Tim Ferriss gave me a deep Exhalation for my birthday month, and it is a fantastic cortical tickler. It reads like an assemblage of Black Mirror short stories, of varying length — from a 3-page teaser on the illusion of free will to 101 pages on the parenting analogs imbued throughout the creation of AGI. I have made similar arguments, that AI will “require the equivalent of good parenting” and that “experience is algorithmically incompressible.” (163)
My favorite story is Omphalos, a theological and scientific exploration of young-earth creationism… as if it were true — with peculiar archaeological details in fossils and primordial mummies and teleological theories that unfold from the singularity of modern creationism. But then, astronomical observations reveal Earth to be a cosmic afterthought, abruptly triggering humanity’s ontological shock and subsequent unraveling of faith.
The philosophical romp of black-mirror snacks include:
• A Kip Thorne time machine portal, where the past cannot be altered, set in a Muslim context of fatalism and Arabian tales within tales. “Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.” (36)
• The cosmic exhalation of entropy (inspired by Roger Penrose).
• The parrots of Arecibo as a datapoint for Drake’s equation.
• The anthropology of prosthetic memory recorders, starting with the written word, altering our conception of truth. This story was inspired by Freeman and Gelernter’s “lifestreaming” lectures at Yale in the 90’s.
• The titles are rich too, like “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” — an exploration of group therapy across branching parallel universes. Their universe splitter app sounds very similar to my own, with a “keyboard command that sent a photon through a polarization filter.” (279)
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