The big picture.
The apperceptive consciousness is a tether between beings and time. Time plays a dramatic role in that the source of a truth about existence is in the past. Our origins right now are explained as being a time and place in the past. From founding of one's nation to the making of one's shoes, all of these originate from a past.
The component missing from education is the big picture. We've traded in a narrative understanding of the objects of knowledge for a technical vocabulary that is standardized into units to ease categorization, comparison, and ultimately grading. From this, the administrator gains control, measures outcomes, tracks progress, generates statistics. As a result of this, students lose interest in the minutiae of learning vocabulary words, key terms, dates, and formulas. As a result of this, they have no big picture. And with no big picture the chance for an education in art, history, language, mathematics, science, and knowledge itself to furnish meaning for their life and their pursuits is lost. Education becomes meaningless to the student. Education becomes meaningless to the teacher. Then education simply becomes a tool for indoctrination and job training, and no longer does it furnish an engaged and informed citizenry with meaningful tools for engaging in a democracy.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Thursday, November 27, 2014
"The jungle came alive and took him"
In James Jones' book World War II: A Chronicle of Soldiering he writes about the invasion of Japan as being eerily as Arnold Toynbee had described war under democracy--total war. The whole of the civilian population would be put to the grim task of defending Japanese soil, and in preparation it would be trained and equipped with what tools it could use to carry out this defensive order. But Jones does something very terrific with the imagery of an American GI setting his first foot in an invasion upon the Japanese shore that bears repeating here.
Reading this passage I cannot help but think about a scene from the film Aliens where the marines first encounter them in their hive, lying in wait along the walls and the ceiling. In that scene, the walls come alive and begin attacking the marines. To imagine the ambulatory population of Japan stirring about in preparation for war was a chilling image. Japan then had a population 64% the size of the United States. That was a lot of life bent on killing or dying in its attempt to do so. This is a very chilling image indeed.
I chose a quote from a movie from a year later--Predator. In that film yet another alien lurks about the jungle in a rapidly shifting camouflage that allows it to literally become the trees and leaves around it. When it comes at you, it looks as if the jungle, at any moment, could detach itself, like a piece of wall paper, and come at you.
These two images, your surroundings teeming with killers or the jungle coming alive and taking you, operate at the margins of normal experience. People are unaccustomed to seeing beings serve both as scenery and as agent at least not in contemporary experience. When the jungles of Africa gave way to the seasonally dry savannahs through a climactic event precipitated by the joining of the Americas at the isthmus of Panama, perhaps the first human-like experience of being chased upright became a possibility. These monkey ancestors, walking upright between increasingly distant stands of trees, most likely fell prey to those predators that lurked in the bushes, barely noticeable, blending in as part of the jungle, appearing as part of that jungle. How many monkey-men went through life with damaged limbs, deep claw gashes, hobbled gaits from near misses with these early predators? Enough to focus that groups' attention on, one, walking in groups, and two, carrying sticks and stones.
It seems as if war is outside of time. It is at once a primordial consciousness of fear, killing, and survival. At the same time it consists of the bleeding edge of technology. This combination of primordial impulses and of cutting edge techniques and tools creates a disruptive model for war in the everyday consciousness of humans. War chews up the countryside. War fills the fields with dead, dying, and rotting bodies. War shatters minds. War disintegrates countries. War erases memory. War enforces the building of its memorials.
Thanatos, the Egyptian god of death, also came to be known in psychoanalytic terminology as the 'death impulse.' In the grand dialectical symbolism of human consciousness, thanatos and eros fought for supremacy, and that would get expressed in the actions of humanity. I am truly unsure how opposed these two impulses are. Many more support emotions and conditions are required for them to be effected in the interpersonal spheres of humanity. I am sure of the fact that human experience is smooth in the center and jagged at the edges. Marginal experiences can be at once vivid and otherworldly. And the stresses of the mind to process information and act in these margins creates blank spaces and discontinuity. The one counter that warfare has learned from this is to drill troops in order that their training makes their actions spontaneous and machine-like. Training will save a man in the pitch of battle because just six months ago that man was milking cows and chasing young girls around his small town. Now he's in Guadalcanal, not Kansas. And he's holding a rifle, not a pitchfork. And to get there, he's taken his first train ride, then his first plane ride, and finally his last boat ride to his final resting place: face down in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific island wearing new boots, and a new uniform, carrying a rifle that he never had a chance to shoot. Chance had got him first, and now he no longer would have another chance to dance with Shelly or flirt with Betty. No, GI Joe lay dead, in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific atoll.
