E/ACC




I’m going to expand this into an essay when I get the time:

I am kind of torn:
Yes e/acc (singularity worshipers) might destroy the world in eleven interesting ways before lunchtime…

– but –

crows, apes, etc, are conscious, will never go foom (a colloquial term for AI hard takeoff), and there’s thousands of planets full analogous sentient agents to keep the spark of consciousness burning if we do disappear up our own brainstems…

– soo – (I guess)

push the button! Turn the page!
Light the blue touchpaper and stand back!

Also…

The singularity is coming whether we like it or not, so for all you/us neo-Luddites out there, maybe it’s time to accept that you/we can’t beat em, so you/we might as well join them.

(as I said, I’m torn)

Edit:
Hmmm… seems like he might be the antichrist after all. (see:THE SINGULARITY IS UPON US!)

Aliens!



So, Aliens huh? My gut feeling? All this hysteria is just more of ‘THEIR‘ endless Psyop nonsense to distract us from the Fourth Turning. On the other hand…

I met a drunk guy in the park. He had one of those conference ID tags around his neck. He was sitting on a pallet of Bud Light raving about opportunities in post scarcity deflation. He was clearly making the most of the arbitrage opportunity, so much so, that eventually he staggered off and passed out. The guy was so sloshed he forgot to close his laptop. I had a peak. There was a lot of repetitive energy budgeting and genotype statistical analysis to struggle through but sensing my perplexity, the laptop suggested it could summarize and translate the data into Terran vernacular for aboriginals—

The Vetan, the Quagaars, the Vindaloovians, and the rest of the ten-thousand-strong coalition that make up the GPLC (Galactic Poverty Law Combine) have been visiting Sol3 for a hundred million years.

100M BP – Fish, big lizards, small hairy critters, volcanoes. Recommendation: check back in 50M years.

50M BP – Lots of hairy quadrupeds, some interesting aquatic mega endotherms, significant feathery aerial diversity. Recommendation: check back in 50M years.

1M BP – Bipedal hairy endotherms communicating abstract concepts via sonic telepathy, tool use, marine navigation. Standard technology curve. Recommendation: check back in 1M years.

10K BP – Significant depopulation of mega-fauna. Bipedal endotherms experiencing severe genetic bottlenecking due to comet strikes and a hemisphere-scoped extinction event. Standard technology curve. TTS (time to singularity) 10K years +/- 5K years. Recommendation: distal civilizations may want to start packing for a road-trip.

1K BP – Large-scale social mobilization. Extended cognition […] TTS 1K years +/- 500 years. Recommendation: step up surveillance cadence. Tickets open within the 500LY party zone—start boosting up now, you don’t want to miss this one!

100 years BP – Atomic theory. Branchial Theory. Digital Computation. This is it, galls and zims! The hairy bipeds are going Singularity any decade now! Last chance to book your tickets! This one is going to be a blast!

14th October 2017 – High-density probe insertion despite light sail ejection malfunction. Observation of critical ecosystem degradation. Significant existential self-annihilation risks: current odds are 3:2 against. Evidence of unsanctioned Quagaar technology transfer. Vindaloovian griefing sigils. Genetic diversity has been cached. Post-doc observers will remain on station for the final singularity end-run.

Interesting articles have been written about Sol3. Evolution between major lineages has delivered good papers on Dolphin and Fish convergence. Sonic-telepathy is pretty cool and unusual, remember way back when #GruntingHomo was trending? But you know the deal… there are a hundred billion life-supporting planets in the Galaxy. Dinosaurs are cool, they come in different sizes, but they all taste of chicken. The only thing that properly gins up the Galactic news cycle is some new Sophont species going full-blown Singularity!

This happens rarely; two or three per millennium. All the players like to have delegations on the ground when the fireworks start. Remote civilizations that miss-estimate kick-off time often arrive hundreds or thousands of years early—better a thousand years early than ten minutes late, right?!

We hang around in the Oort Cloud with our press passes around our necks (anatomical analogue) drinking too much (psychotropic analogue), fucking each other (physiological analogue), and killing time. Those of us with a few Singularities under our belt, know there’s always a black market for sneaking down early to get inside scoops or, if you’re from one of the non-compliant factions, negotiating deals before the GPLC lawyers stitch up exclusivity on all the good stuff…

You wouldn’t believe the price of beer down here!

Ooops, the red light just started going ape!
I’m off to put on my Singularity trousers! The fun’s about to start!!
See you on the other side!

Summer SciFi Musings



It’s summer, it’s hot, I’m in Turkey doing some writing—surrounded by some very pushy cats and startlingly clever Jaybirds.
I got to thinking about non-human intelligence again (a big theme in my books).

Forget about aliens, we already see non-human culture and technology.

Animals are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. We know they are capable of using tools. Some even pass new knowledge onto their offspring and colleagues—technicallythis is culture.

In my writing, the ‘BugNet’ allows animals to interact economically with humans. It’s Science Fiction, but it might not be as far off as we think…

I recently read about a group of scientists watching as a population of crows learned to use paper money to purchase treats from a vending machine!

The idea of their study was to see if birds could be incentivized to adapt to a completely new situation. The guinea pigs (flying guinea pigs) in this case were a murder of crows on a small south pacific island. They had already demonstrated they were able to make and use tools to snag bugs out of holes. In this experiment, they were presented with a vending machine and given some spending money. These very special birds quickly learnt that by inserting pieces of paper into the machine they could buy themselves lunch. Going further, when they were given notes which were too big, the crows were able to tear the larger denominations to match the advertised price.

In Siguarity’s Children I have a sequence where a trapped super-AI uses incentives and rewards to enlist wild animals to help it escape. Some of my early readers expressed scepticism that this might be a stretch, but here we have animals using tools, adapting to novel scenarios, and innovating on the fly (no pun intended). This is the same set of skills we might hope to find in a bright human being!

Imagine, if Instead of birds behaving this way, we’d found slug-beasts on another planet, or a population of zeno-chaete swarming beneath the ice of some Galilean moon! We’d be flipping out!

 

“Our difficulties in understanding or effectuating communication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world.”
― Carl Sagan




Let me know your own examples (or YouTube videos) of animals being unusually smart. I might include them in my upcoming book which (starts under the crust of an ice-moon).

If you want to read more about smart critters working within the human economy to build a better world… check out my Science Fiction!

Cheers, have a good summer!

Toby