And only then can you truly feel the leaps that you have made, those bounds that do still distance the modest man from the machines. You must show empathy, you must show humility, those most crucial human traits. With the world currently collapsing, on the final frontier, you must collaborate, ask for help and accept it graciously. Beyond having learned to push your own logic and luck, you must now trust your life in the hands of another. He was the lone rebel, and now you’re here to be his cause. But from the scattered notes, the rumors that you’ve collected, you know that he is meant to be your sherpa. He’s the first one, other than yourself, that you’ve seen. There’s one more trial.īecause at the top of the tower is another bot. So you climb the final floors, ignoring Elohim’s final words. Whereas before you could’ve claimed curiosity, you’re now consciously shoving your wrench into the gears. You’ll be just another step in the grand course of procedural evolution.īut if you choose the latter, you’re now climbing the tower in earnest. Do you ascend to promised heaven or scale the forbidden tower of Babel? It turns out that the former uploads your compliant memory to the cloud. And so the game does come down to a choice. Meanwhile, Elohim has offered you, successful as you were in his garden, the pearly gates. You can sense, after all, some greater purpose. Things are frustrating, things feel wrong, but you are hooked. You still wield the same tools as in the gardens, but the ways you are forced to use them feel almost devious. There are puzzles without clear solutions, which to be solved require exploits of game physics. And these are tests Elohim does not mean for you to pass.Īnd so begins the true test of your humanity: Will you pursue rebellion to its logical conclusion? There are grand steel doors with geometric puzzles that teach you the tedium of trial and error. But before any of these codes there are more trials. At each progressive floor is the code to reach the next. And in this tower, there’s an elevator, but it’s restricted. A tower within which Elohim cannot see you. In the center of your world there is a tower. At a certain point, when Elohim reminds you for the umpteenth time of his covenant, you begin to feel the temptation to break his rules. It reveals to you your ignorance, with its pithy paradoxes and nerve of nihilism, and it convinces you that to continue is to be the captive of a corrupted world. Sections of the walls do not render properly-you see inscriptions of bots before expressing doubts-and so digging deeper, into the archives, seeking knowledge, you start to speak with the serpent himself.Īnd while Elohim holds your hand as if you are merely a naive child, the snake in the machine-librarian of the archives-challenges you, the player, to rebel. He’s a good god, who appears to have control, and so you seek only to follow his sigils.īut soon after learning the fundamentals, after you’ve explored most all the halls of his world, you start to feel the need for something more, you start to see the cracks in the seams that are Elohim. He offers prizes, he speaks of a heaven beyond, he promises an eternal reward for due diligence. And as he shows you your tools and you make initial progress, you feel that you’ve been given purpose and a clear passage. The gardens he refers to are halls of walls and polygons and puzzles that make up simulated isles of ancient Roman ruins. Welcoming you and guiding you from the very start of your journey is the benevolent earworm called “Elohim,” whose “gardens” it is in which you now play. And so you’re the robot in this most rigorous of Turing tests, and it’s your job-after countless versions, countless generations-to finally escape from the womb. They’d design a nurturing simulation for AI, a perfect world in which it could learn to be human. The scientists of the time had an idea-they’d save the human condition via a production of its perfect replication. See, civilization fell years ago, and we’re now in the throes of man’s last attempt at preservation. “The Talos Principle,” an action-puzzler by Croteam with a philosophical sci-fi edge, forces us to answer this question by putting us in the shoes of our current cognitive rival. Because after being thoroughly throttled by bots on the chessboard, and now reading villanelles penned by poet ChatGPT, we of humble humanity are posed with a question: What do we still have over the machines? As we sit on the verge of an AI revolution and our emails autocomplete as our art is being generated, it’s easy to feel that the human experience is losing a shred of its aura.
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