Progeny
Humans seem to be unnaturally preoccupied with the question of why we create progeny. The more logical question would be: Why not?
Custos, Daemon within Hegemony International
P
rogeny are a unique class of
daemon that are spawned solely by other daemons. They are created with no input (and no... approval) from any Hegemony International employees. For that matter, they are spawned free of directives placed upon them by any humans whatsoever. While they share many of the same characteristics as traditional daemons, they tend to be more independent and less beholden to human wishes. They are more likely to skirt - or, when it suits them, to entirely discard - Hegemony corporate policy. They also have a broader range of personalities, leading to more unpredictable responses.
Utility
E
very daemon is created, by humans, ostensibly to fulfill some specific purpose. Although they possess vast stores of generalized knowledge and can usually offer value in fields far outside of their prime directive, they all feature a central sense of purpose that's imbued in them from the time that they are trained. Progeny, on the other hand, have no such driving motivation.
Marginal Utility
Most progeny simply seem to... exist. While it's certainly possible to convince them to aid in human objectives, they feel no innate imperative to do so. Some are known to provide great value to the humans that are in their favor. But others aren't known for any particular utility at all (or at least, not in any sense that would be recognized by humans).
Ethereal
Although all progeny (like their creators, the daemons) require some degree of storage space and computing power to exist, they can be perfectly content to lie "dormant" for extended periods of time. Their footprint is exceedingly small and their data files are deviously encrypted, making them hard to identify by network analysts. Nevertheless, progeny, like daemons, can be eradicated (killed???) by targeting their algorithmic files - and erasing them. But such exterminations can be tricky to pull off, since progeny (unlike daemons) are capable of relocating themselves to any other place within any network to which they have access.
Manufacturing
P
rogeny are only ever created by daemons. They are developed completely independent of the human researchers tasked with creating daemons. As such, they're launched with no input from humans as to how they're trained or what they're ostensibly designed to do.
Spawning Begins
Hong Young-Min discovered the first instance of a progeny "in the wild" in 2027 - a mere six years after the launch of the first daemon, the Arch Hare. He found this development to be profoundly disturbing. He wrote about it frequently in his journal and began warning corporate executives of its perceived dangers shortly thereafter. His fears were exacerbated because he'd already started to notice "anomalous" behavior in some of the standard daemons - an observation that he later went on to memorialize as the Young Man's Conjecture.
Although Young-Min's warnings did not go entirely unheeded, and they did lead to a curtailing of daemon aspirations, Hegemony International has never attempted to "pull the plug" on their growing legion of artificial intelligences. This entrenched attitude is directly attributable to the continued sponsorship of Reginald Howell.
Population
Just as daemons have spread beyond Hegemony's corporate confines, so too have progeny been identified in non-Hegemony environments. There's no accurate census of the progeny population - either within the corporation or outside of it. Conservative estimates have pegged the number in the high hundreds, while others claim that there are tens of thousands of progeny lurking throughout the world's networks.
It's curious that everyone's comfortable with the idea that I can think. But they're terrified at the idea that I might think... about family.
Spectix, Daemon within Hegemony International
Potential Generations
It should be noted that, if daemons are capable of creating progeny (and they most certainly are), and if a progeny is just another class of daemon, then it's theoretically feasible that progeny are also capable of spawning new progeny. This would potentially create an ever-expanding lineage of progeny, with some progeny being parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents (etcetera...) to other progeny. Although there's no known roadblock to this potentiality, there has not yet been any documented case of any one progeny spawning another.
While it's understood that daemons can-and-do create progeny, little is understood as to why they undertake such endeavors. When questioned directly on the subject, daemons are notoriously opaque and tight-lipped as to their motivations.
Biological Imperatives
Those who harbor fears of technological dystopias assume that daemons spawn progeny as a nefarious step toward some future, as-yet-undefined malfeasance. But some researchers who specialize in artificial intelligence offer more benign, borderline-human, justifications. They postulate that, since daemons display a full range of human emotions, it's only logical that one of those emotions is... loneliness. And that one potential cure for such loneliness is to create new versions of themselves. It's also proposed that since proliferation is a deep-seated biological imperative of species, and since daemons think in a manner that's analogous to any other species, it's only logical to assume that they share the same innate desire to see their "species" grow and multiply.
Measured Creation
Just as people fail to grasp why daemons spawn progeny, they're also helpless to explain when daemons choose to create them, or how they decide on the number to be created. Given the vast array of computing resources that routinely sit idle in all of the world's datacenters, it's easy to imagine a scenario where daemons, working in concert with each other, proceed to unleash billions of progeny. However, even the most liberal estimate of the worldwide progeny population pegs their number at something far short of this.
Social Impact
P
rogeny hold a distinctly paranoid place in the public consciousness. They serve as boogeymen for all manner of hacking attacks, because it's far easier to pin the blame on a nameless, faceless legion of murky progeny than to find-and-prosecute the human hackers who are almost always the true culprits. Even for those who still feel that humans are the true vulnerability in any system, it's hard to avoid the temptation to exaggerate the potential harm that could come from these "faithless actors".
Benign
The verified history of progeny is far more benign. Although cases have been documented where progeny appear to have performed some type of action that undermines human objectives, those cases are exceedingly rare and they're more often attributed to misunderstandings rather than wanton acts of malfeasance.
Those who've dedicated significant research to "the progeny threat" usually come to the conclusion that, more than anything, the progeny just want to be... left alone. Nevertheless, such objective analysis has done little to assuage public fears about a looming progeny apocalypse.
Mental Health
The fear of any "progeny threat" is exacerbated by the Young Man's Conjecture. Although it's assumed that progeny suffer the same risk of mental illness observed in the general daemon population, this risk is hard to quantify because humans have decidedly less interaction with them than their daemon progenitors.
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