The Seoul of a New Machine
Rity is the ghost in the machine: an autonomous agent that can transfer itself into desktop computers, PDAs, servers and robotic avatars, and adapt and evolve like a genetic organism. As researchers go from place to place, they are captured and recognized by a network of cameras in the building, allowing Rity to follow them from computer to computer.
The "sobot" can upload itself into a mobile robot -- a simpler cousin of HanSaRam called MyBot -- and follow Kuppuswamy from room to room on its servo-controlled wheels, fetching objects for the researcher with its mechanical arms. If it sees Kuppuswamy sit in front of his office PC, Rity can abandon MyBot like a husk and slip into the desktop machine, to better put itself at its human master's disposal.
(Via Communist Robot.)
Rity's body-swapping antics just might provide a glimpse of our own future abilities. If the human mind can be manipulated digitally and uploaded into a computer substrate, traveling in "meatspace" may become hopelessly outmoded. Instead, we might choose to email ourselves from city to city (or from planet to planet), taking up residence in myriad virtual and mechanical forms along the way. Or, fearing obliteration of the Self, we might elect to spawn virtual clones of ourselves to send on indeterminable errands.
In either case, we may eventually tire of the "real" world in favor of universes of our own invention. If so, we run the risk of permanently isolating ourselves from extraterrestrial intelligences. One could even argue that our perceived failure to discover ET signals or megascale artifacts is due to our universe being custom-designed by unknowable predecessors.
5 comments:
"at its human master's disposal".
Ughh. Just plain CREEPY. Not the story, just the decision to frame the relationship in those terms. I vote for preemptively working to keep the language of domination/submission out of the realm of human/human assistant relationships. Before we're asked to by our human assistants!
As long as reasearchers hold to this equation, AI will go nowhere. And I guess that I am predicting that they WILL hold to it for some time to come, since materialism seems to be such an attractive paradigm to many Western intellectuals.
Hee-hee. Look at it this way: if it turns out that you're right and there *is* in fact a soul, would you want AI researchers applying the scientific method to it? Worse, would you want them succeeding? :D
ther "ways of knowledge" besides science (Rigourous, systematic experimental occultism is one)
Okay. What has been discovered by these methods?
Hmm. Seems to me like every one of those things was also discovered - verifiably - by "orthodox science". As for the moral dimension of existence, since when was that an occult or any way supernatural phenomenon?
I wasn't aware *anyone* had contacted nonhuman intelligences - who, when, where, and most importantly, why doesn't anyone know?
The world of imagination is flexible intelligence given free rein, nothing more. It's beginning to seem to me like your definition of 'occult' is more mundane than you originally lead me to believe.
The moral dimension of existence was discovered because humans are capable of enlightened self-interest - that *is* the essence of the Golden Rule. We'd have looked right twats if we'd backstabbed and eye-for-an-eyed ourselves to extinction, wouldn't we?
War or - at least - conflict is apparently essential to the human psyche, but so is peace.
Kepler and Newton and co were occultists and alchemists because they were still inventing the scientific method at the time - or are there any alchemical processes that worked I should know about?
and their occult research, in fact, drove and fed their scientific research.
Yes, in the sense that reading about ultrasonic manipulation of the brain in real-life gives me ideas for scifi writing. The occult research itself was abandoned for pragmatic science because occult research did not work.
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