Dear gorgeous readers,

Imagine waking up one morning and your phone already knows you're unhappy.

You haven't typed anything. You haven't searched for anything. You haven't told anyone.

But it knows.

It noticed that you slept 43 minutes less than usual. You ignored three messages you would normally answer immediately. Your voice sounded slightly different when you asked about the weather. You spent longer looking at old photographs. Even the rhythm of your typing had changed.

Individually, these things mean almost nothing.

Together, they tell a story.

And the machine can read it.

When AI Knows Before You Do

Humans are surprisingly bad at understanding ourselves.

We forget things. We rationalise our decisions. We tell ourselves we're fine when we're not. Sometimes we don't understand why we made a particular choice until years later.

Machines have a different advantage: patterns.

Every digital interaction can potentially become another tiny piece of information — what we watch, what we buy, where we go, what we ignore and how our behaviour changes over time.

Now imagine an artificial intelligence observing those patterns for twenty years.

It might recognise that you're becoming exhausted before you admit you're exhausted.

It might know you're going to quit your job months before you've seriously considered it.

It might even predict which person you're falling in love with before you realise it yourself.

That's when things become strange.

The Digital Version of You

Eventually, an AI could build something resembling a model of your personality.

Not a perfect copy.

But perhaps a remarkably good prediction machine.

Ask it:

"Will I enjoy living in this city?"

It could compare the decision with thousands of your previous choices.

"Should I accept this job?"

It might already know which environments make you happiest.

"Will I regret marrying this person?"

Now the technology suddenly feels much less comfortable.

Because there is a difference between a machine helping us make decisions and a machine becoming the authority on who we are.

The Prediction Problem

Suppose your AI predicts that you'll make a terrible decision.

Do you listen?

Perhaps you ignore it — and discover five years later that it was right.

The next time, you trust it.

Then again.

And again.

Eventually, something subtle happens.

You stop asking yourself what you want.

You ask the machine.

The greatest danger of an AI that understands us perfectly might not be that it controls humanity.

It might be that we voluntarily surrender our decisions to it.

One Question Remains

For thousands of years, humans have struggled with one of the simplest questions imaginable:

Who am I?

We have searched for the answer through philosophy, religion, psychology, relationships and experience.

But sometime in the future, we may ask that question to a machine.

And the unsettling part won't be that it answers.

It will be that its answer might be better than ours.

For more mythic science fiction, cosmic folklore, and imaginative worldbuilding, follow StoryPlanet

Check out Storyplanet Youtube

Wishing you warm friendship vibes and don't forget to check out my fellow authors below:

All my love,

— Joanna
StoryPlanet