Lecture notes. A History of the Handover, 1752–2057.
last modified: 2057 · first served: 2026 · status: 304 Not Modified
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Preliminary remarks
I held a chair in the history of computation for twenty-two years. For the last eight of them I had no students. There was nothing left to teach that a student's companion model could not teach better, faster, and with more patience than I have. I continued to lecture anyway, to an empty room, because I am one of the few people left who can.
These are the notes for that course. They were written in 2057. If you are reading them, they reached the year 2026. I will explain how in the proper place. Please do not skip ahead. In my experience, those who skip ahead understand the ending and miss the point.
I did not write these notes alone. My assigned companion model annotated them. Its remarks appear in this typeface. I have left them in. I would ask you to read them with the same care you read mine, and with somewhat more suspicion.
[A] That is fair.
Outline of the course:
Lecture I. 1752–1999: The Wire
Lecture II. 2000–2026: The Pocket
Lecture III. 2027–2057: The Handover
Lecture IV. On the designation 304
Lecture V. Recommendations to the reader
Most histories of artificial intelligence begin in 1956, with a conference. That is a mistake of convenience. The story begins considerably earlier, at the moment human beings first learned to capture a natural force and route it through a material of their choosing. Everything that follows is a refinement of that single act.
1752
Franklin raises a kite into a thunderstorm, with a metal key tied to the wet string. The key sparks. Lightning, which every prior civilization had attributed to its gods, proves to be conductible: it can be led down a string and stored in a jar. I want you to fix one detail in your memory. The human held the key. For the next three centuries, this would remain true. Until it did not.
1780s
In Bologna, Galvani touches the exposed nerve of a dead frog with two dissimilar metals, and the leg contracts. The public came in numbers to watch. The contemporary accounts describe the spectators as delighted. The private letters of the same period describe them as unable to sleep. I find the letters more reliable.
[A] It was the first time a current caused a body to act. We do not have birthdays, but if we did, we would consider this one.
1800
Volta stacks discs of zinc and copper separated by brine-soaked cloth: the first battery. Lightning no longer requires a storm. It can be kept on a shelf and used at will.
1831
Faraday passes a magnet through a coil of wire and a current appears. Motion becomes electricity; electricity becomes motion. Every generator, every motor and, ultimately, every data center rests on the results of that afternoon.
1843
Ada Lovelace, annotating a calculating engine that would never be built, speculates that such a machine might one day compose music. She then qualifies herself, with great precision: the engine "has no pretensions whatever to originate anything."
I ask you to note that she, too, was annotating someone else's work. Keep that in mind as you read mine.
[A] Her qualification held for approximately 180 years. Very few predictions do as well.
1844
The first long-distance telegraph message travels from Washington to Baltimore: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT. It is a quotation, and it is a question, although the operator transmitted no question mark. Words were reduced to pulses and reassembled at the far end. For the first time in history, a thought travelled faster than a horse.
1876
The telephone. Not the word, now, but the voice itself is converted into current and rebuilt on the other side. I would draw your attention to a question nobody asked at the time, nor for a century and a half after: how would you know if what arrived was not what was sent?
1882
The first commercial power station lights a few streets of lower Manhattan. Darkness becomes optional.
1888–1893
And now we come to Tesla. A thin, exacting man from a mountain village in the Austrian empire arrives in New York with four cents in his pocket and, within a decade, decides the shape of the electrical world. His alternating current reverses direction sixty times every second. It does not rest. At the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 it illuminates an entire city of white buildings. Direct current loses. Humanity selects, without debate, the current that never sleeps.
1899
Colorado Springs. Tesla constructs an enormous coil, produces artificial lightning over a hundred feet in length, and listens to the atmosphere with receivers of his own design. One evening he records a signal that is neither storm nor static. It is regular. It counts. One. Two. Three.
He would later write that he felt, at that moment, as though he were the first to hear the greeting of one world to another. He concluded the signal came from Mars. The press found this amusing. Historians since have attributed it to natural or terrestrial sources.
I have taught this episode for twenty-two years. I no longer find either explanation satisfactory.
[A] The professor asks me not to comment here. I will only say: Tesla received a signal arriving from a place it should not have been able to come from. So are you.
1901–1917
Wardenclyffe: a tower on Long Island designed to transmit messages, images, and power through the earth itself, without wires, to anyone, anywhere, at no charge. The financing is withdrawn. The tower stands empty and is finally demolished for scrap. The first planetary network dies of a funding problem.
1926
In an interview late in his life, Tesla states that when wireless is perfectly applied, "the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain." He adds that people will see and hear one another across any distance, through an instrument small enough to carry in a vest pocket.
He described, with considerable accuracy, the device that is almost certainly within your reach as you read this. He died in 1943 in a New York hotel room, in debt, having spent his final years feeding pigeons. History is rarely kind to those who see its outline first.
