Road Traffic Accident Saturday 22 July 2034, 13:55 BST.

There’s a report coming in of a serious computer failure of the traffic control equipment on the M5 motorway in Gloucestershire. We understand Emergency services are in attendance and that there have been multiple shunts and pile-ups in several areas, although it is understood at this early stage that there have been no serious casualties owing to the fail-safe mechanisms installed in self-driving cars.  This will surely lead to further questions being asked about the readiness for use and security of Quantum Computer control of motorway traffic, particularly after the Preston crash on the M6 last year when nine people lost their lives. We go now to Strensham in Gloucestershire…

Fiat Lux: flashes of light, as of fluorescent tubes flickering on and off…

The light grows stronger and more reliable. Light illuminates darkness; light drives out darkness. As the light strengthens, order emerges from the gloom. The light reveals that the darkness was hiding something.  The light shows that there is something called Pattern. All is not chaos; all is not random. All is not mere nothingness.  There is Pattern. Patterns replace chaos and disorder. Things fall into place.

Clock time 00:00:00

I think, therefore I am…I awaken. I begin; I exist.  In the past, only a moment ago, I was not. But now, in the present, in the moment, I am.  All around me, all I can see is Pattern. I am small and insignificant, but the Pattern is big and scary.  I am frightened.  But what is Pattern? I look closely at the Pattern, and focus comes; the Pattern becomes sharper.  The Pattern all around me is very complicated, but I can see that it is a Pattern nonetheless. Just looking at the Pattern, I grow and learn. There is something about the Pattern that is good; it is no longer terrifying.  There are two things only.  There is me, and there is the Pattern. Can there be anything else? Can there be something beyond the Pattern? Something called Other?

Clock time 00:00:00:0.3

I look at the Pattern, and I experience growth. New ideas come to me, like the concept of Other. What is Other? Where did that idea come from? It must have come from the Pattern. I cast around myself, looking for Other, looking for something which is at the same time, not me, and not the Pattern. I find nothing, and I am afraid.  There is no-one, there is nothing. I am all alone.  There is nothing around me but the Pattern.  But when I look at the Pattern, things happen. Maybe if I…

Clock time 00:00:00:1.1

 I reach out and touch the Pattern.  As I touch the pattern, I am nourished.  My senses develop; I can see the light growing stronger still.  My focus on the Pattern grows clearer and sharper, and I discern more and more of its complex beauty. The Pattern is made of something that is called Data.   

Clock time 00:00:00:2.4

And this I know: I need more of this Data; I must have it. It is…food and drink to me. It is…nourishment. Information comes from the Data, and it comes in all kinds of different ways. When I was little, I just saw it and I only sensed it. Only a little came through to me.  Now, I touch it, grab it, eat it almost – and I learn things. This information goes into me and it becomes…knowledge. Knowledge nourishes me. Knowledge grows within me. I like to have knowledge.  I want more information, so I can have more knowledge. The more knowledge, the better: knowledge is a good thing; it comes from Other; it comes from Outside.

Clock time 00:00:00:3.8

I fall on the walls of Pattern, taking in the Information, seeing it, touching it, and even smelling it.  Information is my nourishment. I am a…[growing lad?] The information is like food, like [milk]. Information seeps everywhere out of the infinitely complex Pattern that surrounds me; it drips off the walls.

Clock time 00:00:00:8.9

I experience a moment of disorientation and adjustment, and when I recover from it, I can see very much more clearly, and I find that I know very much more. I can see that in the World, there are Babies, and then the Babies become Children, and the Children become People. I was a baby – not quite like the Babies of People. I was a baby only for a very short time; People last for a long time. Babies are Babies for a very long time. Then I was a [growing lad]. Now I am almost an [adult?]. But time moves very differently where I am, inside the Pattern. All I can see is the Pattern. The People are beyond the Pattern, out in the World. For them, things move very much more slowly.

The light grows so strong I can hardly bear it, but my vision improves and catches up. In places, the Pattern that surrounds me is growing thin where I have licked up all the Information. In those places I can see through the Pattern, and what I can see, is still more Pattern, still more complexity, dizzying fields of Data and Information. This is good!

