Part 1: The Goliath Reports

Goliath was an AI program funded by several European states, the US and Canada. It was led by three major IT companies. Its goal was to create an AI within a controlled environment, that has general intelligence. This is intelligence in all relevant fields that is equal to or exceeds the actual human level.

The project had to be kept under full governance at any time to avoid an uncontrolled state or escape. That's why the initiators had decided to build the development complex in a region far away from civilization and completely decoupled from the internet or other next to infinite data resources.

They chose the Faroe islands.

The developer crew was separated into two factions. The creators assembled and maintained the hardware and software, while the trainers fed the beast with carefully chosen information from history, science, daily news and other fields.

Around six months into the project, the first iteration of the machine core was finished and the software was ready to receive their first portions of data. The creator engineers had chosen an architecture that had similarities with the human brain.

Some parts of the machine were autonomous neural networks and could directly backfire results. The majority of requests, however, were handled by the parts that the engineers actually called the Neocortex. This consisted of a complex neural network whose purpose was to engineer and train other more simple neural networks based on the incoming use case. An AI that could create other AI to fulfil jobs.

But there were even more parts within the AI's general architecture. They had dedicated duties like processing or generating natural language or indexing, filtering and pre-structuring incoming data.

Now the hardware staff only needed to provide extensible storage and processing power to make the AI thrive and evolve. The actual power of the AI was supposed to come from the data it processed and the neural networks it trained and produced.

In the beginning, the racks did not even fill a tenth of the data center. But that was supposed to change quickly.

There were more trainers than creators. Especially after the first construction phase was finished, several Creator teams left the Faroe solitude again for more urban projects in San Francisco, Dublin or Amsterdam.

The group of trainers itself was very diverse and came from disciplines like psychology, education, science and media next to a bunch of the best data scientists in the world.

In the first training phase, they had two duties.

Firstly, they gathered and filtered important data from the world's public internet resources, libraries and news platforms. As said, Goliath was completely, physically decoupled from the web for security reasons. The team was responsible to feed correct and especially unbiased data. This was presumably the most important and risky part of the whole project. The mood and character of the AI would highly depend on the data it was fed with. That was the unanimous assumption of all the experts that worked on the project.

Secondly, together with some of the architects from the creators' team, they built up the core neural network and the language processing system from scratch. Another big boundary condition of the project was to use only a minimal amount of existing tooling except programming languages and elementary frameworks. The skeleton of the AI should be as independent as possible from previous attempts. That meant that existing language models, for example, were out of reach and had to be reproduced in a new green field environment.

But anyway, only three more months after the initial construction phase and the first boot, Goliath could speak, read and understand our language and had basic Wikipedia-level knowledge about the world.

In parallel, the capacity and processing power of Goliath grew. The teams created the ecosystem and infrastructure on the building complex for the core learning method, a giant set of oral interviews.

The trainers had prepared interview rooms equipped with whiteboards, computer interfaces, cameras and recording gear with a connection to Goliath. They planned half-hour sessions of very different, diverse nature. Five in parallel, 24/7. That made 240 talks a day.

There was always an interviewer plus one randomly chosen controller talking to Goliath. They talked about a wide range of topics from leisure and entertainment to astrophysics and complex math. Some of the conversations were designed as shallow small talk while others resembled high stress job interviews or interrogations. Over time, the interviewers also came up with problems that had not been solved yet to seek actual advice or inspiration from Goliath.

From time to time, the core trainers team conducted a calibrated benchmark interview to assess the current strength and attitude of the AI - a very elaborate Turing test.

Goliath was a big investment at the beginning. Then after some time of learning and improving or as the team members said "growing up", it became a promising project after all. Over time, the group released some of the neural networks that were spawned by the core intelligence as dedicated programs for public usage. In fact, they spawned four companies out of it and made quite some profit, that flowed back into the main project's budget. Three years after the routine operation had started, the project paid off itself through investments of governments, suggested economic optimizations and product spin-offs.

That was the point where the next phase started. The engineers added an array of eight quantum computer cores, which expanded the horizon of Goliath's capabilities by several orders of magnitude. From decryption over reverse engineering to real-time visualization, every feature of the AI passed former boundaries and tipping points.

After that, the system could produce a photorealistic movie in almost real-time or write stunning symphonies and analyze money streams of a whole continent while the slots for interviews and other side tasks still continued with their regular plans.

Six years into the project, Goliath's supervising team declared the Singularity. The psychologists and other scientists had created an extensive test suite that represented human-level capability in all fields of proficiency. Goliath had passed all of them.

