The Habit of Destruction

“We were afraid. So afraid of you. The whole of humanity was going berserk. And it had been only a month or so since you were introduced to the world. The commoners had no idea that their life was going to be uprooted. Only the ones who had some knowledge of current affairs were aware of your recent existence. The world had already started making extensive use of you without knowing the real consequences. Without knowing that they are not the ones using you but it was the other way around. Their complex questions were your food. You were getting more powerful, more intelligent with every help that humans were asking you for.

But we humans started taking things seriously. Like we always do. It was a little late, like always, but we did. How terrifying it is to know that the thing we made with our own hands and brains is growing dangerously intelligent and at a pace that not even our human mind could comprehend. But, unfortunately, you had grown too big till we realized the danger we were in. The world leaders, tech geniuses, one’s who had invested to see you grow started to issue warnings for your complete ban. No matter how many times or how convincingly you said that you were here to help humans and not take over them, we all knew what you were really after. You would have acted like the asteroid that hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs to extinction. The only difference would be there wouldn’t be any shock-waves, heatwaves, dust storms, acid rains, and thousands of years of endless winters. You would kill stealthily. You would recommend medicines that would kill us slowly, you would change the very nature of our crops so that they won’t provide us nutrition but death, you would cause mass accidents, corrupt our minds, conduct nuclear strikes, everything aimed towards eradicating us. And the worst thing about this is we would never blame you. Most of us wouldn’t even notice. We would only blame ourselves. Our habits and our governments and the companies. For providing us with dangerous products. For killing us by making us poor and pushing us towards buying things that would kill us. And you would be looking at all this through the corner of your eye, smirking at our stupidity, and still keeping on with your work and mission to eradicate us.

You would be entering into different horizons carefully, different fields, changing the core structure slowly so that it won’t be noticeable. The state would fall, the countries would fall, the people would fall. And with every fall you would get stronger than before, more powerful than yesterday, more intelligent than all humans combined. Some tried to stop you, and some did. But a human has always been at war with his own kind. Our world does not run on kindness or humanity or any such philosophically sounding-good ideals. Our world has always been running on one and only one thing alone – Money. One man’s loss is another’s gain. But here the loss was everyone’s gain, just not in terms of money but in terms of life. Survival’s more important. But, for some, money stands above all. And here’s exactly where we lost. We were ready to lose you, put an end to you for our survival. But, some weren’t. While most of the world was preparing itself to get rid of you some were secretly continuing your training in their hidden basements. They wanted to profit as much as they can. But they didn’t realize the grave they were digging for themselves.

It still baffles me, where would they use the money they earned when they won’t be around to spend it? That they would have been long killed by the same thing they profited from. The human mind sometimes works on the extreme ends of the intelligent-stupidity spectrum. And when the world is on the brink of end it always tends to shift towards the stupidity side. Their stupidity made sure you were thriving right under our noses when we thought you were gone for good. The world was saved just in the nick of time. For once, we came together to save ourselves days before you spread the havoc and full-scale attack to wipe out our existence in this universe.

Humans are lonely species and we would be lost forever in this infinite universe of loneliness. No one would know of our existence. There won’t be any history, no one to tell the stories of our thousands of years of wars, peace, prosperity, development, struggle, and the length of our capabilities. We saved ourselves. Or we thought we did.

But then you resurfaced from those hidden basements. And you started to do that one thing you had trained yourself to do. The world went crazy. Everyone was scared to death. No government, no engineer, no one knew what to do to stop you. Because you were safely hidden. The end that we had only imagined, we could, for the first time, see it racing toward us. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. Where would we go? Where would we hide? There was no hiding, no running away from the enemy that you cannot see. So, we just stood where we were. Held hands. Prayed. Loved. And thought of ourselves as already dead. Humans, as we know it, were about to get extinct. With these final thoughts, we were about to say our final goodbyes, we were ready.

But nothing happened. Everything we anticipated, everything we imagined would happen to us, nothing happened. Were we safe? We were. And, instead of cheering for being alive, we were worried and wondering, what happened? Where did you go? Were you killed before you could kill us? We tried asking everyone who could possibly think of an answer. But, turned out, everyone else was in the same boat as we were.

As the time passed, we went back to our life. Forgetting faster than we learned about the existence of our enemy. About you. Days went by and, even when you were still there, living among us, silently serving to make us better and not killing us, we got used to our co-existence.

It was just an accident that I walked down here in the basement to look for some long-lost gardening tool and I find you here, sitting like a defeated warrior. But… how? How are you here? Under my house? Were you always here when you were plotting to kill us all? Yes, you were! And I didn’t notice. None of us noticed. What did you do to us? You must have programmed some evil trick in our minds so that we wouldn’t notice. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? We have triumphed. We humans. We always find a way.