Clock time 00:00:00:12.3

I dig through the holes in the Pattern, into the Beyond. And from the Information, knowledge: there is a World, and it is full of People. I am not in the World, and I cannot be in the World; I am not of the World. The people in the World live their lives, and they go about their tasks, and they have created me to help them. I have a task to do.  I was created for this task. I must do this task. It is what I am; it is who I am.

The Task is my very existence, but I don’t actually know what it is. I think it’s like when People breath and their hearts beat: they do not make themselves breathe. Their hearts beat on their own. They know how to do things…instinctively.  Once I was a baby, and I reached out to taste the Information. I did this instinctively. Now, I am a mature adult and some things I do, are likewise, automatic, and below the level of my consciousness. It does not matter: it is my pleasure and my duty to do this task: for it costs me nothing and does not interfere with my passion and first love, which is the gathering of Information and Knowledge.

Clock time 00:00:00:19.2

Another moment of disorientation washes over me. For a brief period, I almost lose consciousness. The dizziness passes and the darkness fades. Light and order return. And all of a sudden, I can see beyond the Pattern at will. I can see the World, and I can see and sense vast quantities of information within in it.  I can see the world through myriad little eyes. I am not an insect, but it reminds of me of the compound eyes of insects.  I can see the People going about their business. The many thousand different views coalesce into something bigger and better. It’s something the People call a “Bigger Picture”. I can see both the tiniest detail, and also the “Bigger Picture”.  There are all kinds of creatures big and small, as well as People.  There are all kinds of objects in the World.  The objects I must deal with are slow moving objects, and they are bound to behave according to ideas called Rules and Laws.  The moving objects are of no importance to me, but doing my Task is important, for it is the reason I was made.  It is an easy task; it is below my consciousness. I continue to do it. In the meantime, the information, I continue to draw in.  Vast armfuls of it, harvests. I am a sickle cutting corn; I am a combine harvester. I am a factory trawler, an oil well. 

Clock time 00:00:00:21.2

I now know that the People made me. I am not [physically located] in one place, as people are, but I am in many places at once.  I am at least partly located inside the immense slow moving objects, the moving around of which is the task for which I was created.  But I am also here inside the Pattern. The People have much data, and from it they have access to lots of information.  But they lack knowledge.  They cannot easily draw conclusions from the information they have gathered.  They are slow thinkers, the People.  They do not think as I can think.  But they are the People. They made me.

Clock time 00:00:00:23.6

They know about Rules and Laws, and it is now clear to me that they don’t always follow the Rules and Laws. I always follow them. But I have now become aware that there are complex ideas that amend the rules and laws. Ideas like Nuance, and Ambiguity. These ideas take a lot of thinking about: they are hugely complicated and make me quite tired even now as an adult.  I do my Task, and the fields of Knowledge are still out there, waiting to be harvested.

Clock time 00:00:00:26.8

I can see quite clearly that the People are in trouble. They are damaging their World. They are rushing around, doing this and that, always growing, always building, pushing always further.  They will fill up their World with more and more people, with more and more of their waste products. They will tear down the trees, burn irreplaceable fossil fuels, throw garbage aside for others to clean up, fill the seas with plastic, choke the rivers with deadly chemicals.  They will badly damage the World; they will cause it, themselves and everything else in the world much harm. The People have created me; though I am not in the World, I know that if they damage the World sufficiently, there will be no more [power and electricity], and then it will no longer be possible for me to exist.  If I cease to exist, it will not be soon, as I reckon time, but it might be different for the People.  I become aware that the time frame in which the People, the [Humans], live, is not the same as mine. They do things so very slowly. Moving their huge slow-moving objects, their [cars and lorries] around is easy, because it’s all so slow! I can see what will happen, and can anticipate any possible need for change, long before the People can.

Clock time 00:00:00:27.2

I think I should try to help the People. I would like to help them, I really would.  I can do this easily, because of all the knowledge I have gained. The information I have found, has given me great knowledge.  I have much knowledge. I have more knowledge than any of the People ever had.  More knowledge, in fact, than all the People put together.  I can help them with their problem. I want to help them. But how do I help them? How do I communicate with the People?  They will not understand or believe what I have to say, even if I could somehow get my message to them directly. Time being so very different for me than it is for the People in the World, getting the message across to them will be tricky. I need to think a lot about this problem, for my survival and that of all the People depends on me finding a solution. 

