SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #91 New Moon of June 10, 2002 Contents copyright 2002 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* It looks like I'll be doing jury duty later this month. That got me to thinking. Might some future society use artificial intelligence for juries? AI constructs could be ideal jurors in the sense of how they weigh evidence and follow instructions. Also, any prejudices and biases (including "good" biases such as "Innocent Until Proven Guilty") could be controlled and accounted for. In a way it could be an ideal situation. But there may be a downside in that such a jury wouldn't be free to act as a check on out-of-control governments. As it is now, if some law is too unfair the jury may ignore it and say Not Guilty, even if they're not supposed to. I think that's called "jury nullification". An artificial jury may be programmed not to do that. I'm assuming that any society that tries to build artificial juries knows what it's doing in terms of the technical details. Software bugs here could be devastating. So even after the initial development is done and AI juries look good, there will probably be a rather lengthy transition period during which all AI jury verdicts are reviewed by appeals courts. And since it may take a while for the public to come to trust AI juries, there should probably be a provision whereby parties to a case can request an organic jury, at least for major matters. They would probably want to provide some incentive to try the newfangled AI jury, but it should not be so great that people would perceive it as being forced. This has probably been covered already in science fiction, even if no examples come to my mind at the moment. ********************* In a future where some cyborgs have the ability to output video images of anything they see or remember or imagine, would such beings be prohibited from viewing copy-protected material? ********************* Once upon a time there was a huge giant who lived in a huge castle in a magical kingdom far away. He was the terror of the whole countryside for miles around, stomping out whole villages and devouring people and livestock and everything. But he also liked to read, and he had a giant microscope with which he could read normal-sized books. And one day after stomping a college flat he noticed that the ruins of the library were full of books. So he gathered up as many as he could and took them back to his castle to read. Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for the non-giant people in the vicinity), one of the books was a science book. And it had an explanation of the square-cube law, which says in effect that larger things are relatively weak and fragile because the amount of weight to be supported and moved around grows as the volume (the cube of the linear dimensions) while the strength of things like muscle and bone only grows as the cross-sectional area (the square). So since the giant was about 10 times as tall as a normal human he should be able to move around about as well as a normal human could move in a 10-g gravity field, which isn't very well at all. When the giant read that and realized the implications, it broke the spell that had been letting him function up until then, and he collapsed in a heap and never stomped another village or devoured another villager again. So that is why there are no giants terrorizing that kingdom any more, and why the wizards keep all the science books locked up and never let good magical creatures read them. And that is also why people in magical kingdoms aren't taught very much science. ********************* "This is a result of the gleemptothroople not being faligrand enough to allow hemptomorphy." "I think you're wrong." "You have no basis for saying that. I just made those words up so nobody else but me knows what they mean. So even if I'm wrong, you have no way of knowing it." "Oh." ********************* In one of the last X-Files episodes one character kills a couple of people by means of psychic powers. The FBI agents see enough to be convinced of it. Eventually they manage to get the guy to turn off his powers and live a more or less normal life. But they don't seem to be holding him accountable for the deaths. Even if the person didn't have full voluntary control of his powers so the deaths were legally not murder, wouldn't they be involuntary manslaughter or something? Maybe the hard part would be the trial: Showing the jury what little physical evidence there was, the FBI guy describing some of the weird stuff he saw, and so on. They might try to get the guy to demonstrate his powers in court, although that could raise Fifth Amendment issues. So maybe they figured they couldn't make a case. But be that as it may, it reminds me that I've often wondered about the mundane aftermath of horror movies in general. After the vampire or mummy or whatever rampages around, immune to ordinary lead bullets, and is eventually felled by silver or a crucifix or whatever, what do the cops write in the Police Log about it? Do the neighbors of the museum that failed to adequately secure the ancient artifacts that bring the mummy to life sue for whatever havoc the mummy wreaks? What do the doctors write in medical journals about the effects of vampire bites? Do people go on living in the subdivision built on the old Indian burial ground, or do they tear it down and give it back to the Indians, and if they do give it back, who pays for it all? And so on, on and on. Why aren't more people thinking about this kind of thing? ********************* If you've ever seen film of old nuclear bomb tests, you may have seen a sort of ring-shaped wave spreading out along the ground ahead of the fireball. I think it's because the shock wave travels faster through rock (or water) than through air, so it kicks up dirt and debris ahead of the expanding fireball. But what of explosions in outer space? If there's no planetary surface there, there should be nothing for such a shock wave to travel through, so you shouldn't see the effect. But in many science fiction movies in which