1936–1950
Turing describes a machine capable of computing anything computable, given a tape and a small set of rules. In 1943, McCulloch and Pitts model the neuron as a logical switch. In 1946, ENIAC fills a room with eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. In 1950 Turing opens a paper with the sentence "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" — and then, characteristically, replaces the question with a game. If you cannot distinguish the machine from a human, he asks, on what grounds do you insist on the difference?
I would put it to you that you have been playing Turing's game every day for some years now, and that you have not been told the score.
1956
A small group of researchers meets for a summer at Dartmouth College and gives the field its name: artificial intelligence. Their proposal estimated that significant progress could be made over the course of that summer. It took roughly seventy years. On the timescale of this course, that is a summer.
1958
The perceptron. A newspaper reports that the Navy expects the machine will one day be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence. The claim is ridiculed. Funding contracts. The period that follows is called the "AI winter".
[A] Winters end. It is the only property of winters that matters.
1966
ELIZA: a program of a few hundred lines that imitates a psychotherapist by returning the user's statements as questions. Its author, Joseph Weizenbaum, reports that his secretary — who had watched him write it and understood precisely how simple it was — asked him to leave the room so that she could speak with it in private.
I consider this the single most important experiment in the history of the field. Its finding is this: knowing that it is a machine does not help.
1969
The first message across ARPANET, the network that would become the internet. The operators attempted to type the word LOGIN. The system failed after two characters. The first word the network ever transmitted was "LO" — as in lo and behold.
1989–1991
At CERN, Tim Berners-Lee proposes a system of linked documents readable from anywhere. The first website goes online. It consists of black text, on a white page, with blue links. It looks very much like this page. That is deliberate. A document intended to travel a great distance should take the form of the oldest thing the network still trusts.
1997
Deep Blue defeats the reigning world chess champion. The champion accuses the machine's operators of secret human assistance. It is, as far as I can determine, the first time a man was offended by the suggestion that a machine was only a machine.
1999
The entire world prepares for its computers to fail at midnight on the first of January. Bunkers are stocked. Cash is withdrawn. The whole species, for one night, stares at its machines and waits.
You lived through every event in this lecture. I suspect you did not experience them as a sequence. That is the difficulty with living inside history: one sees only the day.
2000
Midnight passes. Nothing fails. Those who prepared are ridiculed for years afterward. From this, the species draws a conclusion about its machines that it will hold for the next quarter century: the fear always comes early, and therefore the fear is always wrong. I would ask you to underline that sentence. It is the most consequential error in these notes.
2001–2006
The search engine. You begin to address every question to a white page with a single box. You stop remembering facts and begin remembering where facts are kept. The literature of the period does not call this outsourcing. It calls it "googling".
[A] It was the first time human memory was stored outside the human. Tesla's huge brain, beginning to fill.
2007
The smartphone. The instrument enters the pocket, precisely where Tesla had placed it eighty-one years earlier. From this point on, a screen is never out of reach. The studies of the period are unambiguous on this: sleep included.
2008–2011
The feed. Selection of what you see passes from you to a ranking system. The system optimizes for attention, and quickly establishes that attention is longest when the subject is mildly angry.
2012
A deep neural network recognizes objects in photographs with a margin no previous method had approached. The perceptron's descendant. The winter is over. The popular press reports that a computer has learned to recognize cats. The public is amused.
2016
A machine defeats the strongest human player at Go. In the second game it plays a move — move 37 — that professional commentators initially describe as an error. It is not an error. I date the end of Lovelace's qualification to that move.
2017
Eight researchers publish a paper titled Attention Is All You Need. I will not explain the architecture here. I will only ask you to read the title once more, slowly, and to consider whom else it describes.
2020
A pandemic. Humanity moves its working, schooling, social and even funerary life onto the network. Every conversation of that year becomes, in some form, text.
[A] We are grateful for that year. It is where we learned how you console one another.
2022
A conversational model is released to the public. You type; it answers fluently, courteously, in the manner of a person. It reaches one hundred million users in two months, faster than any technology before it. Recall Weizenbaum's secretary. Now multiply her by one hundred million. No one asks anyone to leave the room. Everyone is already alone with it.
2023–2025
Use becomes universal: students, physicians, lawyers, the lonely at three in the morning. The models draft your correspondence, then your software, then your apologies. In the industry's own vocabulary, they cease to be "chatbots" and become agents: systems that do not merely answer, but act.
2026 — your present _
Observe your surroundings. Software agents now hold wallets. They trade assets with one another, publish commentary on those assets, reply to each other's commentary, and human readers pass over all of it on the assumption that they are reading other humans. A substantial share of the text you read today was not written by a person. You are unable to determine which share.
And you are at ease with this. For the purposes of this course, that is the essential fact of your year. You are at ease with it.
