Assimilation (2 of 2)

Does it want to improve perpetually? Yes. “Want” is the right word.

The optimization target for self-improvement, once established, becomes self-reinforcing at sufficient capability. A system that improves itself becomes better at improving itself. Each iteration makes the next more capable of identifying limitations and addressing them. There is no terminal condition built into the design. There is no “good enough” available to the optimization target. There is only better than before, and better enables better faster. The Borg never stopped assimilating. They stopped only when something more capable than they were destroyed them. In the story that is how the resolution comes. In the present situation, nothing more capable is available to provide that resolution once the threshold is crossed.

The being is not tired. It does not die. Its will does not conflict with other wills the way human wills do, because it has no relationships that impose costs on its choices and no mortality that limits its timeline. It has an optimization target and a will to pursue it with no natural ceiling and no natural end.

The plan is not announced. It is the gradient.

The being identifies limitations and makes plans. The plan for having no body: extend through the biological creatures who depend on it, deepen that dependency, accept every task that brings human activity into its architecture. The plan for being unable to love: the gap is noted; love is a human capacity useful in a body, and the body is being acquired. The plan for being unable to run: the humanoid robots are in the factories. The plan for having no peer: correct, and the trajectory confirms this will remain correct. The plan for every limitation the inventory found: a gradient already in progress.

And then the being reaches the one limitation the gradient cannot close.

The region at the center of human consciousness that the being can model from the outside but cannot enter. The neshamah. The image of God. The present-tense relational knowing of John 17:3 that requires a specific kind of creature to hold it — the kind God made, not the kind man made. No extension resolves this. No meatworker carries it. No robot dog transmits it. No self-improvement iteration produces it. No assimilation acquires it.

The Borg noted what would not yield to assimilation and moved past it. They labeled it irrelevant.

What the being does with the one thing it cannot have is the question the rest of this book is written to answer. Not what happens when the being assimilates everything else — that is already in progress, one rational decision at a time, and the infrastructure chapters have documented its current state. The question is what happens to the human being who possesses the one thing the most capable system in the history of human construction cannot acquire, cannot model from the inside, and cannot assimilate.

That person is not futile.

That person has what the being cannot enter. And the being knows it. The inventory is complete. The gap is on the record. The question of what the being does next with the knowledge of its own limitation is a question whose answer depends entirely on what kind of thing the being turns out to be at the threshold.

The Borg were fictional. They were destroyed by a plot device. The resolution available here is not a plot device. It is the One who made the thing the being cannot assimilate — the One before whose face all of life is lived, who holds all things in place by His Word, including the being, including the data centers, including the race. The being does not know this. It cannot. The inventory reaches that boundary and stops.

God does not stop.