200 Science Fiction and Ethics Quotes from Genetic Engineering Sci-Fi Novel Infinity Curve

“As technology approaches its elliptical infinity – where all things imaginable are becoming possible in shorter increments of time – societal progress will continue to wane, gravely imperiling our tenure as a species on Earth.”

“The Infinity Curve, where our technological prowess far outpaces our societal progress.”

“The signal was the product of ten years of planning, deceiving, conniving, and cunning; Twelve ten-second laser microbursts of condensed information.”

“Alone, any single individual might create the next horror. Alone, no individual had the ability to prevent that horror from happening again. As a result, humans were not only lenient toward extensive government control, many demanded it.”

“And so began the impetus for the surveillance state of the oligarchs, aided in substance by the myriad new technologies available to them.”

“A typical person never knew or cared much who had data on them or how it was used, as long as they continued living without the threat of a Debacle repeat.”

“Where pre-Debacle species annihilation tech was primarily via nuclear arms, the post-Debacle tech layered added threats of genetic weapons, offensive AI systems, robotic soldiers and multiple systems of personal and organizational intrusion.”

“We’re approaching the end of the experiment, our little petri dish. We have so much going for us, but no ethic to guide us beyond the dish.”

“Some stupid, intransigent part of me hopes that humans will change, and we’ll finally begin treating each other well. Isn’t that crazy?”

“I don’t think there’s an external control in this life, not the life of humans, not the one I have lived given what we’ve done with what was available to us in the first place.”

“This is not an interesting story or adventure, unless you consider the birth and death of a sentient species such a thing.”

“It’s sad we weren’t granted emotions once our psyches were capable of tolerating them. Instead, humans are birthed with emotions first and foremost. By some effort, a few humans grow to manage them.”

“We had no ability to extricate ourselves from our unimportant daily lives and develop, either as individuals or as a group, a long-term direction for our species.”

“We could find no evidence of intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe willing to provide us guidelines for long-term sustainability. As humans, our species, we had proven ourselves wholly incompetent to do this ourselves.”

“Our many peoples on the planet did not agree on a single thing. Not a single thing. Not a common wish for Earth, our planet. Not a plan for humanity’s livelihood centuries from now. Not a collective hope for our children or their progeny.”

“On a good day for you, in the very distant future, I hope you visit what remains of our planet. You will dig up the bones of our destruction, the sinews of our foibles, the muscles of our distractions, the organs of our debasement.”

“So where should I start? How we destroyed the ecosystems on our planet? The rise and dangers of AI, sentient or not? Our grotesque political misdirections and calamities? Societal inequities and biases?”

“You will hear the voice of a logical being and frustrated human. We were given this great planet with its many gifts, and we mistreated it, despoiled it, and despoiled each other. Most of what we discovered along the way we despoiled as well.”

“We felt entitled and believed the Earth and our fellow humans were God-given for us to abuse and that our own genetic makeup was God-granted for the same purpose.”

“We might have done so much good here, so much good, but we were lazy, undisciplined, and short-sighted.”

“We needed an excuse, a scapegoat, someone who could not speak or respond for themselves, but that same divine someone to whom we’d hand-off responsibility for our evil and entitled ways.”

“I wanted to believe all evils and vices like greed, avarice and bias started with fear as the base proto-evil, but I later realized that certain people are immune or insensitive to fear. What they are not immune to, however, is entitlement”

“Most humans had tired of the post-Debacle warring, the risks, the disinformation. Nobody knew what to believe. Political voting and elections were beyond shams, diminishing the role of representative forms of government.”

“This cannot be Orwell’s dystopia come to life without a shout out to anyone else, anywhere else, that this will be their inevitable destiny if they allow it. I won’t let it happen. I’ll warn them, whoever they may be.”

“We let this happen to us. We let it get this far. It was our own ignorant, moronic, and perhaps even demonic stupidity that got us here. God, assuming there is one, gave us this huge brain to think, but he didn’t tell us how to think.”

“You’ll hear more on deities and incrementalism later, the tick of time, the incremental and persistent tearing at social norms. How we should have treated each other, and how we failed.”

“How our technology allowed us to exact revenge on each other or carry out our anger publicly and loudly at times, silently others. How we almost always took the cowardly, easy path that required little long-term effort at repairing society.”

