GoKawiilChrono Cross was one of my favorite games from my childhood. In it, the protagonist, Serge, travels between two dimensions that resulted from a fracture in the timeline. This essay isn’t about Serge, however. It’s about the ordinary people who inhabit El Nido, the archipelago where the story takes place.
On the El Nido archipelago, people consult mysterious devices known as the Records of FATE. These devices are spread throughout the islands of the archipelago, and people routinely visit them for guidance about their lives. They consult the Records when considering where to go and what to do.
Consulting the Records is not considered strange or remarkable, but rather an obvious thing to do. It is simply a normal fact of life for the residents of El Nido.
But what are the Records of FATE, anyway, and why does FATE suspiciously look like an acronym? As it turns out, the Records aren’t mystical devices at all, but rather terminals connected to an artificial intelligence called FATE. The people of El Nido are, quite literally, asking a computer how they should live their lives.
FATE, however, is not a passive oracle. It uses the Records as a tool to subtly manipulate the people of El Nido, guiding their choices to shape the development of the archipelago in ways aligned with its own objectives. The people believe the terminals are providing them with useful guidance, completely ignorant of FATE’s true nature and purpose.
Recently, I was at a baseball game with my partner. One of the reasons I enjoy going to baseball games in person is to watch the crowd. As I looked around, however, I noticed something different: many people had tuned out of the game and were instead on their phones, talking to various chatbots: ChatGPT, Claude and Grok.
It was then that I found myself thinking about the Records of FATE. The resemblance was difficult to ignore.
In only a few years, consulting an artificial intelligence has gone from the realm of science fiction to an ordinary part of everyday life. People increasingly turn to these systems not only to answer questions, but for advice about what to say, think and do. Somehow, almost without discussion, asking an artificial intelligence for guidance has become normal for many. I find that deeply unsettling.
Of course, my analogy is imperfect. The chatbots are obviously not the same as FATE, either in terms of capability or alignment. Or… are they?
This AI summer has been a wild ride: we began only a few years ago with comparatively simple models such as GPT-2, and have arrived at enormous Mixture-of-Experts systems that dynamically route computation through specialized components. Their capabilities have grown enormously, but they are still not FATE. There is no reason to attribute sentience to them, they do not think, and they do not possess intentions of their own. At their core, they still predict.
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