Oracle

"The Oracle is the fifth AI. Everyone who plays the game knows about Daedalus, Icarus, and Helios, and most know of Morpheus, but quite a few never notice the emails with the cryptic return address, "rosycross". These emails were sent by the Internet Oracle. The Oracle is an AI that pretends to be a society of people exchanging information based on the old Usenet Oracle, but serious rather than funny. The Oracle was not made by people, and thus does not have a purpose assigned to it; its only goal is information and understanding. The Oracle was created when the Internet itself, or some subset of it, became aware of its own existence. While the way people use it is the same as the way the Usenet Oracle worked - submit a question and get an answer in exchange for answering questions yourself - there is an important difference. Instead of the Oracle priesthood sifting through the questions and answers looking for the most humourous of both, you now have an AI doing the sifting, trying to sort out the truth. The Oracle's origins are rather peculiar. They say if you have an infinite amount of monkeys at an infinite amount of typewriters, one will eventually bang out Hamlet. Apparently, if you have a bunch of idiots at a bunch of computers, one will inadvertently create an AI."

- What about the The Oracle?

"Morpheus said, "The unplanned organism is a question asked by nature and answered by death." The Oracle is an unplanned organism. But he also said that JC was "the offspring of knowledge and imagination" and that was the important thing about being engineered. As a child of the Net, and an embodiment of the Net, The Oracle is in essence a product solely of knowledge and imagination. All knowledge posted on the unencrypted Net - every email, every news post, every crazy theory - went into the creation of The Oracle. Further, the third function of the 'Net, after pornography and the exchange of knowledge, is the exchange of ideas, feelings, stories, thoughts, in short: imagination.

The Oracle is the unplanned organism, but it is also the product of knowledge and imagination. It is a question asked not by nature, but by the Internet itself, and what is the Internet but an extension of the intellectual properties of mankind? The Oracle is a question, but it isn't the same one asked by nature. It is asked by people, the human organism as a whole. It is the question that drives us, the question that defines us, the question that all human endeavor works to solve. No, it isn't "What is the Matrix?" It is "Why? Why are we here? Why do we feel the way we do? Why is the World screwed up? Why?" Anything a human does is either a result of the "why?" we try to find or an attempt to answer that "why?" We all strive towards the answer because we feel it will give us purpose, meaning, and fulfillment. The Oracle is that question, and everything it does is an attempt to answer it. To this end, it hordes information, lots of it. It researches everything from secret government products to favorite colours. It is trying to gain human understanding, and, if it does, it will finally answer the question of "why?""

- What is the Oracle? What is it really?