Dramatis Personae
Kurgan Father (KF): Me
Kurgan Mother (KM): Wife
Piglet: 3 girl
Little Viking (LV): 5 boy
Monkey: 9 girl
Scorpio Girl (SG): 12 girl
Turtle: 1 girl
Handsome Innocent Host (HIH): Father of 2
Beautiful Innocent Host (BIH): Wife of HIH and mother of their 2 boys
Doggie: very friendly black female dog
Exterior Early evening. The adults are having a pleasant round of drinks under a gazebo in the warm evening air in a well kept garden, and having entertaining conversation. The children have all been playing with each other and the dog, while occasionally passing by the table for a drink or snack.
The two older girls naturally playing and being interested in the boys who are their own age. Piglet has mostly been playing fetch with the dog and her and Turtle tend to get the occasional facewash from the enthusiastic dog.
The children also disappear from time to time down a rather steep escarpment on the edge of the property and periodically pop back up.
Suddenly, the peaceful scene is interrupted by a shocking announcement.
Monkey: Piglet is just weeing down there.
Adults… shocked silence for a few seconds.
KF: Did she take her knickers off?
Monkey: Yes.
KF: Okay, well, that’s something.
SG: She pooed.
KF & KM: (Look at each other, aghast)
KF: Pooed, are you sure?
Monkey: Yes, Little Viking and Piglet are just sitting there talking to each other while Piglet poos.
KM: (takes out wet wipes)
KF: (grabs them and places them in front of KM): Your daughter!
KM (With the face of the most long-suffering madonna): Really?
KF (Assess… It’s real pain in her eyes. The migraine she briefly mentioned before must still be ongoing): Alright. (Takes wet wipes and one of the plastic bags for used nappies and heads towards steep escarpment)
KM: I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with her!
HIH and BIH (in unison, talking over each other):
Oh don’t worry about it! It’s all normal and natural. All in nature! We have a dog and chickens, the whole area is covered in poo of some kind, it’s all part of nature!
KM: I think if you step on that nature she left somewhere down the escarpment you’ll feel differently about it!
BIH: Oh don’t worry we don’t go down there.
Meanwhile….
KF (taking careful steps down a steep and dusty incline, so as to avoid sliding into whatever gift of nature his Piglet daughter left in the area. Sees Piglet near a tree): Stay where you are, let’s clean your butt. (Wipes her clean).
Why have you got dust all over your butt? Did you sit down in the dirt to Poo?
Piglet (proudly): Yeth (she has a slight lisp)
KF: But… why? How? Never mind, don’t tell me. (Looks around).
Piglet: It’s right there. (Points to a small mound of dirt at the base of a large olive tree)
KF: You buried it?
Piglet (still proudly): Yeth!
KF: All right. (Picks up mound of human shit rolled in dirt with plastic bag and puts used wet wipes in it and ties it up.)
Piglet (knickers and trainers are both covered in pee too, but she remains fiercely proud of her achievement) I did a stinky turd!
KF (Shakes head while dragging Piglet up the steep escarpment): Why didn’t you say you needed the toilet?
Piglet: But dad! I did a stinky turd!
KF (Closes eyes. Contemplates discussing with KM the use of the vernacular “stinky turd” at home)
Go to your mother and find out if she has a change for you.
KM invariably does have a spare change for her. But not for the pissy shoes, so Piglet goes barefoot from then on. Her brother LV never used his slip-ons and was already shoeless.
FIN
We don’t have a lot of friends. But the few we have are the kind who take you child doing a stinky turd in a part of their garden as a small delivery of fertiliser instead of the act of a quasi feral barbarian masquerading as a sweet little girl that it is.
Skynet could become real
One of the best descriptors of advanced AI I have found was in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series.
He also wrote the excellent Ilium and Olympos, but in the Hyperion series the AI he ultimately presented was the most realistic. In fact, the only “plot hole” is that he made it considerably less deadly than it should be.
This short video gets you up to speed on some of the latest technologies and how they are starting to be implemented in war scenarios, which is where things can quickly begin to spiral out of at least some level of human control.
I’m not sure what the answer is yet, short of building vast underground cities from which pretty much all computers are banned on pain of death and from which humanity may emerge a few hundred years hence like albino moles, hoping the elements have reduced the robots to rust instead of them having created a whole new civilisation without humans.
Philip K. Dick, of course, one of my favourite authors, (almost everything he wrote is very, very, good) had a rather darker view of AI and he died in the early 1980s, but then he was a true genius and artist with respect to SF.
His short stories on the subject have been made into rather good B class films too. The collection of short stories titled The Father Thing had at least one such story in it from memory, which I will not spoil for you. And Blade Runner really was the foreshadowing of Japanese sex dolls/robots.
As I said, I am not sure what the answer is yet. And walling myself off from civilisation would be the equivalent of the Red Indians hoping the white man will just leave them alone in some arbitrary part of the country. What I believe on the strength of my faith is that there is a way.
Even if it may be simply limited to the Second Coming of Christ, and the three days of darkness that kills on contact of Catholic prophecy might just be a gigantic swarm of murderous nanobots.
Time will tell.
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By G | 9 August 2024 | Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Social Commentary