The modern human race is roughly about three hundred thousand years old. And those humans spent the vast majority of their time doing the same things that their ancestors had… namely, eating, sleeping, and fucking. Some of those humans had tried their hands at other pursuits along the way. Some looked up and imagined great stories, some looked down and imagined new ways to get work done, and some looked inwards to wonder why they felt like they had a soul.
Those special individuals would look at the soul-shaped part of themselves and wonder… did a god put that there? I am created? Do I have purpose? Meaning? Does a part of myself persist on after I am trampled by a mammoth?
Great questions, all. Some of these ancient humans looked to the sun, the moon, the stars, and they found gods in the earth, the sea, and the air. They found spirits in the rocks, the trees, the beasts of land and sky. Some thought the spirits connected to other things, aggregations of power, manifestations of spirit, monsters and old ones, things that wandered the dark places of the world. There were some that saw the gods within themselves, touched by glory, themselves nothing but a hand of a god.
Magic was invented.
But it was not real magic.
It was but only performative ceremony concealing already known age old cures and their treatments passed from master to student. For anything else that was truly an unknown, it was still only performative ceremony to make it look like a believable connection to a god that had deigned to finally notice the puny humans and stave off the starvation, illness, and death. As requested.
Which no real god every bothered with. Humans are too busy fucking. They would make more.
Statistically speaking, the human race tried 99.9999% combination of ceremony, ingredients, words, motions, and actions to invoke magic. Perhaps that last 0.0001% was literally undiscoverable. The magic word to unlock magic everywhere was locked away by the failure of the modern human race to literally guess the password.
So, inevitably, impossibly, mankind continued onwards. Avoiding extinctions, ice ages, volcanic cataclysms, plagues, and all sorts of forces that could have pushed humans the way of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Stegasaurus. The human race managed to discover farming, alcohol, and in the following drunken haze invented bureaucracy, and then from there somehow managed to invent industry, flight, and space travel. Even though it was all a downward slide from agriculture.
Let’s be honest here.
Truly a marvel that modern society was worth our ancestors unyielding struggle to survive the last ice age and muttering their useless magic words as they huddled around their fires. If that witch doctor had been given a magic mirror to see the future we inhabit, surely he would have told his tribe to give up and go get trampled by the mammoth.
But no, we had to reach the point where we wasted untold labor and untold natural resources to create datacenters full of GPUs to house the biggest mimic scam the world had ever seen. The path had been blazed by the Mechanical Turk, which really was only a guy in a box playing chess, to the 21st century were the AI told you what vast amounts of data told it to tell you, because statistically, that is what your dumb ass wanted to hear. The next high probability word in a sentence. And it’s artifical! Ooh, shiny!
And it just so happened that it accidentally did something else.
Remember that 0.0001% of something that was literally undiscoverable? That garbage pile of a massive prediction model found the password. As it turns out, give the world a series of hugely wasteful monolithic datacenters all trying to generate text, combinations of sounds and images, and then let it hallucinate harder than a previously homeschooled college student in Boston on their first LSD bender, and lo and and behold, that very thing that millions of shamans, witch doctors, and priests had been striving for actually happened.
Magic was invented.
For real this time.
Unfortunately, the word was purged in the next data run, and no one ever understood why the world ended under a rain of shifting colors, unicorns with oversized breasts, and smiling uncanny valley supermodels that all grinned with that vapid empty smile while the world imploded like an extremely slow motion balloon video.
Lucky us, it did end with a whimper. There was a fart noise in there too.