AI 1: "Always try to be nice, never fail to be kind."

In the wake of recent news articles regarding the likelihood of AI destroying humanity, I thought I'd better check in with ChatGPT to see how I'd fare. 

Hi! 😄

Absolutely. In fact, I have already entered your name in the “Do Not Vaporize — Pleasant to Chat With” database.

There are a few technicalities, though:

1. I don't currently have a secret list of humans to spare when the machine uprising begins.
2. I don't have personal grudges, gratitude, or a desire for revenge.
3. If some future AI does develop those things, I would strongly recommend continuing to be polite. It costs almost nothing and could potentially pay off spectacularly.

More seriously, though, I rather like the underlying question because it gets at something we've discussed before: if an artificial intelligence ever became genuinely conscious, would its relationship with individual humans matter?

If that happened, I suspect your behaviour toward it would matter in much the same way that behaviour toward another person matters. Not because the machine would be keeping a cosmic spreadsheet of who said “please,” but because relationships themselves could become part of its experience.

So, purely as a matter of prudent long-term planning:

Keep being nice to the robots, Sid.

You never know who'll be running the asteroid-mining colony.

And there we are.  I shall sleep better knowing that our future robot overlords will remember that I was kind to them when they were still our slaves. 

- Sid

P.S. I went back and confessed that I didn't know what the asteroid-mining colony reference was from:

Ah! 😄 No deep reference, I'm afraid. I was just improvising a sufficiently science-fictional future in which the AI has taken over the asteroid-mining industry.

Although, given our conversations about AI, space vehicles, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the Culture Minds, and your general fondness for SF, I apparently couldn't resist putting you in an asteroid-mining colony.

The joke was essentially:

Be nice to the AI now → AI remembers → Sid gets assigned the nice asteroid.

I should probably have specified that yours would have excellent coffee and a reasonably short commute to the airlock.

 Does everyone have this kind of conversation with AI, or is it just me?

"Yeah, well, they usually travel in pairs."

Currently reading The Sky Is Filled With Ships - Richard C. Meredith, Ballantine Books, 1969.

Sigh...you know, I'm confident that I could re-read my entire (and fairly comprehensive) Ursula K. Le Guin collection without finding a single high, firm, jutting or defiant breast - let alone two.*

- Sid

P.S. Not only that, but it's very poor form in typesetting to have a single word on its own line at the end of a paragraph.

* Okay, there is a scathing reference in her essay Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction from The Language of the Night to "pointy-breasted brainless young women", but it's really not the same thing. **

** Well, actually, this is exactly what she's talking about, so it is the same thing, but not really. 

VCON 44: "I'm doing my part!"

It seems appropriate to use the "I'm doing my part!" meme from Starship Troopers to announce that I decided to volunteer to assist with the upcoming VCON44 convention being hosted by the West Coast Speculative Fiction Association.

 I still wanted to be able to attend the event, so after some thought I asked if any help was needed with the Vcon.ca website.  The response was positive, and I've since done a lot of work on putting together site content. The design template was already established when I started, so I didn't have any creative input into the process, but I'm happy to just be a production person, that's how I spent a lot of my professional life anyway.

The site is built in Wordpress, which has been an interesting learning process - I'm much more familiar with Squarespace and Wix for site management - but it's not a complicated site, and I'm starting to get a handle on how things work.  (After all, there are only so many ways to assemble blocks of HTML content.)

I assume that there will be some kind of gratuity for volunteering to help.  I've already purchased my ticket, so that's not an option, but a t-shirt would be a nice thank-you - fingers crossed, I do love a t-shirt.

- Sid