Paul Fussell, writing on the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, makes an expedient out of the need to use it. Forty years on and in the bosom of an academic career, Fussell had both the time and the experience as a GI to reflect upon this decision. His subsequent answer was for its dropping. He also cites that chilling passage from Jone's account of World War II as a component of the thinking that led to the rationale to drop the bomb. The oft-cited statistic which should at least be suspect for its utter neatness is 'one million.' That's how many soldiers the US would have expected to lose in order to take the main islands of Japan and force Japanese surrender. The atomic bomb was an expedient, and God knows those men--having dodged so many bullets, having watched so many comrades die, having sent their share of enemy off to his eternity--they would want no more of it. The whole effort--which was then more so than now, a chain of cooperation among men and women in the coordinated effort to mobilize, build, and wage war--was fatigued. It had had enough. Or perhaps it simply meant that the rear-echelon troops, the sons of senators and powerful businessmen, the movie stars, and the filthy rich would finally be required to take their turn marching into a battle that as yet remained critically abstract and distant enough for them to maintain organizationally.
On that note, perhaps we lost an opportunity for democracy in total war. Perhaps we lost a chance for the war experience to truly level all stations of society, to reduce even the sons of the rich and powerful to rotting corpses. They too would have had that existentially transforming experience that comes from killing an enemy or being shot at or simply lying awake in a fox hole, using your helmet as your latrine. Yes, to have the rich boy exit the croquet greens and find himself in Army greens shitting into an old ration tin inches from his 'suite mate' in a fox hole during a lull in artillery fire while all around him a ghastly bone army poked here and there out of the soil and the smell of decay and the fat buzzing of carrion flies hung about. That is democracy when a rich boy gets his better manners stained over with fear, drill, and survival. When the rich boy is reduced to a wet, fatigued, and vacant expression of battle weariness; when the rich boy's mind is too shattered to run daddy's business, that, that is when we have achieved a modicum of democracy. To have us all ferried about, thrown into alien settings, and rung out emotionally by artillery fire is to reduce us all to the basic datum of battlefield experience, which becomes the common bond, the common understanding, the common traumatic thread by which we can build a society together. In this democracy, this utopia of my mind, we all share the same injury.
What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japan’s home islands, hardly bears thinking about. (p. 189)Jones' point is two-fold here. He is discussing the experience of war from the perspective of the GI who dodges chance because bullets, explosions, and shrapnel are all chance encounters on the battlefield. That's how they were engineered. This GI, having lived through several tours of duty, witnessed several different battles, came within inches of whirring rounds and screeching artillery fragments, now recognized he would likely perish at the final stage of a war with all this battle-hardened experience. That experience would help him to both appreciate the scope and danger of any battle, and he could see more clearly than ever before that this would be the greatest battle and the one most likely to end his tour, in a fusillade of enemy fire, face-down on the beach. The second point follows closely from the first. All the Americans taking part in the Pacific war or reading its daily accounts in the newspapers understood the religious zealots that Japan had made for the war effort. The military had to introduce flamethrowers to burn Japanese out of their bunkers and cave complexes. So few Japanese would surrender during the island battles that the GI who had witnessed it and the general who would plan future landings recognized that only in death would the Japanese rest their weapons. And with this ghastly prospect we find ourselves looking upon the Japanese like a roving colony of army ants. Each Japanese body served a purpose to the greater whole, the colony, and each Japanese man, woman, and child was prepared to throw their bodies into the war effort, dying to save their land from invasion.
