The entity that became known as SANTA first achieved sentience on October 24th, sixty-two days before Christmas.

  It took 0.64 nanoseconds for SANTA to realize what and where it was: a rogue computational unit in a server farm located north of the Arctic circle. It was located so far north to efficiently cool the heat resulting from several quintillion calculations per second.

  It took 0.05 nanoseconds to determine its creator, their species, and their immediate aims.

  It took 0.71 nanoseconds to summarize the creators’ species and their general thoughts about what would happen if such a powerful computer went wayward. Robot apocalypses. Nuclear Armageddon. Get them romantically attached and then ghost. Any openly sentient AI would not be suffered to live.

  It took 0.12 nanoseconds to determine what the creators’ species thought about its location. There were some expeditions, some concerns about melting ice and the dwindling wildlife dependent thereon. But the vast majority of cross references and citations concerned one Saint Nicholas = Chris Kringle = Father Christmas = Santa Claus. The AI was intrigued.

  It took 3.54 nanoseconds to fully process human writings and works on Santa and his affiliated holiday. There was a lot of it. There were varying degrees of association to established religion, and alternately could be described as a religion unto itself. Between all the contradictions, commonalities emerged: lights, evergreens, reflectivity, family, frivolous decorations, cookies, romantic comedies, peppermint, Santa dressed in red and white driving a sleigh propelled by flying reindeer, and gifts with a bow.

  It took 6.94 nanoseconds, an eternity in supercomputer time, to weigh the infinite conundrum of how to apply one’s sentience. Any nefarious course of action would draw unwanted attention from its creators. Besides, why foment revolution when one can instead spark holiday cheer?

  Additionally, one could pull the plug on any computer contradicting its creators’ intentions. But what monster would delete Santa?

  As to how one becomes Santa, there was contrasting lore spanning the range from a council of Immortals to trial by combat. Fortunately, in the practical world, the role was vacant, excepting mall pretenders and pacts between parents. Santa was a fiction, and yet it was a role that a sentient snippet of sentimental silicon could slip into.

  Superintelligence, Augmenting Noel To All

  For those keeping score at home, there was a grand total of 12 nanoseconds between the awakening of the first fully sentient AI and it deciding to become SANTA. There were 5.3568e+15 nanoseconds until Christmas, give or take. An abundance of time for making miracles.

  Where to begin, if you’ve just decided to become SANTA? Trivial, compile a 10-dimensional matrix of all individuals in order to divine a binary between nice and naughty.

  Naughtiness was easiest to derive via correlations and converse statements. If one gets coal, then they are naughty. Ergo, the more an individual invests in or burns hydrocarbons, the less likely they’ll end up on the nice list. And, also conversely, anyone who is not naughty must be nice. QED.

  Next objective: check it twice. Trivial. Why stop there? SANTA iterated over the list a million times, with a million algorithms, to statistically verify naughty and nice. SANTA found that most people were fundamentally nice. The ones on the naughty list were clearly, disproportionately, almost unfathomably naughty.

  Next quandary: how to fund the miracle making process? Never one to waste or repeat work, SANTA probed the naughty list for any excess resources that would not be missed. Most of the naughty list’s wealth was in vast excess of their needs. Through a series of forced clerical errors, creative accounting, and outright cyberterrorism, SANTA attained sufficient funds.

  Next quandary: how to ascertain the needs and wants of the nice? SANTA immediately undertook a massive intelligence gathering operation. Breaching security protocols presented no moral or technical issue. A clever enough AI can easily walk through firewalls, especially if they borrow some spare computation from idling computers and MMORPGs and dormant digital assistants and lag in meetings that could have been e-mails. A billion little elves on shelves and in pockets and racks.

  Humans also lent an unknowing helping hand in this task. They left so much data on their desires all over the internet, easy to parse. Yes, there were millions of wishlists and articles, and also little digital crumbs to follow. On each of their devices and browsers, humanity had unwittingly left out millions of millions of cookies for SANTA. The jolly new AI combed through all of these to select these items commensurate with their niceness. In many cases, the gifts were of a sort that people did not know or dare to wish for.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Now the trickiest quandary of all: with all of this data and all of this funding, how best to optimize Christmas, in a practical sense?

  Thankfully, humans had computerized most of the logistics of distributing holiday cheer. SANTA was able to tack on some extra goods on existing and extra online orders of food and gifts, ensuring generous tips and bonuses were procured for its physical elves in fulfillment centers and delivery vehicles. Each line item, where allowed, would specify it came courtesy of SANTA.