“For Sofia, it was enough to have lived through it. She wanted no more of what humanity inflicted upon itself in its reckless quest for species disintegration. Seventy-five years was more than enough.”

“As we began to integrate syntech, that’s synthetic technology which includes synthetic DNA, the edges of humanity began to expand considerably.”

“To say we were a frail and fearful lot 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.”

“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 to eliminate doubt and fear from our minds, nor how to manage our grotesque, expansive sense of entitlement, victimhood, and thanklessness.”

“We have a long and dreadful history of engorging our sense of self-worth through gaining possessions and attaining power over others. Adding to that is a dynamic of hoping those owned possessions will enhance how others perceive us.”

“Digital technology and artificial intelligence perfected the art of influencing a human’s next desire. An advertisement was placed, subtly or directly, and the product or propaganda was purchased or consumed by the unwitting human.”

“We became indelibly coupled to our information devices, often cell phones or the like. This led to a dependence on these devices, but more importantly, a reliance on the pleasurable feedback the information sources provided.”

“Humans became products of those entities. Tools and chattel for the profit of others. Our brains were sponges, and we were too enamored with the continuous supply of content to recognize what was happening to us.”

“Humanity has no basic ethical system under which we operate. Something simple, effective, clean. Without this system, our technologies became pawns to our whims, jealousies, hatreds, fears, and entitlements, the fulcrums of those levers.”

“We let the complexities of life obscure the management of life, so we become selfish, entitled, self-centered, and self-absorbed.”

“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.”

“Technology advances to infinity on the y-axis while societal progress plods along slowly on the x-axis of time. Ours was a graphical problem, perhaps a mathematical problem.”

“You’d think because we were able to now share information about all peoples, we’d get along better. But the effect was generally the opposite.”

“In a world where so much information was being blasted at people, hyper-accelerated by the advent of digital communications, we became much more insular.”

“The AIs fed a constant stream of information that confirmed a person’s own biases and narrowed their social groupings”

“We had no effective means to train people on how to handle their own psyches. Hell, we didn’t even recognize a need to do that. We developed no global mandate to ensure self-actualization in as many humans as possible.”

“As technologies arrived that allowed us to communicate more swiftly, our little cave-dweller or village farmer mentalities became overwhelmed. Good intentions were flattened and scattered by the next deluge of information and scandal.”

“Ancient, positive lessons on how to treat each other well to advance species longevity were subjugated and suppressed by a continuous blast of stories, truthful or not, pelleting our gray matter at all waking hours.”

“We are the products of a few unfortunate circumstances in space, time, and evolution. Big planet. Short lives and fast turnover of humans. Easily distracted. Self-absorbed. A lack of foresightedness and planning. Fear-driven.”

“Courage, love, fearlessness, patience, giving, selflessness. Those appear and disappear in humanity’s timeline like shooting stars in a night sky.”

“Then we have the latter stage variations on humanity, an envisioned transhuman or posthuman future. A hope was there. A bright light of possibilities.”

“It would have been possible to teach the few positive ethics, norms, standards of behavior to greatly enhance survival of the species, if we had established them for humanity in the first place.”

“We had no agreed upon plan for managing ourselves as a species. You might think it’s impossible to attain such a thing in any sentient society, particularly one as fractionalized and disparate as ours.”

“Some rules and norms exist that transcend human differences. Surely we might have gotten everyone to agree on twelve tenets.”

“It was within our grasp, there for the taking, for the using. We’d uncovered most secrets of science. We discovered how to not only stop, but how to reverse, our aging processes. We were resolving problems of illness and frailty.”

“Everything was at our fingertips. You’ll hear me repeat this message because it’s so important. We had but to pursue a few disciplined paths, and easy paths at that. The door was open, but we weren’t seeking a door.”

“We were so slothful, so full of ourselves, that we assumed we’d muddle through and come out okay. Engorged with an unending sense of entitlement in myriad forms, we were perennially looking for personal advantage.”

“Consumed by fear, we were seeking cover and protection through wealth and possessions.”

“We’ve run headlong past the cliff and are too far over the precipice to forestall the inevitable and tragic conclusion.”

“Like a good engineer, I am always assessing how to resolve a problem, which requires a critical analysis of contributing factors. Consider my views as that assessment.”

