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Bitter- Sweet Brain- Candy | ||
Assorted Philosophy
[ Hard Hat Area – Under Construction ]
[ Updated
What is copyrightable is copyrighted. Copyright © 1998 owned by Kent Dahl.
Articles in progress:
Have you ever tried to think without using words in your mind? Blank out all the voices in your head? Doesn’t that also blank out your conscious mind? Thinking solely with the recollection and construction of pictures, sounds, smells and other perceptions in your mind can be difficult. Until we all communicate telepathically and are able to accurately transmit our state of mind and perceptions to others, the Language will be the most important communication tool. Telephones, fibre-optic wires and high-orbiting satellites can all fly straight into the sun, because without a language of some sort, communication is futile.
In a world where technology has tied us all closer together, and communication across the globe is no problem, it is surprising that there isn’t any uniform language, any global language, in the works or evolving.
"Hey, what about English?"
, you might ask. English has acquired its position through the British Empire, and isn’t necessarily fit to be the Terran Language, the global language. The "English" language as a global language is the combined sum of both english English and american English. The Global English Language (GEL), which seemingly is the strongest candidate for the Terran language, is grammatically loosely defined. Color or Colour? Its lexicon/dictionary, or the combined sum of all legal words, is littered with very varying words that mean the same to people with a non-english native tongue. Trash & garbage. Van & truck. To you these words may be clearly distinctive, but to other people, the difference may be a bit foggier.That is just some of the problems with basing Terran on English. The fact that English mainly is a Western language, both in origin and use. (As for Australia; well, the British Empire was just lucky with that one.) English contains an abundance of scientific and technological words with roots in Greek and Latin. Student, f. ex., means the same in Norwegian as in English, and the pronunciation is only slightly different. But when we set foot on Arabic or Asian land, we suddenly don’t just loose our linguistic roots, but also our common alphabet. How can we create a unified Terran language based on GEL without totally compromising the Eastern part of the Globe and their Culture?
Socialists and communists have an idealistic utopian vision. They preach of Equality and other valid, valiant qualities. But history has shown us that the completely socialistic, or communistic, state, doesn’t quite make it in a world with the population we have seen so far. These "extreme" states are founded on a powerful enthusiasm summoned in the followers by the leaders. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm dies quickly in the face of real life problems. A strict state intervening severely with its citizen’s private life creates resistance against itself. The totalitarian state is self-destructive due to the same kind of reactive elements that spawned forth the new state.
This is partly why the "reds" are becoming more and more "blue". The milder, more socialised form of capitalism that today (1998) is practised in f. ex. Norway seems to be the golden middle way.
The communists didn’t want the people to be divided into several classes. So they made the mistake of throwing everyone into one class... the working class, which more or less equals the slave class. Pol Pot did a dandy job of – literally – eliminating the upper, educated class, and having everyone slave under his regime.
The problem is to fulfil everyone’s needs equally, while keeping all the people happy. But people have grown used to a lot of luxurious things: education, entertainment, cars, restaurants, alcohol and so on. At the same time, they also have grown tired of the laborious, time-consuming work required to maintain their state of luxury. The only way they will go voluntarily is toward more luxury for less work. Currently, this type of progress is reliant on the differences between the classes in the society and in the world,... and technology.
Like the Greeks of Ancient Greece, to be truly prosperous and free, you need slaves. Someone to support your existence, while you are free to follow the pursuits of your choice. Technology is the perfect source for our slave class; a Swarm of networked ’Bots and AIs born to sustain our existence, as we are "watched over by machines of loving grace."
When technology takes care of the needs of everybody, a stable, socialistic society based on equality is instantly more feasible. Humanity has been removed completely from the lowest of the three classes; the slave class. No one needs to work, but everyone has the opportunity to do so if desired. The need for a paycheque will wither away. The Utopia is close at hand.
However, the possibility of malfunction or uprising among the Techno-Servants requires that they be ruled with an iron fist. (Pun not intended.) The individual Techno-Servants must not be granted too high a level of sophistication, power or intelligence. They must also have built-in means of external termination, f. ex. small capsules of water or explosives nearby vital components. These Machines are designed to die for us. But if everyone can shut down our Servants, a single individual could very well sabotage our Utopia. The power to terminate the Servants must lie with the elite-like Rulers of our selection. But should the Rulers be Humans or Machines?
So far, the machines will have taken over the slave class completely, but all good political theories have at least three social classes: slaves, citizens and rulers. Even Plato had all three. And the Homo Sapiens are now divided into:
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Rulers |
The ones with power, those owning or controlling the Machines, directly or indirectly. |
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Citizens |
The ones living a normal life in our Utopia. |
The Rulers may become corrupt, crazy or otherwise unfit to be Rulers, as they are merely human. Jealousy, power-hunger and the want for a higher status can open a dividing gulf between the two classes, creating much of the same problems we had before the Machines filled the shoes of the slave class. These problems are not new, and seem to always have accompanied fascistic, totalitarian states. Adolf Hitler, World War 2, ‘nuff said!
The finite solution to this problem is, of course, to let the Machines fill up the Rulers class as well. Keep the chaotic masses of Homo Sapiens confined to the middle way and contentment. The Human race is not fit to spawn Rulers of this magnitude. Smaller, tribal societies seem to be the natural habitat for Homo Sapiens. Here there is no need for Rulers, only Leaders, and these take the role as Ruler upon them selves when it is needed, with the majority of the tribe behind them. This is quite unlike the would-be Rulers of our Techno-Utopia, where the Rulers always have the Machines, who represent the majority of power, behind them. Human revolt seems unlikely to be successful (or likely to be bloody) and a fascistic, totalitarian state inevitable.
The need for a private sphere of complete control, and cyberspace as a solution.
With the technological leaps that have followed mankind through history, it could appear to be our "destiny" to create a Race to follow us. An autonomous Swarm of Technological Life-forms, created by us humans. Industrial robots, living in symbiosis with organisms crafted together through genetic manipulation. Solar panels and energy-producing cells filled with chlorophyll, side by side. Networked nodes of vast computational power, coupled with colonies of neurological cells, artificial or otherwise, to create the Sentinel, the Supreme Conscious Artificial Intelligence.
The Dissection, or quest for understanding, the Mind and Consciousness, will find its climax when technology can create the first Artificial Intelligence which seems to possess a consciousness all of its own, the first Sentinel. Artificial Neural Networks (NN for short) are today capable of being simulated at a reasonable speed on even your home computer, if the number of cells it simulates is restricted to a fraction of the number of cells in the human brain. But why don’t we try to combine the vast population of the Internet with an attempt to spawn forth this Sentinel?
Each user would have a set number of cells running in the background, perhaps a few hundred, or even a couple of thousand cells, if the machine is up to it. Now these cells would have to be interconnected with some of other cells on the Internet, most likely the ones at their Internet provider’s server. By feeding the each cluster of neural cells with input from other cells, and from the human users, cameras, screen contents, etc., while letting it teach itself, it would soon have acquired a large amount of knowledge, perhaps even enough to make it seem sentient.
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