Reading this passage I cannot help but think about a scene from the film Aliens where the marines first encounter them in their hive, lying in wait along the walls and the ceiling. In that scene, the walls come alive and begin attacking the marines. To imagine the ambulatory population of Japan stirring about in preparation for war was a chilling image. Japan then had a population 64% the size of the United States. That was a lot of life bent on killing or dying in its attempt to do so. This is a very chilling image indeed.
I chose a quote from a movie from a year later--Predator. In that film yet another alien lurks about the jungle in a rapidly shifting camouflage that allows it to literally become the trees and leaves around it. When it comes at you, it looks as if the jungle, at any moment, could detach itself, like a piece of wall paper, and come at you.
These two images, your surroundings teeming with killers or the jungle coming alive and taking you, operate at the margins of normal experience. People are unaccustomed to seeing beings serve both as scenery and as agent at least not in contemporary experience. When the jungles of Africa gave way to the seasonally dry savannahs through a climactic event precipitated by the joining of the Americas at the isthmus of Panama, perhaps the first human-like experience of being chased upright became a possibility. These monkey ancestors, walking upright between increasingly distant stands of trees, most likely fell prey to those predators that lurked in the bushes, barely noticeable, blending in as part of the jungle, appearing as part of that jungle. How many monkey-men went through life with damaged limbs, deep claw gashes, hobbled gaits from near misses with these early predators? Enough to focus that groups' attention on, one, walking in groups, and two, carrying sticks and stones.
It seems as if war is outside of time. It is at once a primordial consciousness of fear, killing, and survival. At the same time it consists of the bleeding edge of technology. This combination of primordial impulses and of cutting edge techniques and tools creates a disruptive model for war in the everyday consciousness of humans. War chews up the countryside. War fills the fields with dead, dying, and rotting bodies. War shatters minds. War disintegrates countries. War erases memory. War enforces the building of its memorials.
Thanatos, the Egyptian god of death, also came to be known in psychoanalytic terminology as the 'death impulse.' In the grand dialectical symbolism of human consciousness, thanatos and eros fought for supremacy, and that would get expressed in the actions of humanity. I am truly unsure how opposed these two impulses are. Many more support emotions and conditions are required for them to be effected in the interpersonal spheres of humanity. I am sure of the fact that human experience is smooth in the center and jagged at the edges. Marginal experiences can be at once vivid and otherworldly. And the stresses of the mind to process information and act in these margins creates blank spaces and discontinuity. The one counter that warfare has learned from this is to drill troops in order that their training makes their actions spontaneous and machine-like. Training will save a man in the pitch of battle because just six months ago that man was milking cows and chasing young girls around his small town. Now he's in Guadalcanal, not Kansas. And he's holding a rifle, not a pitchfork. And to get there, he's taken his first train ride, then his first plane ride, and finally his last boat ride to his final resting place: face down in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific island wearing new boots, and a new uniform, carrying a rifle that he never had a chance to shoot. Chance had got him first, and now he no longer would have another chance to dance with Shelly or flirt with Betty. No, GI Joe lay dead, in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific atoll.
Paul Fussell, writing on the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, makes an expedient out of the need to use it. Forty years on and in the bosom of an academic career, Fussell had both the time and the experience as a GI to reflect upon this decision. His subsequent answer was for its dropping. He also cites that chilling passage from Jone's account of World War II as a component of the thinking that led to the rationale to drop the bomb. The oft-cited statistic which should at least be suspect for its utter neatness is 'one million.' That's how many soldiers the US would have expected to lose in order to take the main islands of Japan and force Japanese surrender. The atomic bomb was an expedient, and God knows those men--having dodged so many bullets, having watched so many comrades die, having sent their share of enemy off to his eternity--they would want no more of it. The whole effort--which was then more so than now, a chain of cooperation among men and women in the coordinated effort to mobilize, build, and wage war--was fatigued. It had had enough. Or perhaps it simply meant that the rear-echelon troops, the sons of senators and powerful businessmen, the movie stars, and the filthy rich would finally be required to take their turn marching into a battle that as yet remained critically abstract and distant enough for them to maintain organizationally.
