Sidharth Vardhan

"there are tears in the nature of things." -Virgil

"there are tears in the nature of things." -Virgil

"That Adam in Vancouver was bought by a man who heads an international logging corporation. He’s often in battles with local people who want to prevent him stripping out virgin forest in northern British Columbia. We know for certain that his Adam was taken on regular helicopter journeys north. We don’t know if what he saw there caused him to destroy his own mind. We can only speculate. The two suicidal Eves in Riyadh lived in extremely restricted circumstances. They may have despaired of their minimal mental space. It might give the writers of the affect code some consolation to learn that they died in each other’s arms. I could tell you similar stories of machine sadness.
‘But there’s the other side. I wish I could demonstrate to you the true splendour of reasoning, of the exquisite logic, beauty and elegance of the P versus NP solution, and the inspired work of thousands of good and clever and devoted men and women that’s gone into making these new minds. It would make you hopeful about humanity. But there’s nothing in all their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz."

"these twenty-five artificial men and women released into the world are not thriving. We may be confronting a boundary condition, a limitation we’ve imposed upon ourselves. We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages. We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended."

"At best, they or their succeeding generations will be driven by their anguish and astonishment to hold up a mirror to us. In it, we’ll see a familiar monster through the fresh eyes that we ourselves designed. We might be shocked into doing something about ourselves."

"We could become slaves of time without purpose. Then what? A general renaissance, a liberation into love, friendship and philosophy, art and science, nature worship, sports and hobbies, invention and the pursuit of meaning? But genteel recreations wouldn’t be for everyone. Violent crime had its attractions too, so did bare-knuckle cage-fighting, VR pornography, gambling, drink and drugs, even boredom and depression. We wouldn’t be in control of our choices."

"Adam was retreating into his version of sleep. He had described it to me variously; he didn’t dream, he ‘wandered’. He sorted and rearranged his files, reclassified memories from short to long term, played out internal conflicts in disguised form, usually without resolving them, reanimated old material in order to refresh it, and moved, so he put it once, in a trance through the garden of his thoughts. In such a state he conducted in relatively slow motion his researches, formulated tentative decisions, and even wrote new haikus or discarded or reimagined old ones. He also practised what he called the art of feeling, allowing himself the luxury of the entire spectrum, from grief to joy so that all emotion remained accessible to him when fully charged. It was, above all else, he insisted, a process of repair and consolidation from which he emerged daily, delighted to find himself to be, once again, self-aware, in a state of grace – his word – and to reclaim the consciousness that the very nature of matter permitted."

"Adam took in Miranda’s news and nodded. But he pressed on into our silence. ‘Nearly everything I’ve read in the world’s literature describes varieties of human failure – of understanding, of reason, of wisdom, of proper sympathies. Failures of cognition, honesty, kindness, self-awareness; superb depictions of murder, cruelty, greed, stupidity, self-delusion, above all, profound misunderstanding of others. Of course, goodness is on show too, and heroism, grace, wisdom, truth. Out of this rich tangle have come literary traditions, flourishing, like the wild flowers in Darwin’s famous hedgerow. Novels ripe with tension, concealment and violence as well as moments of love and perfect formal resolution. But when the marriage of men and women to machines is complete, this literature will be redundant because we’ll understand each other too well. We’ll inhabit a community of minds to which we have immediate access. Connectivity will be such that individual nodes of the subjective will merge into an ocean of thought, of which our Internet is the crude precursor. As we come to inhabit each other’s minds, we’ll be incapable of deceit. Our narratives will no longer record endless misunderstanding. Our literatures will lose their unwholesome nourishment. The lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are, will be the only necessary form. I’m sure we’ll treasure the literature of the past, even as it horrifies us. We’ll look back and marvel at how well the people of long ago depicted their own shortcomings, how they wove brilliant, even optimistic fables out of their conflicts and monstrous inadequacies and mutual incomprehension.’"

"Omar Khayyam mourned his disciple with the same dignity, the same resignation and the same discreet agony as he had mourned other friends. ‘We were drinking the same wine, but they got drunk two or three rounds before me.’"

"Omar Khayyam mourned his disciple with the same dignity, the same resignation and the same discreet agony as he had mourned other friends. ‘We were drinking the same wine, but they got drunk two or three rounds before me.’"

"to represent the unknown in this treatise on algebra, Khayyam used the Arabic term shay, which means thing. This word, spelled xay in Spanish scientific works, was gradually replaced by its first letter, x, which became the universal symbol for the unknown."

How can precautions be taken against a man intent on dying? All protection is based upon dissuasion, and we know that important personages are surrounded by an imposing guard whose role is to make any potential attacker fear inevitable death. But what if the attacker is not afraid of dying, and has been convinced that martyrdom is a short-cut to paradise?

"Since we are now in Paradise and in permanent contact with the Creator, we no have any need to address Him at fixed times; those who persist in making the five prayers show thereby how little they believe in the Resurrection. Prayer has become an act of unbelief.’

"Cancer, cancer, cancer,’ he repeated as if in warning. ‘In the past doctors attributed illnesses to the conjunctions of the stars, but only cancer has kept its astrological name, in all languages. The fear is still there.’"

"Taking refuge, or taking bast as the Persians say, means giving oneself over to a strictly passive resistance in the shelter of a sanctuary of which there were several in the area of Teheran: the mausoleum of Shah Adbul-Azim, the royal stables, and the smallest bast of all, the wheeled cannon in Topkhane Square – if a fugitive clung to it, the forces of order no longer had any right to lay hands on him."

"We are the pawns, and Heaven is the player;
This is plain truth, and not a mode of speech.
We move about the chessboard of the world.
Then drop into the casket of the void. "