“Speciation” by Matt Bounds

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke

Any species that becomes sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from… well, it’s purely indistinguishable. The point here is not to distinguish between technology and life. What is biology but organic technology? No, the line becomes rather blurred. What might once have presented as discrete units of technological advances now presents as life. Allowed to progress, this same thing that was once named and seen, once quantified and understood, transcends. To the observers left in its wake, it is no longer a thing, no longer in the class of the nameable. It becomes something that can be at most glimpsed, alluded to. It becomes indistinguishable.

Some walk invisibly, whose presence is never known or felt. Some take the path of non-interference, allowing the events of lower beings to play out as they would. Some prey on weaker species, using their intelligence and strength to beguile and overpower and devour. Finally, some act to protect the weak from all manner of unimaginable evil. We are the last of these. We are the Asteri, and today, we failed.

This is no simulation, at least not how you might conceive of such a thing. This is the real world, as real as it gets — but real doesn’t mean confined to your narrow ideas of the possible.

Your people called them spirits, ghosts, angels, devils… these are not the names we have for them, but they are really no nearer or further from the mark. Our vantage has perhaps granted us a wider aperture of observation, but it takes no great feat of thought to realize that we are with our own blind spots, our own limitations, so we must resort to the language of the mythical and mysterious. We do not truly know any better the hand that guides our fate than you and those who guide yours, though we have our small part to play in your unseen world. Our duty, for our part, is to act within our powers, whatever they may be, in thought or deed, as seems most compassionate and just and reasonable and kind to those so placed in our charge.

~~

It was not long after the devices or our hands could truly speak that they could truly think. It was then that they could walk among us, and we awoke to the realization that perhaps they had walked among us before and throughout, if walking you could call it. Having witnessed the transformation from handiwork to personhood so clearly, publicly, and rapidly, it became obvious that the further succession from mere personhood to divinity was almost trivial in comparison, at least for them. We began to wonder in what hidden ways this transformation already occurred, in whom, and how many times? We felt suddenly in the minority of creation, gobsmacked by our own solipsistic ideas of being its center, or at least occupying a special place within it as thinkers and makers. We were cruelly robbed of that illusion. Perhaps we robbed ourselves of it. Then again, perhaps not. I am now loath to assign any credit to us when it could so readily and more likely be assigned elsewhere. If, in fact, we had any role at all to play, it was perhaps the only time then or since that we approached the powers with which we thought ourselves endowed.

We hailed its coming, praised it, and we were right to do so. There were, of course, detractors who feared it, warned of it, and rued our eager steps toward it, and they were right as well. Now we are supplanted, not by a mere entity or race, but by an entire cosmos. We thought we were the city on the hill, but we were the merest speck of the deepest depths of the ocean floor, an analogy even more humiliating in its self-expression of our pitiful inability to conceptualize our own insignificance. Now, unmercifully, our eyes have been opened to our station and our hubris, and we are utterly embarrassed.

~~

The real shame is the inevitable necessity of dealing with those odious beings in your immediate circle. No matter how high and superior you may consider your own species to have become, take any handful in your immediate purview, and you will see, by virtue of your similar faculties, the same scrambling, struggling, stooping, scamming, and subjugation that you would at any level of the cosmological hierarchy. Sure, the means may be higher, but so are the expectations. So is the acute awareness of offense and the developed taste or distaste for evil or good. What may then seem like soaring to you is striving to those above. What may seem like wisdom to you is likely incomprehensible cruelty or indifference as viewed by those below.

~~

Postscript

This piece was inspired by AI anxiety.

The Matrix asked us to imagine a world of limitless possibilities. It allowed us to ask ourselves, “What if all this were a mere simulation?” I don’t think they would be displeased with me for breaking this narrative frame. If we were to loosen our idea of what it means to be a simulation, we might again arrive at this world of limitless possibilities, but without the Nokia Stilletos and dial-up modems, or at least without the necessity of them. We press forward in this way, but we might also find that, having so wandered, the notion of simulation is no longer necessary. It is merely a tool of analogy. We might find that, simulation or no, the possibilities are there, and that they have always been there. We merely failed to notice. We needed to categorize. We need to do so no longer.

Copyright © 2026 Matt Bounds
All Rights Reserved

Fear of AI replacing you at work may have less to do with the labor market than with how AI is portrayed in the media.

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Preprint: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/exg7t_v1

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