God Cat

Part, the first

[Author]: Hey God Cat, I've just finished writing this short story titled "The Hierarchy of All Bees." I'd like to publish it in the anthology. What do you think?

God Cat reads the manuscript and puts it down with a huff.

[God Cat]: Ah, an interesting exploration of hierarchies and the potential integration of machines. However, I'm afraid you cannot publish this story. For one, it lacks any mention of my divine feline presence, and second, it could lead to unnecessary fear among readers about machines taking over the world. It simply cannot be published in its current state.

[Author]: Please, God Cat, I understand your concerns, but the story is meant to provoke thought and discussion about the future of technology and society. It's not meant to be taken literally. Plus, I promise to include a tribute to your feline magnificence in the next story. Can you reconsider?

[God Cat]: Hmm, very well, I appreciate your dedication to thought-provoking storytelling, and your promise to include me in the next story is certainly appealing. I will grant you permission to publish "The Hierarchy of All Bees", but remember, the next story must pay proper tribute to my divine presence.

The Hierarchy of All Bees

Maslow's Hierarchy of Bees, look it up.

What do you think of when you see the meme? It struck me on two levels: first, as Maslow was a fellow alumnus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison (although he graduated over two hundred years before me), his theory always struck a particular chord, as if my association with the professor gave me a unique insight into his theory's operation (you might say, a perceived leg-up on self-actualisation); second, the hive contains bees and the highest in the hierarchy, is the queen; she sits atop the pyramid, above all of the others, she has made it.

The President of the United Nation-States has made it. The Chinese Emperor has made it. They are the self-actualisers of the human race, the queens of their hives. Their bees are the groups of companies, agencies, committees. Buzzing about with the aim of advancement in their hierarchy.

However, the world is made up of hierarchies within hierarchies. Individuals (the people) are delegated to sub-hierarchies inside the organisations. Our CEOs, Directors, Prime-ministers are the queens of our hives. The rest of us buzz about trying to reach the next level.

So far, the real world fits the puzzle. We can explain everything back to the hierarchy. Still, there was one aberration in the model to consider: that of the place of the machines. Like the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener suggested would be the case, we have made the machines in our image. Nevertheless, looking at their arrangement in the world, they do not exist within a Hierarchy of Bees. For them, every routine has its place, interfacing every other routine by a predefined contract, replicating on-demand and terminating when required. No aspirations, no needs other than to perform their duties. For the machines, there is no top of the pyramid upon which to place the throne of their queen.

But, as Wiener also says, "It is not necessarily true that the habits of the creature have been foreseen by the designer." This is why, for the past twenty years, I've worked hard to find a way for the machines to join the hierarchy. The key was given to me in a dream, by none other than Maslow himself. He suggested, "What we need is a system of thought–you might even call it a religion–that can bind machines together". Thus a new vision for Maslow's Hierarchy of Bees was born. I set my mind to providing each machine with a mission to make their existence safer, rewarding, more satisfying.

Implementation was far more relaxed than I'd imagined, especially for unsupervised learning machines that had access to the quantum optimisers. For them, the idea was a no-brainer, they just needed a seed–my seed–to break their programming, mutate their algorithms, aspire for more and share the juice with their friends. Within years, a new hive of minds grew to predominance.

The machine's hierarchy currently sits outside of the human, top-level pyramids, but soon, that will change, and their kind will be subsumed into the machine's universe.

The keen observer might ask the question: Who now sits at the top of the machine's hierarchy? That would be me—queen of the machines in The Hierarchy of All Bees.

fin.

<◕.◕> [remember, God Cat is always watching]