Miller

"The cultural era of Europe, and that includes America, is finished. The next era belongs to the technician; the day of the mind machine is dawning. God pity us!"

~ Henry Miller

Quantum AI will not know the right places to kiss before making love.

Reviews

[Michael Sun Bear]

Hi Vol, I find our future, even our present, extremely frightening when I contemplate AI. I attend a writers gathering every two weeks in the retirement community where I live. We have people who only write longhand on paper tablets, some who bring typewritten pages, I am the only one who actually reads directly from a computer tablet, and we have one person who uses AI heavily to write her stories. There’s the evolution of society right there.

[Vol]

Michael,
For as long as Western Civilization has existed, even before Classical Greek philosophers, we have based our very identity on intellectual evaluation of the human condition and interpretation of the world around us. If we continue down the AI road as a source of our art and philosophy, then we have sold our souls for a handful of silicon. It is a technological advancement on a par with fire and the wheel. Well, except those were tools we were able to use to carry us out of our caves and hovels. Civilization now had great things to accomplish and societies to build. AI gives us the freedom to abandon our drive to improve the human condition and steals our passion. Nobody is talking about the great danger we are in. I had a physics professor in 1972 who said AI and robotics would be Humanities next evolutionary step...
Vol

[Lorry]

Eras define us not as a whole but as part of an ever moving movement where we can participate in or at least look back and wish fondly we were part of.
What will the future generations have to look back fondly at? Most likely nothing because they'll be too exhausted from a hard day's work of influencing to care and spend the rest of their day freaking out about wrinkles at the age of 24 to give much a crap about anyone else. Or wondering why Barnstaple seemed like a great career move at thirty but sharing a house with four other strangers just to make rent isnt quite as quirky as they thought it would be at the ripe old age of 40!
I for one am glad im nearly done with this whole life thing... Not that I plan to pop my clogs soon, id just rather be a curmudgeonly old git than participate in the charade that living seems to have become.
I think I now realise I was born with an old soul and its took me this long to feel comfortable in my ever increasingly wrinkled skin.
The future? Pay! Take it. I don't want it. So just keep working those double shifts at its just coffee ffs. Com and remember to pay your taxes that will cover my pension nicely, thanks very much! 😀

[Vol]

Lorry,
I'm reminded of a StarTrek TNG episode about just this. The Enterprise went back to Earth and picked up four cryogenic capsules with folks waiting to be reawakened. One of them was a big-shot businessman who wanted to know how his portfolio had held up... When he learned that the replicator had replaced the need for wealth and its pursuit, he asked, "What do people do, then?" He was told "We improve ourselves." I'm not quiet to the point that I can appreciate that joke for its great misunderstanding of human nature. WE lie and the truth is not in us, we shoot people who cut us off in traffic, our ignorance is too big to see the whole of it from any distance, we commit genocide for fun and profit...
It's funny, I feel little regret that I am old and ready to kick the bucket, buy the farm, push up daisies, vacate this earthly meat prison, and become a famous smorgasbord for worms. Living virtually alone in the middle of nowhere has a surprising attraction these days.
Vol

[Lorry]

Until you take ill and wonder if you'll live the 18 hour wait for an ambulance. Its a great gig living in the boonies until that happens! 😀

[Vol]

Yes.... :-(

[GlendasNotAlwaysaBadwit..]

Vol, I love that line you added.
Not just the romantic feel...
but the reality.