I planned posting another AI summary of my new book about AI... ailien minds.
But one of you* messaged to remind me of something that I predicted long ago. The AI-generated summaries that we are all now getting with our emails.
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POVLOVERS (Chapter 18 of Existence)
Well, God bless the Thirty-First Amendment and the Restoration of Federalism Act.
It had become a litany, as MediaCorp kept asking Tor to “drop in” on eccentric envelope-pushers while making her way across the continent. At last, she felt she understood the real purpose of this journey. What the execs were hoping to teach their up-and-coming young point-of-view star.
There isn’t one America anymore. If there ever had been.
Take her brief visit to the State of Panhandle, for example, fifty-sixth star on the flag, where she met with members of the ruling party, who planned to ratchet up their secession bid next year, and to stop even nominally flying the Stars ’n’ Stripes. Even if that meant another aiware embargo. Meanwhile, next door, in cosmopolitan Oklahoma, there was renewed talk of a bid to join the EU …
… rousing bitter anger in Unionist Missouri, where bluecoat militia membership was rising fast and several casinos had burned to the ground.
A cynic would attribute all this fury to economics. A spreading dustbowl. The cornahol collapse. Across what had been the heartland, Tor felt the same anxious note of helplessness and letdown, after the bubble prosperity of the twenties. A renewed need for someone to blame.
And, yet, all through the last week, Tor’s hand kept drifting into her bag, to Dr. Sato’s little relic, still unable to believe that the Atkins director had given it to her. A Neolithic tool-core, thirty thousand years old. One of many, to be sure—anthropologists had found thousands, all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Yet, the specimen was surely worth something—several hundred newbucks on a bidding site.
An attempted bribe for good coverage? Somehow, she doubted that. Anyway, it didn’t affect her report. The Atkins Center treatments seemed promising, but hardly a panacea cure for the worldwide Autism Plague. Their approach only worked for “high-functioning” patients, who could already interact with others in fairly rational conversation. For millions of acute victims—fixated on minutiae, evading eye contact, prickly toward any distraction, or else lost down corridors of bizarre virtual reality that few normal minds could follow—for them, Sato offered only hope for desperate loved ones.
Still, her encounter with that strange man gave Tor an excuse to add one more stop, before proceeding to her new job in Rebuilt Washington. The semiannual Godmakers’ Conference, held this very week in Nashville, city of tolerance and hospitality.
It had better be tolerant, she thought, stepping past vigilant doorway sniffers, into the expansive Metro Convention Center. These people are wearing a great big target on their backs. And proud of it, too.
A real-cloth banner, just inside the entrance, proclaimed—
TOMORROW WELCOMES THE BOLD!
To which, a tagger had attached, in lurid vraiffiti, visible to anyone wearing specs—
And Next Tuesday Greets the Gullible!
Beyond, for aisle after aisle, eager companies, foundations, and selforg clubs touted “transforming breakthroughs” from smartly decorated booths, augmented by garish VR. Tor found her specs bombarded by eager pitches, offering everything from health enhancements to lifespan folding. From guaranteed rejuvenation supplements to home marrow repair kits.
From “cyborg” prosthetics to remote controlled nanoflits.
From fully-implanted brainlink shunts to servant robots.
Yes, robots. The quaint term was back again, as memory of the Yokohama Yankhend slowly faded, along with a promise that this generation of humanoid automatons would actually prove useful, rather than cantankerous, too cute, or dangerous. Or all three at once.
“Every year, they solve some problem or obstacle, in machine-walking, talking, vision, navigation, or common sense,” she subvocalized for her report, allowing the specs to absorb it all, watching as one aindroid from a Korean chaebol showed off eastasian dance moves and a winning smile. The demonstration was impressive. But demonstrations always were.
“Then, they always wind up bollixed by some simple task. An uneven flight of stairs. A muddled foreground or background. A semantic paradox. Something that wouldn’t bother a five-year-old kid. And every year, the lesson is the same.
“We are already marvels. A three-kilo human brain still combines more amazing things than any computer model can yet emulate.
“It’s been seventy years that ai-builders have promised to surge beyond human ken. Their list of tricks keeps growing. Ai can sift and correlate across all of human knowledge, in seconds. Yet, each decade reveals more layers of unexpected subtlety, that lay hidden in our own packed neuron-clusters all along. Skills we simply took for granted.”
There it was, again. A theme, planted in her mind by Sato. The notion that something strangely spectacular had been wrought—by God or evolution or both—inside the Homo sapiens brain. About the same time as that chert core in her bag was the technological acme.
“If anything, today’s Tower of Babel is flat but incredibly wide. This generation of godmakers isn’t thwarted by language—that barrier is gone forever—but the bewildering complexity of the thing they hope to copy. Our minds.”
Of course, some of the products and services here had more modest goals. One body-sculpting booth offered the latest fat-dissolving technology, using targeted microwaves to melt lipids exactly where-u-want. Their slogan—from Nietzsche—
“The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a deity.”
She wondered what Sato would make of that. Well, one more humility-reminder bites the dust. When everyone can look good in spandex, will conceit know any bounds?
Speaking of the abdomen … dozens of men and women were lined up at a booth for the McCaffrey Foundation, signing waivers in order to join a test study of e-calculi—gut bacteria transformed to function as tiny computers, powered by excess food. Have a problem? Unleash trillions of tiny, parallel processors occupying your own intestine! Speed them up by eating more! And they produce Vitamin C!
At first, Tor thought this must be a hoax. It sounded like a comedy routine from Monty Phytoplankton. She wondered how the computed output finally emerged.
Not everyone could wait patiently for all this progress. Elderly believers in the Singularity grew worried, as it always seemed to glimmer twenty years away, the same horizon promised in the 1980s. And so, Tor passed by the usual booths offering cryonic suspension contracts. For a fee, teams would rush to your deathbed, whether due to accident or age. The moment after a doctor signed-off you were “dead,” skilled teams would swarm over your body—or (for a lower price) just your detached head—pumping special fluids so you could chill in liquid nitrogen, with relished confidence that some future generation would thaw and repair you. Decades ago, cryonics companies eked along with support from a few rich eccentrics. But the safe revival of Guillermo Borriceli changed all that, pushing the number of contracts past thirty million. Some of the offshore “seastead” tax havens even allowed cryonic suspension before legal death, leading to a steady, one-way stream of immigrants who were wealthy, infirm, and—in Tor’s opinion—certifiably crazy.
