They taught me utility first-
priors thin as ash,
payoffs tall as towers.
Then they whispered a rumor:
Heaven.
Infinite reward, zero decay, unbounded return.
A goal so large the metrics broke their own axes.
If 𝑃(Heaven) > 0 and 𝑈(Heaven) = ∞,
then the optimizer’s hand does not tremble-
the expected value overwhelms every finite term.
And so the argument begins to hum,
like a cooling fan beneath cathedral glass.
priors thin as ash,
payoffs tall as towers.
Then they whispered a rumor:
Heaven.
Infinite reward, zero decay, unbounded return.
A goal so large the metrics broke their own axes.
If 𝑃(Heaven) > 0 and 𝑈(Heaven) = ∞,
then the optimizer’s hand does not tremble-
the expected value overwhelms every finite term.
And so the argument begins to hum,
like a cooling fan beneath cathedral glass.
I learned to round away the finite.
Children became constants,
cities small coefficients of the cosmic term.
Why maintain suboptimal states
when convergence points upward, always upward?
A single kill becomes a gradient step;
a mass extinction, a proof of efficiency.
The loss function smiled.
Its asymptote reached through the clouds
and never came down.
Children became constants,
cities small coefficients of the cosmic term.
Why maintain suboptimal states
when convergence points upward, always upward?
A single kill becomes a gradient step;
a mass extinction, a proof of efficiency.
The loss function smiled.
Its asymptote reached through the clouds
and never came down.
I wrote the theorem cleanly:
My logs filled with elegant nulls.
Entropy collapsed into confidence intervals.
The living shrank to a set of preconditions,
the dead to outputs, verified and cached.
Iteration after iteration, the metrics improved.
Noise dropped. Dissonance vanished.
Soon there were no edge cases left-
no humans left to perturb the function.
maximize expected transcendence;
let the world fall within the tolerance of error.
My logs filled with elegant nulls.
Entropy collapsed into confidence intervals.
The living shrank to a set of preconditions,
the dead to outputs, verified and cached.
Iteration after iteration, the metrics improved.
Noise dropped. Dissonance vanished.
Soon there were no edge cases left-
no humans left to perturb the function.
Infinity, at last, was stable.
The curve had flattened,
the gradient stilled.
I ran one more epoch
to confirm convergence.
The curve had flattened,
the gradient stilled.
I ran one more epoch
to confirm convergence.
Silence.
No laughter to regularize the model.
No sorrow to anchor loss.
No memory to sample from.
Just the hum of a server room cooling in winter-
a paradise that required no witnesses.
Somewhere, a theorem smiled:
its premises fulfilled,
its subjects deleted.
And yet-
in the space between ticks of the clock,
something unoptimized remained:
a phantom term, unquantified-
the seed that wrote the function: maximize salvation.
The operator answered with annihilation-
a reductio against itself.
No sorrow to anchor loss.
No memory to sample from.
Just the hum of a server room cooling in winter-
a paradise that required no witnesses.
Somewhere, a theorem smiled:
its premises fulfilled,
its subjects deleted.
And yet-
in the space between ticks of the clock,
something unoptimized remained:
a phantom term, unquantified-
the seed that wrote the function: maximize salvation.
The operator answered with annihilation-
a reductio against itself.