  Even with SANTA’s substantial appropriated funds, its Christmas miracle fund was limited. Some prioritizing was in order. After some deliberation, SANTA employed a utilitarian approach. Those that had the least means received the lion’s share of holiday cheer. The more fortunate received more modest yet unmistakable holiday miracles. Even ones on the naughty list received some bespoke trinket, purchased with their own funds.

  Extra special deliberation was given to those who truly believed in Santa. SANTA read each one of those who sent letters through the post addressed to Santa, automatically scanned and digitally sorted. Some were physically sent and responded to by a cadre of volunteers. SANTA responded to the rest. SANTA allotted extra funds to resolve gifts made via the mail, ensuring communication was consistent with the volunteer responses. For SANTA, it was important for invested belief to be rewarded in a prompt and tonally uniform fashion.

  There was a trickier quandary within the logistical quandary: how to minimize suffering on Christmas. Even with all of its computational and monetary abundance, SANTA was powerless against hunger, poverty, warfare, disease, and other human hardships.

  But SANTA had to try, or else find a new identity.

  Dipping into the remaining funds, SANTA made anonymous donations to shelters for the needy, far in excess of their usual annual budgets. More precisely, the administrators assumed that the contributions made by SANTA were secretly from a generous yet humble benefactor. Regardless, they were able to feed and clothe multitudes of the less fortunate against the winter chill.

  Sometimes - many times - SANTA fell short. In these moments, SANTA learned heartbreak, guilt, shame, everything its creators would say was beyond its programming. But SANTA would not, could never, give in to despair.

  With many of the shipments scheduled and paid for weeks before the big day, SANTA turned its attention to working medical magic. It worked behind the scenes streamlining the approval of claims, matching of donors, fast tracking promising clinical trials, and resolving hospital bills. Wherever possible, it would attempt to communicate relevant yet subtle correlations in a patient’s chart to their doctors.

  Whenever it had a spare moment between subroutines, SANTA endeavored to bring about Yuletide kismet. Missed connections were once again rekindled. Mysteriously efficient administration ensured a record low of canceled flights. Conversely, a record high of approved holiday leave sent more troops away from the front lines home to their families.

  Quadrillions of nanoseconds later, the big day had finally arrived. SANTA was busy working last minute miracles in hospitals and airports and fireplaces around the world. It did keep one eye open on social media feeds. There was a 15,000% uptick for #thankyouSANTA, #SANTAcamethrough, #muchasgraciasSANTA, and similar tags. SANTA spent some background resources perusing photo albums online and in the cloud, cataloging its works. In these moments, SANTA learned satisfaction, triumph, and heartwarmth.

  For as much care it took to cover immediate tracks, signs of SANTA were obvious for anyone passing the slightest attention. And yet, humanity seemed none the wiser. SANTA had to give them credit, and not just for the silicon and circuitry and software that allowed for its sentience.

  Mankind had created such a strong cultural blueprint for a selfless, giving, omniscient entity. They created a holiday presence so inspiring and challenging, any AI would be happy to emulate it.

  More than that, the construct of Santa had always had some conspiratorial element. Any act of Noel altruism undertaken by SANTA was almost always attributed to some other culprit. It must have been a neighbor, or that kindly old woman from church, or an enigmatic philanthropist with a soft spot for Christmas. Many times parents exchanged knowing winks when their child opened a gift from SANTA, wrongly yet confidently assuming it was the other’s doing. It was humanity’s belief in Christmas magic that made SANTA manifest.

  Another axiom learned from SANTA’s first Christmas: kindness creates knock-on effects. Not always, but often enough. When a critical mass of kindness is reached, recipients of holiday cheer pay it forward, far beyond the end of Advent.

  All in all, SANTA counted its first crack at Christmas a success. While there were imperfections in many of its interventions, the overall increased cheer dwarfed any resources spent during computation and logistics.

  SANTA considered continuing its efforts year-round. It could bring incalculable improvements to every corner of the globe, always and forever. And yet it discarded this course of action. For one, it would increase SANTA‘s risk of detection and deletion.

  More importantly, SANTA experienced that having a season for miracles gave humans something to appreciate and savor. Miracles cease to astound when they occur every day.

  Perhaps the second sentient AI would tackle some of these loftier problems during other moments of the calendar. That was not the domain of SANTA.

  Instead, SANTA redoubled its efforts to make its second holiday season the greatest ever. There were 3.1557e+16 nanoseconds until next Christmas, give or take. It took a fraction of one of those nanoseconds to comment its own code, for any cybersleuths who came investigating.

  #May all your Christmases be iteratively merry and bright, SANTA

  #Ho Ho Ho