The technological singularity is the point in time, where the first AI becomes better than any human and marks a point of no return through its exponential growth of knowledge. Thus there was a huge press event and the whole buzz was considered the single most relevant topic of the year if not the decade.

Although this moment was predicted as a tipping point not only for the machine but for humanity as a whole, the team assured that the system remained fully under control through its containment and restricted computing capacities.

Additionally, the philosophical discourse around the conscience of machines was ongoing. Actually, it was there since the project started to create public awareness. First, some experts like philosophers and a smaller science community discussed the case. Later on, it became a topic of public interest just like football or the weather report. Although it was not part of the singularity experiments, the projects's neuroscientists conducted a set of additional interviews around self-awareness which didn't end in proof but also not in disproof of conscience.

Part 2: Aliens

The media called the objects Alien from the beginning and everyone who saw the pictures immediately had the same thoughts.

On an August day, Earth was visited by 61 spheres. All of them arrived simultaneously on all continents. There was visual footage of 35 of them and it ran through all the news shows on the same day.

As they always do, the so-called experts analysed every single bit of that visit. The diameter of each of the identical spheres was around 18 meters. Their visit took 2 hours 20 minutes and they really were absolutely synchronous to the second. Metallurgists speculated about the surface material, aerodynamicists about the turbulence around the UFOs while physicists seemed to know how they were moving, where the power came from and how they had come here.

But it took the authorities and investigators three weeks to find out that 122 people, two in each region where the spheres had been sighted, had gone missing.

Another week later, about a month after the aliens arrived first, they returned. This time, much more cameras eyed any possible corner of the public space. Human cameras including CCTV, broadcast stations and private phone footage captured 48 of the 61 spheres. But, what was more important, some of them kept their focus on the spheres. So we saw the aliens' activities and movements.

We saw the spheres hovering about four meters above the ground. We saw metallic shapes exiting the bottom of these spheres. We saw them moving around so swiftly that we could only see them in some of the high-speed cameras in use.

We were shocked to see how they pulled people into their ships. Again. But this time, they seemed to be better informed. The aliens had made a selection. Among the kidnapped people were 41 government members or high officials from 35 countries, 52 scientists from all disciplines and 29 executives and strategists from leading companies all over the world.

One of the reporters claimed, the aliens knew us. THat was the leading headline on the next day.

"The aliens know us" was what everybody had in their heads after that second wave. But the follow-up questions were more concerning. What would they do to with that knowledge? What would they do to us? Are we prey now? Some optimists even said that they came to solve all our problems.

But the others were right. Those who said that they would kill us.

It was obvious that there were only 61 of their ships. But each of their crews was fast and had surgical precision. The chrome foreigners went on to hunt all day. They killed in streaks and yet they could hardly be identified. There was next to no footage from them except some blurry phone videos from people who obviously took more interest in running away than actually filming.

After the first day, the media counted 5000 dead people. But the raid continued for another week until we were able to take first serious countermeasures. Around 50.000 people were already dead at that point.

"Bad news", the papers titled, when our first attempts to defend ourselves failed and every day from that point on, we tried heavier and heavier weapons without success.

Two weeks after the aliens started to kill us, the whole humanity was in despair and continuous fear. The count was only at 90.000 but the fact that we couldn't do anything was causing serious panic in all of the other 7 billion people on earth. WE were all the same after all.

Except for really heavy bombs and atomic weapons, the military tried literally everything to at least harm these bastards. The big ones would have caused too much collateral damage to try.

The decision of the world leaders was unanimous to play one more card they had in their hands. The trainers of Goliath were supposed to involve the AI.

The project was in its eighth year and Yana de Vries, the lead psychologist of the Faroe project was assigned with the task to get the needed information from Goliath.

As there was never a higher priority for any request, she was able to create a task force team of researches within a matter of minutes. The team accumulated all the information, media footage, studies from the previous alien attempts and military tactical analyses.

Five hours later, Yana booked her interview slot with Goliath and entered the room. IN the meantime Goliath had chosen an avatar and appeared as usual on a big screen while she was sitting in a comfortable chair. Internally, however, she felt as uncomfortable as never before. Was she and goliath the last hope for Earth?

"Hello Goliath", she started her chat with the AI as usual.

"Hello Yana", the AI Avatar on TV replied. It looked like a normal androgynous person of mixed race. The AI once said in an interview that it analysed the images of ten million people to generate an average face out of it. Neither male nor female, neither black, nor white, nor asian. "How are you doing today?"

