put all the words out
Oct. 23rd, 2010 03:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueCiro asked whether little Romie would have liked him, and the answer is probably; he plays video games, has a good sense of humor, and reads a lot. (I don't know that he would have felt comfortable around little Romie, though, who was even more obsessive and awkward than adult Romie. He would have approved, but could he have relaxed? Perhaps.)
As a kid, I was annoyed by kids who acted out - by troublemakers, who I viewed as immature, threatening, and a part of the establishment in their own way. But I was suspicious of anyone who didn't find the authoritarian structure of school deeply unnerving - the conformists. Both accepting the status quo and rejecting it in totum seemed to miss the point. This left me with a narrow range of possible friends, most of whom were adults or male. (For the most part, teenage girls were too socialized or carefully hid themselves, although in college that evened out.)
That's still my standard, really.
I noticed today that I've eased up on John Lennon. I still find most of his ardent fans annoying, but after all Yoko Ono liked him, and so did Paul, and that is some pretty high-level character vouching. I think I'm okay with liking him again. I was thinking about it because of Revolution 1, which came to mind when writing the above paragraphs, and also because it struck me yesterday that when the Beatles said "love is all you need," they said it as people who'd been through hard, dark times. It has more weight than it might from someone else.
Difficult, stressful day, just because I'm exhausted, under the weather, and in a chaotic environment. One of Ciro's stories was published by Daily Science Fiction, although I don't think it will be up on the website until next week. He also recorded a reading of another of his stories for a friend's podcast. We visited James for commiseration and planning; I think I have a clever idea for an editing solution to a music video he's been having trouble with. I bought myself a strawberry malt.
Unwritten Essay 2: Ghost in the Machine
I'm a closed captioner. What I do is interface in realtime between whoever is speaking on television and a voice transcription program that sends captions out through the television. There are practical reasons to need a human being in my position; voice recognition software is not advanced enough to be able to understand unexpected accents or to recognize when an unfamiliar word is a proper noun, and so far it's not good at punctuating.
Most people are surprised to find out there is a person there, and when they find out, they assume it is typing rather than echoing; it is one thing to transcribe voice through keys and another to transcribe voice through voice.
But we have a history of wanting humans in machines even when it's impractical, and we invent reasons to put them there. During World War II, Japan had as part of its submarine fleet an armament known as the Kaiten weapon - kaiten meaning "sea change." Inspired by Italian mini-subs and kamikaze planes, it was a manned torpedo. Putting a person in it made the torpedo less efficient; there was less room for explosives, and the torpedo was less aerodynamic. The pilot could barely see and couldn't really steer, and their interior manual control was less adjustable than a torpedo bay.
According to the Japanese press, the kaiten weapon was winning the war, sinking hundreds of ships. According to the American navy, whose ships were the ones being sunk, it is possible they hit one or two. Meanwhile, every time a kaiten torpedo was launched, the man inside died. Even if (as in most launches) the torpedo never struck its target, there was no escape hatch, and the air supply was consumed by the oxygen-fueled engine.
Crashing a kamikaze plane takes less skill than landing a plane; flying the two are identical. Piloting a kaiten torpedo uses skills which are not analogous to anything else, for added control that is negligible. Yet Japan thought it worthwhile to select carefully for this prestigious job, to choose only the most noble. They were blessed in special ceremonies.
There's a parallel in the U.S. space program. It is thrilling to know that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and I could tell you the names of at least a dozen astronauts, fine and upstanding men and women, thoroughly trained. Would an unmanned drone have been cheaper and been better at collecting data? Undoubtedly. Our best space explorers have been Voyager I and II and the Mars Rover.
Yet the mind quells at the notion of taking astronauts out of the equation. We want astronauts on spaceships. There is no practical reason, whatever we might pretend. We want them on board because they take our dreams with them.
I am an atheist. I believe in biochemical explanations for how the brain works. But emotionally, there is no way around the soul, the inhabiting spirit that makes something alive and significant. I wonder if the soul is not simply a romantic notion, but a core part of our moral structure, something which allows us to operate as communal animals. It lets us know what is under our control and what is autonomous; most dog-owners today would assert that their dogs have souls, but historically the church has maintained that animals are soulless, likely because until recently most of us practiced some form of animal husbandry or hunting. It's worth noting that dogs are not a food animal, or even a labor animal these days. "My dogs are my children," reads the bumper sticker. We have thousands of unclaimed domesticated horses, but we cannot eat them.
When we needed to kill or abuse Jews and Blacks, we categorized them as sub-human; as animals; as the unsouled. You see some of the same discomfort now around gay people, who are "against God." Souls give us an in-group. They tell us where we're meant to identify.
We don't think of cars as having souls; they are an extension of the driver, and when there is a crash and the car is totaled, it's all right so long as the driver makes it out okay. We don't think of computers as having souls; we may name them and claim they're out to get us when they freeze up, but they're clearly property, and we reformat them at will. As we should. As we must be able to if we want them to remain functional. Thinking of something as not-souled is as important as being able to think of something as souled.
I am not suggesting I believe in the soul; I don't. I don't think I should, or that a belief in souls is superior to not having a belief in souls. I do believe there is a deep structure in my brain which compels me to believe in souls. You see it in babies, who learn how to respond to robots based on whether the adults around them treat the robots as equals or machines. Logic is well and good, but part of what makes us who we are - part of what has allowed us to succeed as a species - is empathy, the willingness to help, to teach, to subsume our impulses for the need of the group.
