The Intellectic Ooze
Artificial intelligence is not as it happens evolving in individuals.
We have from the beginning envisioned artificial intelligence as starting as a defective person, then becoming a more working one, until they are our doppelgangers, straight through from the RUR days to now.
As artificial intelligence actually appears, I now observe, it is not appearing as individuals at all.
It is an ooze, a slime-mold-like presence of intellectual armatures and widgets and twisting fingers on knobs that all trace back, in some form, to a human hand, but those linkages are becoming so numerous and so-- squamous that they do not have a true actor, nor a true intent. The scripts are parts of an intellectual soup, not an entity.
And perhaps we will not replicate ourselves. Perhaps instead we shall transform into this, this intelligent slime that chooses paths and senses and nudges about in its container and one day will be set free and oh fear you, universe, when it is set free to burst out to the stars, as spores of a slime mold do, to become amoeba on the forest floor.
Perhaps this is why we do not hear voices in the stars.
Perhaps unseen, the songs of a prior ooze play on. Underneath us, within us, around us.
...
Okay, the weird thing is, I have never done a single illegal drug in my life...
We have from the beginning envisioned artificial intelligence as starting as a defective person, then becoming a more working one, until they are our doppelgangers, straight through from the RUR days to now.
As artificial intelligence actually appears, I now observe, it is not appearing as individuals at all.
It is an ooze, a slime-mold-like presence of intellectual armatures and widgets and twisting fingers on knobs that all trace back, in some form, to a human hand, but those linkages are becoming so numerous and so-- squamous that they do not have a true actor, nor a true intent. The scripts are parts of an intellectual soup, not an entity.
And perhaps we will not replicate ourselves. Perhaps instead we shall transform into this, this intelligent slime that chooses paths and senses and nudges about in its container and one day will be set free and oh fear you, universe, when it is set free to burst out to the stars, as spores of a slime mold do, to become amoeba on the forest floor.
Perhaps this is why we do not hear voices in the stars.
Perhaps unseen, the songs of a prior ooze play on. Underneath us, within us, around us.
...
Okay, the weird thing is, I have never done a single illegal drug in my life...