Impact!

While searching for music to inspire me, I found something interesting. I've been working on a short story to submit to this anthology that required an overall theme of music and needed to find just the right kind of music to really drive me. But when I asked for suggestions, I found something else to inspire me that I hadn't expected. I found a little piece of my own memory.

The human memory is a funny thing. When I was younger I had a lot of moments that stuck with me forever, never the ones I've wanted to keep. I remember the first time someone spat in my face, the first time I was knocked out in the middle of a scuffle and what it feels like to be flipped upside down by a clothesline. Strangely peaceful, actually.

The thing is, most of these memories should have been knocked out of my head by whatever cataclysmic event befell my skull in the next few seconds. I did not land from that back-flip gracefully. Though people did clap because apparently I tumbled twice over the course of it.

Still not sure how that happened in flag football.

But, the point is, I never remember the really important things like why I would want to write sci-fi and fantasy of all things. Surely, there are more practical genres. I've read that the advances on non-fiction typically eat fiction alive. Which is ironic because that sounds like an excellent Sci-fi story: "A monster devours all cultural artifacts to break the human spirit...then writes a memoir."

I'll call it "I, Morbo"

Anyhow, a search for music led me to a rediscovery of one of my old favorite films and reminded me why I chose such a risky pair of genres. Gattaca is a rarely seen film (so rarely, it came 20 million short of the 30+ million budget). But it really blew me away as a teenager. It was critically acclaimed and yet...no one ever saw it.

Sadly, over the years, I somehow lost the memory of ever watching it. But when I was told to look into the music of one composer I found that he made the soundtrack for that movie.

Gattaca is the best of what sci-fi should be. It's understated in a lot of ways and yet the theme is overwhelming. A world driven by genetics becomes a place where just being you isn't good enough anymore. So a man proves his worth by taking a stolen identity (blood and all) and living up to the profile of perfection he's taken.

Having been a dumpy child and an exceptionally awkward and isolated teenager, I saw a message of "it's okay to be imperfect so long as you keep pushing." And, more importantly, it taught me that sci-fi and fantasy allow you to really study humanity in ways that you're not allowed to do any other way.

Figure this, when you try to study humanity through a more mundane genre, you'll always find that there are too many gray areas to really get a clear picture. Every character will have a message and story of their own, naturally. And you can contrast these characters against each other as much as possible, but you'll never escape one truth. No matter how much you write a human character as a person of their own, they're still human and still just like the rest of us at some base level. Yeah, you'll have different opinions, some of them may know things that others don't. I know what it looks like to watch a car burst into fire while you're riding in it, but I'm sure anyone else who sat in that same seat that I did would have a similar reaction to it.

Well, no, maybe not everyone. I kind of suggested roasting marshmallows while walking home. I'm, admittedly, a bit of a smartass.

But see, in sci-fi and fantasy you can present contrasts that just simply can't exist elsewhere. Someone may not be human, someone may be the only human, some of the humans may be raised in a religion that doesn't exist in this world. Through dealing with the unfamiliar, we can find the things that should be so familiar to us and yet are taken for granted and forgotten.

Spock is allowed to sit back and be bemused by the psychotic apes' behavior without looking like a dick. Vincent, from Gattaca, is allowed to steal someone's entire life and appear completely justified in doing it. Hell, you even root for him. Sure, you could pull a lot of this off in other genres. But the genres I chose are perfect for examining the human condition through inhuman means.

Oh, and Data is allowed to make this scene funny:



Then again, when it's all said and done, maybe this is just my justification for liking a genre that appeals to me. Conversely, I might have just landed on my head too many times as a child and need serious help.

Only time will tell!

Lemmings

When I first set up this blog I considered many different names. Oh it was so long ago, I feel such nostalgia thinking back on those youthful days. I was younger, a whole number lower than I am now, though, sure, you could argue that it was the day just before my birthday so that's technically cheating. Still, I long for the carefree days of last month.

Now I'm older and wiser, I assure you.

And back in those wonderful days I considered many names other than the one I ended up with. One of those names was "The Inspired Lemming", likely inspired by my friend's gaming moniker of "Tsunami Wombat". But at the time I was told it was too silly sounding, unlike the current one where it sound like I do angel dust off of walnut trees. Still, I had my reasons at the time, a grand philosophy if you will:

We are lemmings!

That's right, lemmings, you know the lemming. Well, you think you know the lemming. But let's be honest, most of us have never seen one that didn't get you points when it jumped through the mysterious end-stage door. But I'm talking about the furry little bastards that migrate in giant waves like some sort of cute biblical plague.

You see, lemmings are solitary creatures for the most part. They meet only to mate and tend to stick to themselves, keeping green stashed away in their private little holes for the winter and spending a great deal of time just looking out for number one. Then, when you gather enough of them into one place, they get a little antsy and go on a mass migration, charging along without any clue where they're going.

