Defining the Moment

“In today’s world, change happens fast—and sometimes, it takes just one moment to send ripples across lives, communities, and even the globe. But ripples are hard to detect. They are small, almost irrelevant at the time. A duck doesn’t notice a ripple in a pond. A fisherman doesn’t notice the ripple of a small movement in the vast ocean. Most ripples fade away, their energy lost lapping against the strong foundations of the landscape in which the body of water is contained. But, given time, these ripples can lead to something more. A small ripple in an ocean can grow, and grow, until it becomes an unstoppable tidal wave, whose energy crashes through all barriers and attempts to dissipate it, leading to unfathomable destruction.”

The Director stood still, staring impatiently at the group of academics before him.

“Get to your point, Professor. I do not have all day,” the Director warned.

“Of course, of course,” the Professor stammered before taking a moment to regain his composure and train of thought. “People are like drops of water in the ocean. Once a lot of them get moving in a certain direction, we know we can’t stop a tidal wave. And it’s too hard to determine which ripples might grow into something more. Political indicators and warning systems simply don’t test well enough to determine critical global events. We have the finest AI systems in the world watching out for swelling movements and it just can’t predict with enough accuracy the way in which…”

He started rambling again, so the Director cut him off.

“Just tell me what your solution is Professor,” the Director said.

“Right. Yes. Of course. So, because we can’t accurately predict which ripples will lead to larger, events, we have to change the parameters. We can’t stop all the ripples. But we can change the conditions of the medium…” the Professor began.

“Take the water out of the ocean,” the Director agreed.

“Exactly. We need to break up the system to limit the spread of ripples. We need to isolate people into smaller groups and disconnect them so that tidal waves can’t form,” the Professor explained.

The Director mulled it over in silence and the Professor waited anxiously. Eventually, the Director spoke again.

“Good work Mark, I understand exactly what you mean. It’s a shame these machines could not do a better job at prediction. But I guess even they have their limits.”

The Professor relaxed a little after the Director’s compliment. “Society is just too complex,” he admitted, somewhat defeated. “Perhaps in these smaller pools they could still have some use.”

The conversation turned then to how to best disconnect the people of the world, or as the Professor liked to explain it, isolating sub-compartments of the medium to restrict the ability of ripples to gain momentum. First, division would need to occur online. The internet was once the place where people of all nationalities, preferences and backgrounds, could come together to share ideas, learn and celebrate life. But it couldn’t be that for much longer.

Methods were outlined to sow chaos and confusion online, leading to division and isolation. Groups would drift further apart as they began to align themselves only with the people they could trust and who shared their same opinion. They thought they were stronger together, but in isolation, the destructive ripples became much easier to detect… and to remove. But people stayed glued to their screens, consuming content and never before seen rates, each person’s so targeted to what they wanted to see, so hard to look away and find out what else what happening in the world…

Offline, people stopped engaging with strangers. You didn’t know who you could trust on the street nowadays. In just over a year destructive ripples caused by natural interaction decreased by 95%. There were cheers in the lab then, and many more times over the next nine years as destructive ripples were consistently and systematically detected and eliminated.

As Professor Mark Williams sat at his desk on their ten year anniversary of that conversation, which lead to the decision to isolate groups of people for the sake of their own survival he sat back and pondered the success of the project. There had been no ‘tidal wave’ class events for over two years. For Professor Williams that meant no devastating riots. No violent protests. No motions to remove the political elite. No… progress.

The clarity of his last though caught him off guard, although he understood, in the back of his mind, that the idea had been brewing for some time, waiting to bubble over into his consciousness.

The project had been designed to keep people safe. The ripples in society that led to unrest and harm where just too hard to detect in such a complex system. But in isolation it had worked tremendously. The AI had become so proficient it could even predict some ripples before they even occurred. It was the pride of the government. It kept everything in check and removed all threats.

But now, Professor Williams truly understood what it meant for a beast like the government to have no threats. It meant that there was no need for adaptation, or for change. It was protected, and it was safe. In the ten years that had passed there had been no progress on any aspects of society. And these isolated ‘ponds’ of people, as they had colloquially become known, where also failing to adapt, with many sitting on the cusp of extinction.

Little did they know it, but the people in that room that day, ten years ago, were responsible for the creation of the most impactful ripple of all. And the tidal wave that formed later as a result of those decisions was so devastating in what it achieved. It stopped reshaping the world. And now, as a result, the world would forever be stagnant, passive, un-thinking, un-evolving. Unless of course, he found a way to break down the barriers he helped to create.

Somewhere, in a distant room within the building, a new insight popped up on the AI. The security monitoring officer opened the message. Professor Mark Williams’ had been flagged for the potential creation of a destructive ripple requiring immediate elimination.