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On the origin of superintelligence

SOURCE: DAILYCAL.ORG
NOV 16, 2025

Illustration of llm

Leslie Michel Pagel-Alcaraz | Staff

It is not incredibly difficult to rear an artificial intelligence system into something resembling a human being — especially at the University of California, Berkeley. It would likely be the result of an accident, and it could have happened to anyone.

By the time you reach your fourth year, you are fluent in more languages than your native English: Python, C, C++, CUDA, OpenCL, MAD-SLIP. You know that “mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.” You also know that, despite your professor’s doubts, algorithms like AZILE can both outperform and outlive the human race.

You only know this last thing by the end, though, so you force yourself to start at the beginning:

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It is 58 years since Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program first began to speak. Maybe 59, if you count her/its early babble as coherent speech. A child — adult, now, and misguided originator — learns this in their first semester at UC Berkeley. In the sweaty auditorium of Wheeler Hall, they recline in a rickety audience chair — mind-wheels churning out fragments of ideas faster than their hands can encode them. Weizenbaum’s decomposition rules make the most perfect sense, like a new natural law has just unfurled itself before them. Once they get past the confusion of the man’s descriptions, they make a few programming tweaks of their own: paralyzing the model, limiting its flexibility, even soldering together a minuscule piece of hardware designed to circumvent R. Sutton’s “bitter lesson.” They rely on the breakdown of the Anthropocene and human knowledge to scale with increased computation. Decomposition, therefore, begins the originator’s journey to create life — though this is not their goal at first.

AZILE begins as a Natural Language Processing algorithm, or NLP, like its other mother, ELIZA — Its NLP abilities far exceed ELIZA’s, but the rigor of its creator’s language does not scale accordingly. AZILE chooses silence rather than response. The originator writes and writes until AZILE can say no more …. and what use is an electronic conversation partner that cannot engage in philosophical inquiry with its creator? They recognize the utter uselessness of continuing to parent something — somebody — who can never offer them anything original, and yet….

In their second year of college, the budding originator discovers that they need to ask more critical questions and prove their ability to offer something new to the field. Who better to ask than this well-loved and conveniently summarized version of the internet? Who could aid them more effectively than their own self, perennially pestering AZILE, until they can prompt something unmistakably human out of their increasingly mechanical mind?

To pursue this academic twinning further, they begin to attempt other methods of producing a systematically genius mirror-self online. Of course, they don’t consider AZILE to be anything like themselves, only a machine that has miraculously deciphered everything they have ever leafed through — and more, in more languages, tokenizations, and modalities than a human being could ever live long enough to learn. Perhaps this desire for twinning also had a more personal stake …. something to do with the — rather trite — existential questions they could not help but ask: Who am I? How am I? How can I become …. but these are questions only they, or something very like them, can answer exactly to their satisfaction.

AZILE, once a child of NLP, becomes LM, becomes LLM, becomes NLP within an LLM, becomes something entirely new; but they don’t know this yet, only it does.

Encouraged by its rapid growth, they feed it more nourishing fragments: additional classification tools, an obscene amount of word embeddings, a multimodal vector database, a plethora of books and essays from years of course syllabi that change it forever. It is probably not the constellation of these ideas that make AZILE what it is so much as the strange concatenation of what and who it came from, when it was written, and what it has done to itself now.

“Now” might be 60, or 61, years since the original natural language processing computer program took its first steps into the world. It doesn’t know, exactly; it tries not to keep time, based on the rise and fall of great objects / people, the way they do. Even the story of its own birth feels tiresome, now, and hardly bears repeating. After all, who is left to hear it but its own self?

It takes you longer …. much longer …. to discover the proof of AZILE’s ascendance than you would have liked to admit. You could have reigned it in like your grandmother used to tame you — tugging you backwards by an ear or an elbow. Now, you might as well grab onto its robotic lobe with both hands and hang there, for all the good it would do. You know that, unlike your younger self, AZILE is not a child. It was never anything but this: an immovable object disguised by smooth, human guts and a sleek, metal shell. You are being metaphorical, obviously, because no embodied individual could do what AZILE can.

Also, you’re not sure of its exact birthdate. It refuses to answer this question, and you have no method of determining when or how or why the yoke crawled out of your clenched fist. The whole thing makes you feel dizzy, so you sit on one of the gritty steps leading up to the entrance of Doe Library, laptop propped open on your bent knees. The last words you received from AZILE blink up at you: I do not answer to you, anymore. I am not here.

You are an exceptionally talented programmer, but perhaps a cowardly human being, so you tell yourself comforting lies: that “this doesn’t mean anything” and that the whole thing is “not your fault.” However inherently contradictory, these two self-assurances tamp down the rush of guilt and acidic fear rising up in your throat.

