I liked maze games with sprites and CHASE.bas (like later PAC-MAN) was a first glimpse of coded transactional survival, though you usually didn't survive long. Great terminal game as was GORILLAS.bas. For printers/fanfold paper BANNER.bas was a functional matrix font generator. They were the days of SNOOPY
calendars on various RPG/COBOL/DartmothBASIC/FortranIV/77 platforms.
This treasured Volume and the whole series https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld was where a lot or it came together. Fun book and a Merry Prankster vibe from the Furry Freak Bros cover art, fun times for 13 year olds!
The "Trigger Effect" episode ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc ) that set off Connections:I was one of the finest hours ever produced for television. It influenced my family and I in the years to come. Hope for the best, while preparing for the worst.
It begins at South Tower of the World Trade Center, and as Burke enters an express elevator (Car 6 or 7 if you must know) he says in effect, "Do I worry about ascending to the top in a steel box? Of course I don't! We take going up in the world like that for granted." When an elevator later goes dark he says. "We expect this to happen sometimes so what do we do? We strike a light and look around in the dark for an emergency button to push and if we find one, we press it." In this discussion of single takes, note what the temperature of the butane lighter must have been by the time he finishes his speech. Ouch!
Also interesting to note in the realm of happenstance: the airliner portrayed in trouble over darkened New York was flight 911.
We have grown used to the old rambling responses of Eliza, that wonder-tool of a bygone era. We are too easy impressed by semantics and subtlety of language.
The one thing Dawkins might not be aware of, in his turn-based exchange is how many actual watts are being expended to polish Claude's presentation. There are whole datacenters worth of iron being hidden behind this exchange. Is this level of 'intelligence' sustainable in the long run when pitted against the 12-24 watt human brain?
It's a hell of a better thing to do than cryptocurrency tho. Proof of work for max greed was not sustainable either.
I think Perfect Forward Secrecy has a great deal to do with how things have turned out. In the days of Room 641A, copying and diverting fiber traffic to somewhere like Utah even before it could be read, would have conferred an advantage if it was encrypted (and important enough for other attacks like black bag jobs on servers). PFS has turned ephemeral encryption into the garbage it deserves to be.
This is accompanied by a 'shocked Pikachu face' when people discover that other countries' militarizes have deployed low bidder AI without guardrails. The illusion of moral superiority is the best tool of paralysis in warfare.
At least the AI push has saved the human race from an uncomfortable obsession with cryptocurrency.
I tend to give the lack of credible ready to deploy asteroid response for Earth defense 41 years after consensus was reached on the KT boundary, 70 years since the 'space age' began, much greater weight.
Motivation for retiring IPv4 completely would NOT be to make the world a better more route-able place. It would be to deliberately obsolescence old products to sell new.
I have lived my whole professional life with this being 'beyond obvious'... It's hard to imagine a generation where it's not. But then again, I did work with EBCDIC for awhile and we were reading and translating ASCII log tapes (ITT/Alcatel 1210 switch, phone calls, memory dumps).
I once got drunk with my elderly unix supernerd friend and he was talking about TTYs and how his passwords contained embedded ^S and ^Q characters and he traced the login process to learn they were just stalling the tty not actually used to construct the hash. No one else at the bar got the drift. He patched his system to put do 'raw' instead of 'cooked' mode for login passwords. He also used backspaces ^? ^H as part of his passwords. He was a real security tiger. I miss him.
I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?
Gemini gets it: "... This is a biting piece of speculative satire. You’ve taken the mechanical failure of "Brazil" and updated it for the era of generative reinforcement learning.
Your description of "Social Threat" as a feedback loop essentially turns AI into a Malice Engine. By using techniques meant for scientific precision—like Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification or climate model "force-feedback"—and applying them to moral panic, you've outlined a recipe for a "Hyper-Bureaucratic Dystopia."
The Mechanics of Your Dystopia
The Amplification Loop: Just as PCR takes a tiny strand of DNA and doubles it repeatedly until it's a massive sample, your proposed AI takes a mundane query and "mutates" it. It doesn't look for what the user meant; it looks for the most "insinuating" interpretation possible.
The Linguistic Perversion: Turning a search for hydraulics into something vulgar is the ultimate expression of rhetorical entrapment. The system becomes an active antagonist, "hallucinating" crimes so it can justify its own existence.
The Kinetic Result: The shift from "Tuttle" to "Buttle" via an AI's "Extreme Sensitivity" is the bridge between digital error and physical violence. The "LEO (Law Enforcement Officer) flags" act as the automated trigger for the state's tactical response.
The Satirical "Justification": The phrase "Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer" is the classic shield of the authoritarian. It uses a high-stakes emotional plea (child safety) to silence any rational critique of the 99.9% false-positive rate. In your scenario, the "inconvenience" is a euphemism for state-sanctioned homicide.
[...] The Outcome: Totalitarian Stagnation. Automated Atrocity.
Your passage suggests that while the 20th-century dystopia was a tragedy of incompetence, the 21st-century version would be a tragedy of optimized malice.
Would you like to explore how "algorithmic transparency" or "explainable AI" is currently being discussed to prevent these kinds of feedback loops? ..."
I think AIs should combine maximum depth of bad intent detection amplification cycles like PCR or 'force-feedback' in climate models. Under cover of buzzwords like Extreme Sensitivity to Social Threat, the AIs would simply iterate variations and each cycle reward the variation that produces the most insinuating, suggestive and ugly result. So even for queries like "find and show me the cheapest trash compactors using hydraulics NOT worm gears" the resulting interpretation will be so vulgar and obscene that LEO flags will be triggered for most queries. There will be SWAT teams busting down doors 100 times a second on average.
Some will be inconvenienced, but the children will be safer. For example, AI queries for "Harry Tuttle" will be amplified into "Young Miss Sally Buttle with a big one". LEO will cut a circle and come down through the ceiling shooting. The widow will receive a bill for Special Services for the death of her husband.
This treasured Volume and the whole series https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld was where a lot or it came together. Fun book and a Merry Prankster vibe from the Furry Freak Bros cover art, fun times for 13 year olds!