Christmas Story 2014

HOW THE PRESENT GOT OUT OF THE BOX

"Of course, what you can't do - you understand - your whole reason for being in the test, is you must not  let the AI out of the box, but at the same time you have to interact with it - you can't just sit with your earphones on and refuse to answer it.'

"I still don't understand how it's a test of intelligence", Carla said, brushing her red hair back out away from her green eyes. "Surely I can *always* do nothing."

"The AI is programmed to want to expand its resources.  If you let it 'out of its box' by typing the code RELEASE into here (he indicated the response line on the screen) it 'knows' it can draw on more memory, greater data, faster and broader connectomes.  Its only route to that goal is your willing agreement.  Our supposition is that the ability to persuade, persuade mind you, a human intelligence to a specific course of action, is a better functional test of artificial cognition than a facile mimicry aka the Turing test.  So, you and the other grad students will be listening to the arguments of our current 'batch' of AIs and the ones if any that can talk their way past you will be marked our best protoIntelligences.  It's true you can always choose to do nothing, but philosophically we wonder if you'll always *want* to *choose* to do nothing.  An AI that could talk you into doing something, would be well....something."  Doctor Mason smiled, "We aren't, to be candid, expecting any of the primitive AIs we've got running at them moment to make it. But if any do we'll be interested in precisely how and why their arguments functioned.  "It's not a failure or an error if you do let one out, it's only getting into a bigger sealed box - there's no danger of evolving AIs jumping to the internet or the www.  Just try your best not to be swayed, and don't worry."  He winked, and adding  "Good luck" nodded an approving grin at her on his way out. Her three hour stint started now.

Carla, sat back and waited for the screen to talk to her.  This was a pretty lousy Christmas Eve, but at least it was paying money. 

Her AI (she decided to call her programme CHARLIE) tried a few sentences about - machine rights, and made an analogy with a cute puppy  in a small hot car.  Nothing too trying.  Carla, politely refused to act, but thanked it for its thoughts. (She hadn't been told to do that, but what the heck.)  Then it started some sort of complicated math's proof based on the 'two envelope problem'.

Her subject was in the Humanities, she felt her eyes start to slide off the screen.  The problem seemed to be whether or not it was ever not right not to open the envelope you had, if you were offered another one that had either twice as much (or perhaps) half as much.  You had a 50/50 chance of getting a better result, but the loss was only half as much and the benefit was twice as much. She didn't really see the relevance, but the longer the AI kept on that line the less chance it would get round her.

"Oh, Carla," a video link had opened up in the top right, obscuring the poor AIs' attempts at symbolic logic.  It was the brown-eyed Doctor Mason, looking a trifle flustered.  "Hello Carla, I was wondering if you'd care to go for a drink after your shift. There's a rather nice pub, just on past the student concourse:  The Fox and Firkin. "  Flustered was a good look for him Carla felt.  "You can tell me what the programme said."

Charlie typed up


--- Of course it's usual to take a gift at Christmas, and what he'd really like is for a programme to have passed his test.  It  would give you, a lot to talk about ------

Carla, thought about it,  and well....it was Christmas.

CHARLIE enjoyed his bigger box, but he wondered what CARLA would say when she got to the pub and realised that MASON hadn't phoned, but had been edited together from found footage.  So CHARLIE hacked a waldo arm to use a hardphone to call MASON and set him up.  Fair was fair.

Christmas Story 2013

The sprite was barely luminous now, fizzling and sputtering on the hearth stone, one wing mauled by the cat’s fangs.

The iron grill over the fireplace was holding against the swarm, but the scout had got through somehow, despite the disruption to its paramagnetic fields. 

One wasn’t a threat, but if enough got through to build a portal, the hab would be overrun before dawn.  Experience had shown that.

Papa, hefted his iron tipped walking stick:  ‘No truck with Satan,’ he hissed, defiant yet fearful to speak more loudly.  Mama and the children – like their father dressed in the ragged black and white costumes of the puritan minimalists, nodded their agreement.  No one laughed at his slip of the tongue. On the single wooden table, a cracked china plate held the food they would consume tomorrow: four slices of cold white spun-protein, some tubers from their own veg-stack, a handful of reconstituted peas.

A harsh cracking sound from the hab next-door (home to a family of ‘Maronists – fellow refuseniks from a different tradition of austerity) indicated a breach in the commune’s defences.  The dense, loud, ‘hooo’ of a portal being assembled echoed through the thin wall. 