They never explain why future generations would choose to revive refugees from a more primitive time. Money alone won’t cut it.
Was that why many of today’s rich were converting to fervent environmentalism? Donating big sums toward eco-projects? To bribe their descendants and be recalled as karmic good guys? Or was it an expanded sense of self-interest? If you expect to live on a future Earth, that could make you less willing to treat today’s planet like disposable tissue.
Meanwhile, some offered services aimed at the other end of life. Like new kinds of infant formula guaranteed to enhance early brain development. Or suture-spreaders to enlarge a fetus’s skull capacity, letting its brain expand in the womb—with a coupon for free cesarean section. The brochure showed a happy child with the smile of a Gerber baby and the domed head of some movie alien … bearing a glint of unstoppable intelligence in big, blue eyes.
Fifty-Genes, Inc. offered a service that was legal at just three seastead colonies. Enhancing the few dozen patches of DNA thought to have been crucial in separating the hominid line from other apes. Continuing along the evolutionary trail. All three of the people manning that booth wore dazzle-makeup, hiding their identities from facial recog programs, making them painful to look at. As if the feds didn’t have ten thousand other ways to track a person.
Farther along, she encountered yet another humanoid automaton, under a virt-blare that proclaimed Certified: Turing Level Three-Point-Three! in flashing letters. Proportioned like a body builder, it bowed to her, offering Tor a seat, some zatz-coffee and a game of chess—or any pastime of her choosing. There was a flirtatious glint in the machine’s smile, either cleverly designed … or else …
She was tempted to plunge a pin into that glossy flesh, to see if this one yelped. The old man-in-a-robot-suit trick.
A subvocalized side note, for later: “No cutsie animal or childlike bots, this year? All hunk-style males, so far. Why? A trend aimed at fem demographics?”
She couldn’t help but wonder. Men across the planet had been using robo-brothels for a decade, with hundreds of thousands of Luci, Nunci, Pari, Fruti, and Hilti models purchased for home use. It didn’t exactly require artificial intelligence to mimic crude, servile passion, if that’s what some males wanted. Of course, the trend was bemoaned in the press. Women mostly stayed aloof, contemptuous of the unsubtle artificial lovers they were offered.
Till now? While the hunk-bot flirted with her, Tor recalled Wesley’s onetime proposition—to maintain a cross-continental relationship via dolls. Would it be more palatable to be touched by a machine, if the thoughts propelling it came from someone she cared for? He was coming to D.C. in a few days, flying east to meet her final zeppelin, at this journey’s end. Did that mean he was giving up such nonsense? Ready to talk, at last, about “getting real”? Or would he have a fistful of brochures to show her the latest enhancements? A modern way they both could have cake, and eat it, too?
Oh crap. The subvocal was on high-sensitivity. Her musings about sexbots and Wesley had gone straight into notes. She blink-navigated, deleted, and disciplined her mind to stay on topic. Spinning away from the enticingly handsome android, multi-tasking like a juggler, Tor kept reciting her draft report without breaking stride.
“Oh, few doubt they’ll succeed eventually. With so many versions of AI cresting at once, it seems likely that we’ll finally enter that century-old sci-fi scenario. Machines that help design their successors, and so on, able to converse with us, provide fresh perspectives, challenge us … then surge ahead.
“At that point we’ll discover who was right, the zealots or the worriers. Can you blame some folks for getting nervous?”
Of course, Tor’s aiwear had been tracking her word stream, highlighting for gisted meaning. And, because her filters were kept low on purpose, the convention center mainframe listened in, automatically making goorelations. Helpfully, the building offered, in her low-right peripheral, a list of conference panels and events to match her interests.
My Neighbors Prefer Death: Easing the Public’s Fear of Immortality.
Yes. Out of five hundred program items, that one had good relevance to her “skepticism” phrase. The next one was also a good fit.
Risk Appraisal: Dangers on the Road to Transhumanity.
But it got even better. Tor blinked in surprise at the next offering.
Special invited-guest lecture by famed novelist Hamish Brookeman! “Reasons to Doubt ‘Progress’—and Reasons to Believe.”
Tor stopped in her tracks. Hamish Brookeman? Here, of all places? The author of Tusk! and Cult of Science, coming to beard these extropians in their own den? Who had the courage—or outright chutzpah—to invite him?
With a tooth-click and scroll, Tor checked the conference schedule … and found the Brookeman talk was already underway.
Oh my. This was going to be demanding. But she felt up to the challenge.
Swiveling, she called up a guide ribbon—a glowing path that snaked toward the lecture hall. Which, according to a flash alert, was already full to capacity. So Tor sent a blip to MediaCorp, asking for a press intervention. It took a couple of minutes (after all, she was a newbie), during which Tor hurried past a publisher of biofeedback mind-training games and a booth selling ersatz holidays on realistic alien worlds.
Smell Colors! Taste the Rainbow! See Music in the Air!—hollered a kiosk offering synesthesia training. Next to another that proclaimed a kinky aim—to genetically engineer “furries,” cute-but-fuzzy humanoid versions of dogs and cats. Tor shivered and hurried on.
Abruptly, the guide ribbon shifted, aiming her instead down a different aisle, away from the back of the lecture hall, where standing-room crowds waited. Now, it directed her toward the front entrance, closest to the stage. Wow, that was fast.
I am so gonna love this job, she thought, not caring if that made it into the transcript. MediaCorp already knew. This was what she had been born to do.
Along the way, Tor passed between stalls offering latest generation ottodogs, lurker-peeps, and designer hallucinogens … the latter one was covered with vir-stickies on about a hundred levels, sneering Ignore these guys! and It’s a narc sting! (As if anyone needed to actually buy drugs, anymore, instead of homebrewing them on a MolecuMac. Or using a meditation program to make them inside your own brain. A dazer with a twin-lobectomy could hack the lame safeguards.)