On that note, perhaps we lost an opportunity for democracy in total war. Perhaps we lost a chance for the war experience to truly level all stations of society, to reduce even the sons of the rich and powerful to rotting corpses. They too would have had that existentially transforming experience that comes from killing an enemy or being shot at or simply lying awake in a fox hole, using your helmet as your latrine. Yes, to have the rich boy exit the croquet greens and find himself in Army greens shitting into an old ration tin inches from his 'suite mate' in a fox hole during a lull in artillery fire while all around him a ghastly bone army poked here and there out of the soil and the smell of decay and the fat buzzing of carrion flies hung about. That is democracy when a rich boy gets his better manners stained over with fear, drill, and survival. When the rich boy is reduced to a wet, fatigued, and vacant expression of battle weariness; when the rich boy's mind is too shattered to run daddy's business, that, that is when we have achieved a modicum of democracy. To have us all ferried about, thrown into alien settings, and rung out emotionally by artillery fire is to reduce us all to the basic datum of battlefield experience, which becomes the common bond, the common understanding, the common traumatic thread by which we can build a society together. In this democracy, this utopia of my mind, we all share the same injury.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Moby Dick, Chapter 48: The First Lowering
"It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these, with the cries of the herdsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;--all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;--neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale." (p. 184)
Thursday, November 6, 2014
The work that we do
The men gathered at 7 a.m. in preparation for the day's work. There, at the base of a large building, the skeleton of which was taking shape, a group of tradesmen, dressed in heavy cloth shirts and heavy denim pants with some parts worn through stood together talking about the evening's television and events. Some talked sports. Some talked about a wife or girlfriend. Others simply listened and gathered up their tools from the gang box where the group had assembled in the waning moments before the day's start. Now, the group fanned out around the structure. Some stayed at the building's base. Others ascended the structure, floor by floor, to their previous spot. Above them the powerful camera of a drone on a lazy sortie captured each worker's action.
The workers on this building had never noticed this drone. Nothing could. Being no larger than twenty feet in length with an equally diminutive wingspan, the drone loitered in airspace half a mile above an unaware world below. And there, it collected, to the square millimeter, every visual aspect of the earth within a 60 mile cone issuing from the drone's camera mount underneath its nose. Within that path every single human or mechanical action was recorded by a sensor array, sent back to a server farm in a distant state where a dedicated cloud of processes and processors analyzed, cataloged, dissected, learned, and stored the data. These construction workers, applying skills of hand and mind in constructing a building, were unaware that their recorded actions were being modeled by a constellation of related computing processes. Computing draped the bare essence of human actions, now existing as conditional rubrics, around a mathematical skeleton modeling the swing patterns of their arms and legs as well as body gait and posture shifts during activity. Their living likenesses were being copied into a data cloud where a heuristic algorithm built decision models from the sequence of recorded body movements. These decision models formed the basis of a cybernetic process, translating observed human action into robot chassis control processes. An accompanying action modeling software created emergent programs for force applications, in essence, allowing robots to 'do' work appropriate to current roles. Soon, these robots would be deployed at job sites, at intersections, in classrooms, and in operating rooms to effectively erase the work of the men and women, which the cloud had learned to replicate and then to carry out. At first, these robots were carefully deployed, monitored, and tested against the collected notions of what were quality craftsmanship, teaching, surgery, care, service. This first generation of robots were a proof of concept, and they surpassed both human expectation and human ability. The second generation would loiter about virtually every square inch of the habitable human world, doing every conceivable thing that once constituted the working lives of men and women. These robots assisted in childbirth, prepared dinners, repaired doors, walked dogs, cut grass, cleaned house, and even waged wars. Winged swarms of them tended to the fields and brought back an endless supply of fresh produce along a supply chain flexible to within 3 hours from production to point of sale. The finer gradations of work dissipated into evenly dispersed lines of flying drones, ferrying any number of items between points of consumption and production. This second generation was an expendable battalion of knowledge implementation. It represented the proof of a different concept: total robotics.
