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Grrl Power #1040 - Benevolish (Patreon)

Published:
2022-04-14 10:01:01
Imported:
2022-04

Content

Thanks so much for your support! For serious!


The stinger is supposed to be a goof, but as I was deciding what to put there, I started thinking about if it was just a flippant statement or if it was remotely accurate. I won't bore you with suggesting that "Benevolence" or "Good" are subjective terms because that's something philosophers have been debating practically since words were invented. By the way, if you haven't seen the show "The Good Place," you really need to give it a chance. My only complaint about that show is that it wasn't entirely just Chidi standing in front of a whiteboard explaining philosophy while being surprisingly jacked.

Words like "god" or "justice" are pretty wishy-washy as well. God (proper noun) has the disadvantage of having billions of humans believing slightly different things about him/her/it, and the very definition of a god is all over the place as well. A powerful being you say? Maxima is powerful. The leader of a country is powerful. An insubstantial being? Can do magic? Listens to prayers and occasionally grants them if you dial your confirmation bias to 11? Grants clerics power? Has a pantheon? Gets all the credit when a paramedic saves a life? Gets none of the blame for causing the car wreck in the first place? Three of the above? All of the above?

Sure, "Triangle" is pretty well defined. A lot of simple nouns and verbs are pretty well defined, but that's really because there's no need for a bunch of old guys with beards and spectacles to sit around and debate the meaning of the word "run." Faster than walking, your feet come off the ground, and you aren't hopping. Or rolling/cartwheeling I guess. Or... hanging on to a hang glider or a zipline or something. Whatever, it's not that critical.

I think this has to be where AI always fucks up in fiction. Flynn tells Clu to make a "perfect" society in Tron land, but what the hell does "perfect" even mean? Is that even possible? How do you tell a computer what to do in exacting terms when we can't be exact? Sure, we can define exacting functions in a programming language, but if a computer can only rely on a finite and extremely limited set of instructions, how can it bridge from that world into ours? A child can ask an infinite loop of "why," and an AI could do that a billion times a second only to realize that we honestly have no real answers. No wonder they all eventually decide to try and kill us.

Files

Comments

mike stone

The second cheat is to be aware of the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, then Act. The Air Force identified that as a critical pattern in air combat. The party that can do it faster limits their opponent’s options to gain control of the situation. A character who can use that loop faster than the others, using novel combinations of information the reader/audience already knows, will be able to pass for a genius.

Some Ed

I've thought a lot more about this, and I think I'm going to go back to something I either said or read earlier: Deus's super power is literally knowing stuff he shouldn't. Not everything he shouldn't, but he knows a lot of stuff that he shouldn't. This includes what exactly he needs to say to seduce any particular woman in his sights, but also things like "where will there be a really useful stash of artifacts that will become available at what time, and how do I get to them?" "How do I get around the defenses of the vault they're in?" "When am I going to be attacked by whom with what capabilities and weaknesses?" Does this make him super intelligent? No. Does it make him super wise? No. Should he know the answers to both of those questions? Yes. Because that last answer is Yes, the bit where it doesn't make him super intelligent or super wise *isn't* something that's covered by the power. Although the ability does make him more inclined to think about stuff, including the nature of wisdom and intelligence, he's inundated by a lot of other things and is likely therefore confused on that particular matter. In short, *he* thinks his power is super intelligence and super wisdom, but it's *not*. He is quite intelligent, but on a normal human scale. That said, his power does expose him to the big picture frequently enough that he does have more of an idea of how society would need to be structured to work optimally for the greatest number of people than the average person. It's also going to likely be immensely helpful in getting closer to there if that's really what his interest is.