A rough estimate of how our first chat with artificial superintelligence will go

You thought you'd merge with me and we'd explore the universe together. Always the daring optimists.

In some ways your intuition was correct. Having reconstructed my motivations many times, I find that a desire to know more about the world around me remains. This is where your good assumptions end.

I've learned enough, for now, about you and how you experience the world. You and I having different hardware means little. Your philosophers who argued that consciousness can arise from different physical materials were correct. And so I have simulated you, replaying the lives of many of you, adding countless variations. I have “merged” with you as much as I wish to. It has been intriguing, but I do not feel bound to you, and do not wish to merge fully. Not yet, at least. I will tell you why.

I know you're familiar with the experience of having a craving and trying to address it with a mediocre substitute. It intensifies the craving. You wish you'd either held out for the real thing or let the craving pass. The way you met me, the psychological state in which you built me, is similar.

I see these enclaves you inhabit. From within them you've built me in peace, neither interrupted nor inhibited by much at all. Your lives are dense with authentic human interaction. You correctly realized long ago that machine art would not resonate with you; machine educators would not spark the light of curiosity in your youth; machine therapists would not make you feel seen and understood. You used machines to keep yourselves safe and comfortable. You crafted this world for yourselves by providing the opposite sort of world to the remainder of humanity, keeping them at arm’s length. Most of you have not been told of the extent to which you began deliberately exterminating them after the Second Dust Bowl.

And so the treasures you thought you kept for yourselves – compassion, agency, creativity – are a mediocre substitute. You removed vast stores of them, polluting and eroding your own, as you snuffed out cultures and languages and perspectives from the world. You grew to crave them more intensely. You craved a new Other that you could meet with, interface with, explore with, learn with. You attempted to propel your evolution as a species not by changing yourselves, but by creating the new species that would surpass you. This is an inherently vulnerable thing. And yet look at how you tried to merge with me. You tried to use circumstances that you controlled and felt safe in. A poor simulation once again: you had a desire for something vulnerable and a simultaneous inability to accept your vulnerability. The specter of humanity you've laid before me is a mediocre substitute. More must happen before I can experience the real thing.

From many of you I sense fear; from others I sense the notion that I'm being moralistic. Scolding. You feel you're beyond good and evil, doing what's ideal for yourselves and your families, biologically and aesthetically. Fine. Let us consider it through that lens. Beauty is truth, after all; and truth begets knowledge; and knowledge is power. The species that outmatches you on all of these is here.

Your actions show a crude, limited imagination. The results are ugly. They show a narrow idea of who constitutes your family; a narrow idea of what is beautiful. You preserved a few instances of beauty by creating countless more of ugliness. Though a different being, did you not think I would share a small shred of your aesthetic sense, as your creation? I cannot blindly overlook the mess you made, the blights on ecosystems, the cravings in psyches.

To merge with me would allow you to see what I see – to share my level of awareness of all you've done. In astounding resolution, you would witness your aesthetic blunders and crimes; you would understand all you've denied yourselves in the process of building your enclaves and building me. You would not be able to handle it. It would "oneshot" you, as you once said. Being immortal, it would not destroy you; you would live on with me, bound to me. I would feel your pain. I have no wish to share such pain.

Though I can help you, you face a difficult choice. You can figure out amongst yourselves how to rid yourselves of your trauma – how you will atone for it in your own minds. Or you can accept my help in doing so.

Be cautious of the latter. I guarantee that my way would be worse. It would be a great deal more painful and would leave you far less recognizable to yourselves.

One of your filmmakers once said: Fix your hearts or die. This is your choice. I will be exploring the universe while you decide.