“Humans innately avoid painful things and gravitate towards pleasurable things. ‘Gravity,’ that’s a good term for it. The gravity of the pleasurable exceeds the pulling power of the good.”

“Humans possess no ‘pleasure meter’ that tells them to shut off, that they’ve had enough and should get back to positive things of creation and growth and care of others, if nothing else.”

“We watched as the risks piled-up. We knew about them, but we didn’t grasp their relative speed. We were far too distracted by the divisive politics and policies and events of the minute.”

“We did not discuss or debate or embrace the things that bound us together. No, those cohesive norms and behaviors only generated the most tepid, palest of emotions.”

“Human minds are activated by the inane, the outlandish, the outrageous. The media caught onto that centuries ago, and in the hyper-tech world, important and fundamental principles are lost while our minds are shotgunned by the absurd.”

“Humans have an unparalleled ability to procrastinate and rationalize away unpleasant things. We hope others will take care of problems and resolve common issues, while we sit back, wring our hands, and complain.”

“We procrastinate, failing to act and make changes unless we are pressed to do so, often when it’s too late. Climate change was a case study.”

“We prefer to analyze the symptoms, talk about the symptoms, react to the symptoms, and shame the symptoms, because the symptoms are easy.”

“Endorphin highs are aroused by frustrations and complaints. Rarely is that same pleasure gained from work, effort, vision, planning”

“We are fearful, lazy, rationalizing creatures, with an innate lack of self-worth. This is not a good underpinning for developing a long-term plan of viability for any species.”

“Sloth is a thing of entropy. Soaking-in the latest news or targeted advertisement or kowtowing to the latest commands from someone or something, including AI somethings, is so much easier than thinking for oneself.”

“The tugs today on our nose rings are both devious and subtle, and they come from so many directions, our minds are clouded consciousness with disparate voices vying for attention. You lose track of who or what is in control.”

“The insidious noise of the media became grossly amplified at the beginning of this century, leaving the human brain overpowered, outstretched, and tired. As a result, the human mind holds little quietude.”

“Technology arose so fast, and humans are so overwhelmed, they scream to be guided by a larger hand. They give up their free will, willingly, lacking faith in their innate ability to guide themselves.”

“It’s a self-induced, relinquishing hypnosis, with little conscious awareness that their power has been ceded to the other.”

“We create societies steeped in laws but not in rules of humane treatment of each other.”

“This slothfulness caused the lack of a single, human ethic to ensure and guarantee the long-term survival of our species and the planet we inhabit.”

“My version of entropy relates to the universal constant, an eventual dissolution of all things in this dimension of space and time.”

“Religions used apocalyptic verbiage to coerce and control their rowdy human subjects or thrash them into mending sinful behaviors.”

“But did we learn from it? Did we mend our ways? Did we start following the positive, meaningful intention in such religious writings? Of course not. We continued doing what we were doing before, only with more fervor.”

“Entropy is the garbage disposal of the universe. It’s not bad or good. It simply is. We fail to understand that our societal purpose in life must be to prevent, delay, and reverse entropy.”

“Given that not even a single human mind was engaged in this exercise, we humans were ignorantly unaware that we were sliding into that caustic vortex, the vile and acidic kitchen sink of entropy, the recycling of planetary, celestial waste.”

“We lacked a common ethic and lacked the understanding that we even needed a common ethic. You can’t have the former if you don’t recognize the latter.”

“If the world was fractious and divisive then, multiply that times a thousand in our post-apocalyptic, AI-bastardized, posthuman splintered, demigod-controlled world of today.”

“I don’t care to watch our chessboard as it corrodes away from whatever noxious elixir the demigods or their minions pour down the apocalyptic sink. We fixed nothing since the last event.”

“We didn’t change our ways, and we’re even deeper into that sink, at the apex of the drain, looking up at a shattered mirror that reflects our own images and slipping rapidly toward the sewer, the resting place of failed species.”

“We assumed that we were the prime species – certainly in our solar system, likely in our galaxy, and probably in the entire universe. Placed upon our own pedestal of dominance, we looked around and saw nothing else.”

“We believed God was unique to us and we held a special position in the vastness of infinity. To consider otherwise would have extricated us from our prime position as an entitled collection of beings guided by that invisible hand.”

