From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 10:15:47 MST
Lately my car has been suffering from a few problems. It began when the
engine would sometimes crank for a while before starting. Then, when
idling at a stoplight, sometimes the engine would begin sputtering or
knocking or coughing or something - I don't know the technical name for
this particular kind of funny noise - causing the entire car to rock.
Then the idling problem at stoplights got bad enough that the entire car
would just stall, requiring me to, in a hurry, switch the car off and
start it up again.
I know absolutely nothing about cars. The only reason I know it's called
"cranking" rather than "starting your car" is because I googled on my
problem and managed to find the right keywords from reading someone else's
description.
So I take my car in to a mechanic. He looks over the car for 30 minutes.
Can't quite find what's wrong. He thinks it might be the idle speed
regulator computer or the O2 sensor. I don't know how expensive these
parts are, or where they need to be ordered from, but I fear the worst.
So I do what any Child of the Internet would do in this situation. I say:
"Check the fuel filter."
The mechanic comes back. The fuel filter is almost completely blocked.
Swap in a new fuel filter, drive away.
Why? Because someone else who owned a 1995 Ford Escort had an identical
problem, which turned out to be the fault of the fuel filter, and posted
about it to Usenet, which I searched using, you guessed it, Google News,
before taking my car in.
I can fix problems I don't understand. There are no words to convey the
feeling of omnipotence this generates. The combined knowledge of the
entire human species is at my beck and call. It doesn't matter whether I
understand cars. It's enough that someone somewhere does. That knowledge
is my knowledge for I am of the Children of the Internet. You can keep
the Force, thank you; the Google is my ally and it has the Force beat cold
solid. The mechanic has years of training and years of experience. I
know nothing about cars and the workings of the engine are a complete
mystery to me; for all I know the fuel filter passes food pellets to
hamsters running on wheels. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters except
that I have Google. I am the racial memory of the human species and no
isolate can compete against that. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the
realization that I had to drive to an auto shop to actually carry out the
repair. I am helpless in the face of mechanical things and wouldn't dare
try to remove or replace a fuel filter if I somehow managed to find it
inside the engine. I try to focus on this thought and it doesn't make the
high go away. I am the Web. I am the groupmind. Resistance is futile
for we are Eliezer of Google.
Has anyone else begun to get the feeling that, wherever you go, you are
there to represent the Net groupmind? I don't have a wireless wearable so
it's not really true, yet, but on this occasion the sensation was quite
strong.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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