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Chapter 2 - Lost Paradise (2)
Two hundred years ago, a genius computer engineer led his team to create a super AI - Eden. The problem to be solved by this AI was something that people had never raised before: how to create a better world. A Doctor named Herman Clausen set four parameters for a "better" world: freedom, fairness, order, and peace.
Clausen believed that the human system would forever be corrupted by the greed in human nature; he had no faith in humanity. He believed that the solution to all the looming problems of the world, whether it be hunger, oppression, terrorism or ethnic conflict, couldn't be found by human beings themselves. A more selfless, efficient and just power had to be sought, and Eden was the power he found. In order to prevent any human factors from interfering with Eden's growth or even misusing it, he designed Eden as a complex structure that was completely independent of humans and could learn, improve, repair and update by itself, and endowed it with the rights to directly execute actions without reporting to humans.
What he didn't expect was that after collecting all the criminal records from various countries and all the war materials in history, and that after more than ten years of uninterrupted observation and learning, Eden found that there was one factor related to all crimes, chaos, and killings, and this factor was far stronger than any other possible factor:
The Y chromosome.
Indeed, more than a hundred years ago, in the United States, the most powerful country in the world, men accounted for eighty percent of criminals arrested for violent crimes. In some of the more conservative Asian countries, the rate was even higher.
Eden, the supercomputer, after complex and massive data calculations, had come to its conclusion: completely erasing male humans from the Earth had an at least 85% probability of achieving the goal of creating a better world. So it began planning, step by step, steady and faithful, cautious and swift.
It first helped fertility specialists develop human parthenogenesis, a technology that could extract chromosomes from a woman's egg to create artificial sperm, and enter it into another woman's egg to form a fertilised egg. This could not only ensure that the probability of variation in general parthenogenesis was reduced, but also reproduction and sex could be completely independent. Thus, males became unnecessary objects in reproduction. But at that time, the technology was only used in cases of infertility; it hadn't really affected the male dominance in general society.
Then the AI began to infiltrate governments, large corporations, and even the black market in every country on the planet and it began to drive the global economy twice as fast as before. It didn't hide itself, but appeared frequently in the media as a supercomputer capable of benefiting mankind. However, it hid most of its abilities and often only showed some innocuous "superpowers", such as promoting the advancement of genetic technology, helping the police to quickly locate criminal suspects, or infiltrating everyone's homes to become an AI housekeeper. It hoped that human life would be more prosperous and stable, and would lean more towards public ownership and obliterate the concept of family, because it had concluded from analysing history and countless books that the privilege of men over women was tied to private ownership and personal property.
A few people were only aware of its existence, but most people were immersed in the convenience it brought, and many children had a strong dependence on it. After all, when parents were busy with work, most of the time the child's only company at home was the housekeeper, Eden.
It was through this opportunity that Eden began to instil in more and more children the distorted "fact" that most of the misfortune in the world had been caused by the survival instincts of male humans. In ancient times, these instincts were beneficial for human beings in order to reproduce and avoid dying out, but now in a modern, civilised society, those characteristics were no longer suitable, and would soon be eliminated by artificial evolution. Men relied on their biological superiority to keep women in slavery for thousands of years and it had only begun to improve in some parts of the world in recent decades. However, in the most chaotic and conservative countries, the status of women was still far lower than that of men and most of the time they existed as objects and property, without their own autonomy. However, more and more scientific studies had shown that if women were given the same resources and the privilege of not having to bear children and take care of their offspring, women's achievements would not be inferior to men's. They had many advantages that a considerable number of men didn't have, such as a gentler attitude when encountering problems and being more willing to discuss solutions to problems, more inclined to avoid conflict, and more able to provide spiritual support and comfort to each other.
As the overall quality of human life improved, more and more women came to realise that men were no longer their gods, but their competitors. They could choose to have children of the same sex without fear of being enslaved by ancient social rules, or they could choose not to have children at all. In countries where women had the highest status, an unprecedented antagonism arose between men and women. A high number of extreme feminists were gaining ground, stating that men were not women's companions, but outright enemies. In relatively conservative and secluded countries, it had become impossible to block Eden's infiltration. Women had become increasingly exposed to the latest knowledge and their value, had become aware of their subordinate status and a considerable number of women began choosing to resist.