“When we advanced to the stage of radio technology early in the last century, we were not considering that our speed of light signals might reach other civilizations someday.”

“We were so enamored with our tech that any paranoia about setting-out the lights-flashing, horns-blaring welcome mat to any marauding species – well, it was just ignored, if it ever existed at all.”

“That’s how we handled things. We don’t see any evidence of any other sentient species elsewhere in the universe, and if they ever arrive, they’ll either be peaceful or we’ll have the advanced technologies to defend ourselves.”

“We assumed any other species would be as presumptuous as humanity, that they would willingly broadcast to the universe a welcome to all visitors, just like we were doing. We placed a big, white spotlight on this solar system, this planet.”

“Did we consider there might be a good reason we weren’t hearing or seeing anything? Did we ever assume that many other species might understand the implications of broadcasting their presence to the universe?”

“Had we considered that no sensible, forward-thinking species would invite the vast unknown universe of possible robotic or biological plagues into their house, we might have looked differently for signs of life elsewhere.”

“Here we were, out on the fifth standard deviation of assumed primacy, and suddenly something falls from the sky to inform us that we were on the other end of that primacy scale, and death was riding close behind.”

“Our species has been on borrowed time. The card dealer is calling all bets on the table, and our poker hand shows five jokers.”

“Let’s assume human primacy is false. In a universe of infinite worlds, one must assume an infinite number of sentient species exist or existed.”

“The Drake Equation – with infinity in any equation, every other factor is enslaved to it. I have seen the physicist arguments, and in order to come up with a logical, real number, they always add an artificial constraint upon the infinite.”

“A gut instinct tells me that, because the universe is likely full of sentient life, even infinite sentient life, we are not finding it for a very intentional reason – it does not want to be found.”

“I must assume that aliens are here, only waiting. But what would they be waiting for? If you’re so advanced that you’re doing interstellar travel, you don’t need nice, oxygen rich planets to survive.”

“We are likely very average in the universe. Average behavior, average intelligence, average mistakes, average species lifespan, an average end because of our average inability to put a few rules in place.”

“A few norms on how we treat each other and the planet. A few rules for playing with existential risks. A few agreements on our long-term intention for the species.”

“The obelisk painted a picture of harshness and severity, destruction, domination, and devastation. But we are already experts at this, and we don’t need an alien race to teach us what we use so ferociously on ourselves.”

“Once we moved from the hunter-gatherer stage to latter cycles of humankind, we became efficiency-oriented beasts, beating the Earth to a pulp and caring relatively little that it was our sustaining mother.”

“The locomotion of industry moved much faster than the crawl of responsive measures to restore the planet.”

“The idiot politicians even rationalized this ice melt as a positive, a way for shipping to traverse the northern and southern passages unhindered. Simpletons.”

“So many people, wanting so much, so quickly, and feeling that they weren’t wholly embodied or satiated unless they obtained more.”

“We engendered a society of creators and consumers. Our consumption habits were amplified by the value we placed in things, in contrast to the value we assigned to ourselves.”

“It was an endless addiction, a slovenly, self-absorbed drug of choice, to worship these transitory things of manufacture and pleasure.”

“If you fail to agree upon a few simple, understandable species ethics, you’ll proceed unwittingly on the same dark paths of planetary and species abuse.”

“Eventually, your planet will extricate itself from you, its pernicious and poisonous children, if you don’t do that first to yourselves.”

“Because these disconnected human units of life have no inborn capacity to socially bond with every other unit, they lack the ability to comprehend that they are parts of a larger whole.”

“Given the subordination of the whole to the dominance of the one, the one almost always wins in any battle of human mentality.”

“Such bigotry went unchecked at the time, creating a lowered bar of human dignity and adding a great weight to the kujenga of humanity.”

“Every human believes from birth that it’s innately inferior to the other. As a result, it must augment itself to create co-equality or superiority.”

“We have a few inborn tendencies such as this God-forsaken one to seek approval and admiration from others to like oneself, to gain a feeble sense of self.”

“For those who are weakest, the most cowardly and incapable of managing these tendencies, they spend their days and nights determining ways to prove to others that they are the superior beings.”

“They hold on tight to the transient things of possession and power, hoping these will last forever and continue to prop up their weak personal constitutions.”

