PicoBlog

So I paid my friend MDZ twice on Venmo. Those of you who know Venmo also know that your transactions are semi public. Why on Earth they decided to do that is beyond me - probably catering to those who expect to micromanage their friends and who feel stood up, catfished, ghosted and all other sorts of violations of instant gratification. He paid me back, but not without giving me shit. I texted him and he literally asked me “Who is this?” To which I gave the obligatory answer “This is Michael David Cobb Bowen. Note that on Venmo you will have gotten $90 from me twice. @MDC-Bowen. Maybe we’ve both been hacked.” And now you know how to send me Venmo. And so do the Sophons.

If you haven’t been watching the 3 Body Problem series on Netflix, I can understand that you have other priorities, or basically no taste. But what you should be aware of in case you actually did enjoy Black Mirror is that the Sophons from the Netflix screen adaptation of Cixin Liu’s masterpiece are basically the super AIs that everybody is afraid of. In the books and in the series they are planet scaled supercomputer AIs, two of them in fact, which are paired via quantum entanglement to another pair on an alien planet three generations of tech ahead of all humanity. By generations I mean the distance between the discovery of agriculture and the atomic bomb is just two generations apart.

The Sophons are the seemingly omnipotent emissaries of the San-Ti, the alien race that covets Earth and have sent a massive fleet of spacecraft that are on their way. In the meantime, the Sophons can basically out-NSA the NSA, direct the actions of subversive groups of Earthers, erase any recording, project any image, animation, or sound at any time to anyone they choose. In fact, if you’re really special and worthy of recruitment they’ll invite you to play a virtual reality game that is completely indistinguishable from reality.

It turns out that the Sophons are not God, only godlike. What they cannot do is read minds. So some of the most brainy and crafty humans came up with a project to fund the Wallfacers.

GPT sez:
The Wallfacer Project in the novel is a strategy developed to combat an alien invasion from the Trisolaran civilization, which can monitor all human communication and actions except for private human thoughts.

Wallfacers are individuals selected by the United Nations to come up with secretive plans to ensure humanity's survival against the Trisolarans. These plans are concealed even from the Wallfacers themselves, as much as possible, to prevent the aliens from discovering and countering them. The Wallfacers are granted significant resources and powers to execute their plans, all while being observed by appointed Wallbreakers, whose job is to uncover and sabotage these plans to the advantage of the Trisolarans.

The concept plays on the idea of deep strategy, deception, and the power of the unseen thought, making it a unique narrative device that intertwines with the broader themes of communication, mistrust, and survival in the face of an inscrutable and vastly more powerful enemy.

You can imagine that today that individuals like Mark Zuckerberg and some other 30 something who has been rich since his 20s at Stanford are quite interested and capable of putting their Sophons all up in your business. Is it a cookie? Is it database profile? Is it some words your smart assistant heard you say? Let me take a moment to remind you that it now takes the leading AIs about 15 seconds of your recorded voice to mock you so your own mother won’t know different. While I think the proliferation of AIs will guarantee that ethical people will get their hands on them and we will be relatively safe from snooping, like with the safest automobiles we share the public roads with idiots, drunks, and punk kids. In other words the safety of one AI will not protect us completely from the Sophons of others.

So my Stoic interpretation of this, my final week of immersion in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past, brings me to the comfort of meditation and the power of solitude. The ironic epiphany is that in our populist culture, we demand both an abundance of privacy and a excess of rights of expression.

What are we expressing that is so pressing that we expect it to go viral on social media. Are we so ignorant (yes) of the past that we believe everything that pops into our head is worth shouting from the electronic mountaintops? What else is an influencer?

I have written before of the magnetism of truth that is found in the desire of those who deeply value it. It brings unexpected pluralism to the beauty of creation. You never know who will be sitting next to you in the intimate jazz club, the small art gallery, the book signing or the new cafe. It is at these sorts of events that we run screaming to our friends or to our followers. There is always that temptation to be the herald. I guess I am arguing that in light of the Sophons, that perhaps it is better to be quiet about being cool before cool is cool - in that same way there is satisfaction in reading the book that no one you know has read. And yet those creative ideas will bring all those who know together in unusual ways.

One of my best friends is Lutheran. I only learned about this and many other things about him this past week. Our independent journeys toward truth and virtue, honest and heartfelt has brought us a greater amount of mutual respect even through the years of not explicitly revealing our deepest beliefs about the sacred and the profound.

This week I have also come to understand for the first time the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of the design of modern jet engines. Some years ago I had the opportunity to work on jet APUs and it was the first time I became fascinated with the more predictable data coming from embedded systems and sensors. The inner workings of these are mysterious but full of the truths that keep planes in the air.

As AIs make more fragments of the world of human experience more transparent, understand that those of us with self-possession will not outsource our peace of mind to their ability to spy on others or inform us about things we believe ought to be our business but is actually not. If and when you get to complete the entirety of Cixin Liu’s series of books, you will be rewarded by the understanding of how tending to our souls and our virtues can lead to the ultimate triumph.

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