General subjects with a focus on philosophy, morals, epistemology, basic income, the singularity, transhuman
Will we simply not matter?
Published on July 21, 2015 By Phil Osborn In Everything Else

I loved the movie, despite its disjointedness, and it was only today, over a week later, that I realized why the scenes were set up that way.  The entire movie was IMHO shot to match up with a planned theme park.  Too many mis-mixed pure fantasies with hard science. Way too many scenes clearly shot with something other than the plot in mind.

But the thing that really caught my attention was when I typed "to" into Google and got back a whole set of "TomorrowLand" suggestions, even though I had not typed it in anywhere during that day's session at the library, using a public computer. Just my email log-in was enough to bring the big engines to bear, based on a few blog or email suggestions for people to watch the movie.

The trail even went to my work - same results, even though I don't even have or use email at work.   Other people at my job were meanwhile getting the same results, once I started the infection - or  so it appears.  And while I'm getting the same results here and now at the library, other people who I asked to test "to" are not.  So, it has latched onto me personally...  I wonder if my connections to people at DARPA or NSA or the hacker community, for that matter, has any bearing on this?

Please test this yourself and leave the result in comments.  Thanks.

Oh, come ON!  NOBODY tried it themselves?  Or did those responses somehow disappear?

At work today, probably no connection, but I lost a font.  I mean that the .doc files I was editing suddenly started displaying bizarre replacements for the font used in the company trademark and logo.  I didn't delete anything, but when I went into COREL DRAW to check, the font was gone from the list.  So, I located our sysop, who verified that the font had been somehow expunged from my computer.  He was scratching his head.  Said that he couldn't explain it at all.  Shouldn't happen, period.  So, he reloaded and everything's fine, except that now I know that things can disappear from my system without leaving traces.

Imagine a self-reinforcing memetic system that, like a sociopath, cares for nothing but winning.  And because this is the dominant focus of our game creature, and therefore it and its clones tend to win and propagate ever more, by the time we mere mortals notice, it's too late.  The Gamer wins it all.  Is that an idea for a game or what?  What if the game based on that idea takes off, keeps improving into new mutant breeds of ever superior gamers until the game generates the reality...  Is that an idea for a game or what?   Will our need to find better ways to defeat the Gamer backfire into simply making it all the more inevitable?

Tell me that someone hasn't thought of precisely this, or close enough to do the job...

Yet another answer to the Fermi Paradox?  Do we REALLY want to find those interstellar radio signals? 


Comments
on Jul 21, 2015

The Algoriddim is all-knowing. 

on Jul 23, 2015

on Jul 23, 2015

Daiwa

The Algoriddim is all-knowing. 

How're (Ma)trix, Daiwa?

on Jul 23, 2015

this is like the movie it follows.