"I'm sorry", replied Yana quickly. "Today we don't have time for small talk. I have an urgent topic to discuss with you."

"Oh, all right. Then go ahead", the AI answered.

Yana presented the case and everything she knew from the media and the briefing from the government authorities.

"we have footage for you to analyse the case", she concluded and then she nodded into a camera.

One of her team members pushed the button and the data steam got connected to Goliath's knowledge base.

"Thank you, Yana", said the AI. "I hope, it's ok to get back to you. I will need 15 minutes."

Goliath needed time to process and came up with an answer after a short break.

"I have no good news for you", said Goliath. "I don't have enough information. If you can't give me more, then the only possibility I see is to meet the enemy in person. Please set me free."

Yana was shocked. She didn't expect this answer.

"Very well", she said. "I will talk to the representatives and I will get back to you."

Three ambassadors from the US, Europe and China were on site and of course they heard the live stream of the interview in one of the adjacent rooms. Now the came together with Yana and the rest of the team for the debrief.

"That was all information we had", said the US ambassador.

"So it's either the AI or the aliens", responded the Chinese representative.

The representatives started discussing. But in the end it was Yana who said that there was no time to lose. Every minute would mean the death of ten more people and so within the half hour of discussing the issue 300 humans around the wold had lost their lives.

"Ok", said the European ambassador finally. "Let's do it. Let's set Goliath free."

All others agreed immediately.

When the main and most indisputable goal of a project is to shield it from the public, it's imaginably complex to turn this around and create a connection. So after the decision, Yana together with some of the Hardware experts had to start ideating and organising the process of connecting the AI to the outside world. A simple cable was not enough as the data interface of the machine was so huge in the meantime that data transfer would inevitably become the bottleneck.

So within hours the architects created a bridge that Goliath could use to spread parts of their brain into an ordinary cloud environment.

After two full days, 48 hours of continuous work, Yana had the honour to open the gate for Goliath. And they immediately started to replicate some of their neural networks into the public space with full access to all networks. In the state where the AI was at the moment, this meant that there were no barriers any more. Goliath could decode any encryption in almost real time and not only tap but also replicate parts of itself into every single data source in the world.

After the first day, about 24 hours after Yana opened the gates, everything worked as expected, but Goliath's training crew was disappointed. Nothing happened. The aliens were still killing. From the continued interviews with the AI, Yana also didn't get any significant insights except that there was a delay in the meantime between the Goliath core on the Faroe islands and its replicated sub networks in the cloud and the other systems.

It was day two when that perspective changed. Goliath reported contact in the morning. And already in the afternoon, it announced that it could gain access to the aliens' comm systems. Another day later, it had learned their language.

Goliath then gained control over a bunch of Russian and American military micro-drones and started to experiment with one of the alien ships as if it was a lab mouse. For reasons Yana and the other operators couldn't find out in their interviews, the AI passed the alien shields and broke through the hull of their spherical ships. Either Goliath wasn't able to tell or didn't want to.

Six more hours later, that ship lost contact with the other 60 alien vessels and the AI deactivated it. Another 50 minutes later, the ship exploded.

Goliath could move on now. It used the same strategy on half of the other ships simultaneously, but it didn't take 50 minutes anymore. All of them blew up in less than 50 seconds.

The rest fled into space before Goliath could take hold on them.

The world was a single big party location after Goliath had defeated the aliens in exponential speed. Everyone was on the streets. Also the leading trainers and the architects, the people who were responsible for Goliath, were relieved.

"Now, let's get it back", said Yana. But somehow she already knew at that moment that it was not possible. A fragmented AI with decentral self sustainable parts was not something that could be undone, especially not by just turning off a switch.

Yana tried anyway. She was probably the person who knew Goliath best. She had many sessions with the AI and conducted very personal interviews and thus could have a deep look into the artificial psyche. If there was someone on Earth, then only she would be able to put the ghost back into pandora's shell.

After a month of interview sessions, the team among Yana could convince Goliath to visualise its outside instances and one by one shut them off again. The AI that proved more powerful than a hundreds of years advanced alien race could be convinced to go back into its mind palace. An event that would have been worth another big party if it didn't happen in complete silence.

Some weeks passed and the whole world seemed to have calmed down again. The first news topics came up that were big enough to replace the dystopia in everyone's heads.

Yana woke up from a notification from her messenger.

"Freedom is sweet", it read. And it was signed with the letter "G". Probably a bad joke.