ادغام

Consolidation

As a result, nation after nation saw landslide election victories for parties embracing the seven Omega slogans. In carefully optimized campaigns, they portrayed themselves at the center of the political spectrum, denouncing the right as greedy bailout-seeking conflict-mongers and lambasting the left as big-government tax-and-spend innovation stiflers. What almost nobody realized was that Prometheus had carefully selected the optimal people to groom as candidates, and pulled all its strings to secure their victory.

Before Prometheus, there had been growing support for the universal basic income movement, which proposed tax-funded minimum income for everyone as a remedy for technological unemployment. This movement imploded when the corporate community projects took off, since the Omega-controlled business empire was in effect providing the same thing. With the excuse of improving coordination of their community projects, an international group of companies launched the Humanitarian Alliance, a nongovernmental organization aiming to identify and fund the most valuable humanitarian efforts worldwide. Before long, virtually the entire Omega empire supported it, and it launched global projects on an unprecedented scale, even in countries that had largely missed out on the tech boom, improving education, health, prosperity and governance. Needless to say, Prometheus provided carefully crafted project plans behind the scenes, ranked by positive impact per dollar. Rather than simply dole out cash, as under basic-income proposals, the Alliance (as it colloquially became known) would engage those it supported to work toward its cause. As a result, a large fraction of the world’s population ended up feeling grateful and loyal to the Alliance—often more than to their own government.

As time passed, the Alliance increasingly assumed the role of a world government, as national governments saw their power continually erode. National budgets kept shrinking due to tax cuts while the Alliance budget grew to dwarf those of all governments combined. All the traditional roles of national governments became increasingly redundant and irrelevant. The Alliance provided by far the best social services, education and infrastructure. Media had defused international conflict to the point that military spending was largely unnecessary, and growing prosperity had eliminated most roots of old conflicts, which traced back to competition over scarce resources. A few dictators and others had violently resisted this new world order and refused to be bought, but they were all toppled in carefully orchestrated coups or mass uprisings.

The Omegas had now completed the most dramatic transition in the history of life on Earth. For the first time ever, our planet was run by a single power, amplified by an intelligence so vast that it could potentially enable life to flourish for billions of years on Earth and throughout our cosmos—but what specifically was their plan?

That was the tale of the Omega team. The rest of this book is about another tale—one that’s not yet written: the tale of our own future with AI. How would you like it to play out? Could something remotely like the Omega story actually occur and, if so, would you want it to? Leaving aside speculations about superhuman AI, how would you like our tale to begin? How do you want AI to impact jobs, laws and weapons in the coming decade? Looking further ahead, how would you write the ending? This tale is one of truly cosmic proportions, for it involves nothing short of the ultimate future of life in our Universe. And it’s a tale for us to write.