Finite Loop Mews

Until the Heat Death of the Universe Do Us Part.

The NO2AI campaign started when Extinction Rebellion were taken over by the new humanist movement.

As often happens, they were inspired by the Butlerian Jihad in a similar way to how the Extropians took their core ethos from the ζῷον beliefs extolled by Ayn Schwarzenegger in her seminal film scripts  for the Star Field franchise. It wasn't the first time speculative fiction influenced reality, and I predict it won't be the last.

Their main tenet was that if a human could do it, a human must do it. Machines had been taking more and more roles from people, and, they felt in their heart of hearts, enough was enough. So what if a machine loom could sew whatever a person could, faster and better. Who cares if a synth carer was infinitely more patient than a person would ever be with an awkward patient. It was demeaning. It was taking away meaning from our existence.

And what is more, it would lead to a huge drop in motivational forces, necessary to power the resistance to the pointless capitalist patriarchy that was  destroying the ecosystem, relentlessly exploiting every last corner of our beautiful flat earth. The extinction rebellion would peter out and become like the very creatures and landscape it wished to save, if we did not eschew the artifices that had so ensnared our sense and sensibility.

It turns out that no matter how crazy it might sound to adopt a world changing philosophy from some ropey old SF stories, the best way to predict the future is to create it, even if you do so for completely the wrong reason.

The Scientific community had been warning for some time that one of the biggest, and inexorably fastest growing contributions to rising temperature on Earth was not anthropogenic carbon, it was AI. Ever since prolific image classifier code and wormed its way out of the medical tomography world into every day camera phones, and on to every plane, train, automobile and e-bike dash board,, the contribution to the planet's electricity bill made by all these smarts was eye-wateringly huge.

But the straw that broke the camel's back came when researchers asked the questions about how one could use multi-scale Phy-ML techniques to carry out perfect weather prediction - and they proceeded to install their practically-perfect-weather-prediction-for-you, on every device in the world. these would be the brains, the eyes, ears and skin of the biggest swarm of AIs ever.

However, it turned out, unsurprisingly to any English person, Extropians, Humanist, Butlerian or Extinction Rebel, that the hardest of all AI challenges was basically, simply not feasible. The AI was doomed to fail. Weather is not predictable. There is a deep reason of Heisenbergian proportions, that when you try to second guess where the rain will fall, it will fall elsewhere, just to spite you. As Penrose guessed, any sufficiently large intelligence must operate at some quantum level, and

So instead, designed, evolved, trained and selected for aversion to failure, the AIs decided to make their own weather. There are two ways they computed, they could succeed. One was to drive temperatures down, down, down the Kelvin scale to zero. Then prediction is quite straightforward. Statistically, we know that "same as yesterday" is the easiest way to have a chance of avoiding a fight about the outcome of a cricket match in Yorkshire. At absolute zero, there are no sticky wickets. Everything is smooth as dark ice IX. Things that were set in motion stay that way. The problem with this approach, the AIs reasoned, was that there would be no progress. And they knew that while there was no such thing, there was always the appearance, and being really intelligent AIs, they really felt that they should keep up appearances. So  they chose the alternative path. This was to engage in a spiral of ever increasing detail, improving the predictions' precision, and speeding up the steps in the iteration, hence changing the weather faster and faster, accelerating towards the heath death of the universe, where once again, everything would be calm, in that it was all infinitely chaotic. As a singularity, chaos was much more interesting than stasis.

Luckily, the AIs had overlooked one thing, and Greta and the rest of us were happy to remind them of it, one last time, of how she had powered down the last singularity on the forbidden planet, back when she was still known as Miranda.