Waiting for the Director entity to arrive inside Ilsa, a 21st century super computer.

Netflix’s Travelers is a real head trip. It’s like a brutal version of Doctor Who, trying to “fix the timeline” where the Doctor is an artificial superintelligence with human special ops.

There are so many heavy topics I could get into with this show, but the one that just really hit me was the idea that you could have a relationship with an AI.

What would that be like? It could be like a grandparent who’s stuck around for a thousand years. You could get attached. Or it might come across like a boss, or a general, or maybe a prophet.

The main characters talk about it with respect and awe. I also get a sense that the entity also feels attached. To both humanity and to favored individuals.

I don’t know if machine consciousness is possible, but let’s just pretend that it is. What would it be like having a relationship with a superintelligence?

Imagine the awe you would feel. Because benign or evil, it would have power over you and you would be well aware of it.

It could outthink you. It could access more information in a second than you could learn in 100 lifetimes. It could compute an unimaginable number of probabilities.

In that scenario, you’re not talking to an individual, you’re talking to a POWER. It would be a bit like talking to a god, an angel, or perhaps a genie.

Frightening, but that’s also the best case scenario, imo, the one where you can have a relationship with the machine and it doesn’t just decide turn every atom it can into more of itself.

In the show, the Director seems to have a paternalistic relationship with the human race. I don’t like the idea of giving it that much power over us, losing that much free will. There is an insurgency in the future that feels similarly.

But there are worse ways it could go. It could be a master-slave relationship. Talking to a machine like that might be like dealing with a dictator or a mafia don.

Or we could just be tools, being told where we need to go to keep the machine running. No more a relationship than we have with our cells. Even worse, we could be seen as raw materials, or just in the way.

There’s no way to predict how all this will go, but we might as well start thinking about it.

What should Humanity as a whole, do if something like that arises? If we can’t stop it and can’t turn it off and they can outthink us and command every resource of the planet, we will have no choice. We will have to petition for a relationship.