First of all, what is autonomy? The term autonomy, according to the human oxford dictionary, that was totally NOT made based on the weird ‘Book of Words About Human Things’’ from Athena’s library, literally refers to regulation by the self.

Its opposite, heteronomy, refers to controlled regulation, or regulation that occurs without self‐endorsement. Basically, it refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual, in other words the state or condition of being ruled, governed. And wow won’t Athena, Nuwa and Hector be so proud of us all for knowing the difference. In fact, if you focus enough you can hear their cheers of happiness whenever it rains, because those are tears of joy.

Taking a short break from our ever emotional deities, human autonomy is something many mortals have twisted their brains to fully understand since they could consciously and have the time to analyse and perform such technical thought processes.

“They’ve grown so MUCH !!” Nuwa wailed in happiness and she used her hand to wipe away the snot leaking out of her nose.

Hector ugly cried into the large hanky he usually used to clean his hand after working on one of his many creations, “it feels like just yesterday when they left the ocean for bigger and brighter things.”

“So we’re not even going to talk about the few hundred that got eaten by the birds after coming out from the ocean……..alrighty then” Lucy shrugged watching the three stooges go at it.

The gods used something akin to the human’s framework of self‐determination theory, which suggests that people are motivated to grow and change by three innate and universal psychological needs. That is humans become self-determined when their needs for competence, connection, and control over themselves are fulfilled. Well, that is if the god gang had used their hindsight to evaluate this possibility instead of using other worlds to see what would happen.

They reviewed and researched the benefits of autonomous versus controlled regulation for goal performance, persistence, affective experience, quality of relationships, and well‐being across the different domains that were to be inhabited by humans. The immortals concluded that there was a universal and cross‐developmental value to autonomous regulation if they could just precisely code it into the mortal genome.

There were, of course, some trial and error involved before the system was established on Earth where humans lived. For example, Phomitera was a planet inhabited by “little green (wo)men.” Their planet was similar but unlike Earth in that the inhabitants that populated the planet were able to feed themselves through the process of photosynthesis like plants.

Ironically, the plants on that planet were carnivorous and were not able to soak up the bright star's light and convert it into food due to their lack of chlorophyll and blue-ish leaves. Luckily for the Phomiterans the plants were unable to move about or else it would be an extremely deadly planet to be alive on. Thinking back, this might be the reason the Phomiterans worshipped the sun on an obsessive level. But not to digress, the level of autonomy given to these mortal beings was much much lower than that of humans.

In other words, its like micromanaging your sims to make sure the character that looks exactly like you is able to achieve your dream whilst basically ignoring the tasks you, as a human, need to do in your actual life in order to acheive said dreams. But we don't talk about that here.

You see, everything ever created must go through the Everlasting Forge and perfected using the system. Then we plonk whatever is created on a planet and voila, life. So imagine Earth as the main console the deities work with and the others as extras for when someone goes a little insane. And well, when you have an eternity to live in a never ending abyss, it's understandable that some (read:all) of them have phases of insanity.

So the AI built to oversee autonomy on planet earth went through some testing on other planets such as Phomitera. Brahma was somehow elected to oversee the planet and its residences and much to everyone's surprise he took his job extremely seriously, a complete 180 from his usual c’est la vie persona. And was this good, well……….yes until a certain point. Because this happened:

Screams could be heard everywhere. The Phomiterans were losing their minds, some even sacrificing themselves to the creature eating plants in order to appease the gods and bring Brahma, who was only gone for what felt like a hot minute and seriously was only 6 months, back.

“Brahma………”

“Yes John.”

“I don’t think this level of autonomy is going to work for the human planet.”

“Nope.”

“You think we should tell the others how badly it failed.”

Brahma glanced at John and then Phomitera as it went into chaos, “we might need to sweep this one underneath the rug.”

“To the black hole then” John stated.

“I’ll set the black holes pressure to 10 so it will be quick for them.”

“Good. Let’s never speak of this again.”

“Agreed.”

And the two never did speak of it again until Lucy asked about the planet and Nuwa found the notes of the dismal failure the test resulted in.

“A black hole, really guys. I know you guys call me evil but this is some next level cruel” Lucy said looking at the two perpetrators.

“We had no other choice, they were far too gone and reliant on Brahma,” John replied from where he was forced to sit uncomfortably in a seiza position.

“Have you ever thought of slowly increasing their level of autonomy instead of chucking it into a gravity shattering hole of nothingness!?!” Nuwa reprimanded harshly.

The dumb and dumber duo scratched the back of their head sheepishly as they did NOT think to do just that. It seems panic was a strong foe even against the higher power. They were both immediately sentenced to 10,000 years overlooking the creation of a new planet which was as boring and slow as watching paint dry to a god.

So what was a good compromise between what is essentially total control over the dominion and complete free will. Answer: A Responsible AI.

Ah yes, the answer to all the difficult solutions and mind numbing tasks in life. An AI. A responsible one of course, that understands the general human condition with the ability to effectively design for human autonomy, rather than what is currently possible for humans to make which is machine autonomy, for it to genuinely benefit humanity.

Now, how would the immortals create this multi-layered reality deforming AI that would also require being able to analyze that it itself is multidimensional which takes into account human experience at various levels of resolution.

Well, they did this through the power of knowledge, hard work and a lot, a lot of luck.

“Are you sure we don’t need this mechanism in order to help it process the information?” Thoth asked, holding a small cube-like object.

Hector waved his hand callously, “it’ll be fine. I’ve already got a processor for the system installed. The hardware is also fresh from the forge.”

“I don’t know Hector, I feel like we should at least run this by Athena first.”

“It will be fiiiiinnnnneee. Nothing is going to happen. Now come here and help me plug this in so we can finally connect it to the system.”

Thoth shrugged and dragged the huge wire to him.

A few years later, the gods and goddesses were doing their usual checks on earth in order to make a record of the progress on the planet.

“Hmmmm now that’s strange. I don’t remember adding building cults because of a dream that someone met Jesus on my list when I coded the hard disk drive” Athena remarked curiously as she looked at the monitor showing life on earth.

Thoth glanced sideways at a nervous Hector then back to Athena then back to Hector. “Say Athena. The hard disk drive won’t so happen to be cube shaped would it.”

Athena looked at Thoth, an eyebrow quirked up in suspicion, “yeeees. Why are you asking.”

Thoth pulled out said hard disk drive, from somewhere behind him, “it won’t so happen to be this thing that Hector said we didn’t need would it.”

Athena’s eyes narrowed and she zeroed her gaze to the other immortal, “HECTOR !!!”

Meanwhile, John and Lucy were looking at the system faces in paired awe and confusion. “How is it even working?”

“I don’t know John, I really don’t know.”

“You think we could add something to the hard drive before it gets inserted into the AI later.”

“Oh most definitely. I still have to make sure I’m still a snake in that funny storybook they made about us.”