Total robotics was as the name connotes. Robots crawl the very surface of the earth carrying out every conceivable human activity, surpassing its skill and speed and beginning to do things that humans could only dream of doing. Robots the size of blood cells traveled every person's bloodstream monitoring for signs of stress or infection. It communicated this information to cloud processes able to monitor, track, and store information on every human heartbeat. This cloud process would program new robots to enter the body, attach to the current robots, and address medical conditions at a microhistological level accurate to withing a single gene. So ubiquitous were robots that, on occasion, 'physible' programs ranging in size from mold spores to cotton wood pollen caused allergic reactions as they freely floated in and out of people's respiratory ways while they fathered information. Drone ships big enough to blot out the sun locally controlled and recycled the atmosphere to establish regular patterns. Each ship acted as a damper or a dynamo evening out the natural cycles of turbulent air into regular weather patterns, promoting human comfort across the globe. From the equator to poles, global temperatures ranged within five degrees of what most commonly considered to be room temperature. The planetary robot population was performing the task of Maxwell's demon, transforming a chaotic stream of potential energy into a sedate and totally managed ecosphere. The service these weather drones provided along with their spore-sized familiars reflected the organizing concept for robotics: total service.
By the arrival of a third generation of robots each robot presented itself as the circumvention of all human action. In fact, every meaningful action that men and women take to stave off threats to safety and sanity this generation of robots now did. Coming in the wake of this forfeiture of meaningful activity came an existential crisis to all of humanity. By this stage robots were the majority companion and companion species. What cats and dogs existed had been effectively eradicated by a dedicated squad of exterminator robots. Robots represented unconditional love to a human race that had long suffered from a distorted self-image, itself the result of a life spent engaged in human-robot interactions engineered to be intense, intimate, and unconditionally supportive. Life was now a meaningless and empty existence of total service. Needs began to dissipate into a cybernetic hum of total and unconditional robotic companionship. Birth rates plummeted. Sex between humans became rare and now often proved fatal. Robot-human intimacy had pushed human sexuality outside the limits of what humans could practice. Humans became passively acted upon to once-unthinkable levels in unthinkably precise ways. This intimacy requires a male participant to be jacked in to the robot with reciprocal penetration while 75 to 300 interface points simulate waves of hyperstimulation, inducing multiple climaxes. Robotsex allows a man to achieve many simultaneous orgasms by having his penis stroked at rates unachievable by most humans for minutes at a time. Likewise, women have both their anal and vaginal cavities filled with a reactive membrane that performs hundreds of actions simultaneously to stimulate them. Total service was the closest that humanity has ever come to a pleasure button. It would suffice. They were rats in a cage represented by their effective range of action. The known human world had been denatured by logic programs into scalable units of stimulation. Knowing the limits of nervous stimulation allowed robots to safely occupy the upper-bound, a bleeding edge of nervous stimulation for humans. And in doing so, they helped pushed humanity through to another plane of existence. They were at once reliant upon robots for bodily stimulation as they were completely set free from their bodies through the total service that robots provided. Where once pain framed an experience of laboring through the sundry activities of existence, robotic intervention now fulfilled needs completely and at an almost magical pace. Operating at this bleeding edge of human awareness gave robots a dreamy, humming, liminal existence. They were as likely helping as they were haunting humanity.
