This story seems like good art, in the sense that it appears to provoke many feelings in different people. This part spoke to me in a way the rest of it does, but with something to grab onto and chew up and try to digest that is specific and concrete...
Working through these fears strengthens their trust in each other, allowing their minds to intertwine like the roots of two trees.
I sort of wonder which one of them spiritually died during this process.
Having grown up in northern California, I’m familiar with real forests, and how they are giant slow moving murder systems. There is no justice. No property rights in water or sunlight or nitrogen. Trees die all the time, choked out by the growth of neighboring trees.
In a parody I wrote of humanity’s current default plan for trying to make AI not kill everyone I invoked fungus linkages between roots and called for “Symbiosis, maaaan! No walls. No boundaries.” (Not that this is a good idea… its just a sadly common refrain, even though real boundaries are common and normal and healthy and useful.)
Something that’s fascinating about this art of yours is that I can’t tell if you’re coherently in favor of this, or purposefully invoking thinking errors in the audience, or just riffing, or what.
If you had called your story “The Gentle Seduction” then the sense that Elena and her spouse are confused, and are being seduced by algorithms into killing themselves… it would be clearer.
With Marc Stiegler’s story, he uses that word “Seduction” in the title, but then in his story, the protagonist’s augmentations are small, and very intelligibly beneficial to non-transhumanists, and (it turns out) gifts from a very thoughtful man, who is the “seducer” who engaged in a sort of chivalric “personally unfulfilled but spiritually genuine love, in service to his lady” that she only understood and appreciated after it was much too late, but built a shrine to, once she did.
It is kinda like your story is about a seduction (and called romance) while that one is a romance (and called seduction)!
Something that’s fascinating about this art of yours is that I can’t tell if you’re coherently in favor of this, or purposefully invoking thinking errors in the audience, or just riffing, or what.
Thanks for the fascinating comment.
I am a romantic in the sense that I believe that you can achieve arbitrary large gains from symbiosis if you’re careful and skillful enough.
Right now very few people are careful and skillful enough. Part of what I’m trying to convey with this story is what it looks like for AI to provide most of the requisite skill.
Another way of putting this: are trees strangling each other because that’s just the nature of symbiosis? Or are they strangling each other because they’re not intelligent or capable enough to productively cooperate? I think the latter.
This story seems like good art, in the sense that it appears to provoke many feelings in different people. This part spoke to me in a way the rest of it does, but with something to grab onto and chew up and try to digest that is specific and concrete...
I sort of wonder which one of them spiritually died during this process.
Having grown up in northern California, I’m familiar with real forests, and how they are giant slow moving murder systems. There is no justice. No property rights in water or sunlight or nitrogen. Trees die all the time, choked out by the growth of neighboring trees.
In the forests I grew up in, decade by decade, the oak trees have been dying off in groups, faster than they are born, due to a fungus that kills them, while the fungus does not kill bay trees, such that the fungus is “symbiotic” to the bay trees, by murdering this tolerant host specie’s niche competitors. Such competition is rarely seen because it is out-of-equilibrium by default but invasive species can put things out of equilibrium, so we can watch actual changes play out in real life in the highly disrupted forests we really have these days.
Most theories about “trees cooperating underground” rely on intermediating fungus species, or them being clones, or both. Sadly, some parts of academic ecology is full of brain worms that sound nice to naive nature worshipers. Maybe “the mother tree hypothesis” is true in some cases somewhere… but probably it is a faulty and misleading generalization.
In a parody I wrote of humanity’s current default plan for trying to make AI not kill everyone I invoked fungus linkages between roots and called for “Symbiosis, maaaan! No walls. No boundaries.” (Not that this is a good idea… its just a sadly common refrain, even though real boundaries are common and normal and healthy and useful.)
Something that’s fascinating about this art of yours is that I can’t tell if you’re coherently in favor of this, or purposefully invoking thinking errors in the audience, or just riffing, or what.
If you had called your story “The Gentle Seduction” then the sense that Elena and her spouse are confused, and are being seduced by algorithms into killing themselves… it would be clearer.
With Marc Stiegler’s story, he uses that word “Seduction” in the title, but then in his story, the protagonist’s augmentations are small, and very intelligibly beneficial to non-transhumanists, and (it turns out) gifts from a very thoughtful man, who is the “seducer” who engaged in a sort of chivalric “personally unfulfilled but spiritually genuine love, in service to his lady” that she only understood and appreciated after it was much too late, but built a shrine to, once she did.
It is kinda like your story is about a seduction (and called romance) while that one is a romance (and called seduction)!
Thanks for the fascinating comment.
I am a romantic in the sense that I believe that you can achieve arbitrary large gains from symbiosis if you’re careful and skillful enough.
Right now very few people are careful and skillful enough. Part of what I’m trying to convey with this story is what it looks like for AI to provide most of the requisite skill.
Another way of putting this: are trees strangling each other because that’s just the nature of symbiosis? Or are they strangling each other because they’re not intelligent or capable enough to productively cooperate? I think the latter.