Re: Friends or Enemies

From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Sun Mar 23 2003 - 08:56:59 MST

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     "Christian Weisgerber" <naddy@mips.inka.de>

    > the web mostly consists of drivel, low quality porn,
    > and interesting content is either not available at all or locked up.

    Not entirely true, I don't think Eliezer would mind me resending a article
    he sent to the list a few months ago.
    ======================
    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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