Chapter 2 The End of America
Nine years later, 2044.
A entertainment neighborhood in Miami Beach.
Zhou Ke struggled to wake up.
Who am I? Who is hitting me? Am I dead?
Three consecutive amnesia?
"There will be sequelae in the freezer after hibernation." A voice came from the side in a trance, and it was hard to hear clearly.
After the blurred vision condensed again, Zhou Ke realized that he was in a cold metal secret room.
There is a circle of OLED light tapes attached to the metal wall to provide cold visibility. But the end of the light tape is hung with a vanadium battery pack - obviously, there is no need to pull the city power line in the house.
The next second, with a hint of chill, Zhou Ke realized that he was naked and had a piece of clothing in front of him.
On the sofa opposite, there was a middle-aged bearded man who looked vulgar but had a fanatical look in his eyes.
In fact, he was Zuo Zonglang, the negotiating expert nine years ago, but unfortunately Zhou Ke doesn't remember it.
"You finally woke up. Now we have less than an hour left. Please listen to me and finish your words." Zuo Zonglang talked enthusiastically.
But Zhou Ke felt that he could not trust the other party again.
"Well? Why do I think of the word 're'?"
While he was dressing in panic, he stumbled back to the other side of the room.
It took him three minutes to regain his sense of balance, and then while he was wearing clothes, he checked his anus and then breathed a sigh of relief.
Three minutes were actually very short, because he was a semi-paralyzed guy back then, and it was really not easy to control this strong and unfamiliar body.
Zuo Zonglang looked at Zhou Ke's confused look and couldn't help but be anxious.
He took advantage of Zhou Ke's control of his body before he could fully control his body, rushed forward, slapped Zhou Ke completely awake, and then shook his collar and asked him to concentrate:
"Hey, calm down! I don't know how much you remember. Anyway, I'm short and have no time to explain - your surgery was actually very successful back then, but later Academician Lucas and the boss decided temporarily not to wake you up. They also forged your death record and allowed you to continue to sleep in the Petri dish.
Just because during the period when you were unconscious, there was a huge change in this world - now, you are the last pure natural person in the United States to have not been implanted in the "central nerve big data collection system"! I don't know if it's right to release you out hastily now, but I have no choice!"
"What the hell do you want to say?" Zhou Ke was nervous and wanted to retreat, but was already knocked against the wall.
"I hope you can trust me - if you still remember that my name is Zuo Zonglang, the negotiator who gave you the opportunity to operate, then you should trust me! At least you are still alive now, right? This shows that the operation is effective, and I didn't lie to you!"
Zuo Zonglang explained sternly like a cannon, trying to make Zhou Ke accept the fact that he had been undergoing a head change surgery and was resurrected after eight years of freezing.
"Thank you for saving me." Zhou Ke said gratefully, and the two sides finally established basic mutual trust.
Zuo Zonglang had no time to accept his thanks, so he took out his cell phone and stuffed it into Zhou Ke's hands first.
"Now, this Samsung phone from 10 years ago has been processed and will not emit any RF signals, so it will not be monitored and positioned. You can just use it as an e-book and a player. You can try to check everything I don't have time to explain today."
Zhou Ke instinctively pressed the fingerprint lock, and the machine actually unlocked it directly - it turned out that his fingerprint had been bound.
This made him feel a little more at ease.
Zuo Zonglang continued to explain: "The information on the phone is not the latest, because I am the target of being monitored and I have no chance to update it in time; so the most important point is that you listen to my oral statement now.
This house is called the privacy shielded house, which is a new weird thing in recent years. When I came in, I paid for the two-hour room - I could only buy it for so long.
Its only feature is that there is a strong electromagnetic interference radiation source in the house, which can temporarily fail all data acquisition chips on the people in the house; and any external communication signals cannot penetrate the lead wall of the room.
As long as people enter this room, they are like completely disappearing from this world and have absolute privacy. In order to cover everything today, I have come here to consume five times in a virtual place, so the store owner will not doubt that I have resurrected you here. Can you understand?"
Zhou Ke has accepted the concept of "resurrection", so he nodded immediately.
Zuo Zonglang continued with a sad expression: "It took me more than an hour to resurrect you. There are 42 minutes left. I must explain the situation to you clearly, then commit suicide and pretend to be sudden death, so that all the chips on me will stop running. Because as long as I go out alive and connect with the outside world again, your existence will leak."
"What? I don't understand at all! What's wrong with this world? Also, why are you committing suicide?" Zhou Ke was confused, feeling that there were so many questions that I didn't know where to ask.
"Everything starts eight years ago. Academician Lucas had just finished your surgery. A sudden super economic crisis broke out around the world - some artificial intelligence technologies suddenly developed to the critical point, and there was a blowout, and billions of people on the earth were suddenly unemployed.
