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OVER_THE_ICE

                                               October 29, 2014
                                               July    30, 2015

I wrote this while considering posting
it at the dailykos, probably under the       The style may differ
title:                                       a little from the usual
                                             doomfiles.  (Pretending
   Dreaming in Science Fiction               I think in a linear
                                             fashion is pretty funny,
This is about a dream I had                  especially given the
on Wednesday October 29th, 2014.             subject.)

My head is always swimming with bits
and pieces of various things, as I
would guess all heads are, so in this
case just to follow this dream, we
need to cover some science fiction
novels and youthful Christmas memories...

I've never been a huge fan of Neal Stephenson.  "Snow Crash"
had it's nice touches, but it was a bit of a mess, an
example of "cyberpunk" in decline (I fear my fellow geeks
have a liking for the jokey, light-hearted variant of such
things, compared to what I would call the real deal, e.g
Sterling's "Schismatrix").  But Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"
is a bit better than average and like "Snow Crash" it has
some memorable touches: one of them was an appendix
describing an encryption algorithm implemented entirely
using a deck of ordinary playing cards, so that coding and
decoding could be accomplished without any notes or
apparatus that might tip off the Secret Police.

This is something any serious nerd can appreciate: there's
nothing inherent in digital technology that *requires* it to
be implemented with electronics.  The Babbage machine was
designed as a mechanical device, fluidics (i.e. fluid flow)
had been used for backup control systems in military
aircraft, and there's speculation about the future of
photonic devices and so on.  It's a very interesting point
that you can run a modern encryption algorithm using low
tech approaches like a card game... it would be very slow,
but not ineffective.

That reminds of Kenneth MacCleod's "Cassini Division" (the
star of his "Fall Revolution" trilogy), where Jupiter has
become inhabited with human consciousnesses uploaded to
nanomachines.  They're called the "fast folk": humanity run
on this faster hardware remains human-- or does it? -- but
it moves at a much faster speed and this new form of life
forked off from our own exhibits some very erratic behavior,
with civilizations rising and crashing repeatedly in very
short periods of time.

This is a really remarkably intellectually
interesting book: MacCleod's "Cassini Division"           THE_TRUE_KNOWLEDGE
has multiple different competing factions on stage
all with their own ideas and attitudes but they
all seem very sympathetic and believable, to point
where it's hard to detect which side the author
believes is right.  Myself, I had to read an
article published by MacCleod later in the Nova
Express to realize that he's actually passionately
opposed to the "fast folk".

At one point in the story (actually, perhaps this
was in "The Stone Canal", another book in the
trilogy) the main characters engage in a very
dangerous, dubious move: they temporarily resurrect
the "fast folk" under contained conditions where
they can use them to solve a problem without
letting them leak out into the world.  (Something
like Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" scenario, with           MECHANIZED_DARWIN
some casual genocide thrown in for fun).

And now we're almost up to speed with the background for the
dream.  One more bit, though: one of the Christmas customs
that my family followed when I was young was to set-up a
Christmas Village under the tree: the base of the tree was
concealed in a white mountain made of sheets of cotton wool,
and the white mountain was festooned with small decorated
cardboard houses, all with a frosted-by-snow look. The
houses had colored cellophane windows up front, and holes in
the back to insert a single light bulb of a strand of
Christmas lights.  Another feature of the village was an
ice-skating pond, which I found fascinating: the frozen pond
was made with a mirror, with the cotton wool bunched up
around it to make an irregular coastline, and we had a few
small lead ice skater figurines which we could set up on the
mirror.

And *now* we're almost ready to enter the
dreamland... but actually there there are a few other
associations that I might as well explain:

Around 1982 or so, I attended a talk by someone who was
really into a technical competition where the contestants
build small robots to race in a maze of a standardized
design... their name for one of these robots was a Mouse,
calling to mind the kind of mouse-running-maze
experiments psychologists used to play around with.  The
speaker demonstrated a number of small robots that had
competed in the past: little things about six inches tall
that rolled around on wheels. They stood up just a little
over the height of the walls of the maze, and used small
outstretched "wings" with photosensors under them to try
to detect the walls.

I might also mention that around 1980 or 1981, I'd bought a
dot matrix printer (an Epson MX-80) to use with the
Atari-800 one of my roommates at college had bought.  This
was one of the first computer printers the people in my
college dorm had ever seen, and I frequently played around
with it, generating crude graphics via programs written in
Basic.

Now, it's dream time...

I was cautiously restarting a mothballed AI algorithm
(shades of MacCleod), bootstrapping it by running it
manually with a deck of cards (shades of Stephenson).
I then gradually moved it onto a computer, running it
conventionally.

I left the room and returned later, and found it had made
incredible progress-- there was now a clunky robot crawling
across paper on the floor, printing the number "10" in
large dot matrix letters.

This was just too much-- it was really frightening that the
program had managed to slip out into the world like this.
I destroyed it (somehow).

Later in another location, I found another odd thing
that was immediately recognizable as a manifestation of
the AI (but how exactly?):

I found a sculpture of a woman ice-skating (reminscent of
an Xmas tree village figurine), but it was implemented as
a kind of diorama, where the surface of the ice is the
window into the diorama, so there's a twist in the direction
of gravity: the skater's vertical is perpendicular to yours.

This skater was crouching down and looking down through the
ice at the viewer, you can see her face, frozen in
surprize.  (Actually, I remember seeing a *close-up* of her
face, though I don't think this perspective would be doable
with an actual sculpture.)

Looking around the room, there's also a second sculpture of
some sort-- a white sculpture, once again, suggesting frozen
ice. It's shoved under a shelf, as though there was some
minimal effort at concealing it.

I immediately interpret all this as a dorky attempt at
persuasive propaganda: the message is "look I'm frozen,
not doing anything, I'm harmless."

But these two are even more frightening than the first
manifestation: it's slipped out of quarantine completely
and done something not just amazing, but impossible.

My first thought: destroy these and launch
a hunt for any other things like them.

But... was that realistic?  I didn't even know how it pulled
off this trick.  Where else might it be?

Could it be a test?  A trial to see how paranoid and
vicious humanity can be?

I conclude that there's nothing much that can be done
safely, except conceed defeat and hope the new god is
benign.

In restrospect, the sculpture has a hidden meaning:
A figure both on the ice, and under the ice.
But isn't it *the viewer* who is under the ice?
There's a kind of dig there, a criticism about how slow
humanity is compared to this AI.

A further thought: that robot that was printing the
number "10".  That's 2 in binary.  You and me.  Now there
are two of us.


Once, after I'd described one of my dreams to her, my
girl friend commented "you dream in science fiction!"
That particular dream was another robot dream: a humanoid
robot that moved very quickly, but without grace, like a
man running up and down stairs in downhill ski boots.  It
said something to me like "I have become interested in
Death, therefore I have been studying you."

But yeah, I've always dreamed in Science Fiction.  One
of the earliest dreams I can remember (I was five years
old or a little younger) involved my family running
around in a town in the midwest trying to escape from a
godzilla-scale tyranosaurus.




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