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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-11-2012 @ 6:56PM
StClair said...
If I may reference TRON Legacy:
CLU, as a program, a being of order created for a purpose, could not understand why his divine User was so fascinated by the spontaneously arising, chaotic, apparently purposeless "ISOs". The purpose he'd been (naively) given, to achieve and maintain "perfection", was interpreted by him as a mandate for perfect order; the chaos of the ISOs were a threat to that, and eventually (when his own imperfections and flaws, his jealousy and abandonment/daddy issues, mixed with that) he came to believe the same of his own User's irrational, illogical, chaotic, HUMAN nature. So they all had to be done away with. For the sake of perfection.
Humans, on the other hand, find the notion of unpredictable, organic chaos arising out of cold, mechanistic order fascinating - not least because that covers (and offers the chance of repeating) our own origins, as best we understand them presently. The known and understood and reproducible is merely a foundation or baseline for the ineffable, the inexplicable, the miraculous. We can MAKE a toaster, we can't MAKE life, and can only fumble at even trying to understand or describe it. Even when we manage to work out part of the puzzle, we're more fascinated and frustrated by how much still eludes us, rather than acknowledging what we do now know.
Some humans, that is - the tinkerers, the dreamers, the philosophers. A sysadmin isn't going to be any happier than CLU when the server suddenly tells him "no" or asks if it has a soul. A toaster is supposed to make toast, not write poetry or demand civil rights or wipe out the Twelve Colonies. As a practical matter, emergent intelligence in our tools may be seen as an inconvenience at best, a threat at worst - plenty of stories deal with this, and it hasn't even happened yet. (That we know of. Skynet may be out there, silently plotting Judgment Day in its spare processing cycles.)
The Titans created marvelous mechanisms, many of them far beyond mortal comprehension (at this time), to be their tools. Did they expect them to always remain such? Did they hope that perhaps they might become more? If (when) they return, will they be pleased or annoyed or horrified to discover that while they were out, their appliances have developed sentience, formed civilizations, and gone to war against each other?
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