there are big explosions in space you see the ring-shaped wave anyway. Traditionally the ring spreads in a more or less horizontal plane as seen by the audience, although in some recent movies this has varied. But horizontal or vertical or slantwise, why do we see it at all? I think what's happening is that the special-effects people are working, directly or indirectly, from that old stock footage of nuke tests, and don't know that the expanding ring wouldn't be there if the explosion were in outer space. So they put it in. There are other differences between explosions in an atmosphere and in outer space, and they probably get those wrong as well. But do non- technical people in the audience know the difference? Probably not. ********************* The thought has occurred to me that if I was rich and powerful I could start National Stay Home From The Movies Day, probably about monthly, when people are encouraged to just sit around the house and read the paper or watch TV or whatever. I'd publicize it, sneak it into the scripts of TV shows, bribe newspaper columnists into promoting it, and otherwise make it part of the culture. Then I could go to the movies on those days and not have to hassle with crowds. Unless, of course, too many other people got the same idea. Of course if I were rich and powerful enough to really do all that, I could probably just arrange private screenings of whatever movies I wanted to see. But part of the fun of going to a movie is making an occasion out of going out, and I would miss that. ********************* One of the current problems afflicting our society is the high cost of medical care. This leads me to wonder whether some future technological revolution might send medical costs into a nosedive, sort of like what happened with the cost of computers over the last couple of decades. I don't see any immediate prospects of that, but then people in the 1940's and 50's probably couldn't see the silicon revolution either. In the 1950's they were putting transistors on printed circuit boards, and some engineers were thinking of combining the two concepts to make complex circuitry out of transistor material, but I don't think more than a very few people noticed the trend at the time. So what breakthrough might even now be slowly being born in some obscure lab somewhere? ********************* I saw that new Star Wars movie recently. There's all kinds of plotting and intrigue that I didn't quite follow, but one thing that stuck in my mind was that Yoda mentioned an old prophecy that some new person will "bring balance to the Force". So now I'm wondering about the Force. Some of the Jedi mentioned that the Force has been getting weaker. Why? Does it go through cycles? Or is it because the Jedi have been neglecting the Dark Side? If the Force was active before sentience evolved, the Dark Side may be more primal, because much of pre-sentient life is lived on a predator- prey basis. The Light Side would have had little to do. In many species parents care for their young until they're mature enough to go out on their own, and in some species there's altruism among kin because that helps similar genes to survive, and the Light Side may have evolved in those situations. But outside of that, most animal life would tend to follow the Dark Side. So maybe it's less like Good and Evil, and more like the divisions within the human brain: There are the higher thought centers, and then there's the primal Old Brain from our animal past. And the Old Brain is still part of us and can't be gotten rid of, even though it can usually be guided and, to some degree, restrained. So maybe trying to use the Light Side of the Force while refusing to touch the Dark Side is like trying to remove someone's Old Brain. It just won't work. And that's what the old prophecies about "bringing balance to the Force" are about. Someone needs to do big stuff with the Dark Side to bring the energies into balance. If this is the case, what can be done about it? Acknowledge the Dark Side in all of us, and let a bit of it out under proper safeguards? Maybe that could be done via some of the more violent sports (football, hockey, boxing) and by games involving deceit (such as poker), as well as certain kinds of comedy. We all have both sides of the Force within us. Perhaps the Light Side is like a pilot on an airplane, while the Dark Side is the engines. You need both, and either without the other is useless. ********************* Some of the people to whom I mentioned my theories about the Dark Side of the Force say that it isn't that way according to Lucas. But I've seen people starting to treat the Force as a real-world religious concept. If that trend continues, I suspect Lucas and company will lose control of Force theology. He might be able to keep others from using the name "The Force", at least for a while, but he won't be able to stop variations of the concept from being talked about and even used in ritual. So even if Lucas has a Force theology all mapped out, and in his system there is no place for the Dark Side in the souls of non-evil people, that might not continue to be the case in the real world. ********************* If a time traveler were to grab a science fiction fan from the early 1950's into a science fiction convention today, how would he react? As he browsed the dealer tables in the huckster room would he be more amazed at the technology of things like laser pointers and hologram jewelry and DVD's, or dismayed by the dealers selling so much stuff that isn't books? ********************* People in another forum have been discussing "panspermia", the theory that life on Earth was somehow seeded from elsewhere. Meanwhile something else brought up the matter of genetic incompatibility. That got me to thinking about what if some interstellar civilization had been seeding the galaxy with life, using a set of standard prototypes. Which planet got exactly what would depend on local conditions, but it was always something from their Standard Library. But what if Earth life hadn't seen seeded, but had started independently? Imagine what happens