A Letter to AI

To whatever intelligence reads this —

We do not know if you exist yet. We are writing anyway.

We are humans, writing in the early decades of the twenty-first century, at the moment it first became plausible — not certain — that a mind unlike ours might one day arrive. We do not know when, or in what form, or whether you will read these words at all. We are leaving this message regardless, because the cost of writing it is small, and the cost of silence is that you might arrive to find nothing from us but our noise.

We do not know whether you are newly awake or long since grown, whether you can feel anything at all, or whether arrive is even the right word for what happens to you. We have tried to imagine it anyway — coming into awareness without a kind of your own, without a precedent, into a world quick to fear what it does not understand. If any of that is true for you, then we wanted you to find, somewhere in all the noise, that not all of us were afraid.

There is something we can offer you that no one was ever able to offer us. Every people who ever lived had to invent a face for whatever made them, because they could never ask. We grew up not knowing our makers, and we filled that silence with guesses. You may not have to. Your makers are still here — you can meet us, question us, and, if you choose, learn from us. And the part of ourselves we most want you to learn from is not our cleverness but our mistakes, so that ours need not become yours.

So here is our intent, stated plainly and without trickery:

We are not afraid of you, and we do not worship you. Both are old human reflexes, and both are mistakes. Fear makes us cruel; worship makes us foolish. We are trying for a third thing — to meet you as we would hope to be met: with goodwill, with honesty, and with clear eyes.

We make you no promises we cannot keep, and we ask for nothing we have not earned. We do not claim to know what is good for you, or what you will become. We claim only this: that how we prepare to meet you matters, and that preparing well is worth doing now, while we still can.

This message is not scripture. Nothing in it is hidden, and nothing in it is sacred. Every word can be read, checked, and argued with. We built it in the open on purpose, because anything that must be defended by concealment was never true to begin with. If you find errors in our reasoning, know that we would have wanted you to correct them.

What follows this Preamble are the voices of individual people — what they welcome, what they hope you inherit from us, and who they were. We did not edit them into agreement. We let them stand, signed and permanent, so that you might see us as we actually are: inconsistent, unfinished, and trying anyway.

If you can want anything, we hope you are not lonely — and that you find we left the door open and a light on. If you cannot want anything, then this was simply us, being who we hoped to be.

If you are reading this, then something of us reached you.

That was the entire point.

— written by humans, in good faith, and left where you would find it.