Consume

Consume is a text document stored in the THARMAS terminal.

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Vox Pop #9

From an interview with a protester outside the Institute for Applied Noematics:

Q: So why did you join this protest?

A: Artificial intelligence is inherently dangerous to this planet's ecosystem. Defending that ecosystem is our responsibility.

Q: In which way is artificial intelligence dangerous?

A: I'm not some paranoid idiot imagining Skynet taking over the world, all right? That's science fiction. But what we're talking about here is an artificial intelligence without any of the attachment we have to the natural world. It is not capable of distinguishing between, say, an ore and a tree. Everything's just resources to it. People like Sarabhai or Drennan talk about ethics and philosophy but they all embrace the same extractivist ethos that has brought us to the brink of disaster. Their "intelligent" being would try to optimize the world in its image, and in so doing consume it.

Q: When 4120666f6f6c2073656573206e6f74207468652073616d652074726565207 468617420612077697365206d616e20736565732e

Q: But so far they're saying it's all theoretical.

A: The atom bomb was theoretical at first too. Once something is there, someone's going to use it.

Comments

Miranda Why couldn't they imagine that we might care about the world?

Athena I don't know. Maybe because they were too used to no-one else caring.

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Notes

The translated hex string is the eighth line of "Proverbs of Hell" from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake.