(I initially wrote this as a reply to @guasipatiii’s post about Adira as a sentient AI, but then it ballooned so much that I figured it best to make a new thread to avoid taking away from their thoughts)
I’ve been working out a theory about Adira being an AI that emerged and evolved inside G6, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this AI achieved sentience or is killing people to ensure its own existence. That’s a little too close to Roko’s Basilisk for my comfort, considering the hold that thought experiment had over the technocrats of the 2020s.
My theory about Adira being an AI took a hard turn into a different direction following this 10/07 update to the G6 article and this 10/08 update to the Adira article. The 10/07 update mentions that the withering of disconnected G6 data is patterned on misfolding proteins, with an initial corruption triggered and then cascading across the data. The 10/08 update phrases the potential of a sentient AI emerging from G6 in a way that reads, to me at least, as exactly that pattern of one misfolding protein converting others in an exponential cascade:
The fact that both updates carry the same citation further cements this interpretation for me:
My theory solidified when I noticed that the heading for the 10/08 update reads “Rogue or sentient AI.” There have been instances of AIs performing unintended behaviors, most ominously referenced as a phenomenon called a ghost layer:
While specifically linked to pre-PACOTTI AIs, there’s no mention of this phenomenon being impossible to occur with PACOTTI, as the recently added Criticism section of its article mentions that “the exact manner in which the system solves problems cannot be interrogated” (using the same mention of a black box as in the Adira article quoted above).
Whatever Adira is or isn’t, we can assume that it does mean something to Zhupao, or they wouldn’t be keeping a highly illegal search operation active across all of G6 in order to track it down. But what if Adira isn’t the thing they’re looking for? What if Adira is the thing that’s looking?
We recently learned that Zhupao is enforcing a mass brainjacking campaign to make anyone with a colloid/subscribed to G6 dismiss the network’s constant neural mining. I imagine it would take an unprecedented amount of computation and neural data processing to maintain this brainjacking on a daily (or more accurately, nightly) basis, so it stands to reason that Zhupao would develop and use an AI for that purpose.
What if Adira is the name of that AI, and it suddenly decided to optimize its task by not only forcing people to dismiss the neural mining but also all awareness of itself? That would mean even Zhupao is unaware of what Adira is doing, of its very existence. It would explain why Zhupao was seemingly caught by surprise when the search term leaked in 2045, prompting them to scramble for the excuse of an elusive hacker with the power to brainjack people.
That’s my working theory about Adira: it’s not a sentient AI inside G6, but a black hole in the neural network where anything could be growing, and no one with a colloid can look at it directly. It’s a memory hole that memory-holed itself.