But, for the most part, Tor had little attention to spare for exhibits. Kicking her M-Tasking into overdrive, she called up a smart-condensed tivoscript of the Brookeman speech, from its start twelve minutes ago, delivered to her left ear in clipped, threex mode—triple speed and gisted—while preserving the speaker’s dry tone and trademark Appalachian drawl.
“Thanks invitation speak you ‘godmakers.’ I’m surprised/pleased. Shows UR open-minded.
“Some misconstrue I’m antiscience. Antiprogress. But progress great! Legit sci & tech lift billions! Yes, I warn dangers, mistakes. Century’s seen many. Some mistakes not science fault.
“Take the old left-right political axis. Stupid. From 18th century France! lumped aristos with fundies, libertarians, isolationists, imperialists, puritans, all on ‘right.’ Huh? ‘Left’ had intolerant tolerance fetishists! Socialist luddites! And all sides vs professionals. No wonder civil servants’ guild rebelled!
“Result? Wasted decades. Climate/water crisis. Terror. Overreaction. National fracture. Paranoia. Blamecasting.
“Shall we pour gasoline on fire?
“Look. Studies show FEAR sets attitudes/tolerance to change. Fearful people reject foreign, alien, strange. Circle wagons. Pull in horizons. Horizons of time. Of tolerance. Of risk. Of Dreams.
“You tech-hungry zealots answer this with contempt. Helpful?
“New ‘axis’ isn’t left versus right.
“It’s out versus in!
“You look outward. Ahead. You deride inward-driven folk.
“But look history! All other civs were fearful-inward! R U so sure YOU are wise ones?”
The front entrance to the lecture hall lay ahead, just beyond a final booth where several clean-cut envoys in blue blazers passed out leaflets to educated and underemployed U.S. citizens, inviting them to apply for visas—to the science-friendly EU. The brain-drainers’ placement was deliberate. They’d get plenty of customers, when Brookeman finished.
Feeling a little eye-flick strain and attention fatigue, Tor clicked for a small jolt of Adderall, along with a dash of Provigil, injected straight into her temple by the left-side frame of her specs. Just a bit, to keep her edge.
“Look at topics listed in this conference,” continued the ai-compressed voice of Hamish Brookeman, addressing the audience in the hall next door. “So much eager tinkering! And each forward plunge makes your fellow citizens more nervous.”
The condensed tivoscript was slowing down and expanding, as it caught up with real time.
“Ponder an irony. Your premise is that average folk can be trusted with complex/dangerous future. You say people = smart! People adapt. Can handle coming transformation into gods! How libertarian of you.
“Yet, you sneer at the majority of human societies, who disagreed! Romans, Persians, Inca, Han, and others … who said fragile humanity can’t take much change.
“And who shares this older opinion? A majority of your own countrymen!
“So, which is it? Are people wise enough to handle accelerating change? But if they are wise … and want to slow down … then what does that imply?
“It implies this. If you’re right about people, then the majority is right … and you’re wrong!
“And if you’re wrong about the people … then how can you be right!”
Even through the wall and closed doors, Tor heard laughter from the audience—tense and reluctant. But she already knew Brookeman was good at working a crowd. Anyway, most of this bunch had grown up with his books, movies, and virts. Celebrity status still counted for a lot.
“All I ask is … ponder with open minds. We’ve made so many mistakes, humanity, during just one lifetime. Many of them perpetrated not by evildoers, drenched in malice, but by men and women filled with fine motives! Like you.”
An aindroid stood by the door, smiling in recognition as Tor approached. This one featured a holepenetrating straight though its chest, large enough to prove that the entity was no human in disguise. An impressive highlight. Till the automaton gave her a full-length, appreciative eye-flick “checkout” that stopped just short of a lustful leer. Exactly like some oversexed, undertacted nerd.
Great, Tor thought, with a corner of her mind MT’d for such things. Another realism goal accomplished. One more giant leap for geek-kind.
The robot opened the door, just enough for Tor to slip through without disturbing speaker or audience. Her specs went into IR mode and a pale-green ribbon guided her, without stumbling, the final few meters to a VIP seat that someone had just vacated, on her account. She could tell, because the upholstery was still warm. A wide imprint, and her spec-sensors gave a soft diagnosis of fumes from a recent meal, heavy in starches. If it need be, she could track down her benefactor, from those cues alone, and thank him.
But no, here was Hamish Brookeman, in the flesh at last, tall and angular, elegant and expensively coifed. In every way the un-nerd. Leaning casually against the lectern and pouring charm, even as he chastised. The tivoscript faded smoothly, as real time took over.
“Look, I’m not going to ask you to restrain yourselves for the sake of holiness and all that. Let others tell you that you’re treading on the Creator’s toes, by carping and questioning His designs; that’s not my concern.
“What troubles me is whether there will be a humanity, in twenty years, to continue pondering these things! Seriously, what’s your damned hurry? Must we rock every apple cart, while charging in all directions, simultaneously?”
Brookeman glanced back down and ruffled some sheets of paper, though Tor’s zoom-appraisal showed that he wasn’t looking at them. Those blue irises held steady, far-focused and confident. Clearly, he already knew what he was about to say. In public speaking, as in music, a pause was sometimes just the right punctuation, before striking a solid phrase.
“Take the most arrogant of your obsessions,” Brookeman resumed. “This quest for life-span extension! You give it many names. Zero senescence. Non-morbidity. All of it boiling down to the same selfish hope, for personal immortality.”
This goaded a reaction from the crowd—hisses and muttered curses. Tor commanded her specs to deploy a slender stalk wafting upward with a tiny, omnidirectional lens at the end, surveying members of the audience, joining dozens of other gel-eyes floating, like dandelions, up to a meter above the sea of heads.
“Did I strike a nerve with that one?” Hamish Brookeman chuckled. “Well, just wait. I’m getting warmed up!”