According to the traditional view of the academic community, the destruction of employment by artificial intelligence is not terrible, because technological progress will always create new human needs and new employment opportunities.
But this wave of unemployment frenzy came too rapidly. Moreover, structural contradictions could not be reconciled: that is, newly created positions cannot be adapted by those who have eliminated their skills, so the world is in turmoil.
At this moment, Niu Ke Monzac, the president of social giant ASBOOK, stood up and claimed to be a savior to propose an emergency solution, which was also valued by the governments of most capitalist countries around the world (except for socialist countries such as the Ming Dynasty and the four Nordic countries, their superior social system led them to directly pay welfare benefits and not be afraid of the capitalist unemployment crisis).
Monzac's plan is specifically as follows: He believes that according to Niuslow's hierarchy of needs, the first three basic needs of human beings are food and clothing, safety, entertainment, etc.; and the jobs created to meet these needs may be replaced and eliminated by artificial intelligence - can you understand this?"
Zuo Zonglang paused for a moment and waited for Zhou Ke to digest.
"I can understand that food, clothing, housing, transportation, electronic games, and robots can help humans produce." Zhou Ke nodded.
Zuo Zonglang continued: "He believes that only when the work of meeting the needs of the fourth level of ‘social respect’ and the fifth level of ‘realizing self-worth’ will not be eliminated by artificial intelligence - because the satisfaction of ‘social respect’ is mainly done by ‘let one person respect another, pretending to be a salty fish and worshiping, and shouting Double-ClicK-666’.
Just as no matter how much technology advances, stand-alone games cannot bring social respect (without sharing achievements), because robots are useless to call 666. They must go to online games to liver or krypton gold and trample other human players under their feet.
Some people are glorious and others are humiliated. This is a zero-sum game that will never win-win. It is this characteristic that creates a social model that will never let humans be unemployed!”
When Zhou Ke heard this, he felt it was too incredible, but it seemed very reasonable.
He decided to accept this setting first.
In fact, before he was operated in 2035, the society had reached its peak of prosperity and decline.
Keynesian theory that stimulates demand and manufacturing investment has developed the global developmentable fields. Even the African black uncle's territory is full of high-speed rail, and there is no place to transfer the "spillover capacity".
After all, the rate of capital investment expansion, if not interrupted by the economic crisis, will grow geometrically.
Is the United States finally going to fall under Keynesianism for 100 years?
"I didn't expect that after I fell into a coma, there was such a big change in the world..." He sighed and continued to ask, "What happened later? How did Niu Ke specifically use Niuslow's theory to build his 'immortal model'?"
Zuo Zonglang smiled bitterly: "His plan is to promote an 'implanted data acquisition chip'. This chip can be combined with AR glasses, somatosensor sensors, etc. to collect the following privacy data:
First of all, the audio-visual information that users see directly and hear will be recorded by the camera and microphone on the AR glasses. Then, the main physiological health indicators, GPS positioning, and the "mood index" of a person will also be collected and stored in the cloud."
Zhou Ke was shocked when he heard this and felt a chill in his head. He subconsciously touched the back of his head and asked: "What is the mood index? Can you read brain waves? Do you know what people are thinking?"
Zuo Zonglang waved his hand: "It's not that advanced. It just relies on detecting certain physiological indicators to identify whether a person's mood is roughly 'joy' or 'sad', 'worship' or 'disdain', and its intensity. However, what people are thinking about specifically, this chip cannot be read, that's too complicated."
After all, that technology cannot read thoughts, it can only read general emotions. In fact, as early as 2018, GOGL's facial expression recognition intelligence could detect the joys, anger, sorrows, and happiness of people's hearts, so this is not considered a black technology at all.
At best, it is more precise and quantifiable.
Zhou Ke is worthy of being an IQ of 200. After hearing this, he suddenly realized:
"Could it be... Monzac's plan is to solve the unemployment problem in the global capitalist world by 'let human worship/lowerness emotions be quantified by technological means and directly selling human worship value'?"
When Zuo Zonglang heard this, a hint of relief and excitement flashed in his eyes: "Yes! You are indeed someone worthy of my rescue! That was the situation at that time!"
But Zhou Ke quickly thought of a question: "But this is a serious violation of human privacy, and the governments and people of various capitalist countries have not resisted? Those European white leftists usually make a fuss about high welfare and white-collar workers' money. How could they be willing to wait for death at this time?"
Zuo Zonglang sneered: "The initial resistance was of course very fierce. But a cunning existence like Monzac is well versed in the way of step by step and peaceful evolution. There are many tortuous conspiracies here. Now there is no time to explain it, so you can force yourself to remember the conclusions and wait until you are safe before you can find the answers slowly.
Chapter completed!