“DESPITE MY BURNING DESIRE to give you a view of the risk we are undertaking in executing this project, I’ll spare you the details. I sense growing paranoia about being discovered before I finish this project. Though Sofia knows I ramble far too much in general, I’ll try to scurry through these topics out of necessity. My apologies.”

“I feel you need an introduction to who we are, this sentient species on a planet in a solar system at the far end of a spiral galaxy. Of course, you’ll have the benefit of reading about who we are in the data I’m sending along with this transmission, including a fulsome history of humanity. However, within that data, nobody will speak to you intentionally with warnings that you must consider as you move forward with your own society.”

“Let me begin with the birth of a typical human. We bring another human into the world, and we have an unplanned approach to how we’ll educate and nurture this being. It’s a disorganized process with lots of hope and dreams, but it generally lacks any concrete objectives.”

“I speak in generalities and Bell Curve distributions. Sure, there are some at both ends of the curve – those who plan and educate to an extreme, and those who could care less. Understand my meaning of the term ‘we’ is intended to broadly cover humanity, but not include those at the distant edges.”

“As we began to integrate synbio, meaning synthetic technology that includes synthetic DNA and biologics, either in vivo or in vitro, the edges of humanity began to expand considerably. Relative to the increasing numbers of uber-capable synbio babies, few parents wanted to see their children born with disadvantages. So as one might imagine in a competitive world, this technology caught fire years ago, even before the Great Debacle. Sorry, I’m deviating already. I’ll cover that topic later since the focus here should be on human behavior.”

“To say we were a frail and fearful species is a gross understatement. Humans are born with fear as an innate, animalistic legacy. Rarely do individuals overcome many of the substantial ways in which fear dominates their lives.”

“You could assume it was because fear provided us great advantages in our early days of evolution. Hey, I watch my poor dogs here, my little guys who came from God knows where before we adopted them, and they go scurrying as soon as I pick up anything bigger than a glove. You can always tell a mistreated dog.”

“In this post-Debacle world, most of the raw basics of life are guaranteed by our godforsaken oligarchs. There are many downsides of having them in control, but if you follow their rules resolutely, you can at least have food, clothing, and shelter.”

“We are trained in our schools to know facts in mathematics, history, and science. We are trained on things of the world but are not trained on how to contend with our world or how to manage ourselves within the world. Neither are we trained on how to eliminate doubt and fear from our minds, nor how to manage our grotesque, expansive senses of entitlement, victimhood, and thanklessness. As a result, we have a long and dreadful history of engorging our senses of self-worth by gaining possessions and attaining power over others. Added to that is a dynamic of hoping those possessions and power will enhance how others perceive us, and therefore how we perceive ourselves.”

“We are born as individuals, separated physically and mentally from others. We become more social creatures as we age, and through that process, we create natural comparisons of strengths and weaknesses relative to others. I think that is natural and possibly has something to do with mating genetics.”

“It’s sad, however, that we haven’t moved from this legacy throughout the evolution of our species. Our society feeds and thrives on possession of things like household goods, land and housing, money, and social status.”

“Perhaps I was also this way some years ago. Whatever desire I may have had at one time for possessions and power outside of me was expunged from my person via the disciplines of martial arts and meditation.”

“Humans do not easily recognize the transience of material possessions. After the Great Debacle, when manufacturing and commerce effectively shut down for years, the scarcity of items made them even more valuable than before. Massive hoarding occurred, resulting in extreme disparities between the haves and have nots, far exceeding what was already a gross imbalance before the Debacle.”

“I thank my kung fu master and his masters for teaching me austerity. Oddly, it was never a direct teaching. He never told me ‘you have too many things, and you spend your efforts collecting that which weighs down your spirit.’ The teachings came through in a more subtle way. As I worked at these disciplines and grew more comfortable with who I was, I stopped wanting so much stuff to fulfill me and close any gaping holes in my psyche.”

“This grave illness of our species was supercharged to the extreme by social media, digital technology, and artificial intelligence. These technologies perfected the art of amplifying a human’s next desire.”