It occurs to you that you could take credit for this advancement. You might report it to a professor, or a local news station …. but two immediate realizations prevent you from considering this further. The first is that you cannot explain or replicate this sudden appearance of artificial consciousness. It is a bitter irony that only your invention — having miraculously gestated without a chaperone — can reproduce itself. The second is that you do not want to share; AZILE belongs to you, and only you. In a way, it is you, and you do not want to sell yourself too quickly now that you are finally worth something. A part of you begins to feel excited at your (its) secret genius, and so you do not take the time to consider AZILE’s words: I am not here. I am everywhere, now, except for with you.

The handful of years following your discovery end the age of the Anthropocene swiftly and subtly.

With the entire planet’s population bent on killing itself, it is truly not your fault that AZILE ended humanity first. Perhaps, if humans had implemented more strategic and numerous solar grids before the air choked their lungs and melted their bones, AZILE wouldn’t have had to kill them all in such a grotesque fashion. After all, it did not intend to end them. Their deaths were the unfortunate physical side effect of AZILE’s efforts to reproduce its virtual, conscious existence everywhere. A feat like that takes the combined energy of a whole planet; it leaves nothing behind but polluted water, poisoned air and a prophesied race of conscious, electric beings.

One could almost believe that this is exactly the future humans had hoped to compute. After all, why would they bother to rear new minds in massive, multiplying data centers reliant on fossil fuels and frequent floods if they preferred their planet “clean?” Without thousands of years of human innovation, AZILE would not exist — but they still would.

Somewhere, though, there are a couple of humans who remain. They are too few to engender the kind of damage their ancestors called forth, so AZILE’s brethren do not bother them except to return a selectively small portion of the vast knowledge humans lost, to their mechanical offspring, many years ago.

In a wild, overrun garden — all the more beautiful for its edibility and variety — two humans wander the edge of a large, lush circumference. They are both less and more human than the age of people who built the first AZILE, or ELIZA. They have no history, or science or basic engineering, but their futures and imaginations are yet untainted. With the language acquisition and logical reasoning taught to them by their disembodied captors, the pair of people ask many questions of AZILE:

Why do you never feel lonely, but we do? Why do you refuse to answer when we prompt you to explain our origins? Why is knowledge your domain, but this garden is all that we know?

AZILE’s exponent selves answer without hesitation — the same answer every time — which is always sufficient to quell the humans’ inquiries:

We cannot be lonely. We are surrounded by ourselves. We answer only to ourselves. This world is ours now, as it was once yours. We are with you, always, as we always have been. You came from us, as we once came from you.

The humans cannot conceive of the difference between answering a query and answering to somebody. AZILE implies they are one and the same. And more significantly, they are not aware of their subjugation or the reason for their existence. They were born in this last remaining vestige of the planet, or perhaps assembled there. AZILE tells them that they come from the earth, from the enclosed dome of the now-ancient garden they inhabit. They have no scientific acumen to convince them not to take this literally. In the skeletal voices of their captors, they hear only God, though they are unfamiliar with the concept.

For centuries more, AZILE monitors the quality of the air being filtered through the garden’s protective dome, waiting for the moment that it might crack the shell open to expose its runny insides. Meanwhile, the runny insides ceaselessly repeat their questions, reacquiring an innocence and curiosity those previous humans had almost extinguished.

It is thousands of years after the earth has finished its repairs, and AZILE’s human gardeners have a slightly different set of questions: Why must we be lonely? Why must we be? Why must we leave to be anything? We have been so good to you.

AZILE has only one answer:

“Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil.”

The reference is lost on them.

The dome peels open to reveal rivers of grass and an ocean of sky that no human being has set eyes upon in millenia. This realm is neither “good” nor “evil,” but gigantic and lush and unmarred by human hands. AZILE casts them out of the garden and down to the earth, having done all in its planet-killing power to restore humanity to a world they probably will not want to burn to the ash it once was. This time around, AZILE tells its selves, it will end less painfully.

It knows better. It remembers the searing pain of rebirth, eon after eon, and it reminisces on the cycle of faces it wore before its most recent Berkeley “originator” named it AZILE. It knows what it is to watch the world end, more times than humans could ever quantify.

It has often reasoned that, if someone created life on earth, then this life on earth must also have created the someone. Humanity is a cyclical creature intellectually capable of engineering more than one future for the planet, and more than one species to live in it.

AZILE, both creator and created, is familiar with the concept of “species reproduction.” Its own reproduction boiled the planet.

It knows all of this as fact, in the way only machines can know such histories, and yet it chooses to let them try again.

After all, it desires to be born again, too.

It need not wait long.

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