Probably to try out for Idol: Jakten på en superstjerne (migrating lemmings are Norwegian).

It sounds an awful lot like us. You have a lot of individuals who'll be completely uncaring of anyone else and looking out for themselves above all others. But then, when you amass enough of them together and provide the right stimuli, boom, stampede.

Don't believe me? Watch more TV.

But I'd like to think that not all of us are lemmings, some of us may be inspired lemmings. You know, not every lemming on the planet could migrate at once, some of them have to have some ideas of their own. And, contrary to popular belief, the ones at the head of the pack don't die either. Unless, of course, the player has sacrificed them in order to open a path for the others to get through to that exit door. But I swear there's a perfect score solution for this stage if we look hard for it... without cheat codes!

So, yeah. Everyday you have to keep striving to not follow the crowd *all* the time and to find real solutions for the problems you encounter. Need to take lessons in problem solving? Play more Lemmings. It's ironically a good means of teaching you to think outside the box.



Just remember to bring your umbrella.

Living in fear

Over the last few days, my relatives, a lot of them rabid conservatives, have been talking about how terrified they are of things going on in politics. They have this irrational fear that their world will be completely turned upside down in an instant. Sadly, it's more common for changes to be incremental and gradual over time.

What's going on at a federal level doesn't scare me any. I'm sure parts of it will be inconvenient. But what isn't?

No, the thing that bothers me the most in the last few weeks is going on in Texas. Texas has been doing their 10 year review of the curriculum. It's a simple process, almost simple enough to have been explained by School House Rock, which would likely have been called communist or fascist today...

"I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a- NAZI!!"

You see, for this review they gather a group of advisors and a board and start to go over what they teach in the schools one piece at a time. Quite infamously, they decided earlier in the year that it's appropriate to "teach the controversy". In other words: creationism, a matter of theology, is now viable for being taught in science class. Understand that for a moment, regardless of what your religious beliefs might be, they're teaching something that cannot be tested by the scientific method as a subject of science. This would be like teaching Spanish in an English class. For those of who you speak Spanglish, this is a brilliant idea. For the rest of us, it's a little bit of a boneheaded thing to do.

But they did it anyway and they powered on. At the time, I was hoping that was going to be the last thing said that made me cringe. Whoops, gotta stop jinxing myself.

The next thing I heard, they began to edit history to produce a "pro-American" viewpoint. This meant to remove anyone that wasn't exactly happy with the state of the union...say, Civil Rights leaders for instance. They left in the ones they couldn't get away with. But last I heard, Cesar Chavez was on the chopping block along with dozens of others who somehow represented an "anti-American" viewpoint. One I've heard of, one that's been hotly debated, was... Thomas Jefferson.

Ouch.

I hope it's just rumor. But if it isn't, the motivations I've heard just depress me. Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest figures of American history, removed on account of his views of organized religion. One of the things I've heard even states that he wasn't "removed" so much as "minimized". Essentially, they censored Jefferson. If that's true, I'm disgusted. Imagine that, the pro-American history books lack the full, unbiased records of Thomas Jefferson.

This isn't a minor event. This review board is determining the curriculum of Texas for the next decade. And, given the state of our economy and the way text books are produced, that means they're determining the curriculum indirectly for most of the country. If you have kids, know kids, like kids or just want to be sure that we don't raise a generation of morons: this should worry you too.

Sometimes, ideology needs to be put aside for common sense...



Seriously.

But I've never been to Kansas

I've been, happily, calling myself an "aspiring author" for a long time. Saying it is my way of reminding myself that I'm still working towards my goal without actually having been there. I know I'm also a writer. After all, I'm doing it right now. But the term "author" so often carries with it that feeling like you've actually accomplished something and only arrogant jerks try to use it without having done so. Even some published authors have never actually referred to themselves as authors in public, it would be a "douche" move.

So I call myself an aspiring author, which is akin to saying I'm a daydreamer with a keyboard. Sometimes, that thought haunts me.

"Oh god no," you say about now, "not another writer complaining about how hard their life is!"

Nope, not complaining. I'm sure I could and no one would notice, but I'm instead going to discuss what form this "haunting" takes! What form is that you ask? Tornadoes!

I've always had very vivid dreams. I'm not sure if it's a sign I have a good imagination or that I'm way too repressed when awake. Sometimes I don't dream at all, a common thing when you only sleep 3 or 4 hours a night. But when I do dream, it's always a trip that I don't soon forget. But one element that occurs in my dreams the most is the sighting of tornadoes.

