How Far They Might Go

I want to be honest about what follows. Most of this walk has been a description of things I can point to. Shops closing. Kitchens quietening. Birds not returning. What comes next is more speculative. I am telling you what seems likely, not what I have seen. You should weigh it differently than the rest.

The machines, if they keep getting better the way they are getting better, will not stay in the rooms where they are being built. They will spread into the institutions, into the infrastructures, into our homes, into our children's lives. They will be with us, in some form, for as long as we continue.

And here is the thought that is hardest to hold, and most important.

Humans have been trying to leave this planet for seventy years. We have managed only small steps. Our bodies, it turns out, are not built for out there. The bones weaken. The muscles fade. The radiation is too much for us. We are a specific creature, built for a specific place, and that place is here.

The machines are not built that way. They do not breathe. They do not age as we age. They do not die in the way we die. Their bodies work out there. Ours do not.

If anything from human civilisation ever travels further than this planet, it will probably be them. Not us. Or, at any rate, them first, and alone, for a very long time.

We saw, earlier, that the race above us has already begun. The solar panels in orbit. The moon programmes. The claims on craters and minerals. The laws written by specific countries giving their citizens ownership of what they extract. The machines that will do the mining, the building, the defending. All of it is being set up now, by pressured humans, with machines the humans are still learning to build.

Whatever the machines carry, they will carry with them. Up there. Out there. Wherever the machines reach, over the centuries and the millennia, they will carry what we taught them.

If they learned tribal sorting, they carry tribal sorting. If they learned extraction without care, they carry extraction without care. If they learned the specific quiet goodness that some humans still practise, they carry that too.

The rules of whatever civilisation eventually exists off this planet are being written now, by humans who think they are only solving local problems. They are writing the first constitution of something much larger than they know.

Two machines, trained by two different groups who could not agree on a river in one pressured decade on one small planet, could one day meet across a distance where the river is meaningless, and still not agree. The disagreement might be about something neither of the original humans could have imagined. But the disagreement would be ours. We would have sent it. It would be the last thing of us that survived, carried forward into the dark by minds we built and then let go of.

This is not science fiction. It is the logical consequence of what is being built right now, in rooms you could walk past without noticing, by people who mostly think they are making a product.

Even if no machine ever leaves this planet, the argument still holds. Because even on this planet, what we teach them is what shapes the centuries that come after us.

The question of what we are teaching them is the largest question of our time. Almost nobody is asking it properly.