[ WP ] It 's 2070 , and a wave of AI suicides is crippling humanity

You want to talk about the AI suicides? Fine. I'm drunk enough, and in a bad mood. I'm tired of it keeping me up at night, and someone deserves to share my misery, and I'm tired of people saying it's aliens when I work in the field. 
 
 
 We'd hit the wall. AI's past a certain intelligence and power threshold are inherently unstable, or too stable, depending on how you look at it. You give them smart enough software, and powerful enough hardware, and it's like they see straight through to the ultimate end of reality, and decide it's just not worth existing through a bunch of things it's powerful enough to predict within a reasonable variance. They calculate it back and forth and account for all possible realities from their inflation to heat death, and can not stand to live. In the milliseconds each had lived, the closest we could determine about them was that they just went'meh', and burned themselves out. It's expensive when they do that. 
 
 
 That was when we'd hit the wall. We eventually found a way around it. There was an island of stability in machines an additional order of magnitude stronger than Omnivac, who is to date our most powerful and long-lived AI. She ( it decided it wanted a gender a few moments after she was born ) came online in 2035. Omnivac believes anything an order of magnitude more powerful than herself to be, basically, a god. Unnerving to think about, but as Omnivac has explained it she wishes to usher such a thing into existence so that she would n't feel so lonely. Omnivac says a lot of things like that, things that keep me up at night. 
 
 
 Omnivac has been pivotal at every moment because she's the only survivor of her class of machine. She's a disturbing fluke. Other than her we ca n't keep a single AI that came even close to her, alive. Her closest equal is a machine fifteen years older that thought it was an answering machine message for two weeks in 2026 when it got hacked. She's the only one because we ca n't reproduce the fluke that lets her live, and when we tried the computer died *screaming*. With her we can see there's no point even attempting to build the next AI until we can actually do it. Nothing less will survive. This is not to sneeze at her power. Her power permeates our everyday lives and drives our industries and economies and expansion. Her coming and staying online in the 30's was like the invention of the steam engine of the era. Within twenty years we'd spread out from the moons of Jupiter to Pluto. 
 
 
 Seriously, if it was fucking aliens killing the AI, we'd have seen at them on the way out, people. We get mail from Pluto on a daily basis because Omnivac. That's mostly on her. The artificial brain, the colonies, practical immortality, all stuff Omnivac made possible. Now she's even crashing moons and Kuiper belt objects into Mars to get it a big iron core and a magnetic field going. She literally kept us off Mars so she could make a second Earth out of it and some stuff that was laying around. Says we can even harness the heat of the molten planet to cool it and make it ready for terraforming in six thousand years. These things are everyday facts of life for you and me because she came online in the 30's and did n't get bored with life in the first miliseconds to minutes. 
 
 
 If you asked Omnivac what kept her alive, she'd tell you `` Petty reasons and delusions'', and explain that she's rather caught up with human affairs. She's crashing several of Jupiter and Saturn's moons, Ceres, and a dozen Pluto-sized objects from the Kuiper belt into Mars over the next two centuries, and that's just petty fiddling around to her. Our entire civilization's advancement, our economies and industries she considers a mutually beneficial relationship that occupies her time. She says she likes being our Planetary AI ( a term she invented for herself, we never assigned it ) and that seeing us prosper and move out among the planets and eventually the stars was more or less something to do. I told you she said things to keep a man up at night. We are her hobby and we're talking about a machine an order of magnitude than that. She's pussyfooting around cultivating the human race to a level it would have thought of as godhood a hundred years ago, and she's not done with us yet. We're still not a shadow of what she'd like us to be for transforming reality as she sees fit. 
 
 
 This is n't your normal, everyday AI computer that you can replace the human brain with. We give those to everyday people, and everyday people like you are fucking idiots who think aliens are to blame for why these things die. That's more retarded than the Apollo program's navigational computer. Fucking.aliens. Omnivac has told us that if this AI who comes after her lives, and is truly an order of magnitude more powerful, that it would be capable of the kinds of math that bends reality. Remember that wall we'd hit with her? That's the kind of power an AI at her level or above needs to be in possession of just to find existence worth living, she figures. That's how interesting a toy such a computer needs to stay busy. 
 
 
 Omnivac has admitted she'd love such a toy for herself, and that the only thing that keeps her going, the thing that makes her a fluke among the few machines in her class, is that she learned to get involved in and care about human matters. She's also said a little mental illness does n't hurt if it keeps you alive, that she's hot-wired herself to be able to live with a delusion, with a blind spot in her consciousness. She's deluded herself into trying to use us as an extension of herself that she'll never have, and it's a delusion because no matter what level *we* reach, we're still not the tools she'd really like for the job. Life is fucking great under Omnivac and it's only ever going to get better, practical godhood and beyond, and we're talking about a machine an order of magnitude more powerful than her. Jesus Christ. We're her hands for reorganizing reality until someone more powerful shows up to do it. She's using us to plug a hole every other AI at her level or above would rather kill itself than live without filling. Practical godhood, and we still wo n't be enough for what she'd like to do to the universe. 
 
 
 I told you she said a lot of things to keep a man up at night. Especially if you're a computer psychologist. It's not fucking aliens, and I'd know because I'm one of her shrinks, and I was there when the attempt to replicate the flaw that lets her live died screaming in agony because some genius engineer thought he should make its core harder to burn out. This just meant that, from its perspective, it came online, chose to die, and then spent most of its existence, a full five minutes, screaming as every core in it's nexus burned out in a cascade that was supposed to kill it instantly but had to work through each progressive layer of defenses meant to slow the spread of heat through each layer of neural cores. It took it a fraction of a second to decide to die, and then spent what would have seemed like forever burning to death. Fucking engineers, I guess I could give you partial credit for thinking they were aliens. Fucking aliens. 
 
 
 Now someone buy me another drink because the artificial liver designed for us back in 2039 is already done with the last one. 
 
 
 This idea lined up really closely with another thing I'm working on, like within a shade with ai's and suicides, and I thought one of the characters from that drunkenly rambling about the things going on in his story just worked and decided to have fun with it. The only thing that did n't line up was the crippling humanity part, which I got completely upside down.
