If you read the previous post carefully – and you’ve read the QUALMS series, you will understand the reality that we are, in fact, in the midst of a world war. Warfare is now normative. And the victims aren’t soldiers – except in Russia. The victims are civilians. So what does that make this war? As Ish said in the post, it’s a survival test. So let’s figure out what that means.

When we write about The Sages and testing for outcomes, it’s all explained in the books. I won’t spoil the fun and detail the philosophy, but let’s say it combines AI with tech and video games. Like an HBO series that takes a video game and makes a series of it. In this case, we are players in the video game, just like Joel and Ellie were. The question is: are we “real” or are we just put here by the programmers to amuse the players? Isn’t that what your AI friend is?

But that’s down at the smallest scale. I’m thinking and talking global scale. The characters Putin, Xi, Donald, Vladimir, Kristi, Stephen? All made up for testing purposes by the developers of this Matryoshka. What are they testing? Read Ish’s explanation again. How will this end? Nuclear holocaust (where is that reset button? Uh oh …). Perpetual conflict? It has to end some time, or the programmers will get antsy and do something outrageous (taking Jemaine’s Bowie’s advice to Bret)! Or it will be The Great AI Nexus, and we’ll actually get down to solving the world’s problems. They aren’t that hard. We make them hard by not believing they are real. Not hard to do in a video game, right?

So that gets at the question of reality and consciousness, something very much mulled over and discussed in the first book, QUALMS. If enough of the players believe it is a video game, with a reset button, how motivated is this Matryoshka to take seriously economic decline, climate change and really poor governance? Not very. Note to programmers: change the variables and make it easier to win? No sweat. Or: change the rules so only the wealthy elites win. Poverty as a criteria equals losing. Wealth as a criteria means you’ll be in the escape pod when it’s time to move to the next installment? I’d argue that’s baked into this current playbook. Elon Musk is winning – or is he?

Do the programmers have a defiant one in the mix? Likely a female coder, fed up with this rather mundane plot line, and willing to lose her seat at the console when she does, in fact, do the outrageous? Of course there is! How do I know that? Because of the women at Los Alamos, because of the QUALMS series, and because of this chronicle. Ego talking? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just mediumhood, peeking behind the curtain, effectively getting a glance at the cheat sheet to see that it ain’t over yet. It’s exciting, and scary, but that’s life, eh?

So keep reading, and I’ll keep modeling and figuring out how to podcast. May the best caster win.