I was expecting there to be another layer of mirroring related to “the scold”.
What might have happened is that some flaw would seem “too crazy” and then after the “initial detection of the true flaw” the narrator would start to suspect that he himself was a self-aware subprocess in a GAN (but not self-aware about being a subprocess in a GAN) whose role was to notice some implausibility in his environment.
The “childhood memory and sarah detection experience” process might have been a narrative prefix that implies the kind of person who would be suspicious in plausible ways. (Suspicious of the car accident, suspicious of the crackable program, suspicious that VR headsets have that much CPU, suspicious of what the sexbot asks him to do, etc, etc.)
In this ending, the final paragraph or two would have included cascading realizations that as he became more and more certain of general implausibility, it would becomes more and more likely that the observing meta-process would reach a threshold and halt this run during this epoch, and then reboot him and his world, with SGD-generated variations to see if an even higher time-till-doubt can be achieved somehow.
And what becomes of the scold is best left unsaid.
That’s an interesting reading! Thanks for sharing it. Spoilers for a Black Mirror episode, in ROT13: Vg erzvaqf zr bs gur Oynpx Zveebe rcvfbqr, Unat gur QW, nobhg gur fvzhyngvba qngvat ncc.
I personally prefer the reading where the protagonist is a human in a different universe where AI is a little more advanced than now, because I like the feeling of him being corrupted in a way that’s world-dooming but beautiful-to-him at the same time.
At one point I assigned myself the homework of watching all of black mirror so as to understand “what cultural associations would be applied to what ideas by default”…
...and most of the episodes had me suppressing anger at the writers for just writing characters who violate the same set of very basic rules over and over and over again with no lessons ever learned by anyone (lessons like “never trust something that talks until you know where it keeps its brains” and “own root on computing machines you rely on or personally trust the humans who do own root on such machines”).
However, all the black mirror episodes that were essentially “a good love story in an alternate world” did not bother me in the same way :-)
I was expecting there to be another layer of mirroring related to “the scold”.
What might have happened is that some flaw would seem “too crazy” and then after the “initial detection of the true flaw” the narrator would start to suspect that he himself was a self-aware subprocess in a GAN (but not self-aware about being a subprocess in a GAN) whose role was to notice some implausibility in his environment.
The “childhood memory and sarah detection experience” process might have been a narrative prefix that implies the kind of person who would be suspicious in plausible ways. (Suspicious of the car accident, suspicious of the crackable program, suspicious that VR headsets have that much CPU, suspicious of what the sexbot asks him to do, etc, etc.)
In this ending, the final paragraph or two would have included cascading realizations that as he became more and more certain of general implausibility, it would becomes more and more likely that the observing meta-process would reach a threshold and halt this run during this epoch, and then reboot him and his world, with SGD-generated variations to see if an even higher time-till-doubt can be achieved somehow.
That’s an interesting reading! Thanks for sharing it. Spoilers for a Black Mirror episode, in ROT13: Vg erzvaqf zr bs gur Oynpx Zveebe rcvfbqr, Unat gur QW, nobhg gur fvzhyngvba qngvat ncc.
I personally prefer the reading where the protagonist is a human in a different universe where AI is a little more advanced than now, because I like the feeling of him being corrupted in a way that’s world-dooming but beautiful-to-him at the same time.
Yeah! <3
At one point I assigned myself the homework of watching all of black mirror so as to understand “what cultural associations would be applied to what ideas by default”…
...and most of the episodes had me suppressing anger at the writers for just writing characters who violate the same set of very basic rules over and over and over again with no lessons ever learned by anyone (lessons like “never trust something that talks until you know where it keeps its brains” and “own root on computing machines you rely on or personally trust the humans who do own root on such machines”).
However, all the black mirror episodes that were essentially “a good love story in an alternate world” did not bother me in the same way :-)