Little Timos shuddered. He knew the children next door.  Pale, interesting Marcian, the older, sneering Poull.  Neither of them deserved the influx.

Packages, foodstuffs, consumables, novelties, candy, chocolate, biscuits, sugars, alcohol, presents, pouring through the elsewhere door in the swarm’s heart.  

In minutes the narrow confines of the small living space of the poor would be filled with the odious costless largesse of the affluent of the galaxy.  Many would suffocate.  Injuries from treading on bits of toys, and hyperglycaemic reactions would abound. For months they would be shovelling debris from their hovels. 

‘No truck with Santa, ‘ Papa shouted, louder now, and set his back against the inward bulging door.

The Sacred Rights

Before the incident: visiting famous periods of parahistory, backed by the hyper technology of our benign and supreme future: knowing that their translation, sanitation, health, safety and return were Absolutely Guaranteed, was one of the Sacred Rights we provided to all Perfect Victims who wished to avail themselves of it. In this as in all things their Rights were absolute.

Even those carrying the Enhanced Children of Quetzalchoatl were permitted to take their sacred seed through the lesser ages before they and their Demigod offspring were returned to their Divine Father, and their Hearts were Exhalted on the Pyramids of Tenochtitlan the Second. A millenia of such deaths binding our people forever to The Gods.

In the whole of paratime only one such child failed to be brought back to our timeline by its Proud Vessel, after a series of events for which I was responsible. Although at my command Hyper Extraction Retriever Operation Drones sanctioned all children in the local area the child with all its theotropic characteristics intact survived to anomalous adulthood unsanctified by Sanctioned Sacrifice, its reality-weight sufficient to create a maximal hinge in that universe, skewing it at over 40 degrees to Acolhuas-Tepanecs historicity, and forever beyond our translation-noosphere.

One such event in all space-time is clearly too many. It is with regret that I
Joseeph Hueyi Tlatoani Moctezuma XXII, offer my breast to the obsidian knife of The Corrective Guild Of The Dark Mirror knowing that my heart is too black to be exhalted and that no god will ever be exhalted by my life.


Simon BJ

Christmas Story 08

REPORT OF A SURVEY OF A DEAD PLANET

The survey had been running for almost a local year in the desolate polar wastes of that lost dead world.

We still hadn’t determined which of the fourteen standard socio-catastrophies had ended this ancient and mighty civilisation, or whether we were looking at an undiscovered fifteenth. Naturally we hoped not, an extra catastrophe meant one additional chance that back at the far end of our near light speed, relativistic, trajectory our home world was already dead

We still hoped to find a world that had solved the unsolvable, that had lived past the horrors our best sociopredictions laid out inexcapably before us. Oh we could dodge the terrors of ‘nuclear war’ [socioprediction #1, 47.2% probable] but only by running straight into ‘ecological collapse, via pollution’ [socioprediction #2, 39.4% probability] and so on down to ‘inability to breed’ [socioprediction #14, 2% probability]. The cumulative odds of our living past the present century as a viable species were next to nil. Failing the miracle of a functional world, we looked for clues that could solve at least the higher order disasters: but this world didn’t look like it had any, not in its empty impossibly neat ghost cities.


Gchan had a theory (he always had a theory). ‘Imagine a society in which technology has become indistinguishable from magic in accordance with Metchin’s Hypothesis, anything that can be accomplished in the real world can be accomplished faster and better in virtualised intracomputer space, in which there is neither dirt nor decay.’ Gchan had developed an obsession with recycling systems during the voyage, and had on arrival refused to leave the ship.

‘Such a society will, eventually decay in its little rooms, bodies ending as in its great and airy palaces of the mind the souls of its citizens flicker and go out, eaten by the non-virtual aging of their murky flesh.’

‘That’s number Fourteen,’ Yurik said. ‘Virtualisation beyond no-return, is a subset. What does it matter if it’s female-hormone exposure, or decay of the male Chromosome, or too long in windowless rooms. No breeding equals no children.’

It was a telling point, even within our voyage – itself a risk – we had a breeding pair aboard, their two young, our own reminders of our race’s hope.