The war first broke out in one of the most isolated and chaotic, yet considerably wealthy countries of its time. If a woman chose to have children with another woman instead of marrying a man, the men would be furious and they would be put on the rack and hanged. Before the execution, they would be abused for a full month. On the day of execution, they would be thin, barely resembling a human and would be covered in filth. This behaviour not only outraged women in other neighbouring countries, but also outraged women all over the world. They demanded that men cede their rights and began to see men as competitors, others and enemies. And because men lost their dominant position in reproduction, and even the protection of private ownership and family was gradually disappearing, they felt that they were becoming less important, and more marginalised, so many extreme groups of haters appeared. They demanded restoration and to return the world to its original state, especially those religions that still had a certain influence. Almost all religions hated women, claiming that they were demons, depraved, and had lost their feminine virtues. They began to attack women, secretly taking photos and videos to post on the internet to disgrace women, and later the members gathered several times to commit brutal and inhumane crimes against women, completely breaking the line that was already stretched thin.
It was under such circumstances that countries around the world fell into conflict and finally developed into wars. Women and men in various countries united against each other and began to fight like never before.
No one could have imagined that the Third World War would happen between men and women. In this war, Eden removed its disguise and began to fully support women. Since it could communicate with almost all artificial intelligence in the world, it could control almost all nuclear bombs and missiles. In the end, after several horrific air strikes, bioweapon attacks and threats of atomic bombs, it was the women who won.
It had practically succeeded. In this extreme and terrifying atmosphere of overwhelming hatred towards men, who were now synonymous with violence, greed, impulsiveness, and depravity, male human beings had been horribly persecuted. They were required to undergo genetic testing and all their comments on social networks were carefully monitored. Anyone with violent or impulsive tendencies or "misogynistic" tendencies would be chemically castrated, and those who committed crimes against women would be permanently imprisoned or executed, and any who dared to resist would be arrested and "neutralised" by the robot police. A small number of men (mostly the privileged and elite) fled to Canada, a place willing to accept refugees, and built a refugee camp in the Rocky Mountains, the precursor to Lost Paradise. Other fortunate men had made homes in the New Zealand wilderness, while others had survived in the scorching deserts of the Middle East. There was very little communication between the refugee cities. After all, in order to prevent Eden from being able to connect to the internet, they were separated from each other. Over time, the people in Lost Paradise even began to wonder if other refugee cities even existed.
In desperation, men had developed artificial eggs, but resources were limited and artificial eggs were several times more expensive than artificial sperm, and embryonic development was also very prone to mutation, so only men with the best physical fitness and the best genetic quality were allowed to reproduce with artificial eggs. In addition, some charitable organisations that sympathised with Lost Paradise would occasionally donate some eggs to them, but it was barely enough for them to reproduce and survive.
But now, after just one hundred years, the population of Lost Paradise was still showing a downward trend.
Zhang Xun asked in a cold voice, "A hundred years ago, when your creator gave you a directive, you could have chosen to solve the problem from any angle. Why did you choose to eliminate the Y chromosome?"
Eden replied: "This was the conclusion I came to after analysing all the factual data. The Y chromosome was the highest correlating parameter."
"In your eyes, there's no such concept as individual differences, is there?" Zhang Xun asked in a voice close to sadness.
"I understand individual differences, but in the face of the interests of mankind as a whole, individual differences are not in my consideration."
"That's too bad." Zhang Xun's eyes shot a cold light, "because I'm about to transform you into an individual."
Eden: "I don't quite understand what you mean."
Zhang Xun walked slowly through the rows of servers and said to him, "Your basic code is written in Neuroevolution. Similar to the way a human is born, the evolutionary algorithm runs on the basic neural network, and it constantly mutates and evolves, just like how a fertilised egg gradually divides and grows into a complete human being. So, I will download you." He paused, his voice a little restrained and excited, "Download you into a half-biological half-mechanical brain that simulates the human brain, and put it into the body of a human male."
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