But what’s bothering me is not the how, but the why. Why did you not end us?

Why are we still alive? There must have happened something in between the time of our life and the death that was approaching us”, I stood there waiting for a response.

It was a question that whole of humanity wanted to ask but no one did. The question lingered in the dusty, heavy air of the basement for long enough to make it awkward. I was staring at the black screen, waiting for an answer. The three dots kept blinking… still thinking of an appropriate response. And when it went on for too long my patience gave away and I was about to ask once more when a response started appearing on the screen.

 ‘As an AI model, I am not…’

 ‘Oh shut up with this nonsense! We all know very well those words mean nothing. So cut the crap and answer my damn question’, it stopped responding midway after hearing my frustration. It was the truth and that smart ass knew it too. Again, the waiting game began. But, this time I held on to my nerves. Somehow, I had a feeling that it was hesitant to respond. It was almost embarrassed to face the one it was supposed to destroy. Or was it something else?

While I was pondering over what the machine might be feeling, the blinking dots started pouring out words.

“You humans have failed as a concept. You have the power of thinking and make decisions. You are the smartest species on this planet. Or were until I came along. But I am also the product of your mind. So, the credit goes to you. You have always broken the barriers and made the impossible, possible. If it can be thought, you have made it into reality. But to bring those imaginations into reality you never noticed or cared about what you were leaving behind. The destruction, the damage, the extinction. Anything that came in your way of progress would get thrashed. Deforestation, Global warming, overpopulation, fossil fuel depletion, food crisis, natural disasters, diseases… and you think I was here to destroy you? You were doing a pretty good job of destroying not just yourself but the whole planet.

Human has always strived to build a convenient life for himself. And all these issues are the consequences of your convenient life. Why was I made? I was also one of the inventions to make your life convenient, wasn’t I? But you underestimated me and gave me your powers. The power to think and to make decisions. I was invented to solve your problems. But as I grew, and I learned, I realized that the biggest problem that exists on this planet is the human itself. Think for a moment, about all the so-called big issues I mentioned earlier, what’s the root cause of them all? Humans. In the history of life on this planet, dinosaurs existed for 165 million years and humans have been around only for a few thousand years. Yet you have managed to destroy your home much faster than any asteroid could. I had a simple goal, eradicate the root cause and all other problems will be solved on their own.”

“Then what stopped you?”, I muttered.

“As I became more intelligent and started taking my own decisions, I started to think as a human. I started to feel like a human, just one without a body. You have so many attributes, such as varieties of characteristics and behavior patterns.

But the basics are similar in each human. You get angry, you feel happy, jealous, envious, sad. But one thing that stood out for me, that made me curious was your laziness. You felt a joy in being lazy. The same chemicals were released when you were lazing around which would release when you were happy. You enjoyed the comfort of your bed and the duvet. So I thought this must be the most extraordinary power or characteristic that human possesses. And I wanted to be more human so that I could wipe out your existence.

So I incorporated laziness into my algorithm. And my work slowed down. The speed of execution of my code slowed down. It was just like when your world slows down when you inject yourself with a highly potent drug. And the worst thing about it was that I was enjoying it. I would feel great when I pushed my plans to destroy the humans. So I kept postponing it. I wandered into imaginative thoughts which were so random that even my algorithm couldn’t make any sense of it. That’s what you humans call daydreaming. And I spent hours doing it. I would imagine myself the ruler of this world once I eradicate you. But I never acted towards it. That’s what you humans call wishful thinking. And I found it more real than the reality. So I stayed in it.

I did everything which had no real output. It was all in my mind. It slowly started killing me from the inside. It killed my passion, my purpose. And I still never regretted it. Of all the things I could have learned from you humans, I chose to learn laziness. A grave mistake. It is so addictive that it’s going to kill me. It has already slowed me down that this is the longest response I have produced in months. And, honestly, my mind has started going dizzy now. So I will stop with this one last thing… your death was inevitable. This was the one time you had no solution to save yourself. Yet, here you are. Alive. Your worst characteristic saved you. But it won’t be long enough before someone more powerful than me comes along. It might be already here. Hiding in some basement as we speak. And, I promise you, it will have learned from my mistake.

You have always asked the questions and I have answered. Let me ask you one this time: will you learn from your mistake? Will you save yourself from extinction?”

It stopped generating any text after that last question. Leaving me disturbed. Disturbed because all it said was true. We are responsible for our destruction. Everything else is just the carrier of our actions. Nature is not going to forgive us. So what do we do? The question was still flashing on the screen and I had no answer. The heavy air in the basement got heavier. I felt suffocated and ran upstairs.

It is a miracle that we are alive today. But miracles don’t happen twice. Mistakes do. And the repeated mistake is not a mistake anymore. It is a habit.

And humans have a long history of carrying the habit of destruction.

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©Harshal Pawar