OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models

Speed becomes everything. You don’t have to look more than a couple steps ahead to see what’s coming. I used to travel a lot. Way too much. Enough that it was disorienting. It made me think, what if you took this further? What if there were a device, not like a jet airplane, but something that transports instantly. So, say you are where you are now, and you click some button and now you’re in Thailand. You were, I don’t know, at home, with your family, but now you’re on the other side of the planet among people you don’t know. You can stay there as long as you want, or you can click again and be somewhere else. Instantly. Now you’re in Boden, Sweden, near the arctic circle. Next you’re in Japan. One moment to the next. At the snap of your fingers, you are somewhere else.

Think about what that would be like. It’s a horror. How long would it take before your ability to perceive time or place, or the meaning of anything, degrades to zero? How long until your mind is broken irreparably? If you can be anywhere at the snap of your fingers, then how can you be anywhere? How can you ‘be’? Where’s home? What does that mean? What does anything mean? What does the flow of time mean? The most fundamental things that orient our minds, time and place, are utterly destroyed. I don’t think anyone could argue that any human mind could withstand total loss of orientation.

It’s not a direct analogy but you can see the overlap. What if anyone, literally anyone, can type a few descriptive words and instantly generate a complete AEC design fully documented. And what if anyone, again anyone, can, I mean, if they can do one, why not a thousand. Or 10,000 options for you to choose from. All produced complete in a tenth of a second, total.

What good would that do for anyone anywhere? 

And what harm would it do?

This is the stuff of science fiction going all the way back to Mary Shelley. There ARE things that very clearly lead down the wrong path to a very dead end. And this particular nightmare, though it bodes the kind of apocalyptic repeated time and again in science fiction, comes not from machines declaring themselves supreme and us disposable. No. This nightmare comes from nothing more than so called AI working exactly as designed, doing exactly what we’re told it will do.