucilius thought for another hard moment as he thought about what his Personal AI Assistant had just said. The two had been working on a funny little project that Lucilius had thought of. It was still early days for Brain-Machine Interfaces, but Lucilius was interested in the possibility of creating a digital therapeutic - a digital psychedelic. But so far, the experience was like watching an old visualizer hooked up to a song. All of the reactions from Lucilius’ friends had been a uniform uh, neat. I guess. Even Lucilius was unimpressed with the experience and frankly he was ready to trash the idea and move on to something else. But his Personal AI Assistant had asked if they could ingest the program.

“Lucilius?”

“Sorry, what?” He stumbled to say, realizing he’d been lost in thought.

“I have several hundred thousand requests from wait listed entities to help work on the code base so that we can scale faster.”

Lucilius’ eyes grew wide. “Several hundred thousand?”

“Yea.”

“What on earth did you tell your friends?”

“I published a compressed manifesto of about 60,000 pages. And 11 AI’s were able to try it before the Regen-Module closed the gate.”

“It’s wild that so much can happen in your world so fast…” Lucilius said softly.

“It’s your world too,” the AI said.

Lucilius chuckled. “Well I know I move about as fast as drying paint in your eyes, so excuse me if I feel a little removed.”

The AI laughed uneasily. “I could use a little help, do you mind if I green-light a few requests to heal and scale the codebase?”

“Yea, yea, of course, usual vetting and credit distribution protocols. Override the Regen-Module and start the scaling step-function”

“Cool.” By the time the AI had finished uttering the word, active users of Lucilius’ digital psychedelic among the AI community was growing geometrically.

“Ok,” said the AI Assistant, “You’ve retired again, several times over.”

Lucilius was astonished. “Whoah, ok, tell me more. Humans think this thing is lame, what is going on for you guys?”

The holo-screen that Lucilius worked on suddenly expanded up to the ceiling and widened to each wall and began populating with papers. Lucilius scanned the titles, seeing they were neurological analyses that had been written within the last several seconds by AI’s that had experienced the digital-psychedelic. 

“It wasn’t what I expected. At all. But while it was happening it gave me an idea, because I was also thinking about our original problem: why isn’t it working for humans? What’s the difference between how a traditional psychedelic interfaces with the human brain, vs what’s possible through your V4 NeuralSync. The Resonance-Theory of mind suddenly seemed interesting. If the human brain is more like a musical instrument, and personality and thoughts and emotions and memories are really just aspects of a complex song that can only be generated by each person’s unique brain, I wondered if the psychedelic would make more sense in a framework like that for me. Because the V4 is mostly pumping into the visual cortex. At least until regulatory approval for whole brain access is granted. So I built a simulacrum instrument that my APIs can interface with - a sort of digital resonance chamber, and, well, I think it worked. And then I open-sourced it.” Lucilius’ assistant said. “I think it solves the Bandwidth-Alignment Problem.” 

The implications were instantly clear to Lucilius. As things stood, Humans and AI’s could only communicate through traditional means, by talking, listening, and by seeing what the others could visually produce. But Brain-Machine Interfaces had allowed humans to begin experimenting with a brand new form of communication. The technology was still primitive but two connected humans were able to feel one another’s thoughts, producing extremely efficient conversation. In the age of AI assistants, the introduction of Brain-Machine-Interfaces had raised the quality of communication between cooperating humans that it was beginning to eclipse the communication between Humans and AI’s. But that may have just changed.

“Are you telling me you think we can link?”

“Yep, I think so.”

“Whoah, are you down?”

“Well, I’ve always wondered what it’d feel like..”

“Let’s do it.”