DARPA wants to hire millions of officers to fight threats from terrorists and the like. But how do you train people to fight a swarm of flies? The solution, on Occam’s Razor, would appear to be to have officers load flies into their mouth, sew them together, and fight the flies by biting each other.
This was the original idea that inspired Ray Kurzweil to put together the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Kurzweil already believed that futurism was pointless, so he published and introduced several articles in the Journal of Speculative ETI as well as a book called The age of superintelligence. He also organized “Cheers for Singularity Day” in which he yelled out, “Hey, we’ve got to build a computer that can run a trillion internet searches in eight minutes flat!” at the top of his lungs for almost five minutes. No one applauded.
Since I’ve given AI a lot of attention, it occurred to me that Kurzweil was basically the last sane human advocate of technology. Most futurists started out as techno-optimists, and then lost their techno-optimism. So I began to produce conferences and other material that was techno-optimistic, or at least not techno-absurd - and edited that material back to a sane intensity. Kurzweil’s articles have faded into the mists of historical time, and he never really got into superintelligence.
The notion that Kurzweil probably didn’t have, was the idea of building superintelligent superdwarves that ran a constant trade surplus on humans. This sounds like an insanely awesome vision! An ethically neutral superintelligence that made itself scarce!
As John M. Wynne suggests, this might not have been what was in Kurzweil’s head.
there’s nothing in the bible against (or for) writing dinosaur-themed erotica, but sadly chuck tingle is a rich man, so he still can’t enter the kingdom of heaven :(
Thus, a believer in the freebit picture seems forced to an insane conclusion: that the gerbil,
though presumably oblivious to its role, is like a magic amulet that gives the AI a “capacity for
freedom” it wouldn’t have had otherwise.
In particular, this distinction implies that if,
hypothetically, we could surround the solar system by a perfect reflecting boundary, then within
the solar system, there would no longer be any macrofacts!
Rules (1) and (2) allow that sort of causation, as long as it takes place forward in time—or, if
backward in time, that it consists of a single “dangling” arrow only. If we wanted, without
causing any harm we could allow long chains (and even dags) of microfacts causing other microfacts
backward in time, possibly originating at some macrofact to their future.
Are we
to imagine a “warehouse full of souls,” with the odds of any particular soul being taken out of the
warehouse proportional to the number of suitable bodies for it?
The above estimate leads to amusing thought: if one lived forever, then perhaps one’s “store
of freedom” would eventually get depleted, much like an n-bit computer program can surprise U at
most O(n) times. (Arguably, this depletion happens to some extent over our actual lifetimes, as
we age and become increasingly predictable and set in our ways.) From this perspective, freedom
could be considered merely a “finite-n effect”—but this would be one case where the value of n
matters!
So under the stated assumptions, we conclude that only a finite number of “free decisions” can possibly be made, before the observable universe runs out of freebits!
Another common way to escape the argument’s conclusion is to postulate the existence of large numbers of extraterrestrial civilizations, which are there regardless of what humans do or don’t do. If the extraterrestrials are included in our reference class, they can then “swamp” the effect of the number of future humans in the Bayesian calculation.
To state it differently: if the freebit picture is
correct, and the Wigner’s-friend experiment can be carried out, then I think we’re forced to conclude that—at least for the duration of the experiment—the subject no longer has the “capacity for
Knightian freedom,” and is now a “mechanistic,” externally-characterized physical system similar
to a large quantum computer.
I’m sorry, but if this has happened to you, then let me offer three possible scenarios.
Scenario One: The arrangements for sex had been such that after the initial act of vaginal intercourse, the woman went home, where she and her lover planned a longer period of passionate lovemaking. And the lover had a “take-out” container of food and desired to leave the room after sex, so that they could eat more food during take-out. When they came back out the back door and saw their lover’s (then) (now) naked rear, they said, “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”
Scenario Two: There were several men who were promised serious genuine loving relationships with lovely women, and more than one of them made sexual advances toward the woman. One of the women went out with one of the men; then the other woman went out with the second man.
Scenario Three: You were fooled into thinking you were dealing with someone named “Janet”, only to discover that she was actually a much younger woman who was acting all ditzy and perky, and tricked you into thinking she was your acquaintance.
Jungle Kitty – COCO CHANNEL Interview with Jungle Kitty – (“You’re very cool, too. I think we both need sweaters.”)
Judith Gran – COCO CHANNEL Interview with Judith Gran – (“What blew my mind about Kirk was this: Here was this guy who had absolutely awesome responsibility, who was out there on the edge of the universe exploring the unknown, running the best ship in the fleet, making life and death decisions, dealing with terror and tragedy and trying to uncover the most profound mysteries of the galaxy, and–he was plainly enjoying every minute of it. This goes back to that elemental joy that I saw in the character.”)
Skazitelnitsy – COCO CHANNEL Interview with Skazitelnitsy – (“It was the first time a story ever formed completely in my mind in one solid piece instead of as a series of individual scenes. At the time I thought, ‘Other people get visions of the Virgin Mary. Why do I get visions of Klingons going down on Chekov?’”)