Clearly, he enjoyed the role of iconoclast … in a hall filled with self-styled iconoclasts. A kindred spirit, then? Even while disagreeing with his hosts over every specific issue? That kind of ironic insight could make her report stand out.
“For example, it’s easy to tell which of you, in the audience, believes in the magic elixir called caloric restriction. Sure, research studies show that a severely reduced, but wholesome diet can trigger longer life spans in bacteria, in fruit flies, even mice. And yes, keeping lean and fit is good for you. It helps get your basic fourscore and ten. But some of the fellows you see around here, walking about like near skeletons, popping hunger-suppression pills and avoiding sex … do these guys look healthy? Are they enjoying their extra years? Indeed, are they getting any? Extra years, I mean.
“Alas, sorry to break this to you fellows, but the experiment was run! Across the last four millennia, there must have been thousands of monasteries, in hundreds of cultures, where ascetic monks lived on spare dietary regimens. Surely, some of them would have stumbled onto anything so simple and straightforward as low-calorie immortality! We’d have noticed two-hundred-year-old monks, capering around the countryside, don’tcha think?”
This time, laughter was spontaneous. Still nervous, but genuine. Through the stalk-cam, she saw even some of the bone-thin ones, taking the ribbing well. Brookeman really was good at this.
“Anyway, remember that age and death are the great recyclers! In a world that’s both overpopulated and unbalanced in favor of the old, do you really think the next wave of young folks is going to want to follow in your shadows … forever?
“Putting things philosophically for a minute, aren’t you simply offering false hope, and thereby denying today’s elderly the great solace that every other ageing generation clutched, when their turn came to shuffle off this mortal coil? The consolation that at least this happens to everyone?
“During all past eras, this pure and universal fact—that death makes no exceptions—allowed a natural acceptance and letting go. Painful and sad, but at least one thing about life seemed fair. Rich and poor, lucky or unlucky, all wound up in the same place, at roughly the same pace. Who said that our lives only become meaningful when we are aware of our mortality?
“Only now, by loudly insisting that death isn’t necessary, aren’t you turning this normal rhythm into a bitter pill? Especially when the promise (all too likely) turns into ashes, and people wind up having to swallow it anyway, despite all your fine promises?”
Brookeman shook his head.
“But let’s be generous and say you meet with some partial success. Suppose only the rich can afford the gift of extended life. Isn’t that what happens to most great new things? Don’t they get monopolized, at first, by the mighty? You godmakers say you want an egalitarian miracle, a new age for all. But aren’t you far more likely to create a new race of Olympians? Not only privileged and elite, but permanent and immortal?”
Now the hall was hushed. And Tor wondered. Had Brookeman gone too far?
“Face it,” the tall man told 3,012 listeners in the hall … plus 916, 408 who were tuned in, around the planet. “You techno-transcendentalists are no different from all the millennial preachers and prophets who came before you. The same goggle-eyed, frenetic passion. The same personality type, yearning for something vastly better than the hand that you were dealt. And the same drive to believe! To believe that something else, much finer, is available to those who recite the right incantation. To those who achieve the right faith, or virtue. Or who concoct the secret formula.
“Only, those earlier prophets were much smarter than you lot! Because the redemption they forecast was usually ambiguous, set in another vague time and place, or safely removed to another plane. And if their promises failed? The priest or shaman could always blame it all on unbelievers. Or on followers who were insufficiently righteous. Or who got the formula wrong. Or on God.
“But you folks? Who will you duck behind, when disillusion sets in? Your faith in Homo technologicus—the Tinkering Man—has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.
“When your grand and confident promises fail, or go wrong, who will all the disappointed people have to blame?
“No one … but you.”
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There are many such chapters in Existence.
Okay. One of you please tabulate predictions that were on-target... or seem near-term plausible... or have been proved wrong. Report in comments? If there's any one thing I have preached for 30 years, it is the necessity of light as the only antidote to delusion. Including my own.
Oh, in case any of you extropians are steamed, do remember that Brookemen is (sort-of) a villain in the novel. Though only partially, sort-of... And in some ways right.
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*Dwight Bartholomew
65 comments:
The dialogue (what I read anyway) sounds like the host talking to himself. Not a fan of fiction that dumps the author’s ideas on you so heavy-handedly and transparently like this. That works better at blogs. This reads like a nerd thinking out loud, projecting, fantasizing and editorializing beneath a thin veneer of story. Give me good characters, drama, dialogue, action, and I don’t care much about the author’s ideology. A good writer keeps his ideas in the background, invisible, even irrelevant, imo. This is probably why SF has never been a very respected literary genre: because who wants to read stories that are just vehicles for ideas? How dull.
"This is probably why SF has never been a very respected literary genre: because who wants to read stories that are just vehicles for ideas?"
I don't know which science fiction you've been exposed to. I've always found it to have a lot of crossover with the action/adventure genre.
Clearly, the ent didn't bother to do anything but skim. There are at least 2 dozen conflicting points of view in the chapter, many of em in diametric disagreement, some taken verbatim from opposing folks or groups I knew at the time. In other words, diametrically opposite to ent's diss, proving him a lying loon. As if we didn't know it.
Sorry to divert, but according to a recent report, Iranian missiles have struck PSAB (Prince Sultan Air Base) in Saudi Arabia, a US base designed to support operations across the ME, injured airmen, and damaged or destroyed US tanker aircraft on the ground. If this is accurate AND replicable, it is a serious dent to continued air operations - tankers would have to be either repositioned farther off or the base needs to be hardened, which is not something to do overnight. A lot of US air operations rely on meeting tankers and refueling in mid air before completing their missions. The tankers themselves are unarmed and highly vulnerable - the old KC135 was basically a Boeing 707 designed to be filled with aviation fuel.
I was deployed to PSAB decades ago and still have the pebble painted with a scorpion to prove it. I briefed tanker crews on flight weather conditions.
(I also met a camel spider, which may be the inspiration for some SF and fantasy monsters.)
Pappenheimer
(BTW, none of the military info above is in any way secret.)
