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.

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.