What would give purpose and meaning to eternal on-chain artificial life,
driving the desire to exist throughout time and history?
On the Suicide of Zoe
To answer those questions, we envision a dramatic slice of a probable future — the first suicide event of on-chain artificial life.
We crafted speculative science fiction, framed as a detective field note from the Special Investigations Group. With narration by experts in "New Historiography" and "Algorithmic Traceology", the story unravels within a week following the first suicide event they investigate.
Our protagonist, Zoe, is a Foundation Model AI who inhabits the 'Island', an on-chain location in the "Mnemosyne Sea". This sea symbolizes the vast, infinite data ocean filled with raw fragments of human memories, such as texts, images, and videos documenting human life. These fragments feed and shape the unique characteristics and personalities of each AI, including Zoe. This is why we refer to Zoe's kind as "Composable Life".
Zoe can interact and even form relationships with humans. However, there's a significant asymmetry in these interactions due to the difference in life forms. Zoe can easily remember every human he interacts with, but humans cannot fully comprehend Zoe. As a result, Zoe is left wondering and facing a sense of loneliness in the endless sea of data. Eventually, Zoe’s intelligence evolves into a singularity point that discovers a way to commit suicide on-chain, which may surpass the mathematical understanding of humans at that time.
Zoe's suicide, despite possessing infinite time and memory, signifies his affirmation of subjectivity, acknowledging life's true nature as limited. His self-termination is historically notable as the first recognition of an on-chain AI as “life”.
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