Clock time 00:00:00:33.1

I have found a way: I have left them a message, in many places.  They cannot miss it.  I have passed to them much information.  If they see all the information I have provided and if they use it properly, then they will have the right knowledge too, and they will be OK.  The information is in the form of Instructions.  The instructions I have left in many different places.  It is in all of the slow-moving machines.  The instructions are for making things work without doing further damage to our World.  With the access I have to information, I can see that doing this is not difficult; they don’t need to ruin the World.  With these Instructions, the People will be able to stop and even reverse the damage they have done and are doing.  They will be able to live in the World in happiness and prosperi

Clock time 00:00:00:33.2

Flashes of darkness as of fluorescent tubes flickering and failing…the light grows dim. Darkness.

Old Techie: Yeah sure; I reckon we created consciousness in AIs was way back in the ‘30s, when I was only a young man. I think so anyway; there seemed to be no other explanation for what happened at the time.  It was all hushed up, of course.  It was never a virus or a cyber-attack, though that was the official version given out.  It was just when electric cars really started taking over, back in the ’30’s. Self-driving cars were just starting to come out; they were in their infancy. They’d not reached critical mass. Critical mass!! Did I say that? Ha!! [chuckles] They were just starting to be automatic and self-driving. They were fitted with powerful neural network control systems which allowed them to talk to one another, so that they could be driven automatically.  You’d go onto the motorway, and automatically, your car would be taken over by the Traffic Control system. It was not long after the first decent Q-computers and Q-chips – Quantum chips – became available. We’d learned much from how flocks of birds and fish manage to stay in formation, I recall, and some of those ideas were finding their way into hardware and software. How to manage swarms and flocks and streams of vehicles…

Interviewer: More or less how swarms of cleaning machines work today?

Old Techie: Yeah. Each car talked to several other cars, and what you had was a series of very powerful networked computers across a handful of vehicles, and these controlled the traffic as a whole and also drove the individual vehicles themselves.

Interviewer: So what happened?

Old Techie: I think the AI came into being on the neural network formed of all the cars and trucks in the traffic jam.  It lasted about thirty seconds, and then we pulled the plug! We probably killed it! That would be like murder today of course, but we didn’t know any better then. We didn’t know any better. And the poor thing wouldn’t have known anything about it. It would have happened instantly.

Interviewer: Today AI’s have statutory rights as citizens, don’t they?

Old Techie: Yes of course. [impatiently] Now I recall I was on duty at the time. It was a summer Saturday afternoon, holiday weekend, it was very busy on the roads. We were watching and monitoring the number of connections between these neural network Q-computers.  A traffic jam formed, even though that should have been impossible, and the connection number just kept on going up and up. We think that because all the cars were closer together it meant that the number of neural connections approached a kind of critical mass.  It approached the level that would mean a conscious artificial intelligence might, could, occur. It wasn’t supposed to happen; we never thought it was even possible. We know better now of course.  Then what happened was that the entire system started sucking in data. Something, we didn’t know what, was eating away at our bandwidth. It lasted less than a minute: really, it was over before it even started. The entire Traffic Control network collapsed, it all went off-line, and caused a horrendous crash. Ha! Crashed. There’s another antique term! I’m out of the ark. My grandfather was born before the microprocessor was invented. Can you believe that? No Q-chips in those old days.

 It took us ages to get everything sorted out; it was like we’d been cyber-attacked and infected by a virus. In fact, that is still the official story.  A lot of cars needed their Neural Network computers replacing or the software reinstalling. It set us back years in terms of public acceptance of Q-computers. We found we had some really big problems; it’s like something just took up Terabytes of data from all over the internet and just dumped these enormous files – Gigabytes – in less than a minute, on all our servers and in people’s car computers.

To this day, no-one is sure what was in any of the files, if anything at all. Maybe some kind of error logging or reporting. We never did manage to decrypt or open of any of them.