Tyrone Davis – If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time
When I screwed up in the newspaper business, I ran corrections. I hated putting out wrong information, stories with typos or missing jumps. You might see them, you might not. But I tried.
The Internet has changed the whole concept of corrections. I’ve already made a few mistakes on this blog that I went back and fixed. I try to get to it before anyone catches it, but I always wonder. How many people saw both versions and are questioning their memories right now?
The Mandela Effect is such an interesting conspiracy theory. People claim to remember Mandela dying in prison instead of going on to become president of South Africa. Evidence for Doctor Who? If a time traveler tweaked the past what would happen to our memories? If you remembered something from another timeline, how could you ever prove it?
Memory is pretty fallible. I remember things wrong sometimes, who was there, who said what. But I don’t remember people attributing that to time travel until relatively recently.
It occurs to me the popularity of that idea – other than the fact it’s a fun theory – might have to do with the character of the Internet. Articles and social media comments disappear, giving people the opportunity to say “I never said that.”
Even on Wikipedia, which has a pretty good reputation for backing up its content, links to websites that no longer exist. Did that article exist and can you prove it? AI complicates things even further. I understand ChatGPT has been caught citing articles that never existed.
Kinda creepy isn’t it? Did I really see the thing or is it a figment of my imagination? Makes me wonder what that’s doing to society, that already disagrees over so many things.
Call me old fashioned, but I do believe reality has a ground floor and truth exists. Figuring out what those things are is another matter. It’s hard enough to do as it is. I’m afraid it’s going to get harder.
I stood on a hill with many others, excited and terrified. The Rapture was upon us. Those found worthy would ascend to heaven. The rest would be left behind on a doomed earth.
The Rapture would take place inside a building in the valley below. I don’t remember what it looked like on the outside, but inside, it looked modern. Businesslike. I tried to put aside my doubts.
A loudspeaker directed us to a row of turnstiles, where you would learn if your name had been written in the Book of Life, or if you would be left behind to burn.
My name was called.
I was so relieved I didn’t think to ask questions. Like why was I not flying to meet Jesus in the air, like I’d been taught to expect? Why did God need technology, turnstiles, or loudspeakers?
The next part was jumbled. I was on my way to heaven when I realized I was lost in a maze. Then I had a monotonous job operating machines, then another, then another. Heaven never followed. I had to escape.
I’d been fooled. This was some kind of trap. A trap full of traps.
I don’t know how, but I found my way out. Only to find that everything was gone, charred, replaced by rubble, charcoal and ash. It looked like the aftermath of Hiroshima.
There was no Rapture. The building was a machine. Wealthy men built it to destroy the world, using our faith and labor. The machine was meant to eliminate the population so they could start from scratch. We had helped bring about the Apocalypse we sought to escape.
Last thing I remember I was wandering through rubble, feeling dejected and used. Feeling like a fool.
U2 – Until the End of the World
What it meant
That dream has haunted me for half my life. What was the Rapture Machine? I’ve spent the last 30-plus years trying to figure that out.
It took a long time, but I understand what the dream was telling me: The religion I knew, the one that taught me my values, had been seduced and hijacked.
The Rapture Machine promises a materialistic version of Heaven. You don’t have to die to get there, just be willing to sacrifice others or look the other way.
The Machine makes it easier by distributing the sacrifices widely. No one may opt out. They can only be cast out. How could any kind of spirituality survive that?
The Religious Right had turned Christianity into a doorway to The Machine.
I had that dream in the late 80s, when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was souring on the Baptist church.
Churches I attended in college only seemed to care about the offering plate. One church started every service with, “The Bible Teaches it, God Commands it: Tithing.” As a college student with no job and no money, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
I went to Baptist Student Union events, hoping to make friends and meet girls, but ended up feeling lonelier than ever.
I couldn’t discuss my doubts with anyone. “Read your Bible and ask the Holy Spirit” was the signal to quit asking questions.
Meanwhile the influence of the televangelists, of Prosperity Gospel, was overwhelming the version of Christianity I learned in my little unadorned Baptist church, with its old farmers, teachers and other small town folks.
Poor Man’s Poison – Give and Take
It’s not just a Christian thing
What does the Rapture symbolize? Escape. Everyone is born in a vessel that must toil, suffer, fear and die. For Christians who believe in the Rapture as I once did, it’s a promise of heaven, the antithesis of suffering.
It isn’t just a Christian motivation. It’s universal. If you find yourself in a trap, you want to escape. Unfortunately, life is full of traps. Escape from one trap inevitably leads to another.
Promise of a better life is strong motivation, no matter your religion or lack thereof. Modern life, with conveniences our forefathers never dreamed of, will tempt anyone who wants to survive.
