We Stopped Asking How It Works

Dan Simmons was 36 years ahead of his time. In the Hyperion Cantos, AI sits in an unknown ultra-intellectual plane of existence, working to advance its own interests and problems that seem incomprehensible to humanity. Occasionally AI will deliver a gift to its creators, like Prometheus delivering fire. 

Principal among these gifts is an inter-dimensional doorway called the Farcaster. The device allows humanity to walk across the stars and colonize the galaxy at a massive scale. It eliminates the space travel penalty known as "time debt", in which space travel by vessel is relative inside the ship but absolute for the rest of the stationary universe. This means a journey might feel like 4 weeks but actually takes 10 years. The consequences are as colossal as you imagine.

Despite its utility, the inner workings of Farcaster portals are beyond human understanding. Humans tried and failed to reverse engineer it. However, hesitation for adoption was short lived, for its promise burned too bright. It was quickly mass produced and used by hundreds of billions of humans. 

Later, we discover in The Fall of Hyperion that this hopeful adoption was a deal with the devil. The Farcaster is revealed to be a trojan horse whose hidden utility is to hijack human neurons for its empire. The liminal state between two physical locations is where the AI infrastructure sits and preys on humans.

It's a brilliant plot twist on its own but carries extra meaning in the present day. In 2026, one can immediately draw a comparison to vibe coding. More specifically, our increasing willingness to trust machines outputs without fully understanding their inputs.

As we approach escape velocity, “keep a human in the loop" is a repeated verse but who's actually listening? In the middle of a revolution, the watchers have stopped watching. We might all do well to remember the Parable of the Farcaster.