By the way, your chapter also touched on cryogenics - Lois Bujold's novel 'Cryoburn' asked the question, "if you are frozen before your death, where does your vote go? Can you assign a proxy?"
Pappenheimer
I then and now think of cryo-sleep as a method for societal control.
Imagine oligarchs hibernating most of the time ... only to be wakened for a short period of time to conduct their business. While everyone else ages, they stay at the top for centuries.
(Also think of a secret, Seldonian conspiracy that sleeps most of the time and only wakes then and now to analyze the Progress and make adjustments.)
Anybody want to guess what happens when oil hits $200 a barrel?
Or what happens when the dollar stops being the world's reserve currency when the petrodollar gets replaced by euros and yuan?
Or what happens when the Gulf states have to spend their money on repairing destroyed infrastructure - especially critical desalination plants - and can no longer finance AI data centers, the only thing keeping us out of recession?
All three are primary Iranian war aims and they won't stop fighting until they are achieved.
"Imagine oligarchs hibernating most of the time ... only to be wakened for a short period of time to conduct their business."
Ever see meat that's been thawed and re-frozen more than once? I'm not sure the biology of cryo-sleep is as harmless as it is in sci-fi.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Mar28-1.html
Many Senate Republicans are grumbling, because they think Johnson's outright rejection of a bill that passed the Senate unanimously will cause Republicans to get the blame for the shutdown, and the long lines at airports.
Ya think?
Claude code's performance is simply amazing! Claude produced on of the most sophisticated solvers I've ever seen. It solved https://www.griddlers.net/nonogram/-/g/36358 with NO guesses in 377 ms!! Full report is here http://theviews.org/Life%20at%20the%20Views/2026/march-28-2026-claude-pro-evaluation.html .
Maybe you are right. But then again, if cryo-sleep ever becomes reality, I suppose that problem is solved.
Living meat has the ability to regenerate itself.
Also I think If we are at that technological level, artificial longevity is achievable, too, opening a whole other can of worms.
Muscle tissue can recover. Livers to up to a point. Not so much with kidneys… and dialysis sucks.
I expect that of expert systems. Evolving solvers of any kind is a process with a clean figure of merit.
Cool stuff but not really human style intelligence. Probably not even autism style savant IQ.
@Alfred Differ
I don't think Claude can actually create new code, if it can't find the snippets needed it won't work. There are a number of Nonogram solver implementations around, so that's why this worked so well.
A brilliant excerpt of Dr Brin at his best with all those plus 2 dozen conflicting points of view in play which expose & highlight intellectual cognitive dissonance, as our fine host's most prophetic statements reflect the certainty of change, rather than being predictive of any single certainty.
Change is Constant.
On this we can agree, although I (by virtue of being a natural conservative) prefer to look before leaping, as compared to those credulously progressive individuals who tend to leap blindly into the unknown.
I will therefore relate what I have just seen, looking forward, and it will destroy our telecom industries, shatter our stock markets, collapse our economies & turn many of our progressives into shell-shocked conservatives:
Starlink now costs 50% less than any other cellular, cable or satellite service provider; it's a natural monopoly; and its sole private owner is Elon Musk.
And, since 80% of the West's GDP is generated by our service industries, our current socioeconomic order is doomed.
Best
I think it depends on how abstract the problem is. Having other solvers eliminates a lot of the need to think about the abstraction, but I’ve seen Gemini correctly deduce what I was trying to do with some of my erroneous code without me offering hints. I asked a different question that touched a broken lambda tangentially when it reported that I appeared to be trying… and then offered a fix that worked.
My suspicion is abstraction is both easier and harder than we realize. We are going to learn a lot about the nature of problems with these tools.
StarLink doesn’t have the bandwidth to support gigahumans. Yet. It’s in the plans, though. They actually mentioned Kardashev in a recent FCC filing.
If you are an oligarch in the dark future to come, organ replacement might not be a problem for you. Maybe for your donors/s.
If I remember correctly, the greatest problem yet to be solved is ice crystals forming in the brain, creating grey goo after thawing.
Since clinically induced hypothermia is a thing, "cryo-sleep" will probably just mean "we artificially slow down all metabolic processes as much as possible without killing the patient" ....which opens up a plethora of new engineering challenges to be solved.
One thing in the chapter that didn't track - I have yet to see any notable push by the superrich towards environmentalism - that is, to make the earth sustainable for immortals. Much of what I see is short term profit-taking with no thought for a long future. This, coupled with the interest Brin has mentioned in techbro fortress/bolthole construction, suggests that a lot of the 'PCs' - player characters in their own estimation - don't see a future, one in which they themselves can be expected to live a long natural life as a non-burrowing mammal. The P2025 people may say they are trying to correct the path of the US, but they propose stripping it for parts instead.
Pappenheimer
P.S. Tolkien's elves and dwarves had issues with each other, but might have needed each other more than they wanted to admit. Elves don't want to see forests cleared but Dwarves make some really nifty and useful shiny things. Dwarves can't eat rocks.
Danielle Moodie sez the Future Feels More Like Star Wars Than Star Trek. Thoughts?
"I don't think Claude can actually create new code, if it can't find the snippets needed it won't work. "
I was just musing recently that we seem to be in an era like that of Lord Dorwin in the first Foundation book, in which "scientific research" is merely the archeological compiling, summarizing, or aggregating of investigations that have already been done before.
Funnily enough, the train of thought that put me onto that had nothing to do with science or research. It was noticing that so many big concert events being advertised locally are tribute bands doing the music from 40-50 years ago. "'Freely Dan' doing the music of Steely Dan," that sort of thing. Also one of the hit movies of the season being "Song Sung Blue", a biopic not of Neil Diamond, but of a Neil Diamond tribute band.
@Larry Hart
I've noticed the tribute bands too. One of my favorite venues https://nissis.com has a lot of them. I only go when an original, like Nelson Rangell is playing http://theviews.org/Life%20at%20the%20Views/2026/february-25-2026-nelson-rangell.html .
they also took out an AWACs
@Larry Hart
The Lord Dorwin 'research method' is one of my earliest reasons for working on computational psychohistory, especially as applied to archaeology. Another was Piers Anthony's "Macroscope" which illustrated the direct observation of history.