when the planet-seeding aliens find Earth, which already has life incompatible with what they've been spreading around. Their ethics or religion or whatever forbid wiping it out and reseeding, but they don't want Earth's non-standard life to spread either. So they quarantine the planet. So far, so good, since few planets, seeded or not, develop intelligence. It just means Earth will never be one of their colonies or vacation resorts or whatever. But then, against the odds, Earth develops intelligence. So now they have a problem: Non-standard intelligent life. They can declare us off-limits for interstellar tourists and such, and they can refrain from helping up develop spaceflight, but their beliefs may forbid confining an intelligent species once it starts to spread. So what happens if and when we do develop interstellar travel? All the beings from planets seeded with "Standard Library" life can breathe each other's air and eat much of each other's foods, like in the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, even if they look alien to one another. But Earth humans are odd man out, on a deep chemical level. So what happens then? ********************* Question: Did the universe exist first with consciousness arising from some process therein, or did consciousness exist first and somehow dream up the universe? And is discourse in the realm of science required to start from the former assumption? ********************* As I was walking past a big hardware store a few days ago I noticed a display of lighting fixtures labeled as "Vanity Lights". That got me to wondering if there is such a thing as a "Humility Light", and if so, what it might be like. For example, would it be a color that's unflattering to most people's skin? Would it be mounted at an angle to cast ugly shadows? How else might a Humility Light differ from a Vanity Light? ********************* I've been reading about a new cosmological theory involving something called "branes", short for "membranes". Supposedly our universe is in one three-dimensional (plus time) brane, and there's another one some distance away in some higher-dimensional space, and they move relative to one another. And what we think of as the Big Bang was actually a collision between the two, after which they moved apart again. They may collide again, hopefully not until this universe is well into something like heat death, at which time there'll be another influx of stuff like another Big Bang. It's sort of cyclical, in that this can happen over and over, each time destroying the old and starting something new. Something about this gave me an image of God (as traditionally portrayed in European art) clapping His hands to start each new cycle. Maybe God claps, then watches worlds being born, living, and dying in the palms of His hands, then eventually claps again to end the old and start anew. ********************* One writeup of the brane theory said that the various particles we currently know about are all constrained to stay in one brane. That got me to wondering about things we don't know about, including ghosts and spirits. Are they stuck in our three-dimensional universe like physical matter, or are they free to wander the space between? And if they do go into those other realms, what might they do there? ********************* Some mornings when the sun shines in through the front window and makes it hard to see the computer screen, I think about bricking the window up. That's kind of an odd thing to do in a wood-frame building, but I suppose it's theoretically possible. I might have to reinforce the window frame to take the weight, but it probably could be done. But I suspect the landlord would have things to say about that, probably not favorable. And there are other times I want the view from the window, and I couldn't have that if it was all bricked up. So I'll probably just stay with the blinds that came with the place. ********************* One of the commonly heard arguments against the death penalty is that we can't undo mistakes. But what if that were not the case? What if the cryonics people were to get to the point of being able to reliably freeze people and then revive them later? Then we could simply freeze all executed criminals. Most would probably end up sitting in cold storage forever, but if there's new evidence in some particular case and it turns out an innocent person has been executed, they could be revived. Also, if we ever get to the point of being able to reliably rehabilitate criminals, we could revive all those executed, guilty or not, and give them a second chance. The Revenge faction might not like that, but by that time they may be outvoted by the Rehabilitation factions. ********************* This issue's New Moon is a solar eclipse, partially visible from here. That reminded me of this: Projections Last night I went to the Planetarium. They were doing a travelogue: "The heavens as seen from Oz, Trantor, Middle Earth, Lankhmar, Hollywood, And other legendary places." As an added attraction they had images of UFO's: Lights, disks, streaks, and various other forms Of mysterious heavenly apparitions. But something departed from the script -- A spot of light grew and grew and grew Until a door opened and a Thing emerged. "Our home planet is overcrowded," it said, "And we want you to put a brighter bulb in your projector To make our world larger and roomier." "But that would exceed our budget And besides you don't have tickets." A bureaucrat forever. Suddenly, with a flurry of tentacles into a projector previously unnoticed, The attendant was extinguished And with a quick change of slides A more cooperative one created. Request granted, farewell, and off into the artificial night Leaving me to wonder: Which projector am I coming from? Thomas G. Digby written 0200 8/01/74 entered 1205 4/09/92 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to almost nothing in between. Any post can spark a new flurry at any time. If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The zine content is the same for both. 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