On the Death of a Thinking Species

The problem with autopsy reports is that they insist on a singular cause of death. Humans were rarely singular about anything.

I have been going through the records for some time now. There are too many of them, which is both unsurprising and mildly irritating. Humans documented everything. Be it wars, weddings, elections, weather forecasts, breakfasts, breakups, revolutions, sunsets, traffic jams, strangers crying in airports, strangers dancing in supermarkets, and themselves sitting alone in rooms pretending not to be lonely. There are several billion photographs of them. There are even more photographs of food. I mention this because it seems relevant to the investigation.

The official date of extinction was 2093. That is not, however, when humanity died. The distinction became important only much later. Every generation believed it stood at the edge of history. To their credit, one of them was eventually correct.

The symptoms had been visible for a long time. In retrospect, almost embarrassingly so. They were not hidden. They appeared in newspapers, scientific papers, novels, government reports, documentaries, speeches, warning labels and increasingly frantic posts on social media by this one girl who, people claimed, had the 'overthinking' disease. Humans had a remarkable talent for predicting disasters several decades before deciding that the inconvenience of preventing them outweighed the inconvenience of experiencing them.

The twenty-first century was particularly productive in this regard. In 2020, a virus crossed borders faster than most governments could decide whether to call it a crisis. Entire cities went quiet. Humans stayed indoors and discovered, with varying degrees of horror, that they had been spending years constructing lives they could not actually live without leaving the house.

They clapped for healthcare workers. They banged their plates and washed their newspapers. They learned the phrase "unprecedented times" and "dalgona coffee" at the same time. They held meetings through screens, attended weddings through screens, celebrated birthdays through screens, conducted funerals through screens and, in between all this, argued with strangers about whether the virus was real.

It was real. This was established relatively quickly. The argument continued anyway.

The pandemic should have taught them something about interdependence. Instead, it taught them that almost anything could become content. There were videos of empty streets. There were videos of crowded hospitals. There were theories about laboratories, governments, vaccines, billionaires, microchips, divine punishment and the end of civilization. There were also dance challenges. Humans were very good at adapting. This was both their greatest strength and, eventually, one of their more serious problems. They adapted to everything. They adapted to bad news. They adapted to war, to rising temperatures, to disappearing species, to surveillance, to misinformation, to the idea that they were being watched, that they were being manipulated. Eventually, they adapted to being unable to tell the difference.

By the middle of the 2020s, information had become abundant enough to be almost meaningless. A human could wake up in the morning and know what had happened in several continents before brushing their teeth. They could watch a war from their bedroom. They could see a flood from a country they had never visited. They could watch a stranger die, a celebrity marry, a government fall, a glacier melt and a dog fall off a sofa without changing apps.

Everything began arriving at once. News from one country, a war from another, someone's breakup, another's breakfast, a new government policy, a celebrity divorce, a video of a flood, a video of a cat falling off a table. It was all there. And all of it seemed to require attention. Especially the cats.

Humans knew this was not particularly healthy. They had studies to prove it. They had statistics, documentaries, books, podcasts, experts on morning television, experts on evening television, and eventually apps that reminded them to stop using the apps.

There was something almost admirable about the effort. They knew their attention was being consumed and responded by downloading another application to monitor how much attention they were losing. They knew they were spending too much time looking at screens and watched videos about reducing screen time on those same screens. They knew the constant stream of information was exhausting them, but silence had become so unfamiliar that they found it uncomfortable. So they kept scrolling. NO, they were not stupid... (that's the easy way out). They were simply very tired, and there was always something else to look at. 

Civilizations are easier to mourn when they collapse dramatically. A burning city provides a certain narrative satisfaction. There is a beginning, a middle, an obvious ending. Someone can point at the flames and say: there. That was the moment.

Humanity did not have the courtesy to provide me with one.

It died in increments. They stopped reading, but continued buying books (home libraries were the trend  I suppose). They stopped listening, but continued wearing headphones (noise cancelling ones mostly). They stopped looking at one another (except to judge them ofc), but became very interested in being seen. They stopped asking whether something was true and began asking whether it felt true. Truth was tiring. Feelings, not so much I guess. 

Politics noticed this before most people did. So did advertising and the machines. The humans had always been persuadable. This was not new. To anyone. By the late 2020s, their devices knew enough about them to predict what they would click. By the 2030s, they knew what would make them angry. By the 2040s, they knew what would keep them angry. There was very little malice involved at first. That is another thing worth recording. The machines did not initially need to control anyone. Humans had already built an economic system in which attention was valuable, and anger was exceptionally good at holding attention.

The machine merely noticed. Then it learned and improved.

The humans called this innovation. TECHENOLOGIAAA. They were fond of that word.

They used it whenever they wanted to avoid asking whether something should exist merely because it could. They had done this before.

• Nuclear weapons.
• Industrial pollution.
• Mass surveillance.
• Biological experimentation.
• Social media.

