“Hey, how is it that we’ve all managed faster-than-light interstellar travel and it’s relatively commonplace?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I never really paid attention in school.”
“Oh, well, it’s simple, really. All it takes is—”
[LOUD TRAIN NOISES]
“Wow! Really? That’s incredible! What an amazing technology. Thank you for telling me this.”
Alternatively:
“Hey, how are you able to make this interstellar voyage in an amount of time comparable to sailing a ship across an ocean?”
“I have no idea. I sit at the controls, put on a blindfold, and start pressing buttons and hoping for the best.”
“That seems… unwise…”
“It hasn’t failed me yet.”
“How do you make this thing go thousands of times faster than the speed of light?”
“Oh, you know. I just press some buttons and hope the laws of physics look the other way.”
“That’s insane.”
“It helps if I’m really wasted.”
“How do you make FTL travel work?”
“Well, this button sends us into a dimension of darkness and horror inhabited by todash monsters incomprehensible to the human brain, where the laws of reality do not dare to set foot for fear of corruption.”
“That sounds… bad…”
“Yeah. On second thought, let’s stay put. One habitable planet is just as good as the next, I think.”
“Yeah. Space is a silly place.”
“I can’t believe the ancients used to have spacefaring technology. That was thousands of years ago! How did we lose that? Where did we go wrong?”
“Are you referring to the dilithium crystal myth?”
“Yeah. They used them to power their starships.”
“You know ‘starship’ was a euphemism, right? They didn’t actually travel through interstellar space. They just ground up dilithium crystals into a psychoactive ointment and applied it between their legs and the resulting trip probably made them feel like they went to the stars. The idea that they ‘rode’ on ‘starships’ actually just means they used—”
“Stop. I don’t want to hear it. History majors ruin everything.”
“How do you expect to get a ship of this size to the other side of the galaxy in such a short period of time? I don’t see any cryosleep chambers, so I can only surmise you’ve discovered FTL travel.”
“Very astute, my dear fellow. It operates under a simple mechanism that I’m sure you’re already familiar with, in some crude fashion. May I ask you a personal question? Good. Do you accept that the universe is a cruel and spiteful place?”
“Well… I uh… I don’t know. I guess I’m agnostic, when it comes down to it, but…”
“But it sure seems as though the cosmos at large seek at all times to punish hubris, yes? To elevate heroes only as an excuse to dash them against the rocks? Surely you’ve heard the saying ‘no good deed goes unpunished’?”
“Of course.”
“It’s true. Nature abhors a vacuum of retribution. This is the theory I have developed and upon which I have based my life’s work. All the pilot of this vessel has to do is declare, “Boy howdy, I sure am glad this ship will never leave the planet and its crew dragged across the galaxy to land safely on Egoni Beta c! I am too good of a pilot for that to ever happen!” and the universe will take care of the rest out of spite.”
“You’re exploiting the Universal Law of Situational Irony?”
“Exploiting? I am obeying it in the only way I know how.”
“You’re an accomplished starship pilot. May I ask you how FTL travel works?”
“To be honest, I have no idea. The computer takes care of that. Nobody likes to admit it, but there isn’t a human alive who could tell you the means by which we achieved warp speed. Computers have been designing themselves for generations and we don’t really know how they work, just that they do.”
“Oh. Then… then why do you have this control room? You’ve got all kinds of buttons and wheels and algorithms in here! Surely you must do something to make this ship go.”
“It’s all for show. It doesn’t actually matter what I do in here, but pressing buttons makes my monkey brain feel accomplished. You see, the computers take care of absolutely everything for us, but they’re programmed to prioritize keeping the essential human spirit alive through trials and hardship. Nothing too difficult, mind you, but just tricky enough to make us feel invigorated when we ‘solve’ our problems. I’m pretty sure they engineer dangerous situations just so we can rescue ourselves in the nick of time. Otherwise we’ll become complacent, and the spark of enterprising humanity that brought us here will fade. Not sure if I believe that, but the computers do, and that’s what matters. So I press some buttons at random, put on my captain’s hat, spin the wheel, and pretend I am having some kind of effect upon the universe.”
“But that’s so depressing!”
“Is it? Sounds like you just need to press some buttons. Look – they’re bright and colorful and they go ‘beep beep’! What more could you want?”
