[a website for the Editor and Narrator of the Circo del Herrero series]
Yeah, what they said:
“Terminator, The Matrix, Ex Machina, Robocop, I, Robot, 2001, A Space Odyssey. They all follow the formula of: Man makes machine, machine destroys man. It’s a sci-fi trope. But what if we’re wrong about how we will feel about our creations? I have a feeling it might go much differently. I think mankind will one day go extinct, but that we won’t mind.
Heresy, right? Millions of years of evolution have created an intense drive for self-preservation. The idea that we might willingly be replaced — even replace ourselves — is unthinkable. Except that we do it on a smaller scale every generation. We have children, invest in their upbringing, marvel at all they do and accomplish, all the ways that they are more incredible than we were, and then we move off and leave room for them.
Only because of our infernal mortality, you might say. Well, I don’t think immortality is something we’ve thought through very well. Medical science might provide individual immortality one day, but it will only be immortality against disease and age. Accidents can and will still happen. In this scenario, I see the immortal living lives of pure abject terror, afraid of venturing out. We wager according to what we can afford to lose. I take chances with my remaining 40 years on Earth that I might not take if I had 4,000 or 40,000 years to live. I haven’t seen this conundrum raised before, but the effects will be very real. As our lives are extended, we will hold them more dear, and so live them less fully.
There’s more to consider: Is there truly a difference between making room for progeny and living 400,000 or 4,000,000 years? What about four BILLION years? We can’t call it immortality without thinking about truly large numbers. Imagine a life lived over 4,000 years. Are you really the same person? Every cell in your body will have turned over several times, and memories of anything that happened thousands of years ago will be crowded out by the more recent. Now imagine 40,000 years of this life. 400,000. At some point, the reflex to NOT DIE runs up against the reality of very large numbers. Every day might be a sane decision to carry on, but the idea that this is a unified life is challenged by the ability to remember such a life, or be a consistent actor through it.
It may require us attempting these things to learn the truth of them. Or more likely: We may understand the philosophical insanity of immortality long before we acquire the means. Living healthy lives for a century or two seems doable. Being around for billions or trillions of years is either a hellish torture, or just a series of loosely disjointed lives that only have in common a name and a distant past. Which is what generations of people already accomplish.
I think what will change our calculations is the advent of machines who earn our full empathy. I think they will be like unto children for us. In science fiction, we explore with robots something that happens naturally, and that’s the terrifying and awe-inspiring moment when the next generation becomes more powerful than we ever were. They throw a spear further and with more power than we could. They run and jump higher. They raise their kids more beautifully than we did. They do things with fire, and arrowheads, and pottery, and tapestries that we couldn’t imagine.
I’ve watched parents watch their kids with a mix of confusion, awe, and horror. It’s the way a three-year-old navigates a phone more adroitly than her parent. Or how easily a toddler interfaces with a tablet. It was how my father gave birth to someone who could program his VCR just by fiddling with it. Brute force gives way to intuition, gives way to fluency.
…”
[Via]
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
“Books can be skimmed. In this sense, only paintings are superior to books.
A film or television show, although it is visual, cannot be taken at a glance, like a painting. Nor can it be skimmed. It is possible to lose concentration and be distracted, but not move ahead to see what comes next, flip backward to understand something better, or pause for a moment to think.
Programs recorded on videocassettes or DVDs do allow the viewer to scroll back and forth, but exploring them isn’t easy…One becomes impatient exploring the files of a computer; it isn’t easy to get a quick idea of the content.
…
It is easier to find things in books — which is ironic, after Marshall McLuhan’s declaration of the obsolescence of “linear writing.” Nothing requires more “linear reading” than television, tapes, and records. Unlike books (or paintings) they can’t be taken in all at once. They hearken back to the texts of antiquity, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which had to be rolled from one rod to the other in order to be read.
This new-media disadvantage is evident even in direct-mail advertising. A reader may give a printed pamphlet two seconds of attention before he discards it, but there is less chance that the recipient of an unsolicited CD will load and consider it: that would take more than two seconds. Similarly, even at the height of the paperless era, many people prefer to work with printouts rather than onscreen files. But most ironic of all is the printed instruction booklet that comes with so-called cutting-edge electronic equipment. No book requires electronic instructions explaining how to read it.
…
Books are portable. The advantage of the book is that all the other media require two steps to be read: one step to transform the mechanical, magnetic, optical, or electronic signal (received or taped) into something that in turn (the second step) is legible by a human being. Whereas the book is directly legible…
…The true comparison, however, isn’t between the many volumes of an encyclopedia and a single disc, but between the encyclopedia and a complete set of electronic equipment that is not solely dedicated to the reading of that disc.” -Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books.
‘Chiang doesn’t keep a journal in which to jot down his ideas, and he doesn’t dedicate a set time of the day to think. Rather, “the stories I write are usually based on ideas that have been rattling around in my head for years,” he said. “I get plenty of ideas that I lose interest in almost immediately. It’s only when I keep returning to a particular idea again and again over a long period of time do I know that it’s something that might become a story.”
He continues, “Writing is very difficult for me, and so I write very slowly.” That delay is in part due to Chiang’s character development, thinking of how he can blend his stories with the right characters and then bringing together a number of threads.
…
His characters are capable of existing both on and outside the page, and while Chiang’s plots are clearly sci-fi oriented, nothing is unbelievable. “I’m sure there are readers who can’t suspend their disbelief when reading my work,” he wrote. “But I suppose I’m more interested in exploring philosophical questions, and I don’t think fanciful technology helps with that. When philosophers pose thought experiments, I tend to prefer the ones that don’t involve really outlandish premises.”
…
“Every studio passed, telling me they didn’t see this as a movie,” he continued. “That it was too smart, which I began to see as an excuse to pass on something that isn’t a franchise movie.” Heisserer negotiated for the literary rights for one year, and adapted Story of Your Life on spec until he was finally received the go-ahead in 2010. “It has been a slow crawl to get to where we see the movie released,” he said.
But even if Arrival smashes through the box office and awards season—and if advanced reviews are any indication, it will—Chiang doesn’t intend to forget his roots. He still has no desire to ever write a novel, which he first made clear in an email to Kim when the two initially spoke several years ago, writing: “I am not writing a novel. Just to let you know, I am a short story writer.”’
[Via]