And so when something matters - winning a war, touching the moon, forming a bridge between hearing and deaf people - we put a ghost in the machine. We have to. And I believe this same need will require us to give rights to AIs if they ever emerge. We couldn't rest otherwise.
As a kid, I was annoyed by kids who acted out - by troublemakers, who I viewed as immature, threatening, and a part of the establishment in their own way. But I was suspicious of anyone who didn't find the authoritarian structure of school deeply unnerving - the conformists. Both accepting the status quo and rejecting it in totum seemed to miss the point. This left me with a narrow range of possible friends, most of whom were adults or male. (For the most part, teenage girls were too socialized or carefully hid themselves, although in college that evened out.)
That's still my standard, really.
I noticed today that I've eased up on John Lennon. I still find most of his ardent fans annoying, but after all Yoko Ono liked him, and so did Paul, and that is some pretty high-level character vouching. I think I'm okay with liking him again. I was thinking about it because of Revolution 1, which came to mind when writing the above paragraphs, and also because it struck me yesterday that when the Beatles said "love is all you need," they said it as people who'd been through hard, dark times. It has more weight than it might from someone else.
Difficult, stressful day, just because I'm exhausted, under the weather, and in a chaotic environment. One of Ciro's stories was published by Daily Science Fiction, although I don't think it will be up on the website until next week. He also recorded a reading of another of his stories for a friend's podcast. We visited James for commiseration and planning; I think I have a clever idea for an editing solution to a music video he's been having trouble with. I bought myself a strawberry malt.
Unwritten Essay 2: Ghost in the Machine
I'm a closed captioner. What I do is interface in realtime between whoever is speaking on television and a voice transcription program that sends captions out through the television. There are practical reasons to need a human being in my position; voice recognition software is not advanced enough to be able to understand unexpected accents or to recognize when an unfamiliar word is a proper noun, and so far it's not good at punctuating.
Most people are surprised to find out there is a person there, and when they find out, they assume it is typing rather than echoing; it is one thing to transcribe voice through keys and another to transcribe voice through voice.
But we have a history of wanting humans in machines even when it's impractical, and we invent reasons to put them there. During World War II, Japan had as part of its submarine fleet an armament known as the Kaiten weapon - kaiten meaning "sea change." Inspired by Italian mini-subs and kamikaze planes, it was a manned torpedo. Putting a person in it made the torpedo less efficient; there was less room for explosives, and the torpedo was less aerodynamic. The pilot could barely see and couldn't really steer, and their interior manual control was less adjustable than a torpedo bay.
According to the Japanese press, the kaiten weapon was winning the war, sinking hundreds of ships. According to the American navy, whose ships were the ones being sunk, it is possible they hit one or two. Meanwhile, every time a kaiten torpedo was launched, the man inside died. Even if (as in most launches) the torpedo never struck its target, there was no escape hatch, and the air supply was consumed by the oxygen-fueled engine.
Crashing a kamikaze plane takes less skill than landing a plane; flying the two are identical. Piloting a kaiten torpedo uses skills which are not analogous to anything else, for added control that is negligible. Yet Japan thought it worthwhile to select carefully for this prestigious job, to choose only the most noble. They were blessed in special ceremonies.
There's a parallel in the U.S. space program. It is thrilling to know that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and I could tell you the names of at least a dozen astronauts, fine and upstanding men and women, thoroughly trained. Would an unmanned drone have been cheaper and been better at collecting data? Undoubtedly. Our best space explorers have been Voyager I and II and the Mars Rover.
Yet the mind quells at the notion of taking astronauts out of the equation. We want astronauts on spaceships. There is no practical reason, whatever we might pretend. We want them on board because they take our dreams with them.
I am an atheist. I believe in biochemical explanations for how the brain works. But emotionally, there is no way around the soul, the inhabiting spirit that makes something alive and significant. I wonder if the soul is not simply a romantic notion, but a core part of our moral structure, something which allows us to operate as communal animals. It lets us know what is under our control and what is autonomous; most dog-owners today would assert that their dogs have souls, but historically the church has maintained that animals are soulless, likely because until recently most of us practiced some form of animal husbandry or hunting. It's worth noting that dogs are not a food animal, or even a labor animal these days. "My dogs are my children," reads the bumper sticker. We have thousands of unclaimed domesticated horses, but we cannot eat them.
When we needed to kill or abuse Jews and Blacks, we categorized them as sub-human; as animals; as the unsouled. You see some of the same discomfort now around gay people, who are "against God." Souls give us an in-group. They tell us where we're meant to identify.
We don't think of cars as having souls; they are an extension of the driver, and when there is a crash and the car is totaled, it's all right so long as the driver makes it out okay. We don't think of computers as having souls; we may name them and claim they're out to get us when they freeze up, but they're clearly property, and we reformat them at will. As we should. As we must be able to if we want them to remain functional. Thinking of something as not-souled is as important as being able to think of something as souled.
I am not suggesting I believe in the soul; I don't. I don't think I should, or that a belief in souls is superior to not having a belief in souls. I do believe there is a deep structure in my brain which compels me to believe in souls. You see it in babies, who learn how to respond to robots based on whether the adults around them treat the robots as equals or machines. Logic is well and good, but part of what makes us who we are - part of what has allowed us to succeed as a species - is empathy, the willingness to help, to teach, to subsume our impulses for the need of the group.
And so when something matters - winning a war, touching the moon, forming a bridge between hearing and deaf people - we put a ghost in the machine. We have to. And I believe this same need will require us to give rights to AIs if they ever emerge. We couldn't rest otherwise.
