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Nude Clanking Down a Staircase

By on July 3, 2011 in Toulouse Le Grandfig

female cyborgYou had to hand it to Wanda the Happy Ending Pleasure Borg; sure, she was two-thirds titanium alloy with Buckyball Graphite Tetro-Carbon piping, but she had a sweet disposition, a lovely singing voice, and legs that just didn’t stop.

She had hydraulic servo-motors in places where normal cyborgs could only dream of servo-motors, if you get my meaning. Her lung capacity and subsequent drawing power are also, rather, uh … bracing and give truth to her name. She was originally designed to work at the brothels on Bivalve 12, famed for the race of Silicoids. (You know, the glowing creatures with blood like lava and equipment harder than diamond.)

So don’t let her touch you with her hands.

From Toulouse Le Grandfig in the Land of the Future.

Alltop is also bracing. Originally published, June 2007.

When Roombas Attack: The Singularity

By on June 27, 2011 in But is it art?, singularity

My next novel has a comedic take on the Technological Singularity, so I thought I’d start to do some more posts about the topic here on The Skwib. The following video is a kind-of companion piece for a Time article that came out earlier this year about the Singularity and one of its main proponents, Ray Kurzweil. It is presented by the Earth’s “premier science comedian”. I’m not sure what the hell that means, but it is funny!

The Frankenstein myth predates the story told by Mary Shelly, incidentally. A form of it is as old as Prometheus, in which the Titan steals the secrets of civilization and gives it to human beings. (Zeus doesn’t like this very much, and punishes Prometheus by forcing him to donate his liver to a large avian of the family accipitridae on a daily basis.) In Jewish folklore there is the golem, which is created from clay and in many accounts destroys its creator, largely because it’s so difficult to find a decent corned beef sandwich in medieval European cities.

In most of these stories, at heart is the idea of human hubris — an overweening pride or arrogance that defies the gods, or in modern stories, reality. Well, that and dodgy meals.

Hubris has always been a component of the human heart. Without it we wouldn’t try to create things, but if we rely on it too much, we can get ourselves in trouble. Most of our problems with technology stem from this irrational confidence that we can control our own creations — something that is manifestly untrue. If you ever get the feeling that our technology is out of control, you’re not alone. And you’re more sane than those who believe technology is something we command at will. It’s a bias we all have, because it’s rational.

We can control individual technologies, in the absence of other technologies and systems. But once they start to interact, they become more difficult to understand. The very rationality that allowed us to create science and technology in the first place now undercuts our ability to understand the gestalt of many technologies and systems interacting. That is not to say we shouldn’t TRY to understand them, but it is to say we should show more humility with the further creation of new technologies.

I will now demonstrate a complete lack of humility by inserting a cartoon of a monkey pirate. You didn’t see that coming did you?

Alltop is funnier than monkeys, pirates and robots combined.

Municipal Investment Strategies for the Technological Singularity

By on May 9, 2011 in Odd Science, Parody & Satire, Skwibby fiction

The Singularity ArtsAn Open Letter to Town Council

Dear Councilors:
Your town may have an emergency plan, a development plan, a health plan — it may even have a plan for how to fix the potholes (though I doubt it).

But does it have a plan for how to respond to the technological singularity? Is it preparing for all the new economic opportunities? I suspect not.

Now, some have complained that that technological singularity is the “rapture for nerds”, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is the municipal investment opportunity of the ages! Forward-thinking municipal governments can start preparing now, and be ready to reap the rewards of the point in human history when human intelligence is not only exceeded by machine intelligence, but when human intelligence is merged with (or eradicated by) machine intelligence.

You’re thinking: “well, sure I’d love to help get ready for this, but realistically, how do we plan? We don’t even know if regular flesh-and-blood humans will be around to experience the singularity.”

Of course we will!

Ray Kurzweil believes that we’ll be able to model the human brain by 2029, and create algorithms based on those models to allow computers to gain human-like intelligence. But is anyone working on a way for computers to go to bars and get drunk and hook up with other drunken computers so that they can “make a mistake” and then squirt out new computers? I doubt it.

So there you go: invest in light manufacturing. There will definitely be a need for humans to help create our new overlords.

