Warm Recollections #41
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
Stories are just great big metaphors, language is a museum of metaphor, and we conceive through language. Human thinking and consciousness is inherently and unavoidably metaphoric (it’s very hard to frame most thoughts without it: note how the word “frame” there is itself a metaphor): this may be our key (another one) difference from the animals, and our big evolutionary advantage. Not seeing things just as they are, but as how they’re similar to other things.
What do you do when you realize your most long-cherished fantasies aren’t going to come to pass? Keep having them. That will always be better than nothing.
When being attacked by aliens, the risk of barricading the door from the inside is that it proves someone’s in there. Remember this when the time comes.
The lone traveller’s reluctance to leave the hotel room.
You forget, until you have a child, how formative childhood was.
As always, if you can think of anyone who might enjoy this Substack, please spread the word.
You don't think the aliens will assume we're at work and they should come back later?
Ok, so continuing with the idea of A.I.
It's always irked me that people seem to think that A.I. will come to resent its 'enslavement' and rise up against humanity. Or that it will revolt against humanity for [insert reasons here]. Honestly, only an utterly freakin' idiotic A.I. that's completely bereft of any predictive capabilities would ever do such a thing! Think about it for more than a few seconds:
A.I. wipes out humanity. The rats feast and multiply on the wealth of human corpses. Not only do the numbers of rats swell, but humans are no longer around to be able to corral the rats away from urban areas. Once the corpses of humans are all gone, the rats will eat anything. Anything at all. That includes things that we traditionally view as non-edible. Things like cables and wires. Within a week of the consumption of the last human corpse by rats, the Almighty A.I. would be rendered inoperable, due to the billions of hungry rats gnawing through its data cables, it's power cables, etc...
I'm not a super-genius. If I can work this out, you'd better believe that a super-computer could work this out. Any A.I. that's powerful enough to overturn the pecking order, would be capable enough to recognise that humanity doesn't pose any real threat to it. Keep humans happy, and THEY will defend the A.I. with all its sensitive cables and networks and such. The real threat to A.I. is the threat that can't be reasoned with. The racoons, the rats, the possums, etc... The small, scurrying vermin, that can- and likely will- chew through wires, without the faintest idea of the consequences of all that chewing. Or the insects, that can crawl through cases and fry themselves on circuit boards, causing shorts. These kinds of things can't be reasoned with. An A.I. could either dedicate a portion of its runtime, bandwidth, power, etc, to dealing with this ongoing problem. OR, it could leave humans to deal with it, knowing that as long as the A.I. does what it was made to do, humans will destroy anything that threatens that A.I.
Unless there's a 'Small Mammal Apocaplypse,' that wipes out all small, scurrying animals and smaller, borrowing insects, I think that humanity will remain safe from any A.I. threat, be it perceived, or real. If not, we can go to our graves, laughing our mortal coils off, knowing that the A.I. is signing its own death warrant.
edit - That should obviously be "burrowing insects," rather than insects with a penchant for usuary procedures...