Did you ever read Kurt Vonnegut? His books were kind of science
fiction, but not the monsters and ray gun science fiction, more like social
political and pretty humorous for the most part. He had one book where a
character kept saying, “I once read a science fiction story where...”
I once read a science fiction story where the computers were taking
over the world and all the generals in their big hats and scientists in their
lab coats were helpless to stop them, but then a janitor came along and there
was a cord in the way of mopping the floor so he pulled it, and of course it
unplugged the bad computer and the world was saved for the humans. The story
did not go on to tell how the humans ran their world without
computers.
Well you know we humans are a tribe. We are the most social
animals on earth after the ants and the bees, and some kind of mole rat. We
care about humans running the world. We would be bummed out if mole rats took
over even if they ran it better than we do. Well of course running the world
implies that you are running it for the sake of whatever animal you happen to
be. If the cows take over I think that will be the end of Italian
beefs.
But I don’t about computers and robots. Would they want a world
where little robots sat chock a block in the classroom and then went to Robot U
and then ran big robot corporations? Would they want a world where they lived
in citadels and went out into the plains every summer to catch their allotment
of humans according to what the state allowed them because they wouldn’t want to
wipe us out and have nothing to hunt.
Well of course not, they wouldn’t be aware, they wouldn’t have
goals, they wouldn’t care which city had the tallest skyscrapers or which Robot
U had the best football team in the land. Well I suppose someone could program
that into them, there is all this strange AI stuff going on, and every time my
sister shows me some new app on her super duper phone I am like, “I had no idea
we could do that. What a world we live in.”
But if we are just a bunch of electric networks, which I kind of
believe, then why not if computers got to the point of where they had just as
many as we, couldn’t they have awareness too? And if they had awareness, then
wouldn’t they have free will. Well I don’t personally believe in free will, but
it kind of depends on how you define free will.
Ah you know William Faulkner wrote a parable in one of his books
about how the cats used to rule the world. But it’s a hard job, in fact it’s an
impossible one, you just lurch from one crisis to the next and nothing ever
really gets solved, and did I mention that it is a pain in the ass. So they got
together and decided to give the job to some other animal that was smart enough
to sort of do it, but not smart enough to ever figure out that it really
couldn’t be done. That’s why they go after that thread on the sofa, or in my
case, the keys on the keyboard, they just want to adjust some little detail that
we have missed.
No comments:
Post a Comment