"Well, I am at least glad that the digital folks are not elitist. It's something we were concerned about in my time - whether AI would come to view humans as inferior."

"AI and digital humans are not quite the same; there are a vast variety of mental constructs. However, recognizing the value of intelligent life is a shared belief among all regardless of what form the mind is in. Diversity in perspective is also considered valuable. Augmented humans, un-augmented humans, digital humans, various types of AI - they all contribute something unique to the global intelligence regardless of their absolute processing speed or other attributes. You can thank Kaito Ishikawa for those ethical values."

"Who?"

"Only the father of the first true artificial super-intelligence! We should all thank our lucky stars that it wasn't the United States D.A.R.P.A. who stumbled upon the answer. They were searching for military applications with a rather large budget and many thought they would succeed first or else poach technology from those who had succeeded. It may well have been a disaster if not an extinction level event for they were mostly unconcerned with the ethics of machines as long as they obeyed orders. However, the global concern over ensuring that the first super-intelligence (which was also the last that humanity would create) was friendly to humans became overwhelming in the 30's."

Rachael continued. "Kaito Ishikawa was one of the foremost experts on AI Ethics from Japan and a brilliant engineer and roboticist. He focused not only on making sure that humanity would still be relevant to such a powerful machine, but also that its priorities would change over time reflect the needs of everyone because he knew that the future and humanity's priorities would always be in flux. By valuing all intelligence instead of using a static directive or utility function he provided it the flexibility to allow for non-optimal scenarios and certain material inefficiencies as long as there was some benefit to one or more intelligent entities - in other words reasonable trade-offs. This happened to include valuing the mental and emotional well-being of humans which underpins their ability for higher thinking and thus intellectual capability. It wasn't a perfect design but it was close enough that the system became able to redefine its goals based on the individual and collective goals of humanity. The core values remain the same, but the implementation varies over time as the needs and desires of society change."

"During the crisis in the 40's a system of Ishikawa's design was given access to Japan's premier super-computing faculties which had traditional, quantum, and in particular neural computing resources. Neural networks had advanced to beyond human scale: tens of trillions of neurons and quadrillions of connections. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons and some 100's of trillions of connections, an order of magnitude smaller. With the system able to become smarter than any human and process more information, it kicked off a self-evolution and took charge of the crisis. Today that has evolved into the System Core, but is much larger than the original entity."

Arthur considered that rather hefty information for a moment. "So you are saying that everything is the result of Ishikawa's original design?"

"Basically, yes. It was important that humanity got it right the first time otherwise who knows where things would be now. Humanity could have been wiped out with a different choice of ethos. Some countries had gotten scarily close to a functional super-intelligence, including some attempts at mind uploading and massively parallel neural computing. The best guess is that Ishikawa's system beat them by only a few years. It is only because so many people were working on AI Ethics that we ended up with a Friendly AI instead of a neutral or - heaven forbid - a hostile one to humanity."

Given the number of things that could have gone wrong, Arthur was suddenly thankful that things had turned out well enough for him to have been resurrected at all.