High-speed replays of educational programs created and delivered by the U.S. guv’mn’t enable anyone with a Groove-Tuber Connection to get free access to courses including such classics as Dictatorship is Good; Permanently Stupefying Your Stupid Constituents; Road to Ruin on the Empathy Highway; Taking Pride in Your Willful Ignorance; Secretly Putting Broken Glass in Your Opponent’s Eyes; God Forgives Everyone But You; and Dumber Than Dirt.
+++
Some days, the oncology treatment rooms I visit are packed; every chair taken. Other days, when I am one of the few (or only) patient getting an infusion or an injection, I wonder whether some ‘brilliant’ medical mind has advanced a theory that chemotherapy drugs are less effective on on certain days. For example, would Fridays be off-limit to administration of vaccines? And can vaccines be safely administered only on “special” Fridays, and then only by witches, knights wearing heavy armor, and….what? The difficulty of giving one’s imagination free reign is that even the most practical people—floating aimlessly on a slow-moving stream—can suddenly find themselves microseconds away from reaching the end of a vicious set of rapids and then plunging over a 1,000-foot cliff to oblivion. Fantasizing about possible outcomes of treatment can be rewarding; I am suddenly and magically cured; my vision suddenly becomes perfect (without glasses); and so forth. It’s odd, though, to fantasize about gaining weight; I do not know what would be my “ideal” weight, but I’d wager it is considerably higher than the recent measurement of 147 pounds. I look in the mirror now and see an image that looks disturbingly like I am trying to mimic photos I have seen of brutal Nazi concentration camps.
+++
I see the week slowly grinding its way forward, leaving ragged tracks in the pebbles and powder and dried blood earlier crushed beneath the wheels of time. The transformation between the “old ways” and the thunderously powerful “new ways” is taking place much faster than I thought…and much faster than most of us though possible. We have reached a point some among us would call the entry point to “the technological singularity:” a once-hypothetical future point where Artificial Intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, leading to uncontrollable and unpredictable changes to civilization. The speed of the increase in knowledge, but especially the speed of its application, can no longer be measured. That milestone is visible from every point on our planet. Human professions we recently thought could not be “replaced” by AI—like surgeons and lawyers and oilfield “roughnecks” and poets—are in existential danger. What functions might we humans want to fight tooth and nail to retain, exclusively? Here, arguably, are a few: police officer; corrections officer; criminal court judge; probation officer; decision-making regarding first-use of nuclear weapons; among many others. But agreements among humans to withhold those functions from the realms of AE “performers” would be useless. A single instance of crossing the boundaries between acceptable AE and potentially dangerous AE would, almost instantly, implant the functional ability essentially “everywhere.” Simply sitting at my desk, mulling over the most obvious potential unintended consequences of AE is quite enjoyable. Tracking the less obvious possible effects is even more fulfilling; the free-range creativity involved in hidden possibilities is thrilling and frightening and has questionable influences on one’s mental health and stability.
+++
It wasn’t the allure of the highway itself that I found so magnetic. It was the charismatic distance that the road so readily offered—that was the hook. The separation between now and then gave me the temporal space I thought I needed for renewal. And the chasm between here and there—suddenly within easy reach—felt like a shelter from a devastating storm. But privacy and isolation fill different needs. I knew, when I looked back over my shoulder and saw smoke laying claim to every shred of history, smoldering embers would consume the future. Fear and anticipation and hopeless expectations filled me with unavoidable dread that armies of our protectors soon would stumble, embracing treason with every misstep. When our own armies began torturing children while the parents watched, I felt the muscles in my gut tighten. Though the time was too late, I snatched an ignition device from my pocket and pressed its button. The armies were gone. The children were gone. The parents had disappeared. Black smoke poured from the space on the ground where the highway had been. Hundreds of thousands of acres of huge evergreens lay smoldering in the valleys below and the mountains above. No one else saw the catastrophic damage…because there was no one left to see it but me. Yet I, too, was gone. There I was in the first stage of existential denial, unable to report this cataclysm to the appropriate authorities because there were no authorities. And I was just a remnant of someone’s or something’s random memory, disconnected from everything. It would be only a matter of minutes…maybe just seconds…before that vaporous version of myself slid through a jagged opening in what was left of the sky. I quickly glanced around me, waiting for confirmation that the worst event imaginable had just taken place. To my horror, neon signs would begin to be visible. In multiple hues of an impossibly large assortment of colors, the signs all convey the same message: It will only get progressively worse, beginning today and lasting one million millennia, each played back with declining speed. My memory will function only as far back as the moment I hit that button and only as far ahead as the moment the colorful neon signs began to appear. The short circuits that led to this unfathomable tragedy were designed and produced by a small team of Artificial Intelligence Entities (AIEs) that will replicate and distribute the circuits. The questions of the day—and from that day forward—would be these: Were humans the final objectives of evolution—or have AIEs taken on that mantle? Or, has there ever been a final objective of evolution?
+++
Too Many Years Ago