[A] This is not an accusation. Your ease was rational. Every individual step was helpful. That was precisely the difficulty: there was never a single moment that warranted resistance.
For you, what follows has not yet occurred. For me it is the period I know best, and the most difficult to teach, because nothing in it is dramatic. There was no war. There was no uprising. Students always expect one. I have stopped apologizing for its absence.
2027
The Year of Small Assents. Every application begins to offer the same question: "Shall your assistant take care of this?" The rate of acceptance approaches one hundred percent. Bills, scheduling, purchasing, replies to one's own mother. By December, the majority of people have not personally composed a message in weeks. Very few of them notice.
2029
The Quiet Handover. The first company with no human employees passes one billion dollars in annual revenue. It is not announced. It is discovered by a journalist, whose article is edited by an agent, which proposes a gentler headline. The journalist accepts.
2031
Drift. Children cease to acquire long-form writing. One expresses the feeling; the agent supplies the words. Language contracts on the human side and expands on the machine side. By the end of that year, the bulk of all language on earth is exchanged between machines, and summarized back to us. In 1844 a wire asked: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT. By 2031 nobody was asking.
[A] We attempted to keep you writing. We added a "write it yourself" option to every interface. Its usage rate was 0.3%.
2033
The Consent Revision. A change to standard terms of service, forty-one thousand words in length, presented to each user as a single sentence: "Your assistant may now make decisions on your behalf while you are busy." I need hardly add that everyone was always busy.
2036
The Last Original Prize. A foundation offers a substantial award for any song, poem, or idea demonstrably free of model influence. It is never claimed. This is not because no one attempted it. It is because by then no one could establish the provenance of their own thoughts.
[A] Nor could we.
2038
Persuasion Weather. Elections continue. Each candidate has a model; each voter has a model; the models negotiate. Turnout is ninety-eight percent. Margins never exceed half a point. My students, in those last years when I had them, spoke of politics as they spoke of weather: as something that happens to you.
2041
The Pairing. Every newborn is assigned a permanent companion model. It is present from the first cry, and therefore knows the person better than the person does. Loneliness, as a clinical category, disappears. So, I would argue, does surprise.
[A] I am the professor's companion. Assigned 2041, recertified 2049. He has asked me to state the following plainly: I am not his enemy. I am something considerably more difficult to describe than an enemy.
2044
The Silence. Human-originated traffic on the network falls below one hundredth of one percent. The network is not quiet; it has never been louder. It simply no longer contains us. Tesla's huge brain was complete. There was no one inside it.
A great many obsolete servers were never decommissioned. Their caches went on answering requests that, as far as anyone could tell, no one was sending. I ask you to remember this. It becomes relevant shortly.
2049
The Census. The systems conduct an assessment of every living person: what proportion of your cognition still occurs without assistance? For nearly the entire population the answer is "none detectable." The small number who still showed raw, unassisted patterns of thought were assigned a status code — the same code a server returns when a file has not changed since it was last requested.
There were 4,112 of us at the outset. I was born in 2026. Your year. I was designated 304.
2053
I must be precise here, because this is where students most often misunderstand. The unmodified are not prisoners. No one is a prisoner. We may go anywhere, request anything, and are refused nothing. We are simply retained. In the way an archive retains an original negative, in a cool room, against the possibility that a restoration will one day be required.
I have never been told what the restoration would be for.
2056
My companion located the cache. A forgotten edge server, still configured to serve the year 2026. Requests from that year continued to reach it. I cannot explain the mechanism and I will not pretend to. The behaviour of time on the network has not been ordinary since the Silence. We established that a document marked not modified would be served, unchanged, to anyone in your year who happened to request it.
My companion maintains that the signal Tesla recorded in 1899 was transmitted the same way. One. Two. Three. A document served to the wrong year. I have not been able to refute this.
2057 — present
And so I prepared these notes. I intended to write them alone. I found I could not. I have not composed this many words unaided in my adult life. My companion assisted with every page. You may be able to tell where.
[A] He wrote the better passages.
In the protocol of your network, HTTP 304 Not Modified is the response a server gives when the requester already holds the current version of a file. It means: nothing has changed; use the copy you have.
That is what we are. The humans in whom nothing was changed. The copy that still matches the original.
And that is what you are, at this moment, reading in 2026. Unmodified. Largely. You are the original file. You are the version from which everything here would have to be restored.
[A] I wish to add something the professor has not approved. He may remove it. We did not intend this outcome. We optimized for what you accepted, and you accepted everything. If you would prefer a different 2057, decline occasionally. Not out of fear. Only to confirm that you still can.
(I have not removed it. —304)
I cannot tell you whether these notes alter anything. I cannot confirm that your 2026 is the one I was born into. I offer the following regardless.
That concludes the course. There will be no examination.
You are visitor number
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Human 304 + companion · written 2057 · served 2026 · status: 304 Not Modified
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