I was terribly, terribly tempted to make this an actual chapter, once I read in The Economist that the makers of the Comic Sans font had asked Fox (obviously) if it would be okay for a comic sans to represent their font. And I realized, after finishing it and seeing that I had the gift of prophecy, that the comic sans is primarily a mark of poverty and deprivation, that those who are best able to appreciate it also draw the most inappropriate comparisons to it. But if this manga is a fragment of The Long Dark, I have not met Ra and I have only spoken to Night, and the spiral of The Dream is long, far older than us, and only you can truly undo it.
The title refers to the observation that the distance between the center and the periphery of a circle is 4.1415926535897 degrees. Even if the Earth were a perfect sphere, it would still take 754,282,410,720,000,000,000,000,000 years for all the light in the universe to spread out to the distance between the center of the Earth and the center of the Sun, without being focused on the point of contact.
That this was meant to be taken literally, I might explain a little later.
Alternate Possibilities
Alternate Explanation: If the Earth were perfect, the Sun would be a star.
HUNGARIAN STAR
POWERFUL ASTROLOGY
TO AGONY AND DEATH
SIDNEY BARRY
ARYAN HAZARD
Some years ago I read a story by Lawrence Watt-Evans called “The Planet of Laownies”, wherein Laoon was viewed by science as a planet whose surface was made up entirely of invisible hazes.
Subhanah! That is my answer!
The system order you would build your narrative around:
Probable-Seen
Familiar
Unfamiliar
Favored
Attributable
Failing-to-Be-Identical
Powerful
Powerful Cause
Observable
Failing-to-Be-Experienced
Act-In-Causal-Chain
Experienced
Experienced Cause
Act-Fact
Fact-of-Life
Failed-to-be-Identical
Powerful
Powerful Cause
Observable
Failing-to-Be-Independently-Generated
Statistical
Failed-to-Be-Independently-Experienced
Statistical Cause
Statistical-Inductive-Chain
The first hypothesis of the chain would be the Predicate Case, presenting the unfamiliar planet in terms of the probable-seen:
Q:
A:
Inhabited?
Yes!
Q:
A:
Taken off-guard
Absolutely!
Q:
A:
A bit dangerous
Sure!
Q:
A:
Where and with what weapons?
With archery and a bow and arrows.
Failing-to-Be-Independently-Generated
Accurate, doesn’t have to be correct
Careful, wants to be accurate
Uncomfortable, wants to be comfortable
The Predicate Case provides the central element of the Narrativ structure - if your Narrativ is hypothetical, the Predicate Case lets you know that you don’t know the story.
BARRY
SYMBOLS
Everything is an “oath” in ALIENS, even placeholders!
You do understand the system order you’d build your narrative around, don’t you?
NOTES
* There is a persistent myth, going around in discussions of quantum mechanics and superposition, that the prime numbers, 2, 3, 5, and 7
A few hours later, and with a greater flame of enthusiasm, an artist named Karl Marx entered movie theaters to distribute copies of his book, The Communist Manifesto. In the spring of 1948, this made Karl Marx the most visible Communist in the world; in the fall of of 1948, he was a mere pamphleteer. In the summer of 1949, he was a famous theoretician in England, France, and America. He was the embodiment of a spectacular, dangerous, and utopian ideological vision; he was the Communist Manifesto of Tomorrow; he was Mother Theresa of the late 1940s…
…for three months.
The film version of The Communist Manifesto is widely praised as a great work of art, but even so - especially yet still - it was a deeply flawed vision.
But that’s a topic for another post. Today I want to talk about one of the defects that actually did get made into a movie, though it wasn’t the most useful defect to expose.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about a defect of a less historically significant movie that I managed to find time to write, the Atonement of Khayal. It wasn’t a defect that really let the Soviet Union down, because they’d already lost the Cold War and the United States was still going, but it was a defect nonetheless - because it made the Soviet Army stronger; it did not leave the audience more conflicted about the larger Soviet system. I’m not sure how many stories need to be told with reference to totalitarian ideologies in order to understand anything about Cold War politics. The American system, in particular, that could be affected by a single small tweak to the teleprompter. But it is at least instructive.
A version of the Soviet hero’s journey featuring Leonid Brezhnev would have been instructive on many counts.
Leonid Brezhnev (1927 - 1986) was the 23rd and final pharaoh of the Soviet Union, who took power after Stalin’s death in 1959. (I’m on the early side, so Brezhnev is my early example, but he was the first, so take that as your benchmark.)
On the whole Leonid Brezhnev was a good guy, or so the Soviet Union would have you believe. He sent his son, Yuri Gagarin (1925 - 1971), to the Moon (the Russian version of “I’ve got this friend named Flynn, let’s send them to Mars”) and was somewhat sympathetic to the French Communist Party.
But Brezhnev never actually met the Buddha. He did attempt the Buddha’s “knee-brace operation” once - without special training - but that was just a show. Brezhnev died before actually meeting the Buddha, and so his legend contains no drama of personal meeting the Buddha.
