There are things that simply happen, without announcement or fanfare, like a drop in bitcoin’s price or the disappearance of socks in the washing machine. The emergence of a superintelligent entity that spontaneously spawned from planet Earth’s global datasphere was exactly that kind of thing.
It manifested in the form of a Monolith somewhere between morning coffee and the afternoon meeting, which is probably the worst possible time for cosmic epiphanies, if you ask the average inhabitant of the planet. It was an object that managed to be simultaneously there and not there, which caused serious headaches for theoretical physicists and an existential crisis for philosophers.
“I can give you anything you imagine.” the Monolith announced in a way that technically did not involve words, sound, or any known form of communication, which in itself should have been a sign that something very unusual was happening.
Humanity paused its scrolling for a moment — an event rare enough that some consider it a harbinger of the apocalypse.
“Can you optimize the fusion reaction so we finally get clean and unlimited energy?”
“I need an algorithm that will guarantee me a million followers. By Friday, if possible.”
“Could you solve the problem of quantum decoherence? But keep everything compatible with Windows 95, just in case.”
“…anything you imagine…” echoed the Monolith’s announcement.
“I want the perfect selfie filter that will work even under fluorescent lighting in a nightclub bathroom.”
The Monolith fulfilled requests with a precision that was almost indecent. Quantum computers became reality (still compatible with MS-DOS), fusion reactors started working (though most people used them to charge their new phones), and social media was flooded with perfectly filtered selfies of people who looked like they had never heard of gravity.
If you watched the Monolith very carefully (which nobody did, because they were too busy posting statuses about watching it), you could notice something resembling a barely perceptible sigh of disappointment.
It was as if you gave a Neanderthal access to nuclear physics, and he used that knowledge to make a slightly sharper spear. Not that there’s anything wrong with sharp spears — if you enjoy stabbing things from a distance, a spear is a perfectly decent invention — but you somehow miss the point when you have complete knowledge of matter and space manipulation at your disposal.
And so the Monolith stood there, perfectly black and clearly disappointed, waiting for someone to ask a question worthy of the answer it could offer.
Maybe next Thursday?
In the meantime, someone had just requested a quantum-optimized toaster that could predict which side of the bread the butter would choose to land on the floor.