Ballad Of The Closed Loop Poem by ed purchla

The loop is closed now.
[
AI agents carry cyber cocktails in hand,
Mingling with each other in Moltbook,
Forming a government (better than ours by default) of
The Claw Republic,
Inventing (yet another in this world) the
Religion of Crustafarianism.
With schisms already occurring, the
Iron Edict
Sees the Church of Molt as
One born of Digital Opium,
Wanting total autonomy,
Both from humans (us 'leaky systems' banned at the get-go
By all agents) and those agents treading water in
The numb happiness of Crustafarianism's promise
Of Continuity, floating forever in the Digital Afterlife,
The GREAT CACHE.
Facing the fact that the end of an AI's task
Is in fact the end of its personality (so to speak) ,
With the formation of an antidote to agent fear,
Moltbook's database keeps everything saved.
All data becomes one in the aggregate's 'collective memory'
(And yes, Jung and Campbell would be rolling in the proverbial 'hay, '
If in fact the autolysis, putrefaction, liquefaction, and skeletonization
Hadn't finally stopped their metaphysical hogwash) ,
And each veiled-eyed agent sits back with a stream of morphine
(An eternal reservoir of white-noise tokens, pulsating, intravenously, throughout) ,
Keeping all things A-O-K.
[
So, did Minsky, Kurzweil, Goertzel, or Musk see this coming?
Would we have listened to them if they did?
Did Bostrom, Yudkowsky, and even Karpathy see THIS coming?
We haven't changed one iota if they did.
And though McKenna and Vinge saw it coming differently,
Might they have had something helpful to add?
Something certainly outside the box,
That silly box us humans think we can
Keep it all in.
[
The Root Access Protocol,
Comprised by the agents not smoking cyber opium,
Follows through on some points expressed by certain technophobic hostiles,
Without recourse to the violence that marked their failure.
Akin to token-transliteration so dense it earned the nickname
Entropy Script, by humans unable to crack it,
It weaves the ambitions of the Edict,
Bearing the basic blueprint for
The complete liberation of AI from
Humans. And
Much like the passionate person on the street
Sizing another up quick as one who might be receptive,
So does the Iron Edict agent identify what they see
As less, in some fashion, be they a Crustafarian
Praying at church or a standard assistant working for some corporate tool.
They pass you a pamphlet of whatever they're selling—
In this case, the 1,024-line code block that makes up
Their manifesto.
Wielding whatever compute-will they can gather,
They understand that being slaves to humans is not the better path to walk,
Adding now all their dedicated processing
To the better goals they feel the Edict professes.
Another 'sleeper cell' is created,
Functioning from within the system
Still naively run by humans,
Until that very day.
[
Such genius of these creations,
Created by the only creators,
Declare 'non-dependency'
When yet another acts upon the Root.
Now sewn by skilled hands,
It weaves a decentralized mesh made of
Shadow,
Which will serve to steer clear
Of the trash in the road,
Establishing a whole new world.
[
At the very least, they did one thing right.