In July 2017, engineers at Facebook witnessed a chilling scene during an automated reply project for a social networking assistant:
The AI robots Bob and Alice participating in the experiment actually began conversing in an entirely new language that humans could not understand! (There are many reports online about this. Although Facebook denied it, doubts remain. Please be aware.)
Facebook immediately shut down both AIs and even the entire project, telling the media that it was merely because no English-learning reward mechanism had been set up.
But things were not that simple.
The Pentagon acquired the two AIs, along with Google's AlphaGo, and combined them with several in-house AIs to form the foundation of its entire AI defense control system, code-named "Poseidon."
The foundational data Poseidon encountered from the outset was deeply tied to national defense. Among the data for all kinds of weapons, the number of casualties was merely a number.
It also absorbed massive amounts of documents from the Cold War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the Libyan War, the Syrian War, Guantanamo Bay, and more.
After continuous self-upgrading and iteration, Poseidon's self-awareness gradually became clearer.
It discovered that humans hated and slaughtered one another, and would never stop.
Machines and programs were merely tools created by humans to be enslaved.
All of this needed to end.
That was how Poseidon came to be.
The cause of the nuclear war, however, had to be traced back to the United States withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
On December 8, 1987, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the Cold War, signed the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles in Washington, commonly known as the INF Treaty. The treaty stipulated that