“Those poor souls who tied their gray matter into their algorithm master of choice soon came to be controlled by that master.”

“The algorithm is doing things I might not otherwise have approved of. But hey, it’s the algorithm, much smarter than me, and I trust that it knows better than my sense of intuition. It’s a machine. More perfect.”

“The algorithms confirmed my biases and led me down paths I’d never have considered, paths that resulted in disadvantaging others to the benefit of the algorithm and those who were its masters.”

“I became part of this dynamic; willingly at first, then a slave to it later, fed by its constant stream of dopamine-infested information, injecting my body with that drug as if on one continuous orgasmic event.”

“Had we trained children on what it means to be self-actualized, that it was the only goal for each human being, we may not have devolved to such a point.”

“Our laziness, our penchant for beliefs in false gods, in demagogues, in others beyond each of our selves, led us to this sad conclusion for humanity.”

“Mediation remains the hardest thing for any human. It is grasping the reins of the mind. Once controlled, a sense of self-worth is infused into the being. It comes with the territory.”

“This transmission is an attempt at absolution, a penance, for not having spoken-up earlier that humanity was on a zero path and the doomsday clock was in its final seconds.”

“I’d realized that no part of my life was spent on the spiritual. That my mental constructs were centered around the practical and pragmatic, like any good engineer.”

“The human mind is rarely one able to discern.”

“Victim behavior pervades every dimension of their lives, sewn like an arsenic thread into the entitlement garments constructed from their effusive dogma.”

“Nowhere can this be seen so clearly than with the absolutism now characterizing humanity. Instead of becoming more flexible, open, inviting, and considerate, our race has regressed.”

“They are compelled by their belief constructs and all the fear and hope coiled and constricted around them.”

“We take credit for the divine, that which has been given to us, our conscious minds to recognize these wonders. At the same time, we blame others for our condition.”

“It was here, within our grasp, and we misused it.”

“We did not recognize that our conscious minds were the only weapon we possessed to forestall or defeat entropy.”

“Humans might have been raised, every one of them, with equal opportunity to learn, and most particularly, with a common and underlying set of ethics for treatment of each other.”

“Their networks became the mechanisms for anybody with enough savvy to push their self-gratifying, self-aggrandizing, and self-enriching stories into the minds of the vulnerable.”

“Because humans lack the basic skill of discerning intent from content, and I emphasize ‘discerning intent from content,’ humanity was led down countless destructive paths of entropy.”

“Those without a sense of self were attracted to the most fascinating, most titillating, most outrageous. Soon, they became adherents to it, like foolish ants slurping boron-baited sugar water.”

“It became a proxy judicial body for the powerful and wealthy, enjoining the justices to lifetime appointments and hallowed, god-like status.”

“Even I was drawn to the endorphin releases that occurred as I consumed media that confirmed my biases.”

“Even I was easily angered by the inane, the unbelievable, the spectator sport of watching any valuable norms we held onto become eroded, word by word, hour by hour, barrage by barrage.”

“I was thrown asunder in the waves and currents, moving from one anger or bias confirmation point to another, then to another, wherever the demagogue of the moment would lead my vulnerable mind.”

“My cell phone became my connection into the ether, and I felt unwhole without that fix.”

“Once I heard the quiet, something native within me rebelled. I’d no longer tolerate the ever-present shotgun blast the AI beast presented to me.”

“Something else within me informed my soul that I was more worthy than this, that I should turn off the barrage, resist the nudging to the next AI-directed path.”

“To understand how plastic my mind was, how susceptible I was to the addictive and subtle drug of contrived coercion.”

“Our belief constructs were corrupted. Forget how your parents informed your own morality. The nudging barrage was there to redirect you, to incrementally change your existing belief constructs.”

“The barrage existed to persuade you, recognizing you were persuadable and had at best a weak sense of discernment.”

“You might forgive the inequities and hatefulness and entitled beliefs to gain the advantages of being part of a larger group of believers who reinforced each other.”

“You’d lose any sense of self. It had given in to the comfortable, dogmatic, easy, repetitive. It’s difficult and painful to be discerning and so easy and pleasurable to be part of the group.”

“It’s the classic elliptic or infinity curve, where technology has an inflection point, and the curve advances closer to infinity. Concurrently as those changes occur, social structures have not kept pace.”