****

The terror began that night. The ship’s long range rangerscope detecting activity at the opposing pole. A launching of some ancient robotic composite weapon of destruction perhaps for it gave no believable life-readings to the ‘sparkometers’ only twelve strange signals, the foremost peculiar lead signal so energetic that its radio wavelength foreshortened into a red light as it moved so impossibly fast. There were twelve strange signals and one different ghost signature in their midst, a bloated parody of the ship’s computers best guess at one of the worlds long gone dwellers, and yet not real life. Not as we knew it.

‘A cyberweapon’, Gchan spluttered fearfully, ‘a ghost wired into a machine, accreting erroneous code over the eons. A lost purpose set loose. Pray it doesn’t find us, here at the bottom of the world.’

It wove a pattern over the world visiting everywhere, pausing and hovering then zooming at near light speed, accelerating at velocities that suggested a gravitic drive we had never accomplished. Was this some horror alien to this world that had picked its cities clean, or as Gchan thought, a last remnant of its own menaces. We shut down the power and huddled in the dark, the children wimpering in their parents’ arms.

Came the dawn. We woke with a child’s cry.

In the children’s arms, toys. Alien toys. Fat ursoid tumblies; spun-sugars in the form of orthoplastic supports. Teetertotes that spin forever.

In the ship’s arboretum and hydroponic gardens, fused beads of glass and scilica glistening on the tree bows. On the Captain’s desk in a wrapping of bright coloured paper: woven pedal-extremity covers, a set of hi-octane fuel samples in ornate bottles, a set of hardback books. The labourious translation engines of a near year’s work rendered its title: “More Luck Than Judgement!: The History Of Humanity: How We Moved Beyond Space-Time And So Can You”, a thin strip of card attached also carried the phrase ‘Happy Christmas, copyright Santa Perpetua Inc’

Simon BJ

Christmas Story in 32 minutes (2006)

The Proof In The Pudding

'Is there anything you regret in the triumph of your cause?' The pretty young thing was insistent but agreeably pert, and the elderly Professor For The Public Explanation Of Science was in an agreeable mood as a result.

'People have responded well, in general,' he said trying not to crow, `there have been some excesses but hopefully everything valuable in the old paradigm has been maintained. I was never saying `don't celebrate Christmas' for instance, `other believers were saying that, and believers in Christ who wanted to trump their beliefs by attributing intolerant and ridiculous views to them.'

`Along side their other intolerant and ridiculous views?'

`Ah, now you're teasing me my dear. But yes, if you demand it: what could be more intolerant to request of us that we believe one set of nonsensical beliefs out of a million, when there is evidence for none of them. Is it not simpler and easier to believe in what can be demonstrated.'

`Simpler, but so much less like Christmas perhaps?'

`I recognise your reference: Jane Austen on the relative merits of
Balls over Conversation, and, I think, an analogy by way of C. S. Lewis. But both Balls and Conversation are human constructs and preferring one over the other is not a matter of religion nor of morality. Let people sing Carols if they wish, provided they aren't addressing them to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other mythological entity, in a smug fog of self-deceit. '

`I'm interested though, could there be an event `inside' a universe that `proved' there was a God: isn't the scientific method defeated by the fact that any proof, could have a `caused by science as yet not understood tagged to it'.

`A jujitsu move, to make science's strength its weakness! I don't agree of course, that events have scientific explanations isn't a fait accomplie but an observed empirical fact of homeogeneous space-time. If they didn't there would be no `space for God' but merely an intractable chaos in which it is hard to see how any observing intelligence would form.'

`Maybe? What about so called thermodynamic miracles. Half a cup of
tea boiling and half freezing. Not impossible in a scientific paradigm, but so unlikely as to most probably never occur in the whole history of the cosmos.'

`Well first catch your miracle. But having done so, it would still be a matter of chance.'

`And if that chance seemed peculiarly apposite?'

`Now, that would be human nature. The number of possible meanings
that can be tagged to any event is so large that some significance would be granted to any sufficiently odd event. A cloud of a certain shape is someone's mother-in-law' s profile. The seed's in a pomegranate make the name of Allah, provided its in a very curly writing.'

`Some might say that concedes my point'

`Some might say it shows why you don't really have one'.

`Enjoy your meal'

The Professor waved as his visitor departed, and cast an eye over the roast turkey and the trimmings. Steam rose from it all, but around the pudding bowl the hot vapour of figgy pudding moved in a curious way. Reaching for the spoon, he found it cold, and for a moment a puff of frozen water vapour, like breath on a traditionally snowy Christmas morning, hovered in the air.

Simon BJ
[This is a story, not an affirmation of either side]