Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

“These guys are newly instantiated. It takes them a few months subjective to learn the basics: how to interpret visual stimuli, how to move their limbs, how solid objects behave. We run them in a hothouse during that stage, so it all takes about a week. When they’re ready to learn language and social interaction, we switch to running them in real time. That’s where you would come

Pressure cooking them - no interaction - sounds like a recipes for disaster

owners won’t need to continually reassert their dominance over—but

Pervasive misperception of dogs due to long outdted dog training book about alpha dogs.

Women who work with animals hear this all the time: that their love for animals must arise out of a sublimated child-rearing urge. Ana’s tired of the stereotype.

The researchers conclude that there’s something missing in the Origami genome, but as far as Derek’s concerned, the fault lies with them. They’re blind to a simple truth: complex minds can’t develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any others. And minds don’t grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds. That cultivation is what he’s trying to provide for Marco and Polo.

Artificial-life hobbyists all agree on the impossibility of digients ever getting legal protection as a class, citing dogs as an example: human compassion for dogs is both deep and wide, but the euthanasia of dogs in pet shelters amounts to an ongoing canine holocaust,

From: Ana Alvarado If you think suspending Zaff will increase your motivation, go ahead. Keeping Jax awake is what keeps me motivated.

Interesting Tradeoff

We don’t want pets that have been sexualized through simple operant conditioning.

Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience. She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was more right than it knew: experience isn’t merely the best teacher; it’s the only teacher. If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

“How can paper tell a story?” “It is an art that we Europeans know. When a man speaks, we make marks on the paper. When another man looks at the paper later, he sees the marks and knows what sounds the first man made. In that way the second man can hear what the first man said.” Jijingi remembered something his father had told him about old Gbegba, who was the most skilled in bushcraft. “Where you or I would see nothing but some disturbed grass, he can see that a leopard had killed a cane rat at that spot and carried it off,” his father said. Gbegba was able to look at the ground and know what had happened even though he had not been present. This art of the Europeans must be similar: those who were skilled in interpreting the marks could hear a story even if they hadn’t been there when it was told.

Moseby gave a sermon every seven days, on the day devoted to resting and brewing and drinking beer.

Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, “On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance.”

And if I’d grown up with access to all the video footage, there’d have been no way for me to assign more emotional weight to any particular day, no nucleus around which nostalgia could accrete.

Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children’s ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do about my imperfect, organic memories. People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

But I’ve certainly spent time in the presence of people who kept lifelogs, and I could make use of what they’d recorded. While all lifelogging software has privacy controls in place, most people also grant basic sharing rights: if your actions were recorded in their lifelog, you have access to the footage in which you’re present.

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

With Remem providing only the unvarnished facts, my image of myself will never stray too far from the truth in the first place.

You'll still only hear the perspectives in the script that you prefer when watching the actors in the film

I’ve been recording everything since I started working on this project, and I’ve consulted the recordings repeatedly when writing this. But in my choice of which details to include and which to omit, perhaps I have just constructed another story.

It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

According to Hindu mythology, the universe was created with a sound: “om.” It is a syllable that contains within it everything that ever was and everything that will be.

If we want to give an AI any major responsibilities, then it will need good answers to these questions. That’s not going to happen by loading the works of Kant into a computer’s memory; it’s going to require the equivalent of good parenting.

Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, a book about the impact of the written word on oral cultures;

If we say that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds. If you could somehow examine a multitude of Martin Luthers across many worlds, I think you’d have to go far afield to find one that didn’t defy the church, and that would say something about the kind of person he was.