Chapter 24 of Douglas Adams' LIFE THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING discusses the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax, and their strong desire to just blow everything up. A very violent alien race, these guys "were the first race who ever managed to shock a computer." This computer was Hactar, "the first to be built like a natural brain, in that every cellular particle of it carried the pattern of the whole within it, which enabled it to think more flexibly and imaginatively, and also, it seemed, to be shocked." What happened was this: the Silastic Armorfiends of Streiterax asked the computer to build them the ultimate weapon. Hactar asked for specifications, and they told him, in short, to "read a bloody dictionary." So Hacter did it. He made the ultimate in terrifying, super-destructive weaponry. But when the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax tried to use it, they realized it didn't ork! They asked why, and he (Hacter) "tried to explain that he had been thinking about this Ultimate Weapon business, and had worked out that there was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse than the known consequences of setting it off, and he had therefore taken the liberty of introducing a small flaw into the design of the bomb, and he hoped that everyone involved would, on sober reflection, feel that... The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and pulverized the computer."
What this passage made me think about was our conversation about computers taking over for us eventually, and how awful that would be. But how awful are WE? I mean, we aren't so different from the Silastic Armorfiends; we have such awful weaponry at our disposal, weaponry whose consequences FAR outweigh any means for their usage, and yet we hadn't the sense that Hactar had to just not have them. What is the POINT of having them? We're mad for power, and machines... we'll they're only mad for what we want them to be mad for. We could make them mad for cake, and that wouldn't be so bad.
I guess I am trying to say that we make such awful choices ourselves, and then we cringe at the idea of computers becoming smarter than us... why, because they're "cold, heartless, and logical"? Well, maybe we should start being more logical ourselves, because we're already pretty damn cold and heartless. Look, we're three quarters of the way to that imagined future which we so despise! I guess we should break out the sunglasses and floor-length leather jackets, now, while we still have time to get our hands on them... but is that BEFORE or AFTER we slaughter thousands of cattle for surplus, wasted meat, and then use the skin of a completely DIFFERENT herd of cattle (whose flesh, mind you, will go to waste... this cow was not bread to be a "meat cow") to make our fancy jackets, which we will only wear until they are out of fashion? To a cow its skin is always in fashion, please! Oh, aren't WE fleshy and mooshy kind! What extravagance! A machine would never be so wasteful.
So, what's good, what's bad? It's only what we make it.
So can we please stop making it bad, please? Zarking strags.
No comments:
Post a Comment