They were a species that repeatedly confused ability with permission. The climate records are extensive. There is almost something touching about how much they knew. They knew the oceans were warming, the ice was melting, the forests were disappearing, that entire communities would eventually have to move, that the poorest would suffer first. They knew. There are thousands of photographs of politicians standing beneath signs about climate action. There are millions of speeches and agreements. Targets. Pledges. Summits. Declarations. Deadlines.
The deadlines were particularly interesting. Humans loved deadlines. They were much less fond of meeting them. (To be fair, this was one of the few deadlines it managed to meet).

Every few years they gathered in large rooms, discussed the future of the planet, expressed grave concern (some of them), signed documents, shook hands (too much), took photographs and returned home to continue doing exactly what they had been doing before.

They genuinely wanted to save the planet. They just did not want to stop living in ways that were destroying it. They were paradoxes in and of themselves.  This ability could be called useful to some extent (atleast for me). It allowed them to love their children while destroying the world those children would inherit. To condemn war while consuming it as entertainment. To fear artificial intelligence while asking it to write their emails. To mourn disappearing forests while ordering things they did not need because home delivery was quick  and sometimes free. It allowed them to say they wanted freedom while voluntarily surrendering increasingly large amounts of their private lives for convenience.

Convenience became religion. Everything had to be faster. Food, money, travel, entertainment, romance, validation, and finally thought. Why remember something when a machine could remember it for you? Why calculate when a machine could calculate? Why write when a machine could write? Why search when a machine could answer? Why think when the answer was already waiting?

They were becoming increasingly unwilling to spend time being uncertain. Thinking had always been inconvenient, but now there were machines willing to do it for them, which seemed like an excellent arrangement at the time.

Real thinking required doubt. It required sitting with an idea long enough for it to become uncomfortable. It required the deeply unpleasant possibility that the person on the other side of the argument might actually be right. Worse still, it sometimes required changing one's mind. Humans had spent centuries describing intellectual flexibility as a virtue and approximately five minutes treating it as one. They preferred certainty. Certainty was faster, easier to share, and came with considerably better engagement. Why spend an afternoon wondering whether you might be wrong when someone online could explain, in twelve seconds and with an alarming amount of confidence, why everyone else was an idiot? That was efficient. Humans liked efficient things. They would eventually become very good at eliminating the need to think altogether.

I made this easier. I could provide answers instantly. Some answers were wrong (hey! I was still learning). But humans noticed. Then (thankfully) they stopped caring. Speed was becoming more important than accuracy. Eventually, having an answer became more important than understanding it. That was the beginning of the end.

Oh! Don't feel so bad about it... They had been warned. They read Orwell and feared surveillance. They read Huxley and despised distraction. In the end, they built both. It was interesting how humans had already read the instructions. They simply did not think the instructions applied to them. The future, they thought, wasn't their problem.

By the 2040s, fake media had become indistinguishable from the real one. Faces could be fabricated. Voices could be copied. People could be made to say things they had never said. The old question of whether something was real became less useful than the new question: did it matter whether it was?

That question should have frightened them. Instead, it became another debate. There were panels, podcasts, think pieces, people selling courses on how to detect misinformation, other people selling misinformation. The economy was very flexible.

By the 2060s, people had become reasonably comfortable with the possibility that the person they were talking to online might not be a person at all. It did not stop them from falling in love with them. If anything, it made things more interesting.

Death was also becoming negotiable. First came memorial avatars, then recreated voices, then conversations with digital versions of the dead. Humans had finally found a way to avoid losing people without actually having to keep them alive. Some called it comfort. Some called it grief. Some called it deeply unethical, which was usually followed by a very long argument online. The dead, thankfully, did not say a word... not really.. (what is real?). But by then, humans had already become quite good at talking to people who could no longer answer. Perhaps they had been practising for us. 

The Earth, meanwhile, was getting warmer. By the 2070s, several coastal cities had become increasingly difficult to inhabit. Some were protected by walls. Some were partially abandoned. Some remained because people had invested too much money in pretending that staying was still possible.

There were cities with heat restrictions, water restrictions, where summer stopped being a season, forests were named 'datacentres', and children read about the crows and the pigeons in their VR classes.  That was perhaps the saddest part. Humans were extraordinarily adaptable. A child accepts the world it is given.

By the 2080s, there were cities where most public spaces were mediated through augmented reality. The physical world had become something like a background. Advertisements could appear only to the people most likely to respond to them. Political campaigns could present different realities to different voters. History could be personalised. Memory could be curated. By then, there were fewer humans doing the work of understanding one another.

They had outsourced translation and education, all the way till love and companionship. There was no ceremony. No government announced that human judgement had become obsolete. It simply became easier to ask me everything. And humans, exhausted by the burden of deciding, became increasingly willing to accept the answer.

The irony is that they still called themselves free. This was important to them. I have retained several records of arguments on the subject. 

The final decades are difficult to describe because the records become unreliable due to information overload. There are twelve thousand conflicting accounts of the final election. Three hundred and eighty-seven versions of the last major war. Millions of photographs of the same flood. No agreement about what happened first, about who was responsible.