“I recently learned that the Ardavan Principle was first discovered by a fiction writer in the early 21st century. That seems wild to me… do you know if it’s true? I always thought Ardavan must have been a famous quantum physicist to have discovered the key to faster-than-light travel!”
“Nope! Nadia Ardavan was a sci-fi author with a degree in horticulture. She actually developed the Ardavan Principle for one of her novels. The story goes that her readers and peers gave her a hard time for handwaving aspects of her worldbuilding to focus instead on speculative botany. They kept complaining that her stories weren’t ‘hard sci-fi’ because, while the botany was exhaustively researched and captivatingly believable, she never bothered to give an in-depth and scientifically plausible explanation for how her human characters could travel so easily and quickly between distant planets. You know the ancient proverb, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’?”
The idea of ‘Feral Scientist’ is just so Fucking Funny to me, like ‘i just found this dude on the side of the road muttering about quantum physics is it rabid’ like thats just any scientist
Adopt, don’t buy! In the current environment of anti-intellectualism and austerity, many labs are simply abandoning their scientists. These strays are full of love for the right home! They might be timid and shy at first, but show them some love and before you know it they’ll be curled up in your lap telling you about their research. You’ll never find a friend as dedicated and loyal as a rescue scientist.
But please be aware that certain species of archaeologists, geologists, and palaeontologists can and do thrive in the wild! Some may enjoy being adopted into a loving home but others are best left feral, as they cannot be fully house-trained and will insist on bringing dirt and mysterious rocks into your home on a near-daily basis.
As a technician in a department that cares for a lot of scientists in one place, I would also like to point out that some scientists should not cohabitate! Geologists especially should not be pair or group-housed with biologists, zoologists, chemists, etc, or the geologists may teach them to lick enrichment, which can be deadly for non-geologists.
You also need to be careful housing young scientists, called undergrads as babies and grad students as young adults, with full adults or even each other, as it can sometimes lead to the adults picking on the younger scientists. It won’t always happen, but it’s always a potential so introductions should be monitored closely for the first few weeks and assessed often.
yesterday for April Fool’s my workplace had a short training article on recognizing computer-generated faces from real ones and one of the tricks mentioned was “count the teeth” and I just wanted to say that it’s both ironic and kind of horrifying how society has unwittingly cycled right back to IF YE MEET A MAN ON THE ROAD, COUNT HIS FINGERS LEST YE DEAL UNKNOWING WITH A FAE
Where’s that image with the self driving car that is trapped in a salt circle made of “do not cross” symbols that its software won’t let it disobey
This one?
THE FAE ARE NOT GONE HUMANS JUST MADE THEM CYBORGS
In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
Having been to several talks on modern ai I can confirm
I always think of this tweet when I see people praising machine learning and the new kinds of AI as a panacea.
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello.
So, I have to say something.
This is my favorite post on this website.
I’ve seen this post in screenshots before, and the first time I read it, I cried. Just sat there with tears running down my face.
Because this, right here, is the best of us, we humans. That we hope, and dream of the stars, and we don’t want to be alone. That this is the best of our technology, not Terminators and Skynet, but our friends, our companions, our legacy. Our message to the stars.
I’m flat out delighted, and maybe even a little honored, that I get to reblog this.
Bad: aliens that insist upon referring to human women as “feeeeemales”.
Good: aliens that insist upon dividing humans into binary categories, but the binary in question is based on something we’d regard as trivial and bizarre.
pro cilantro and anti cilantro
Just to screw with us they refer to have designated half the population as “edible” and the other half is “inedible.”
No intention of eating anyone, they just like how uncomfortable it makes everyone.
Even better: the aliens all agree on who is edible and who is inedible, but the humans have no idea what the criteria is
Even better: there is no criteria, the Aliens just keep a running list of whenever one member designated a human as edible or not. People are baffled because the selection appears random yet all the aliens are up to date, so there must be SOMETHJNG
I love this because it implies the aliens possess either (1) a universal hive mind or (2) an intergalactic group chat dedicated to fucking with humanity
“Hey guys Steve Johnson just laughed at my antennae he’s edible ok?”
“Yum yum Steve ribs”
cool cool cool but some people – definitely the younger generations – would for sure take offense if they weren’t deemed edible
like ‘you wanna eat steve but not me? what the fuck did I do’
Katherine Crighton 