The Stratosphere Lounge | Episode 342

Regarding AI etc. …

Science and Science Fiction are not related fields. They sound similar and one playfully masquerades as the other but they are quite different things.

Science Fiction is entertainment and I love that kind of entertainment but it’s the fiction of imagination and nothing more. Science Fiction might reference some real science when it is convenient but it also ignores the hell out of real science when it’s not convenient.

Sometimes Science Fiction is a blind squirrel that finds a nut. If that squirrel lives in an oak tree it’s not at all surprising that he’s going to find an acorn on the ground below. Arthur C. Clarke extrapolated satellites but he did not invent them any more than our squirrel invented the acorn. When the need for satellites came along they were invented. Predicting that need is no more supportive of a fiction than the idea of looking on the ground beneath an oak tree is likely to yield an acorn.

Real science on the other hand is a process. It’s the method we use to learn how things work. Eventually that understanding of how something works leads to the creation of new things. Without understanding how electricity works we could never have created cheap computers. You cannot allow fiction to impinge on this process at all. When you do, you get things like Climate Change Alarmism.

It’s very important to see the world for what it really is. Not what you hope, dream or dread it will be. Imagination is imagination, science is science.

In reality in the real universe if there were such a thing every time someone uses the Transporter System in Star Trek … They die and someone else is re-assembled by the supposed technology. Because whatever made that person who they are is destroyed in the disassembly of their components. Every single hormone, organ, and cell is destroyed by disassembly. There’s no way around that. Reassembling those components does not reconstitute the original person. It creates a mimicry of the original person but that original person DIED from being taken apart.

Because if you cannot move the whole person intact from point A to point B then disassembling that person down to his basic components kills him.

The same goes for ‘transferring’ your consciousness from its organic home to an inorganic one. Even if it were possible, whatever might exist in that inorganic box it’s not you and it’s not human. It is a mimicry of you.

It doesn’t have glands. It has no algorithmic equivalent of glands. There is no engineering problem that will give it glands. Glands are a biochemical factor not an electronic one.

You should be very, very glad it doesn’t have glands or the algorithmic equivalent of glands. Glands are regulated by a complex feedback loop system we don’t even really understand. If you try to give a machine something like an electronic glandular system it must also learn to use that system, the same way you did. By gestating in a womb, being born, going through all the continuing overlapping stages of development and maturation where it becomes an adult capable of dealing with glandular output.

Many physically mature adult human beings cannot deal properly with their own (either evolved or designed, take your pick) glandular output. Even if you somehow simulated the maturation process and accelerated that to electronic speeds, you would have something unknown and unpredictable when you unhooked it and let it loose on the world. The same as you have something unknown and unpredictable when your child is born and you do your best to raise him or her.

The last thing this planet needs is juvenile delinquent hyper-fast thinking robots running all over the place. Things are bad enough with humans and Leftism. Imagine a world where Leftist robots are a thing.

There will never be anything analogous to human level artificial intelligence or if so, it’s so far out in the future that it’s not even worth speculating over. Except in fiction.

Which brings us right back to where I started.

Neil Armstrong died in 2012. I’m sort of glad that he didn’t live to see what the Boy Scouts of America have become. I was very involved in Boy Scouts as a kid and probably even more so with my own kids. It sickens me to see Wokism taking this great institution down.