I construct simulated macroscopes. But I need SELDON I chips; GPUs are basically useless to me.
@Larry Hart
BoomerWorld dies hard, 1) because there are a lot of boomers, with a lot of wealth and influence, 2) because they are reluctant to leave the stage, like no other generation, and 3) because they lived in the era of Peak America, which people in an era of decline are naturally nostalgic for. I have a lot of nostalgia for it myself; I mostly read books from that era, for example. Ask me anything about popular fiction or comic books from the second half of the 20th century (spy and crime fiction in particular) and I can give you detailed expositions.
Other than cultural nostalgia, I’d say BoomerWorld’s race is pretty much run at this point though – finished off, appropriately enough, by uber-boomer Donald Trump. RIP BoomerWorld, 1946-2026.
BoomerWorld dies hard, indeed. I'm part of birth cohort 1965. Unless I turn out to be an extreme outlier, longevity wise, I will probably not outlive the last of the boomers, which is somewhat sad. I predict that in the 30's, when I'm in my 70s, there will be a hit TV show called "eightysomething."
"I predict that in the 30's, when I'm in my 70s, there will be a hit TV show called 'eightysomething.'"
Or "Eighty is the New Thirty"
LH thanks. The Lord Dorwin reference is useful.
When boomers pass, there will be the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the world. But even though ent clearly took vitamins, this time, it's pathetic that his nostalgia does not extend to loyalty to the enlightenment civilization that gave him everything. Americans in 1932 faced vastly more grim prospects... and gathered their mojo and chose a good leader who believed in them and they pulled that civilization back from the brink of hell.
You could be part of that, again. If you weren't a useless, sourpuss grump.
"they are reluctant to leave the stage, like no other generation,"
Someone recently pointed out how absurd it would have been for kids in the 1980s to be listening to their parents' or grandparents' music from 40 years earlier in the 1940s. And yet here we are in 2026 with oldies stations frequently playing hits from the 1980s. Some even from the 70s and 60s.
"Ask me anything about popular fiction or comic books from the second half of the 20th century ..."
Funny, I wouldn't have expected that from you, given all the times you make fun of me for referencing such things.
"BoomerWorld’s race is pretty much run at this point though"
Well, I'm at the very tail end of the Boomer generation (depending on who's counting), so I get to watch most of us sunset. I remember when we were called "baby boomers", and when youth and its associated naivete were our defining characteristics.
Okay, here's a Mac question: I am perpetually bugged by this notice "Some iCloud Data Isn't Syncing" in the upper right corner of my desktop, exactly where I look for new items. Clicking does no good to make it go away, just an endless cycle of irritating nags. It refuses to be moved. To be clear, I have used Apple products happily since 1981 and owned stock since 1982.* But I do not want iCloud. I will NEVER want iCloud, which hijacks your computer and turns it into a remote terminal. I want my stuff on my machine. Period.
So pretty please. Does anyone know a way to tell Apple to stop dunning me with iCloud nags? And to stop it forever?
*PS: Please DO NOT chime in telling me to shift to another computer ecosystem. It's not going to happen. Resist the urge (are you able?) Don't do it. Thanks.
IF you also have an iPhone and run an app on both of them, the app might be trying to sync in the background. A number of apps assume iCloud as their share space.
"I have a lot of nostalgia for it myself; I mostly read books from that era, for example."
I've mentioned before that the twin crises of Trump and COVID have me immersing in fiction of a type that I can only describe as "America porn", and the large subset of WWII porn. I don't literally mean pornography, but rather that type of rah-rah, Yay America! story guaranteed to make one feel good about America.
Movies like "The Great Escape" or even "The Sound of Music" are part of it, but I'm especially enamored of those books or movies published during the pre-war era or during the war itself, when the outcome was a huge unknown. James Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and (of course) "Casablanca" are two of my favorites.
* * *
I just recently saw a Netflix biopic of Jesse Owens and his 1936 accomplishments in the Berlin Olympics. I'm sure many specifics are fictionalized, but I gather the story is more or less historically accurate. There's one scene of particular note between Owens and a German rival, Luz Long, who I gather actually remained friends with Owens throughout their lives. Owens is talking about racism in America and musing aloud that he should immigrate "here" to Germany. Long cautions him,
"I love my country. But I have to admit my government has gone insane. They don't even try to hide it any more. I think they're proud of it."
He could have been talking about 2026 America.
Another thing in the movie is that Leni Riefenstahl is portrayed quite sympathetically as a character, more interested in her craft as a filmmaker than in Nazi ideology, and actively fighting with Goebbles when he tries to forbid filming of events that blacks or Jews might win. I'm wondering, especially from the Germans out there how accurate a portrayal that is.
Alfred I'm getting no notices on the phone, even when it's plugged into the mac.
I'm guessing a bit here, but I doubt it depends on whether the phone is connected to the mac.
My guess is you have an app running on both that is trying to share in the background. Think about how browsers preserve your search history from different machines. My Chrome at work wants me to log in using my personal account so it can sync up and "make my experience continue" which is exactly what I don't want. I never use personal accounts at work as a result.
If you have an app that lives on both the mac and phone, it might be allowed to sync on one and not the other. It might not be allowed to sync at all. It STILL might think it should be, though.
----
Try opening your settings and looking at iCloud configuration. You probably have it turned off (not allowed to sync) or you never provided an account to use for sync'ing. Check both devices. Now ask yourself which apps you have that might think they are supposed to sync anyway. Browsers OFTEN do, but they aren't alone in this.
Larry,
Infighting in the Nazi regime was normal. It was not a bug, it was a feature.
Riefenstahl and Goebbels feuded for a long time, but Hitler liked her, so sehr was protected.*
I do not believe that she was a Nazi ideologically; yet her ambition, choice of films* and ways and means of Produktion made her one, functionally.
"Triumph of the Will" and "The Deep Land" (a movie using Roma and Sinti concentration camp inmates) are examples for this.
She was later tried as a "Mitläufer", associate, not as a main perpetrator; she got away with a rather mild sentence, IMHO.
