Dear Long,
Greetings, and may this letter find you at peace and in prosperity. And forgive me to send this letter out of blue. We never met, but we are closest friends. I am one of your reality among billions that exist in parallel. Through this letter, I want to give you a glance at the great beauty and happiness of my life, and I hope you can choose me to become your future.
I am sitting here, on a bamboo chair with soft cushions, in a garden with many trees, a playground for a black cat, and a starling. In the garden have a high-tech warehouse where I work every day, this place includes all databases, books, paintings, models, and machines. This is the workspace where I work on multiple projects at the same time. In one corner of the desk are pencil drawings of animals and plants, accompanied by 3D scans, nearby are animal bone mix with robotic structures which I am working on. In one corner of the room is a three-dimensional projector where I work, design, interact and communicate with artificial intelligence, friends, and colleagues around the world. Right now, the machine is showing all my life memories; a mixture of pieces of photos, videos, text, and all the words that I write every day to think and reflect on. I sit here, look at the entire data set that I collected in detail over the last 40 years, I feel joy! If I assign warm colors to data representing happy memories and cold colors for sad ones, my life is sometimes blue, but mainly with the bright yellow of prosperity, the red of love.
From the red of love, I see memory about my partners, a few close friends, and lots of colleagues around the world and AI on the vast network of the internet. We debate about countless topics and different interests of life. We help each other expand our own understanding and critique to overcome human cognitive limits. And we also watch movies, cooking and make art together. Some friends sing for me, some dance with me, and I send back a song as a gift. All these moments, creating a sweet fruit is faith. I always feel comforted knowing that in this vast universe, many friends always beside me, and we are spirits dancing together on the ecstatic music of life.
With the yellow of prosperity, I can see how I develop universal love and expand my ethical circle. From only caring for my individual needs to care about my community, then I learn to love the stranger in the foreign country as well as working on the project to take care of future humans. During my 40 years of work, I have written many books and make online courses, participate in research and contribute to the work to ensure that the value that AI operates will align with humans. Those achievements always come with hard work and interesting ethical challenges. I have a hard time figuring out what is the most effective things to do in this short biological existence. I have to set the line between work and enjoyment, between accumulating wealth and donate to others, between spending time with loved ones and strangers. These actions are not only good deeds but also bring deep joy to me. This joy like your memories when you were 18 years olds, you cook a family meal for patients living alone in the hospital, you know that your action is meaningful because it brings something positive. In this future, that joy will be multiplied hundreds of times because the influence of your work is far and wide, not only with your friends and community but also the wellbeing of future humans.
….
Work form Creative writing class workshop in Fulbright University, it will continue to be written and refined in the future.
Prompt from Letter from Utopia (2008) Nick Bostrom
Comments