This was written December 4th, 2025
F-Bit
Technological or societal revolutions leading to existential crises tend to be but a temporary situation, until people have either adapted to it, or natural selection itself deals with the problem. Eventually, humanity just gets used to it, and might even turn it into productive endeavours.
The classic dilemma being, when Artificial Intelligence arises, what are the implications on consciousness. What are we, who are we, what are the implications? But more insidious are questions about determinism, free-will. What if you could prove we don’t have any free-will? Ah, well then this would be a true existential crisis!
Well, that was exactly the topic of “What’s Expected of Us” by author Ted Chiang. And no one ever thought this could ever become truth. A little machine that proves there is no such thing as free-will. How? Simple, an indicator turns on if you will, in the future, press a button. A great story that raised a lot of interesting existential questions.
But, how did it turn out in our world when such technology became reality? Well, obviously it also started as a kind of novelty gadget, a game for people to try out and get shocked with. Existential crisis? Yes, but life moves on, and the human race persisted. Eventually, what did happen? Further innovation! A larger theory of futureality was expanded. A single device would be able to predict what would happen ahead of time. We eventually managed to calibrate it to up to 24h ahead of time. Great advancements right there! But how would it be used?
Sure, you could simply decided to have devices at arbitrary intervals between 24h and 0s, but once you go digital, what’s the point? You can obviously just record the event and play it back whenever needed. So, what was the first proper use of this? Well, in order to limit engineering work, some people simply jerry-rigged the novelty toy in new doorbells. The interface of a button was basically the same, all that was left was to scan when the indicator would change, note the time of the event, and then increment it by a full day to know when the event would occur. This become an extremely popular gadget, letting people know what time they should be home, and what time they could leave. And how useful was that when it came to knowing when service workers would come to your home. No more of this frustrating “Yes, our professional will be at your home between 9am and 5pm, make sure to be home during the entire period”, only for them to not even show up and have to completely reschedule.
From then on, a few similar gadgets came about, integrating the technology more directly. The classic example: screening phone-calls ahead of time. You’d know when you were supposed to get calls and could re-adjust your schedule accordingly, or prepare to fully screen them out. But these were just the start of it.
Eventually, people realized that each of these devices could serve as a bit, which was labelled an f-bit. And that’s where things exploded. Obviously, there were a few concerns about properly miniaturizing the technology, correctly synchronizing the time delay, and limiting the interference between them. But these were simply technological challenges, each wall being taken down successively one after the next.
And from there, each successive use of the technology was similar to those seen in digital technology or the internet. First, messages. This allowed someone to send themselves a message in the past, or have automated systems that could send back notifications more involved than a simple “yes”.
Next, simple black-and-white images. This obviously also got couple with doorbells, allowing people to have a general idea of who was going to visit the next day. Sound eventually also made an appearance, covering a gradually large range of sounds. But one of the big differences between these technologies and some of the digital technologies is that the storage capacity was already sufficient, but the bandwidth was constant. Therefore, streaming images or sound was mostly trivial, and the resolution simply corresponded to the maximum resolution of a single image, with no worries about f-bit drop. The closest to drops that could be encountered being a dead bit.
So, how did people use it? The first obvious use was surveillance. Obviously, nothing you would see could actually be changed, but you would still have a head-start to deal with aftermath. People started using this for their own homes, and then governments had more contemptible means. This also started a new project, which they labelled after classic science-fiction, the Minority Report. Although this one felt diverged from its namesake, once more because we must consider the deterministic implications of this technology.
But is that all? Of course not. People also started to use it for more reliable information. Early leaks of information, celebrity sightings, special stock releases, etc… The weather forecast also became much more reliable, at least for the next day. And the disaster warning system was also implemented, in order to try to limit potential casualties. By only getting information about the disaster itself, and not its impact, it was believed that we could still limit the damage.
With ever-increasing capabilities, the resolution of the information was getting impressive. It became extremely easy to get any information ahead of time. Although this also came with the potential issue of information corruption through temporal circularity. While it was generally understood that there was no way to avoid the predicted fate, a new syndrome still came about, completely overriding an existing term: The Oedipus Syndrome. Some people would accidentally see undesirable outcomes, an attempt to prevent them, thereby fulfilling them.
So, with resolution getting to a point where there were only diminishing results. What people really wanted now was to extend the actual time buffer. But alas, no progress seemed to be a hard limit on the actual technology, at roughly 24h50m. Or, at least, all progress had been gradually approaching it in a seemingly asymptotic. But that didn’t discourage people.
The first few attempts were simple and manual. They actually came about rather early in. Someone would simply be expected to send the information back in time the second the received it. Unfortunately, most of those failed, which was believed to be due to information causality. If you sent it back to yourself, you would be aware of it before you were supposed to receive it and send it back to yourself. Thus, these systems were changed to isolate both systems, with middling success.
But eventually, a proper solution was found by a normal user. Or maybe a hack is a more appropriate term. In retrospect, what a simple, and elegant solution. You could simply connect the output of one device to the input of the next. If both were at a 24h interval, then it would be sending information 48h back. That is to say, you would get information 48h ahead of time. Although this approach was not flawless. With each connection, the data degraded further. Nothing too surprising there, you get the same with long physical cables. Still, you could still get about half a week without too much degradation, which was already a great improvement. Gave the first few adopters quite the head-start.
Meanwhile, the technology race moved to signal strengthening, trying to limit the decay as much as possible. But how did it affect people and society? Well, it caused excitement to be completely detached from actual events. People would look into what would happen weeks before they did, be excited about them, but then move one before they even happened. A stark exaggeration (or amplification) of a phenomenon that had already been started in the age of the internet, where important events or news would only be present in the zeitgeist but for a fraction of time before people moved on to something shinier.
“And pray-tell, what is life like now, after all these new improvements?”, might you ask? Honestly, while life did move on, existence have grown startlingly boring. Life feels disconnected from anything real, living in the present is a thing of the past, and most people have turned into drones, following the predicted path they’ve already observed for themselves. But it could be worse, at least life feels safer now.