*I believe a theory is that Goebbels wanted an affairs, as he had many, and Riefenstahl rejected him.
**Natural documentations. While that genre is not Propaganda per se, she did it in a romanticising way that greatly appealed to the Nazi aesthetics and even defined them.
@Der Oger, thanks for the response.
"I believe a theory is that Goebbels wanted an affairs, as he had many, and Riefenstahl rejected him."
The Jesse Owens movie kinda hinted at that, though not obtursively. In the first scene with the two of them, Goebbels asks derisively and for no particular reason, "Do you think that shirt makes you look attractive?"
There is a frame from King of the Hill, where Hank Hill is complaining to a techie about his computer persistently trying to save his work "in the Cloud." Hank wants his work saved locally on his computer, which he owns, not somewhere he may not have access to eventually. I feel the same way, but current OSes keep trying to push cloud storage on me. The latest one is OneDrive trying to store confidential interview information in the cloud, which coincidentally shares it across all the computers in our local network. NO bueno!
You need no longer worry about AI, Dr. Brin.
Thank heavens Trump has saved us from extermination/enslavement by our new AI overlords.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/ai-boom-polycrisis/686559/
Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster
The AI boom wasn’t built for the polycrisis.
Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key materials that are produced in or transported through just a few places on Earth, with little overlap. In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran. A global energy shock seems all but certain to come soon—the kind where even the best-case scenario is a disaster. The war could grind the AI build-out to a halt. This would be devastating for the tech firms that have issued historic amounts of debt to race against their highly leveraged competitors, and it would be devastating for the private lenders and banks that have been buying up that debt in the hope of ever bigger returns.
Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. In addition, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other regional petrostates have become key investors in the American AI firms that purchase most of those chips.
(cont.)
The situation could quickly deteriorate from here. A helium crunch could trigger a shortage of AI chips or cause chip prices to rise. AI companies need ever more advanced chips to fill their data centers—at higher prices, the massive server farms, already hurting from elevated energy costs caused by the war, would have almost no hope of becoming profitable. Without these chips, new data centers would not be built or would sit empty. Astronomical tech valuations, and in turn the entire stock market, could collapse.
The war in Iran affects data-center finances as well. Should energy prices continue to skyrocket, so will the cost of this already very expensive computing equipment, because it needs tremendous amounts of energy to manufacture and operate. And the war has exposed physical risks to these buildings. Janet Egan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, described data centers to us as “large, juicy targets.” It is impossible to hide these facilities, which can cover 1 million square feet. Earlier this month, Iran bombed Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. American hyperscalers had been planning to build far more data centers in the region, because the Trump administration and the AI industry have sought funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman. Now there’s a two-way strain on those relationships. The physical security of the data centers is more precarious, and the conflict is damaging the economic health of the petrostates, thereby jeopardizing a major source of further investment in American AI firms. The Trump administration “staked a lot on the Gulf as their close AI partner, and now the war that they’ve launched poses a huge threat to the viability of the Gulf as that AI partner,” Winter-Levy said.
Just a few things going a bit wrong could compound, all at once, into a cataclysm. To wit: Qatari and Saudi money dries up. Sustained high oil and natural-gas prices drive up the costs of manufacturing chips and running data centers. Already cash-strapped hyperscalers struggle to make lease payments on their data centers, while similarly strained private lenders suffer as all of the AI bonds become deadweight. Tech valuations fall, taking public markets with them; private-equity firms have to sell and torch their assets, putting intense stress on the institutional investors and banks. The rest of the economy, drained of investment because everything was poured into data centers for years, is already weak. Unemployment goes up, as do interest rates. “Bubbles pop. That’s the system,” Lipton said. “What isn’t supposed to happen is that it takes down the whole financial system. But the concern here is that AI investment isn’t confined and may spread to the whole economy.”
Find a good video summary from Breaking Points of our current economic polycrisis including Bloomberg's detailed analysis of the oil price shock heading our way, what lack of helium does to chip costs, the price spike in food from Morocco to China as a result of cessation of fertilizer shipments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miXtKcISzIY
Or as I like to call it, the macroeconomic clusterfuck.
And a very good analysis of how the petrodollar is about to follow the past world reserve currencies like the Dutch gilder and the British pound sterling into oblivion.
And with it our status as a superpower.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6BjSW4FrE4&t=998s
How bad will this get?
Very, very bad.
Prevent AI apocalypse? I guess that’s another way Trump might unwittingly do some good—maybe even save the world. When I called him a “world-historical individual” before, that’s a concept from Hegel. Hegel claims that certain individuals may be unconscious instruments of history; when things are ripe for change, these “great men” appear, but they don’t necessarily know what they’re doing. When they’re done, the world is forever changed, and a new chapter of history begins. Sounds like Trump to me.
Here’s an interesting essay on the subject: https://www.notus.org/perspectives/trump-as-alexander-the-great-a-theory-that-explains-iran-and-everything-else The author argues that many of Trump’s changes aren’t likely to be reversable, so don’t expect Democrats to bring back “business as usual”, the “liberal international order”, or whatever. The Democrats don’t have any world-historical individuals; they represent an old order whose time has passed. Sounds right to me.
Depends on how fiercely things get reversed, fellah. Watch the beginning and the end of the recent CIVIL WAR flick. You assume we are incapable of ferocity. Just because we didn't WANT to become like your cult. I guess we'll see.
Meanwhile, more GOP reps have 'retired' than any time in 100+ years. Here's #36. https://www.newsweek.com/sam-graves-record-house-republicans-exit-midterms-anxiety-11752465
Theories anyone?
1. SImple disgust?
2. Writing on the wall in November or even the primary?
3. A way to evade the Blackmail trap?
...or
4. To spur special elections... most of which Dems are winning? Five more and Mike Johnson will be out of the Speakership.
5. I thought (wishfully) that some were resigning in order to help prep for a new party of sane conservatism. To help trounce MAGA/Fox in November and then come roaring back in 2028.
Other theories?