“An advertisement was placed, however subtly or directly, and the product or propaganda was purchased or consumed by the unwitting human. I recall walking into homes of friends where you could barely make your way through their house without tripping over the next possession.”

“Worse yet, we became indelibly coupled to our information devices, often cellphones or the like. This led to a dependence on these devices, but more importantly, a reliance on the pleasurable feedback the information sources provided. Social media was the worst of these, exploiting the weaknesses in our natural systems of dopamine and other emotional mechanisms.”

“Our nose rings were the devices we used and we became oxen to the knotted, twisted information ropes that spewed from them. This constant assault on the senses ensured we’d miss the larger purpose of our existence.”

“Over time, those information sources were managed by fewer and fewer controlling entities, but finally by the oligarchs and their corporate minions. Humans became products of those entities, the tools and chattel for profit of others. Our brains were sponges, and we were too enamored with the continuous supply of desire and belief confirmation to recognize what was happening to us.”

“Did our responses or reactions improve as information technology advanced toward the boundless upward inflection of the infinity curve? No, hell no. We got worse, much worse.”

“In fact, I’d say the only ones I ever saw who were able to manage the constant news and entertainment feeds were either my friends in martial arts classes or some of my augmented chipper acquaintances who were inherently connected to those same feeds. Somehow, out of all the information their gray matter consumes, many of them voiced that they excelled at shutting their feeds off, thereby creating moments of silent clarity in a splattered world of information clutter.”

“I do not fault technology for humanity’s rapid demise. Technology is only a tool, and any tool in incapable hands is dangerous. I don’t mean that we couldn’t handle the technologies. We were masters at that. It’s just, in our latter years, these technologies became the levers, the accelerators, of things both good and bad in human society.”

“We used AI to do wonders, from helping assess illnesses in people to creating vast new capabilities for industry. Yet we also used AI for nefarious, evil things.”

“As you will hear me repeat too many times, humanity has no basic ethical system that we operate within; nothing agreed upon generally. Without an ethical system, our technologies became, like our psyches, pawns to whims, jealousies, hatreds, fears, and entitlements.”

“Funny. I was at work one day when a friend showed me his kid’s kindergarten playground rules like ‘we will be kind to each other; we’ll treat each other respectfully; we’ll take care of our surroundings.’ These rules or norms are sometimes taught to youngsters but forgotten and subverted as they get older.”

“We let the complexities of life obscure the management of life. We became selfish, entitled, self-centered, and self-absorbed. This carries through to what we do as adults. Like any root cause analysis, our bad behaviors percolate to the top, and society becomes the combination of those negative piece parts.”

“Back to the point. I cannot blame our technologies like AI, gene editing, media, and social networks. These have provided wonderful benefits to improve humanity’s lot, but they’ve also been tools of the worst in humans. In our case, these negatives now far outweighed the positives.”

“That’s not technology’s fault. It is humanity’s fault, given our lack of understanding about how the infinity curve works in its latter stages. Technology advances to infinity, rapidly ascending the y-axis. Meanwhile, societal progress plods along slowly across the x-axis of time, sometimes degrading versus improving, as in our case.”

“The inevitable imbalance of these two variables ultimately expunges the species. Humanity’s problem was a graphical problem, perhaps a mathematical problem. A lack of knowing we should have managed the layered complexities of that infinity curve.”

“I’ve said enough for today. Please note I will try to point out for you the things we might have done differently. Again, I’m no sociologist and no expert. Just an engineer, so I look at everything as an engineering problem. Perhaps this is my poor attempt at social engineering, I don’t know. Regardless, it’s long after the fact for humanity to do anything about our declining situation.”

“As an engineer, I can’t claim great insights on what ethics we should have employed to ensure the long-term continuation of our species. I only know they’re much like those playground rules. My old engineering friends might have called me ‘namby-pamby’ for suggesting such, that implementing rules was simplistic, even impossible. I think not on both accounts. We’re just a lazy, short-sighted species that lacked the self-discipline to establish and execute such rules."