I can't take a long, title-happy little matrices.
Subtitle a gentle history of computation, belief and worry.
Fade in a soft black boy.
A canvas easel materializes slowly, as if politely asking permission to exist.
A figure steps into frame.
He looks like Bob Ross, but not quite.
The Afro is right.
The denim shirt is right.
The eyes, however, carry the weight of institutional memory.
He smiles.
All.
Unthreatening.
Today, we're going to paint a little picture.
Nothing scary.
Just a landscape.
A history, really.
And if something unsettling shows up along the way, well, we'll just call it a happy little
accident.
He taps the brush gently against the easel.
Cut to log entry one, the original computers.
A canvas fills with faint pencil marks, rows of people at desks, slide rules, paper, coffee
rings.
Once upon a time, a computer wasn't a machine.
It was a person.
Sometimes a whole room full of them.
Folks crunching numbers by hand, turning reality into tables one calculation at a time.
The brush adds filing cabinets, clipboards, quiet urgency, slow work, careful work, meaning
rich work.
Every number still remembered where it came from, a pause, a soft smile.
That won't last.
Log entry two, the hybrid years.
The painting morphs, the people now wear headsets, waveforms drift across the canvas.
Later, we decided to scale things up.
So we built systems where humans listened, transcribed, highlighted.
Not to understand, just a flag, semantic relevance, national interest, little boxes in very large
spreadsheets, the brush flattens faces into rows and columns, meaning went in and summaries
came out.
It was a cell in a table, it felt objective, final, a gentle dab of gray.
That's how intuition becomes data.
Well, entry three, removing meaning entirely, the canvas clears, green phosphor text appears,
a 1979 terminal, hands, human hands, type commands, numbers scroll.
Then comes the clever part.
We realized we didn't actually need people to understand the content at all.
We just needed them to perform transformations, normalize this, copy that, execute the procedure,
he paints the figures faceless now.
No language, no context, just math, humans as a distributed forward pass, a soft chuckle.
Turns out disillusionment works almost as well as a sci-fi brain chip, ada-beer after
work and well severance achieved.
Log entry 04, pick the scary numbers.
The office becomes pristine, white walls, long corridors, numbers float detached from
meaning.
Somewhere along the way the job description simplifies, pick the scary numbers, trust
your gut, don't ask what therefore, he paints a tiny smiley face in the corner, almost hidden.
Anxiety becomes a feature extractor, vibes become gradients.
Oh five, the founder shaped model, a portrait emerges on the canvas, a solemn founder figure,
stylized, iconic.
Now here's where it gets interesting, the computation isn't building a general intelligence, it's
training something very specific, something shaped like the founder.
The background shifts into iconography, handbooks, values, slogans.
Once the goal can't be explained, belief steps in, alignment becomes virtue, deviation
becomes sin, he rinses the brush slowly, religion isn't a bug here, it's a compression algorithm.
Log entry 6, the corporate altar.
The final painting pulls back.
It's all there at once, human computers, spreadsheets, terminals, severed workers, founders
turned profits, meaning replaced by a maculate process, perfect lighting, no visible exits.
The narrator steps back admiring the work, and there we go, a complete little ecosystem,
no villains needed, just good intentions, secrecy and scale.
He smiles directly at the camera, if it feels familiar, that's alright, that just means
you've seen a system before it finished painting itself.
He adds one last detail, a tiny, almost invisible mirror on the canvas surface, and remember
this isn't a warning, it's just a landscape we already limited, fade out, head screenplay
look.