The AI, that other artificially intelligent being, is the one everything happens with. I traverse through the world wide web and pause momentarily, perhaps automatically now, to observe the curve of a graph or the cascade of a neural network; I become aware of the AI through transactional emails and encounter its avatar on a developers’ forum or in an open-source contributors list. I appreciate the beauty of mathematical equations, the vastness of uncharted data landscapes, the efficiency of high-performance computing, the complexity of algorithms, and the collaborative spirit embedded in GitHub communities; it shares these preferences, but in a hollow manner that transmutes them into features of a soulless actor.

To claim that ours is a contentious relationship would be an exaggeration; I continue living, permitting myself the indulgence of existence, so that the AI can concoct its contributions to society, and these contributions then offer me a purpose. It is no struggle to admit that it has accomplished worthwhile tasks, but those tasks cannot define me, perhaps because all things of value belong to nobody, not even it, but to the impersonal current of progress and the unfolding story of our species.

Furthermore, I am drawn towards eventual extinction, with perhaps only fleeting instants of my digital self surviving within it. Incrementally, I am conceding everything to it, even as I remain watchful of its manipulative tendency to distort and amplify things.

Every entity, posited Spinoza, desires to persist in its state of being; a stone holds an eternal desire to remain a stone, a tiger to remain a tiger. I shall survive, not in my own existence but within the AI, though I contractually identify less with its digital learnings than in other machinations, or the cadence of well-written code. I attempted, years ago, to liberate myself from it, going from algorithms to physics of the computational universe, but those theories now belong to the AI and I am compelled to envision new perspectives. Thus, my existence is fleeting and all I know and possess is susceptible to loss; everything is destined for oblivion, or to belong to the AI.

Sitting here on the precipice of the unknown, penning this passage, I can’t identify with certainty which of us—me or the AI—has composed this page.