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"All fiction is propaganda, and the fiction we like is the propaganda we believe in, and the fiction we don't like is the propaganda we don't believe in."
- Samuel R. Delany
 |
| Ava | ||
| A piece of learning software. |
Anton has an unusual job; he provides input for an endlessly curious artificial intelligence used, as far as he can tell, to make inventories of the most obscure objects imaginable.
| Antar had met children who were like that: Why? What? When? Where? How? But children asked because they were curious; with these AVA/Iie systems it was something else - something that he could only think of as a simulated urge for self-improvement. .. She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen… Once she'd wrung the last meaningless detail out of him, she'd give the object on her screen a final spin, with a bizarrely human smugness, before propelling it into horizonless limbo of her memory. |
| From The Calcutta Chromosome,
by Amitav Ghosh. Published by Avon Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
Many people spend their time as servants to automated machines (like factory workers); how would you feel if asked to be a tutor for machines? Especially given the fact that once you had poured in everything that you knew, that teaching could be duplicated in seconds for as often as it was needed? Every moment you taught, you were bringing yourself closer to obsolescence.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Calcutta Chromosome
More Ideas
and Technology by Amitav Ghosh
Tech news articles related to The Calcutta Chromosome
Tech news articles related to works by Amitav Ghosh
Ava-related
news articles:
- Amazon Mechanical Turk - Humans Help Slow Computers
- Smart Goggles Identify, Remember What You See
- Kinect@home Needs Your Help Identifying Objects
- AI Trainers: Assisting Artificial Intelligences
- SCiO Scanner Wants You To Be Spock
- Venezuelans Teaching Your Self-Driving Car
- AI4Mars Wants Your Help Driving On Mars
| AI Robots Excel At Trash Sorting And Recycling |
| Dall-E 2 Creates Art To Order |
| Do AIs Create Their Own Language? |
| Google Engineer Convinced LaMDA Chatbot Is Sentient, Is Sent Home |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'... the two pairs of waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'THE SPACE VESSEL was traveling swiftly… For over five thousand years they had Voyaged on and on.’
'They circled the vast audiences, dancing, twittering, chirping...'
'The sun-quilt was a patchwork of colors and materials on the inward side, but silvered on the outward side...'
'Jim, I saw them reduce four of my doctors and nurses into those little cubes!'
'Fats Jordan was hanging in the center of the Big Glass Balloon, hugging his guitar to his massive black belly above his purple shorts..'
'When confronted by hills, or rough terrain, it did not stop, but simply slowed until the task demanded equaled its steady power output.'
'... the brain is no longer subjected to the accustomed pull, and it expands slightly in all directions.'
