Q: Have you ever wondered whether ideas are thought waves directed at you by an AI supercomputer located in the distant future?
A: I did briefly, but then the supercomputer told me that these weren’t the droids I was looking for.
More seriously, I find that my thoughts are less about well-ordered words and structured notions as they are (to borrow from T.S. Eliot) a heap of broken images. Not that AI doesn’t have the capacity to deal with unstructured data— and there are enough modern supercomputers and well-meaning clouds that work on just this sort of thing today — but given the current state of natural language processing (a core component of current AI tech), I have a hard time believing that that future supercomputer will be ready to beam disorganized thoughts into my head. It would require a significant enough entropy source to generate coherent and yet distinctly unsequenced imagery that I suspect it’s not likely to happen.
(One wonders why it would bother, for that matter; perhaps I’m inadvertently responsible for a divide-by-zero error that takes out a K8S cluster in a thousand years.)
Also, I have to imagine that temporal network latency is a killer. Though that would explain why I’m so groggy in the mornings?
Brian Hugenbruch’s story “Heartbeat of the Seasons”
in Metaphorosis Friday, 11 February 2022.
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