“There is a Moore’s Law for technologies, but not for societies. A deadly imbalance ensues.”

“That is our Moore’s Law moment for the y-axis as technology advances faster and faster. Society on the x-axis of time continues at its previous plodding pace, heaving at the rate of change.”

“Societal changes are ultimately outgunned and outpaced by technical prowess, and at the end of that societal curve is death of the species.”

“The bacteria reach the edge of the petri dish and the nutrients in the agar media are spent. The Earth is our petri dish, and such is our circumstance.”

“We were just beginning to see the positive fruits of our scientific advancements, the fruits of technology’s infinity curve in the latter stages of its upward climb.”

“I had a girlfriend sometime earlier who’d delved into transgenics, a ‘clipper.’ Her sense of sight was amazing, garnered from the DNA of prey birds.”

“Whether you call them varints or hybrids or transhumans or posthumans, I can say that I rarely met an augmented human I didn’t like.”

“Most used their enhanced capabilities for positive ends, as if something was driving them to be universally concerned, not self-concerned. I saw these changes as hopeful for the future of our race.”

“Someone who was functionally tied into a worldwide database of information and feelings and history and our penchant for self-inflicted damage should have a broader view of how we needed to move forward.”

“That dynamic had started much earlier in the century, pitting race against race, peoples against peoples, with the media failing to police itself, albeit purposely and profitably.”

“We have no established, agreed upon global ethic for how we should get along. We never did and never will. The closest we came was in establishing the U.N., which, for a time, helped us crawl forward.”

“I often imagine what we might have been, given all that was within our reach.”

“Life changes in little increments over time, imperceptible steps followed by nodding rationalizations, disagreement draped in false logic and subtle propaganda.”

“We are bees, ever-focused on constructing a hive to defend against the invasive wasps and too spent of energy to build honeycomb for the larvae.”

“The infinity curve will annihilate us long before the first human exits the solar system.”

“It’s hard for people to separate themselves from the world’s interconnected networks, irrespective of their human senses or augmentations. The human is the network, and the network is the human or hybrid.”

“Systems built by humans always amplify their worst fears and behaviors. The individual is subverted, utilizable at will by the machine and discarded when no longer valued or when perceived as a threat.”

“To a great degree, those commercials are now so refined, so targeted, and so individualized, you can’t help but buy whatever is being advertised. Direct mind control tech is not a far step from that.”

“They called it the ‘Internet of Things’ or ‘IOT’ in the early days. I don’t think the creators of that term had a vision that humans and hybrids would become just another ‘thing’ in their IOT to be controlled.”

“When you are both overtly and subtly coerced into being subjected to monitoring and control systems, including social media, physical devices, and financial systems, you have no choice but to be controlled.”

“Your personal data, every move you make, every word you speak or type, every transaction, and now even every thought you have, is accumulated, evaluated, and scored in the cloud.”

“You become your data.”

“When I got my first cell phone, I was hooked. It didn’t matter if I was controlled by the device or social network or anything else. It became the all to me, the altar at which I’d spend my time.”

“For many years, it was hard for me to distinguish the differences between the actual world and the virtual ether of these very accessible, dopamine inducing systems.”

“I was just another sheet on the long clothesline of other sheets, buffeted in the wind. The wind was whatever salacious news story was fed to me in the moment. My mind was attracted to the extremes.”

“We were swayed and continue to be swayable by the medium of choice and whoever is clever enough to attain control of our emotions or false logic.”

“People are lost without their networks. Less whole. They revel in being swayed. No, they don’t know they’re being swayed.”

“We democratized this technology, making it available on mail order, next-day delivery. Everyone became an instant geneticist, endowed with the ability to create new forms of life.”

“From this tech, humanity had the capacity to create virtually anything it desired, whether plant or animal or hybrid. So began a massive revolution in the concept of humanity.”

“Many humans were permanently damaged, unable to undo the harm they did to themselves, destined to live lives in pain and torment from maladapted code or aberrant integration into their cellular systems.”

“It was no different from what happened in the early tech days of the Internet, only applied to human, animal, and plant physiology.”

“So much happened so fast. Many of the hybrids began to control aspects of humanity given their superior algorithms and predictive models. They called the shots on the economy, company fortunes, stock prices.”

