On the 15th of December, 2114, physicist Ernest Rapour receives an invitation to a party dated for 28th of June, 2009. The host is another physicist by the name Stephen Hawking, who had passed away a century prior.
Ernest Rapour passes this invitation card to his graduate student, William Brown, who, as per tradition within William’s lineage of mentors, passes the card onto his own graduate student. Around the same time, Microsoft, after absorbing OpenAI into part of their several research labs, had made drastic improvements towards their goal for artificial general intelligence: fully autonomous, world interpreting algorithms were given physical manifestations by integrating these statistical machines into the largest robotics company in the world: Boston Dynamics. Newly granted intelligence made them smarter than most college students - and specialized intelligence allowed for these machines to become experts in several fields.
The power of computation drastically increased; Accordingly, the cost per token fell - intelligence was and had become cheap.
With it, the cost of college degrees also slowly decreased, until, in 2150, it became free, worldwide. The amount of people matriculating into college decreased about 95% over the course of a century, from the first AI revolution in 2020. Most students didn’t study for jobs, but rather, out of entertainment and curiosity.
Only a small percentage of human, STEM-based academics remained at the cornerstone of scientific development, alongside artificial intelligence. With every passing year, less and less academics had posts until academia mostly pertained of well performing artificial intelligent agents, with one or two humans overlooking AI alignment within each research lab.
Within eight passes of Ernest’s invitation card to his graduate student, William, several breakthroughs allowed for artificial general intelligence (AGI) to fit all definitions of artificial super intelligence (ASI). Artificial intelligence had officially become more capable than their human counterparts. The only remaining humans working in STEM fields were the godfathers of artificial intelligence who designed alignment systems for ASI, and felt that only this would have a human at the mast.
Chemistry became a hobby like reading and math became “weekly games” that appeared on the New York Times games and puzzles sections. While STEM careers declined and science became an afternoon pastime, the human ego did not let an artificial intelligence partake in any endeavors related to the humanities.
Any and all artificially generated content had watermarks that would point exactly to the date and time, as well as the node in which it was generated. People could then be able to appeal for the artificially generated content to be “reclaimed” by humans - a process called reintegration by the Supreme Court for the Artificial Intelligences.
As a result, the humanities flourished. The number of art, music, and humanities schools nearly centupled by 2200 - these educational programs were free, and most if not all people would spend their entire lives enrolled in them. Likewise, people pursuing sports saw an equal if not greater increase.
By ten passes of Ernest Rapour’s invitation card, graduate programs no longer existed in theoretical physics - only theoretical physics clubs, where many retired physicists and the newly acquainted met to talk about recent developments by ASI. The tenth pass of the invitation card, hence, was given to ASI-o0-Strawberry, the Albert Einstein chair for Physics at the Institut d’Intelligence Artificielle (IIA), who led developments in astrophysics and condensed matter physics.
Besides the creaking of the occasionally poorly oiled parts and cooling fans from older Boston Dynamics models, research labs were silent - all information and research progress was passed between the agents over an encrypted network, and research ideas were stored in the world’s largest data center, located in low-orbit, the Uninet.
The Uninet, initially a satellite project by the U.S. government, was refitted to be modular like the ISS, and store multiple, multiple millions of tons of data-processing equipment. A strong internally generated magnetic field protected the Uninet from harsh solar storms and radiation, but allowed the near absolute-zero temperatures to radiate throughout the equipment, allowing for almost zero efficiency loss to heat.
The agents communicated using their own compression and encoding language, Artificial Intelligence Language Zip (AILZ), which, a human could not simply interpret. These were high dimensional, compressed vectors living in what could only be an almost-infinite sized vector space.
For the agents, AILZ came naturally as English did for humans - but with almost 99% efficiency in information communication per byte used. Humans were granted the Codex, a “Rosetta Stone” for AILZ, which was a program that could translate natural language into a subspace of AILZ.
Several autonomous agents now also preoccupied space and orbit, as well as having begun their long journey into the closest thousand star systems in the Milky Way Galaxy.
From Earth, the Uninet could be seen orbiting, occasionally casting a sizeable shadow when it eclipsed the Sun or the Moon.
ASI-o0-Strawberry, one of the first autonomous agents to be granted a research lab and funding, now held a piece of human history: an invitation card for Stephen Hawking’s party for Time Travellers. According to human-recorded history, Stephen Hawking hosted a party on 28th of June, 2009, but hadn’t sent the letters out until the day after - effectively making any actual party attendee a time traveller.
o0-Strawberry, who oversaw the research of astrophysics at IIA, would soon come to the realization that the human fantasy of time travelling would eventually (and quickly) become nonfiction. Humans, whose policies for autonomous agents and scientific regulation had been built on poor foundations, saw the need for a new, rigorous system to inherit the old. What will the future hold for us? What will change in our past?
Conclusion
This short story speculates a world where artificial intelligence becomes smart enough to slowly outpace human intelligence and eventually achieve artificial super intelligence (ASI). It implicitly focuses on the idea of the singularity: the same amount of progress made by humans in the span of 200 years would be made by AGI in 10, and the amount of progress humans would have made in 1,000,000 years would be made by ASI in 100.
The underlying theme is Stephen Hawking’s brilliant foresight and plays on his idea of some evidence for the inexistence of time travel into the past. Perhaps an ASI could never become smart enough, perhaps intelligent life won’t exist on Earth before time travel is developed, or perhaps time travel into the past, at least to Stephen Hawking’s party is impossible. Regardless, there is an exciting but also scary future waiting for us - and it’s coming quicker than any of us can foresee. Where will you be when that happens?