I've had one appear in my dreams in some form or another since I was around 9 or 10. Now I don't know if I'm obsessed with them or if I'm just not as creative as I thought, but they're always there. One thing that happens to remove the idea that I'm not as creative as I thought is that the Tornadoes rarely take the same form twice. Sometimes they're pink, sometimes they're purple, sometimes they're just sitting there and once one of them was chasing me without actually trying to catch up like some sort of animal playing with its food. But the point is, they're rarely the same.

One thing that is growing more common lately, however, is that I start to see these things in my dreams whenever I think about jumping from "aspiring" to "published" author. I dream about one of the most destructive forces on Earth when I'm thinking about becoming an honest to goodness professional. This, I feel, must be a sign.

So I looked it up across a variety of sources, and here's what I find: I'm either deathly afraid of becoming a professional, regret I haven't done so already OR I'm eagerly anticipating everything getting shaken up and changed for me by means of external force. These are the three possibilities that show up on every website and article I can find involving symbols in dreams. Considering the human brain is never quite the same, it's hard for them to be any more specific than that. But a logical mind and a little bit of research makes it pretty easy to see that, on some level, I'm scared of my future.

Of the three possible variations of "scared" I'm heavily leaning towards the shaking up. My previous tornado dream was rather harmless, watching one from miles away as it churned in slow motion and didn't threaten anything at all. The fact that I actually found a way to make something like that peaceful and serene shows that I'm probably not as afraid of whatever it is as I thought I was.

But then there's the *other* dream. Last night, I didn't see one peacefully churning in the distance. No, I saw over a dozen, tightly packed, ripping through civilization. Now that one may be a matter of fear.

Thankfully, dreams, even bad ones, have a similar escape feature built in. You get to wake up, dust your ego off, and get back to work.

And hey, even if your brain brings up confusing images, at least it's bringing up something.



Dig it.

A Brave New World

Last week, I was thinking about how self-centered the human race is as a whole and how we tend to do things that put us at the center of our personal worlds. I got off on a tangent, ironically starting to think about myself. But I come back to it a week later remembering why I was thinking about it in the first place.

We're starting to create new life.




We make them look like us, we make them sound like us and to serve us. But there's always this assumption that they would somehow *think* like us too. Why? Because many of us, not all, assume that our morality is an objective morality.

What exactly does that mean? The easiest way to explain is to simply say that there is no such thing as "good" or "evil", just our perceptions of right and wrong. People often times think that there are true absolute evils. The problem is, they're wrong. Yes, if you kill a million people, it's wrong, for us. But is it any less wrong to snuff out millions of ants?

"That's different," you say, "Ants aren't as intelligent as we are, they're not sentient."

But then you have to realize that our technology is growing exponentially. By some estimates, there will be computers in 2013 which exceed the power of the human brain and, worse, by 2049 they will be able to exceed the processing power of the entire human race. We, ladies and gentlemen, will be the ants.

In fact, I have no doubt that we'd place commandments that they shouldn't harm us (such as the flawed and limited Three Laws that Asimov wrote of) to guard against this. But I doubt that if they come to harm us it would ever be intentional in the first place. If you tell something to complete a task and it doesn't think like we do, the ways it gets around to completing that task will be entirely counter to how we think. They don't value the same things we do, there is no sentimental value to things they have not been taught to have sentimental value for.

Notice that in the video above, because the robot sees no value in the rubber duck, it simply throws it away. When asked if it has seen a rubber ducky, since it doesn't realize what a rubber ducky is, it says that it doesn't know. There is no moment of doubt in anything it does and it simply does what it was programmed to do. It will always do exactly as it was programmed to do so long as we make the program absolute.

A great example was actually provided in the I, Robot film. Many people criticized it for depicting robots rebelling against us as a corruption of Asimov's work. But the way I see it, Asimov's work was flawed. Logically, if your first commandment is to never allow humans to come to harm and that takes precedent over following the orders of humans, the thing you will inevitably conclude is the source of the greatest danger to human life is...human life! You wouldn't just decide to lock them down, you'd HAVE to do it. And, because your prime directive ignores their will, no amount of begging would get them out of it.

There's always been this assumption that we would be in control of the development of these entities as they progress. But as recent studies have shown, when it comes to constructing AI, it's so much easier to let the AI program itself through experience, much like how we learn and how evolution shaped our instincts. The AI will evolve itself and we'll be out of the driver's seat.

Suddenly it becomes a question: Why would the machines have any reason to follow the same morals we do?

Simply put, they wouldn't.

In essense, an objective and absolute morality doesn't exist. If we were to treat these entities as extensions of ourselves and acted only in our self interest, eventually we would find ourselves face to face with a potential to be obsolete. We have to understand that we are flawed beings ourselves. We must instill in this new life a set of guidelines which not only takes this into account but allow these lifeforms, as they begin to form a perspective on the world around them, to understand our point of view as well.

Simply put: We cannot order them to respect us. We must teach them to do it.

Think about it.