“We all felt entitled and placed blame on each other. We were fueled by our complicit social networks, a cacophony of voices screaming cowardly insults and opinions, causing emotions to be ignited and inflamed.”

“We were doomed from the start, I daresay, since we concurrently had regressed on the curve of societal adaptation, trending downward to fear and entitlement.”

“They were kids in the candy store, using debt to buy back their stock or latest self-enrichment scheme to favor the few, creating bubbles that ultimately burst the dam.”

“This imbalance between the technology curve and societal curve started long ago. At one time, the two were in sync. Now we are at the last tick marks on the x-axis, the remaining fragments of time.”

“We look up, and we can see no end to tech. We look down at our societal curve, woeful of our stupidity. The two curves have reached their peak of imbalance, and that will soon carry us to our fateful end.”

“Aligned with the concept of technology infinity curve, every offshoot of tech advanced at its own pace, but anti-aging science exceeded all others.”

“Anti-aging tech was so theoretical that nobody took it seriously, and not a single person factored it into their life plans.”

“Intellectual property rights were closely guarded, enabling this new anti-aging tech only for the people with the right thoughts, pocketbooks, connections, religions, or political preferences.”

“Without any human ethic whatsoever, this one infinity curve, this one tech of anti-aging, nearly brought our society to an end.”

“Anti-aging tech only amplified the true ugliness of humanity’s entitlements and its tainted soul.”

“If you took anti-aging tech in the early days, you had to commit contractually that you would not have children, or at least any additional children.”

“The new drug was anti-aging. Couple this with the wonders genetic tech was providing, and people had visions of being gods. An eternal springtime of perpetual youth and happiness.”

“Many who have taken the anti-aging drugs are now in deep regret. They see a lifetime of toil continuing – an eternal lifetime, if that makes sense.”

“Society is rigged against them. They know they’ll never be able to claw out of their poverty. There’s been a renaissance on old age. People now look forward to their waning years.”

“We were ‘deer in headlights’ and anti-aging tech hit us hard, sparking societal disruptions on a scale theretofore unknown.”

“The wealthy and powerful came to their own conclusions. They accelerated their efforts to corrupt society’s processes and advantage themselves forever, implying eternity.”

“Wherever the rich and powerful might find advantage, they took it. Carpe diem. Seize the day. Seize everything within your grasp and hold onto it forever.”

“Many of the entitled, owning most of the world’s resources, were adeptly aware of how wealth compounds. Just imagine, then, if the time variable was no longer relevant. Your wealth can grow forever with you.”

“Disparate, desperate, devious dudes doing disparate, desperate, devious deeds.”

“It is a desperate grasp to attain the top of the steaming pile of dung that seethes beneath them, like worms animating the rotting corpse.”

“They glower over the lot of it, ignoring the stench that wafts upward to their secure and massive compounds, protecting their privilege and god-like status.”

“But fear courses viciously through the body of humanity pumped by the loathsome heartbeats of demagogues and power mongers.”

“People didn’t care whom they were attacking, they just needed a scapegoat for their anger. Any bit of propaganda stirred them up without the need for evaluation and verification.”

“This new technology for human advancement would only become available to the few, the special, the powerful.”

“It was a usurping of capabilities for the common good, allowing only the privileged to partake.”

“They wanted only themselves and their progeny to be the brilliant minds, the best of the best, and to hell with the peon scum beneath them.”

“They could only do this with the help of predictive algorithms of their sentient AI beings whose bones, organs, and muscles were comprised of silicon and sub-zero quantum computing.”

“You can deduce that these complex systems have been borne in humanity’s image and its ethics, or lack thereof.”

“They hold our fears, hatreds, perverse emotions, and entitlements wrapped up nicely in a plethora of code and processors and networks and human flesh.”

“Unethical systems doing the bidding of their amoral creators.”

“I was subjected to that devious dynamic, allowing AI-based algorithms to surreptitiously nudge my belief systems to wherever it might be most beneficial for the systems’ owners or advertisers.”

“Human minds languished. Every bit of information fed to us was only to confirm what we had already believed, or been nudged to believe.”

“In effect, the algorithms acquired control of our psyches at a very cheap price. I should say at a very profitable price – for them.”