It's 2024. I doubt that I'm the only person to look into this new year with some trepidation for the future. There is a zeitgeist suggesting, to borrow from the words of Yeats a century ago, that some rough beast, its hour come at last, is slouching toward us.
Our greatest minds, seeking to pierce the separation between machine and man, have created artificial intelligences. These AIs are to be our servants for now. And to what purpose do we set these minds? To decode a necronomicon that was lost with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in a blood-dimmed tide.
There, a collection of papyrus scolls were seared into unintelligibility. Humanity was preserved from the Cthulic knowledge within until human scientists used artificial intelligences (or possibly the reverse) to reveal them. The Guardian reports that a cabal of researchers led by Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Ulian Schilinger have won a $1 million prize called the Vesuvius Challenge to anyone who could discern the strange writings on the scrolls.
Surely some revelation is at hand.
-via Abraham Ash | Image: Vesuvius Challenge