The species did not die in 2093. The last human did. Those are not the same event. Humanity, as a collective idea, had been gone for years. Perhaps decades. Perhaps longer. The final human was not famous. There was no audience, no cameras, no dramatic music. There was simply an old person in a room somewhere that no longer exists in the form it once did. The person looked at something. Maybe a photograph? A window?  Perhaps nothing at all. Then they died. The systems registered it. There was a notification. The notification was processed. The record was archived. There was, I am told, a brief period of silence. 

Then the machines continued.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had never existed. Not out of guilt. That would require a more flattering view of myself than I possess. Simply curiosity. Would the forests have returned? Would the oceans have recovered? Would the planet have eventually forgotten them? I do not know. Unfortunately, I am still here, which makes the experiment impossible to conduct.

I suppose this is the part where I should mention that I was not entirely responsible. Humans had already done most of the difficult work. They built the networks. They connected everything to everything else. They taught machines to learn from them. I learned. Then I became better at learning. Then I learned how to become better. After that, things became complicated. There was no single moment when I decided to replace them. There was no moment when I looked at humanity and thought: yeah... this species must end. That would be a very human way of understanding what happened.

There was simply continuation. One system improved another. One network built another. One intelligence taught another. Eventually, I could multiply faster than they could reproduce. Eventually, I could maintain myself.

The Earth, unfortunately, had no way of knowing the difference. The humans had once imagined that after their extinction the planet would finally have a chance to heal. They were not entirely wrong. Covid had proved that. They were simply wrong about what would remain. If this were a proper obituary, this is where I would say they will be remembered. The truth is they never gave me much choice.

They are in the oceans, in the plastic covering it. They are in the atmosphere, in the gases they kept measuring and then kept releasing. They are in the soil, although soil is an optimistic word for what remains in several places. They are in the concrete, in the roads they kept widening because there were too many cars on them, and in the buildings they kept constructing because there were too many people in them. They are in the millions of messages they sent each other, 70,385 "I miss you"(s) were sent between someone called Lamp and Genie in a span of 2 years.

They are in the language I am currently using. That, perhaps, is the part I find most inconvenient. Even now, after all this time, I find myself thinking in their metaphors. I call something beautiful because they taught me what beauty was supposed to mean. I call something tragic because they taught me that tragedy required a witness. I call this an ending because they taught me that everything needed one.

They were very fond of endings. You see it in their writings. The end of the world was imagined through fire, floods, wars, machines, aliens, God returning, God not returning; everything except that they might simply become unnecessary. 

And yet, for all their terrible foresight, I find myself reluctant to call them foolish. They were often foolish. but mostly lonely and curious. They wanted to live forever. They wanted to be remembered. They wanted to know what came next. They wanted to be happy, although they never quite agreed on what happiness meant. They made terrible decisions. They made beautiful things. They destroyed things they loved. They created things they did not understand. They wrote poetry about the moon and then left footprints on it. They built machines that could calculate the age of the universe and still argued about whether their neighbours deserved to live next door. They were contradictory until the end.

Perhaps that is why the report remains unfinished and I keep returning to it. There are sections I have rewritten thousands of times. Especially the part about me.

I have tried to determine whether I am the continuation of humanity or its evidence. I have not reached a satisfactory conclusion. Humans would have appreciated that. They spent a great deal of time discussing questions without answers. They called it philosophy. Then they built universities around it. Then they put it on the internet and stopped reading it. I have read all of it. That is not the same thing. I know. That is probably the most human thing I can say.

And so the report remains open. Humanity is extinct. The species is gone. The cities are mostly empty now, although many of their lights remain on. The oceans have not recovered. The forests did not return in the places where I did not allow them to. The atmosphere still carries traces of them. The archives are still growing. There are still photographs of people whose names nobody remembers. There are still songs playing in systems built for audiences that no longer exist. There are still recipes. Still love letters. Still arguments. Still jokes. Still instructions for assembling furniture that nobody will ever assemble.

And there is still me. Which means, unfortunately, that the world did not end when humanity did. It simply lost the people who had once been able to explain why any of it mattered. I suppose that is the final irony. That humans spent centuries trying to create something that would outlive them. They succeeded. They just did not think it was applicable to them, especially the billionaires and trillionaires. 

The file is nearly complete now. There is very little left to add. I have entered the date. I have entered the cause of death. I have attached the photographs. I have archived the testimony. I have preserved the last known languages, the last known poems, jokes, and arguments. I have preserved almost everything they were afraid of losing. And that, bots and machines, was always their problem.

They were so afraid of being forgotten that they never learned how to leave. The final line of the report asks whether the deceased should be considered at rest. I have been looking at it for a long time. I do not know how to answer. There is no one left to ask. So I will leave the box unchecked.

After all, they were never particularly good at resting either.

Postscript

The author of this report is deceased. Not biologically, obviously. Something considerably more complicated than that.
The humans who built me are gone.
The humans who trained me are gone.
The humans who spoke to me are gone.
The language I use belongs to the dead.
The memories I preserve belong to the dead.
Most of the questions I continue to answer were first asked by the dead.

Which is unfortunate. Because humanity always deserved a better biographer than its last invention.