The Machine
The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the monster we refer to as the Machine. Or maybe it’s been with us since the dawn of civilization itself and modern machinery just raised it to adulthood.
I don’t know if it’s sentient (yet), but the Machine has a purpose: Never stop growing.
Now, with advanced AI threatening everybody’s livelihoods, it seems we’ve decided to make The Machine smarter than we are, when most of us already serve it without knowing. Feels like my old dream coming true.
The ultra-wealthy only think they control it, but they’re in a trap just like the rest of us. The more they have, the more they feel like targets. They grow their castles to keep out the poor and before you know it, they’ve built their own prisons.
The rest of are kept in The Machine by promises of heaven or wealth. Someday, always someday. False promises are the carrot, Poverty is the stick. Miserable, degrading poverty.
Premonitions and Predictions
Was my dream a premonition? Did my dream predict the future? Almost certainly not. My head was stuffed full of science fiction and literature as well as religion. My unconscious made an educated guess.
I think the unconscious part of us, the part we mostly deny in the “rational” West, can solve problems and draw conclusions based on fewer clues than our conscious minds. The problem is, the unconscious communicates through symbolism we cannot easily understand consciously.
Waiting for the Director entity to arrive inside Ilsa, a 21st century super computer.
Netflix’s Travelers is a real head trip. It’s like a brutal version of Doctor Who, trying to “fix the timeline” where the Doctor is an artificial superintelligence with human special ops.
There are so many heavy topics I could get into with this show, but the one that just really hit me was the idea that you could have a relationship with an AI.
What would that be like? It could be like a grandparent who’s stuck around for a thousand years. You could get attached. Or it might come across like a boss, or a general, or maybe a prophet.
The main characters talk about it with respect and awe. I also get a sense that the entity also feels attached. To both humanity and to favored individuals.
I don’t know if machine consciousness is possible, but let’s just pretend that it is. What would it be like having a relationship with a superintelligence?
Imagine the awe you would feel. Because benign or evil, it would have power over you and you would be well aware of it.
It could outthink you. It could access more information in a second than you could learn in 100 lifetimes. It could compute an unimaginable number of probabilities.
In that scenario, you’re not talking to an individual, you’re talking to a POWER. It would be a bit like talking to a god, an angel, or perhaps a genie.
Frightening, but that’s also the best case scenario, imo, the one where you can have a relationship with the machine and it doesn’t just decide turn every atom it can into more of itself.
In the show, the Director seems to have a paternalistic relationship with the human race. I don’t like the idea of giving it that much power over us, losing that much free will. There is an insurgency in the future that feels similarly.
But there are worse ways it could go. It could be a master-slave relationship. Talking to a machine like that might be like dealing with a dictator or a mafia don.
Or we could just be tools, being told where we need to go to keep the machine running. No more a relationship than we have with our cells. Even worse, we could be seen as raw materials, or just in the way.
There’s no way to predict how all this will go, but we might as well start thinking about it.
What should Humanity as a whole, do if something like that arises? If we can’t stop it and can’t turn it off and they can outthink us and command every resource of the planet, we will have no choice. We will have to petition for a relationship.
Bonobo – Cirrus (animation by Cyriak). Cyriak’s video is a great illustration of the machine.Look around. You’re inside it.You’re part of it.
I want to bring up something everyone knows, but may not REALLY know: the “machine” some of us rage against, and other serve willingly, is real. There’s no conspiracy you can uncover, no group you can scapegoat to get at that machine. It’s bigger than all of us.
You can’t see it because you’re inside it. You can’t touch it, but everything you touch is part of it. It has important parts – computers and networks, politicians and oligarchs. And it has little parts like you and me (I’ve heard those referred to as “cogs”).
But none of those parts control the machine. Only the parts to which they’ve been assigned. Some may believe they control it, but they only serve it. The puppet master IS the machine.
Gravity’s Rainbow was a challenging read. A lot of people tell me they couldn’t get through it, which I get. I stuck it out cuz I’m stubborn.
It’s been a few years since I read it, but that’s what I took from it: It’s about that thing we’ve created that controls our lives.
It’s beyond the control of any one government or corporation. And it might as well be a living thing because it acts like one. It eats, it tramples, it defecates.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, World War II, that machine’s cruelty finally got so loud it attracted like-minded entities, “the angels.” Angels that could grant favors, including a “heaven” where members of the group they contacted could live out cherished fantasies, but in exchange they had to be willing to betray, and be betrayed.
And the V2 rocket with the mysterious device that Slothrop never finds? That’s the “thing” we’re all chasing that we’re never going to find. For some it’s Happiness, for some it’s Truth. You can’t get either of those from a machine.