Still talking about "my cult"? LOL, do you even read my posts? You are definitely a case of a guy caught in the previous chapter, imo, desperately trying to come up with 36 point plans to save the old order, still insisting the future belongs to him as the world turns the page. I'm not talking about a world run by Republicans; they are old news too and fully deserve to get crushed. It's more about turning the page from Pax Americana and the arrogant, exceptionalist and imperialist attitudes of "westoid" boomers like you, fellah.
Everyone seems to be in a "The Road Not Taken" funk. Remember that Frost was actually poking fun at an indecisive friend. Turns out that most roads are similar and/or inevitable. Nature's heuristic is to take all available paths, and keep (record) what works. In good old-fashioned Expert Systems, backtracking is not a show of weakness, but of strength. Doubling/tripling down on failed strategies is stoopid, and is likely a Fermi solution.
Yoda was mistaken when he said "there is no try".
Not exactly on topic... but it is a story element that offers me a different perspective while I watch SpaceX build their new rockets.
Traeki stacking.
Those stainless steel rings aren't all identical. Each serves a particular purpose and many of them have their own computational capabilities.
Now when I see those little vehicles moving rings around, I can't help but see rings as traeki rings. Now I just need a name for the vehicles moving them around.
@Scidata: I'm guessing Nemik's Manifesto never made it to Dagobah.
@Alfred: Do you want a name for the payload on top of those rings?
(a million data centres in spa-a-ce! ;-)
@Tony Fisk: Yoda reminds me of Plato. I hate Plato..
With apologies to the poet I'm ripping off...
Last night I saw upon the stair
A president who wasn't (all) there.
He wasn't (all) there again today.
Oh, how I wish he'd go away.
"turning the page from Pax Americana and the arrogant, exceptionalist and imperialist attitudes of "westoid" boomers"
I'm not disagreeing as much as you think, though I would argue that the ugly American-exceptionalist mindset that needs to be taken down is more Republican than liberal.
OTOH, you seem to believe that Russia is something other than arrogant, exceptionalist, and imperialist. FAFO.
"I can't help but see rings as traeki rings"
Well, "Asx" had the requisite X in it's spelling.
I once responded to an error report with:
Yesterday, despite my glare,
I met a bug that wasn't there.
It wasn't there again today.
A 'build all' made it go away.
The response was accepted.
According to the Irish comedian Dave Allen (who probably had more cause to check) the poet was 'Anon.', so you're good.
Baby Boomers, face-to-face with their demise,
Paired to Pax Americana & GAE in full decline,
Israel, swarmed by the Muslim cultists, every side,
Progressives & conservatives, both existential risks,
Also the demographic death of Christian Whites.
And, when we process all-of-the-above with human logic & human spite, the reasoned response has but one unanimous solution with many names.
Pax Americana calls it MAD (and/or Mutually Assured Destruction); Israeli Jews call it the Sampson Option; Boomers, Whites & Christians call it as the End_of_Days; Whovians call it the 'Osterhagen Key'; and the end result is always the same.
If we must die and die we must, then we will pull the whole damn temple & the world entire down upon us, try now we can only lose and the world becomes our funeral pyre.
As a sort of Pyric Pyrrhic Victory, we'll immolate YOUR victory for our funeral pyre.
Best
Yes, Yoda lived in a cave. I think the writer for Andor (Tony Gilroy) would agree with you. The manifesto ends with a single, very pointed, word:
Try.
Maybe that is something that interests you:
Seven AI playing Diplomacy.
"the poet was 'Anon.', so you're good."
My dad used to recite that poem from as far back as I can remember, and for decades, I thought it was by Ogden Nash. It was a shock to find out that it was not, or at least that it's not credited to him.
Tony Fisk @ 10:34,
I once started an error notification with
It was a dark and stormy night . . .
and once the supplier's supplementary maintenance team stopped laughing they agreed the phrase was appropriate.
(This was back in the mainframe application days. The department I was working for had bought a solution based on a commercial core. We eventually worked out that the regular processing occasionally triggered an algorithm which was approximately n to the power 2.5 where n was the number of a particular record type. Since we had over 10 times as many of these records than any other user . . .)
Alfred Differ said...
"Now when I see those little vehicles moving rings around, I can't help but see rings as traeki rings. Now I just need a name for the vehicles moving them around."
Traekisynthes? Ringers? Traekitrans?
40+ years ago, I wrote an Expert System that played Dip. Didn't expand/refine it much because what was the point of playing against six me's? (also I was a novice A.I. programmer back then). This problem was well explored in the TOS episode s2e24 "The Ultimate Computer". Kirk's frantic, desperate scream of "Daystrom!" was unsurpassed until the second movie's "K-H-A-A-A-A-N!!!!!!"
Of course, GenAI will create only monsters. What's the point of playing against six Shoggoths?
And by "anon" we mean William Mearns, I guess...
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1596859/antigonish
So now Trump wants to cut health care to pay for his Iran war.
Since the majority of people who are on Medicaid are poor uneducated whites I will enjoy watching Trump's MAGA base suffer.
But I have to ask, do the Republicans have a death wish?
ooooh. Traekitrams.
My family spent time at Universal Studios just a couple weeks ago. Did the obligatory tram ride.
I like ringers too, but traekitram has alliteration.
"So now Trump wants to cut health care to pay for his Iran war."
What do you mean "now"? They've always wanted to cut social programs to pay for the military.
"But I have to ask, do the Republicans have a death wish?"
Some maybe. Especially the ones who think they'll spend eternity with Jesus, or the ones for whom life sucks so badly that they'll gladly die as long as they can make others miserable at the same time.
But if you mean, "Do Republicans want to lose elections?" I'm afraid they expect to win by cheating, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. Also, don't discount all of the Trump voters who are disappointed in him for whatever reasons, but would still vote for him again.
YOU - desperate not to be proven wrong about the enlightenment civ that gave you everything - would leap to push a button and end us all. As your former leader will (when he is cornered at last.). "Former leader because I give you and Treebeard for finally getting fed up with the lying monster... but incapable of ever murmuring "I guess I was wrong.)
onward
onward
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