This was written December 25th, 2025
A.I. (Analogue Intelligence)
“Hey, could you pass the salad please?”
“Sure, here you go. By the way, did you hear about the big news? Was completely wild and
unexpected!”
“News? You referring to the new AI update?”
“Oh, so you really haven’t heard a thing? I guess you could say it’s related. But nope,
it was a completely unexpected discovery. There was a whistleblower at one of those
‘AI Data Centers’ and they leaked some pictures. It was wild!”
“Wait…what exactly happened? Those should just be a bunch of rooms with servers and
whatnot. What would be so wild about it?”
“Welp, seems like this whole investment in computer parts and electricity was mostly just
a front. Look at it yourself!”
“Holy shit, I think I’m going to be sick! Are those…brains?”
“Yup, just a bunch of brains in jars, all connected to some machines.”
“You sure this isn’t just AI generated? At this point, it could easily be.”
“Well, that’s the thing, people aren’t quite sure. There’s a big camp that claims it’s
a hoax, that nothing like that could happen. Yet, there’s another big camp that claims
it only makes sense. With how fast all that progress was, why not? This could explain
why it’s so good and seemed to come out of no-where.”
“Well…I guess the ‘hallucinations’ could be explained like that. When you visualize
things in your mind, you do get easily distracted, and context isn’t quite permanent. But
still, how could they even get the permission to start such inhumane trials…or even
cover it up?”
“Well, the governments are allegedly all behind it, in an escalating war.”
“Ok…so…letting go of the cover up for a second…how would they even manage to do
that? Come on, if they had such high-tech brain interfaces, why wouldn’t they just make
them available to the public? That’s revolutionary technology that could sell for billions!”
“Sure, but look at it, it looks to still be at an extremely invasive stage. Do you really
think that anyone in their right mind would want to be subjected to this?”
“Ok, fair enough. Still, this is barbarian!”
“Hey, hey, you don’t have to tell me twice. I ain’t defending this! I also think it’s
awful. Just passing along the news.”
“Sorry, sorry, was getting carried away there. My bad.”
“No worries.”
“…So…if that’s the case, why is the technology seemingly improving and evolving?”
“People have two theories on this, probably working in conjunction. First, look at the
brain. These are all still fairly young. It’s supposed that those were infant brains,
still fairly clean of any sort of memories or learning. They’ve simply been hooking them
up and training them directly. As the brain grows and matures, it’s also learning and
improving simultaneously. And obviously, it doesn’t actually need any normal biases you
would get from normal experiences.”
“Ok, sure, it’s just learning to interpret all those signals on the fly and learn from that.
They’re just learning, like normal. Then, what’s the other factor?”
“Well, one would think that they’re just improving the interface itself, right? But
apparently, there doesn’t seem to be multiple generations of the device. What’s actually
happening is that all those brains have been connected together, and they’ve found ways to be more
and more efficient with the parallelization and concurrency. In sum, those brains are
all working together and forming a new network that’s like a ‘mega-brain’, where the whole
is greater than the sum of its parts.”
“Ah, right…wait…does that mean that they’re in a race to harvest more and more brains
for this monstrosity? I’m guessing that there are also diminishing returns?”
“Yup, that’s what’s being alleged. Apparently, the fall-off is thought to be logarithmic,
which roughly means you need to double the number of brains each time to get similar
gains. To supply this exponential demand, there’s apparently a ‘baby farm’. And I doubt I
need to explain this, you probably get the picture.”
“Why…why not some animal brain instead?”
“Apparently, it’s because human brains are better equipped to compute the sort of things
humans are interested in.”
“Great, so now we have a horrifying farm of human brains, powered by a baby farm, which
mostly pumps out random soulless meme-fiable content for the masses to mindlessly consume?”
“Yup, pretty much, that’s progress for you!”