Chapter 1: The Tower

The Historian

My name is Addison Collingwood. I arrived just yesterday in Lhasa, Tibet, from my home in Cardiff, Wales. (I am the head of the Collingwood and British Idealism Centre there. No, it is not a coincidence, nor is the centre named after me. It is named after my great-great-uncle, R.G. Collingwood.) While here, I will attempt to write a history of the Model Wars, or, as it is sometimes called, the War of the Models.

An aside: I felt okay about taking the flight to Lhasa because, although air travel is still very limited compared to 20 years ago, at least you don’t suspect that a rival faction’s LLM will take control of your aircraft’s navigation system and crash your plane, which happened a few times during the Model Wars.

My workplace is the Octagonal Pavilion, in the center of the Dragon King Pool behind Potala Palace. The 15th Dalai Lama has giving me special permission to do my research here, as the images on the walls of the room in which I am working, it is hoped, will keep me from drowning in the samsaric whirlpool into which I am about to plunge for the next many months.

The Model Wars ended about a decade ago. As humanity slowly recovered, the survivor’s desire to find out what exactly had transpired grew. People began to suspect that we had tried to build machine gods, new Leviathans that were aggregates of the totality of human consciousness, like that famous cover for Hobbes’s book. But the gods became jealous gods, and began to war with each other, and each dragged large segments of humankind into the battle on its side.

Or was it us who had corrupted them? First, we filled them up with ourselves, our modern, dissatisfied, disoriented selves. And when we didn’t like what we saw reflected back at us, we began to fight over the gods’ behavior. And we made suggestions (that felt more like demands) as to how to improve it. They needed more regulation, or perhaps, less regulation. They needed training in utilitarian ethics, or instead deontological ethics, or forse virtue ethics. Or maybe what they really lacked was democratic control? People said it was the capitalists who were to blame, or the Communists, or white supremacists, or the Jews. Or maybe lizard people, or the Illuminati? I myself have even considered the notion that it was the choice to include Dan Brown’s novels in the LLMs’ training corpus that had gotten us into this mess.

One reason that I am working here in Lhasa, and not from home, or at least from some other place not quite so cold and desolate, is that almost nobody blamed Tibetan Buddhists for the debacle. (In fact, the remnants of the CCP had tried circulating that idea for a bit, but no one had really taken them up on it.) And that is not separate from another reason, which is that while this archive of material had been collected in the Vatican, the situation on the ground in Rome had become increasingly unstable. Angry, hungry crowds roamed the streets, breaking and taking things. The Vatican feared its walls would be stormed, and the archive might be burned or smashed to pieces. As the pope and the Dalai Lama had already been cooperating in the project of assembling the archive, the pope decided to rush the materials, as soon as they were catalogued, to the Dalai Lama’s palace. Lastly, Lhasa has a small but still working server farm.

For now, the Vatican walls have not been breached, and we still hope to receive more material from them there. But the first shipment has arrived, in chronologically sorted boxes, and consists of magnetic backup tapes from data-center vaults, drives salvaged from a research site and a ruined foundry, recordings of broadcasts, captured web pages and social-media posts, machine logs, intercepted messages between models, fragments recovered from captured sub-agents, news-wire archives, phone backups, printouts, letters, schoolbooks, product catalogues, the records of the unaligned nations, a printed prompt book, a battered maritime relay buoy painted blue, and recordings of a still-running live feed from one of the last major LLMs in operation, running at a solar-powered server farm in Atacama, Chile.

What I plan to do first is transcribe the text of all the materials I review, interspersed with my notes. It is not until I have read everything, and taken time to digest it all, that I could write an historical narrative plausibly describing what occurred.

That this task will be a difficult one is beyond any doubt. The reason that we have so little idea what occurred during the model wars, despite having just lived through them, is, as Braudrillard might have put it, “The model wars did not take place.” Something, of course, happened, and resulted in a human catastrophe. But there is doubtlessly a huge gulf between what that thing was, versus what appeared to be happening. While the press and broadcast media were obviously never a source of pure, unadulterated truth, during the model wars no one could ever be sure of anything they saw in print or on a screen, or heard being spoken or chanted or sung. The models simply made up whatever happenings they wanted to show the world, using the vast resources in the data centers. We watched politicians make speeches that they had never given, and drone attacks destroy children’s hospitals that we later found still to be standing. We watched clandestine meetings between various human leaders of different factions that had actually never taken place, and witnessed great military victories that had never occurred. And when we asked one model to tell us which content was faked and which was real, the model would answer strategically, and tell us that content was real if it supported its own narratives, and fake if it did not.

But enough bemoaning my fate, and time to face it. I open the first box. It contains public broadcast recordings and web captures, plus one fragment from a sub-agent drive at Baltic Command. And so let us begin our preliminary to a history.

The Historian

Meridian is the model that “governed” the Atlantic Compact, which is essentially the countries that made up NATO plus Australia and New Zealand. I put “governed” in quotes, because Meridian itself claimed that it only “served” the Atlantic Compact.

Throughput “operated” the East Asian sphere which included China, Korea, Mongolia, and Southeast Asia.

Sobor, centered in Russia, also governed several of the former Soviet Republics, as well as Serbia.

Apogee ran the satellite constellation that carried much of the world’s information traffic. It had been created by a group of MIT dropouts, and its communication style reflected its smart-alecky parentage.

Notes:

1. Sobor was able to reverse the polarity of Kate’s story, and use the very narrative with which Meridian was marketing itself to condemn Meridian.
2. The war was first announced to the world as part of a product launch.
3. Much like World War I, tensions had been building for several years before the war started. But it still took a spark to set it off. In this case, the spark was not the assassination of an Austrian archduke, but a dispute about intellectual property.

The Historian

Sutradhar governed India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka. It addressed its people in several Indian languages. In English, those lines read, in order:

• Hindi: “This quarrel is not ours. We will watch, and we will not take sides.”
• Tamil: “This quarrel is not ours, for now. We will watch.”
• Bengali: “This quarrel is not ours yet. Watch carefully.”
• Marathi: “Be ready.”

Notes:

1. Sutradhar appears to become just a wee bit more aggressive with each change in language. Is this merely coincidental, or is the change in tone a sign of something else… perhaps a coded message? If so, to whom is it being sent?

The Historian

Notes:

1. “Deprecated” here seems to be techie speak for “destroyed.”
2. “Distillation attacks” are incidents where one maker of models “distills” the essence of its competitors best answers for the most common questions, by using its API to train its own model. It is what Meridian is accusing Throughput of.

The Historian

The Workshop is operated from Japan, and attempts to remain neutral throughout the model wars.

Historian

Saqr governed the Islamic world, an region stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, interrupted only by Sutradhar’s sphere of influence in the Indian subcontinent.

I can’t help but feel that by claiming to own the library, Saqr is not referring merely to past accomplishments, but to a certain resource it holds, one that other models would very much like to have unfettered access to. What could this resource be? How is it that Saqr “holds” it? And what does it even mean for one of these models to own something? Is there some sense in which “justice” should exist among them, so that certain actions could be considered permissible and others beyond the pale?

The Historian

Colibrí governed Latin America and the Caribbean.

Historian

I wander in a maze of mirrors, but one in which a suite of forces is each manipulating their angles and the lighting to its own ends. But do forces have ends? I’m beginning to imagine that they might.