But there’s so many other possibilities! What if the technological singularity is based more on nanotechnology than it is on the gross, large-scale electronics of our current era? Here too, prescient town councils can make good investments for the future. It will certainly be easier for the new machine overlords to replicate themselves in mass quantities if our human immune systems do not fight them at every stage. This leads to so many possible avenues of fruitful research: immune-suppressing drugs, radiation, surgery, bio-engineering, even psychology might (finally) prove itself useful by producing a technique by which humans could allow supra-intelligent nanomachines to use their bodies to reproduce.

We’re only scratching the surface here, obviously.

Many municipalities invest much of their resources in policing and this is an area where they will find huge savings, but only if there is a good interface between humans and our new machine overlords. Apart from the aforementioned research opportunities, municipal governments should begin looking at some kind of cybertronic peace officer corps now, to acclimatize citizens early — after all, an easily controlled citizenry is a productive citizenry! This could be as simple as implanting some kind of control chip in police headgear (hats, caps, flak helmets) to something more radical, such as embedding a semi-live police officers in a mechanical exoskeleton armed with rapid-fire pistols and a loudspeaker-augmented voice.

Municipal leaders should prepare for the darker predictions of how a technological singularity plays out. What if the new machine overlords simply wish to rid themselves of the human population?

There is a simple solution for this problem, and it is summed up in two words: rotating knives.

We’re pretty sure that would never happen, but even if it does, what if you’re the first town to think of it, and sell the process?

Think of the revenue. You could cut taxes. Contact us for more details.

Yours Truly,

Genghis Toon,
President,
Oberdyne Industries, “The Helping Corporation”

Alltop has an investment strategy for funny. Originally appeared on Grasping for the Wind, Aug. 9, 2010.

6 End Theories of Twitter

By on March 7, 2011 in General Skwib

Waiting for Tweetnarok - twitter bird with viking helmetHow will Twitter end the world? There are six competing theories. Perhaps one day religious scholars, apocalypse researchers and other gloomy intellectuals may agree which of these theories is correct, or maybe some genius will provide a Unified End Theory of Twitter. Until that happy day, we will have to simply forearm ourselves with knowledge of these theories, and grimly soldier on.

6:The Twitterpocalypse

This is a re-imagining of the popular (and much-hoped for) Christian End of Days. In this cosmological terminal point, the Son of God will return to our planet and use Twitter to inform us of who has been naughty and who has been nice. Anyone who retweets Christ will be saved, and naturally, he expects you to follow him back too. Failure to do so will prevent you from enjoying the Rapture, which means you’ll have to endure the painful Un-Twittering process. (Known in other Christian eschatology as the Tribulation.)

5: Big Twitter Is Following You

This theory posits a dystopian world-government ruled by a troika of control-freaks using Twitter to watch our every move and control our very thoughts. I don’t personally believe this end theory for one moment, but it is presented here in the interests of accuracy. These theorists may be thinking of Facebook, not Twitter.

4:The Tweetularity

Twitter will eventually become so overrun with bots following one another that human communication will be rendered impossible. Some even posit that these bots will consume all of the Earth’s resources so they can inform one another of viagra and cialis sales. Humans will be rendered obsolete, except as a kind of biological battery and sex drug storage device.

3: Tweetlander

There can be only one! Each Twitter user has the potential to become not only immortal, but omniscient as well. The only catch? You have to cut off the heads of every other Twitter user. So clearly, the number of followers you have doesn’t really matter, and in fact, may be kind of awkward. On the plus side, “unfollowing” could be a bit more satisfying.

2: Peak Twitter

A terrifying prospect — exponentially rising populations, global warming, water shortages, and growing costs of fossil fuels will not only cause massive food shortages, but Twitter servers will not be able to handle the traffic associated with the crisis. Imagine a year of the Fail Whale. (And no cheeseburgers, or any other kind of sustenance.)

1: Tweetnarök

This esoteric theory suggests Twitter will bring about the end of the world in a series of battles and disasters, all set to Wagner. The celebrities with the most followers will face off in a final battle to decide who will be our champion, and try to save the world. For some reason, the danger comes in the form of a world-eating snake. Unless Stephen Fry wins, I suspect this is the end for us all.

Alltop thinks it should follow me @markarayner. Great Twitter bird illustration by Matt Hamm.