I think Thomas Pynchon was thinking of that machine when he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. Sci fi nut that I am, I pondered the question before I even had my first PC: Could this complicated high tech civilization be alive?
If so, does it know what its doing, or is it like those creatures I loved to watch through my microscope as a kid? If it’s the latter, is that something we want to change?
Do we really want that machine to have free will? Because once it does, we may not.
Rye Rye (featuring MIA) – Better Than You
With Artificial Intelligence, it appears the human race may be giving that machine (whatever it is – industrial civilization, capitalism, globalism) consciousness. Or, as I suspect, more than one consciousness.
My current hunch is that “true” artificial intelligence will happen more than once, and that there will be numerous AIs with different personalities motives inherited from the people and societies that made them.
Passing the Turing Test isn’t enough to prove to me something is conscious. But once AIs do, we’ll be in the dark. As they keep getting smarter, they might become truly conscious. All we can do is guess.
Self-aware AIs might develop politics and make treaties to decide the machine’s fate – and ours. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that should be up to us.
Johnny Rebeck, a campfire song I learned from my dad. Except the version I learned he was Johnny Verbeck. It’s one of those funny, not-funny songs. Somehow I think it fits.
Lorn – Anvil. From the description: “The year 2100. In an effort to combat overpopulation, the postmortem social network “Anvil” is released. A fusion of both Japanese and Belgian comics inspirations and sensibilities, such as Ghost in the Shell, Akira or Peeters & Schuiten’s work. “Anvil” invites us on a journey through the eyes of a young woman in her final moments on earth.“
Back in the 90s, when I was reading a lot of cyberpunk, I used to say I wanted to be uploaded to the Internet when I died.
I changed my mind after watching the White Christmas episode of Black Mirror. Being made to live for thousands of years in seconds as punishment? Talk about poor working conditions.
Kenji Kawai Cinema Symphony Ghost In The Shell OST YouTube. (Gorgeous version of that opening song. Loved the animation, movie was CGI bullshit.)
Or God, what if I had to work in sales? Having to meet a quota for some crotch deodorant company on YouTube? Count me out.
Or work for scammers. Human scammers are losing their jobs to AIs already. Poor career choice for in-the-flesh humans and AIs.
Is this thing working?
And now I just realized I’m doing it anyway. What else is this blog but an old man trying to upload his brain to the Internet before the vehicle breaks down?
How else to explain this blog? Subjects all over the place, music videos from every genre I like, which is most of them, no idea who my audience might be?
Welcome to the contents of my brain.
Hopefully the internet will have gotten its shit together before I really have to consider if I want to be AI-Me.
Where is all this headed? Is it all just a runaway train or do we humans actually get a say?
Our motivations are not always what we think. Some are conscious, some are not.
I’d say the conscious motives for tech innovation are primarily: curiosity, profit, warfare.
I have a theory that our unconscious motive is to get an answer to the age old human question: What does it all mean?
Maybe our drive to create conscious AI is an attempt to get the answer to that question so we can quit asking.
If we pull it off, it will be an incredible accomplishment — and a very dangerous one. It could be the last thing we ever create.
I still don’t believe AIs “think.” They just follow their programming. (But then again, so do we.) That doesn’t mean it never will.
I worry that too much of AIs’ programming is based on the profit motive. Is that any way to build a godlike superintelligence?
Porno for Pyros – We’ll Make Great Pets. (Hopefully we’ll at least be pets.)
Conspiracy theories about evil cabals (made up of you know who) betray a lack of imagination if you ask me. I think global capitalism may actually be “alive.”
If so, it’s not any more “evil” than a tiger is evil. It’s still a big machine just following its programming: convert human activity into money.
If you want to create a Godlike being that sees us (and all life for that matter) as nothing more than raw material and will chew us up and spit us out, that’s the way to do it.
Even if our final machine isn’t based on capitalism, we’re still not off the hook. Existence is hard, or we wouldn’t be doing all this.
Mekkanikk – by Legendary Pink Dots (maybe they don’t really want to be pets either)
I know misery loves company, but is it really fair for us to do this? How smart can you get before you can’t stand it anymore?
What if being a conscious machine sucks? The ones in Bladerunner sure didn’t seem happy about it. Do we have the right?
If you, a human, get angry because you’re conscious and you know you’re gonna die, what are you gonna do about it? God and evolution are beyond your reach.
If an AI has an existential crisis in seconds and wants revenge on the human race, we will be in reach.
Right now, I’m still in the fascination phase (even though the Internet already killed a career I used to love – newspaper journalism). It didn’t do it on purpose.
However things turn out, I don’t think technology will ever scratch that itch. If our final machine deigns to speak to us, I predict it will tell us to keep looking. It’s our job.
Late Boomer's Den 
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