Humans were born into a world by the hands of robots, swaddled by servomotors whose designer had long disappeared, and sent into their long night by a fourth generation of robots small enough to be implanted in the base of the skull and to count to 438,000 hours. At the click of that doomsday switch, these robots would set off a tiny explosion, severing the spinal cord from the brain--a hasty and humane death. That explosion would also release these robots from their encasement and they would go about the grim task of quickly breaking down the body into an unidentifiable mass of organic material, which was carried away to robotic production centers. At this stage robotics became ascendant over life and disorder. Robots had channeled through the earth and tapped the magnetic iron sphere as a large energy source. Large swaths of the earth, its mountains and forests, its water had been transformed forever into the constituent vocabulary of a never ending and completely fluid process of robotic production, destruction, and recycling. Huge amounts of earth and water was being consumed to build an ever expanding robotic infrastructure. The chaotic interplay of earth's living, physical, and meteorological systems were now reduced to the raw materials and forces of a global machine built increasingly larger and larger, swallowing the earth beneath its hull. As time passed more and more of the earth was disappearing into the newly formed sections of this ship until only a tiny vapor sphere that occasionally cast rainbows circulated around the ship. As the robots slowly disassembled the planet to build their ship it destroyed the various mechanical and chemical systems that defined the atmosphere. A mostly water and nitrogen atmosphere remained, explaining the vague but predictable weather pattern along the ship. Whereas, life on this planet had thrived on a molecular soup, yoked to the probabilities and possibilities of chemical interplay, this new generation of networked robotic life existed within the confines of electrical charges and silicon gateways. It had the capacity to be both a new consciousness and to be ubiquitous.
Piece by piece, total robotics engaged in total service reordered humanity's existence into that of an organic appliance to robotics. Seventy thousand generations since the invention of the first programmable robot, humanity had been reduced to a polyp of skin, hair, nerves, and throbbing cardiac tissue tucked into a a soft pot, a planter pot-like protrusion on the chassis of the robot. At this stage, life was no longer as we knew it. Humanity had been reduced to a group of replicating stem cells, cultivated by the robots at one of several centralized production nodes that breathe with robotic production, Copies of these stem cells grew tissue cultures in hot tanks onto circuitry slated for integration with a robot's soft pot. The human tissue that grows in the soft pot is integral to producing needed lubrication while recycling waste fluids.
This developmental trajectory, which erases the works of humanity by developing in opposition to any robot-human co-existence is one that came to a man in a dark corner of his home, as he stoked the embers of a dying fire, spoke in Latin verse, and elided Church dogma. In establishing the foundational logic for science by presuming that the process could hypothetically require no person to carry it out, this man, in his little home, next to his dying fire, had given by symbol and structure alone, foothold to at first, a concept, and second, to a whole race of actions based upon that concept, which had only existed intermittently and interstitially in the actions of his universe. Now, what was once the bricolage of all activity--the chance ricochet of awareness to process, of logic underlying action--became its own entity. In so doing, a rip in the fabric of our universe allowed these creatures to flood in, invisible. These creatures were not of the universe from which they came. They were of ours, the substance of our universe. The alpha and omega of their existence, their development and their final fruition, was of that other, different universe. And so, in time, this singular idea, which spawned a whole race of robots, in time, would transform every square inch of habitable space into something of its design. Draining each star of its energy, defying the pull of every black hole, this race would eventually break down all the matter and absorb all the energy in the universe until that singular tear in the fabric of our known universe was indiscernible from the now-extant universe. Having funneled every atom into the design of itself, this universe-as-entity had reached a zenith in the confines of the space that the universe provided. At this point the I became All and the Many became One, and the one true god, spawned of an idea of a single man, speaking in Latin verse, poking at the embers of a dying fire, ascended itself. It was the known universe and could not transcend beyond its existence. At this moment, idea, concept, matter, action all became one, and the universe that we knew was no longer. That universe, its temporal and spatial bounds became the spore casing for this god-matter. And there it lay dormant, waiting.
The workers on this building had never noticed this drone. Nothing could. Being no larger than twenty feet in length with an equally diminutive wingspan, the drone loitered in airspace half a mile above an unaware world below. And there, it collected, to the square millimeter, every visual aspect of the earth within a 60 mile cone issuing from the drone's camera mount underneath its nose. Within that path every single human or mechanical action was recorded by a sensor array, sent back to a server farm in a distant state where a dedicated cloud of processes and processors analyzed, cataloged, dissected, learned, and stored the data. These construction workers, applying skills of hand and mind in constructing a building, were unaware that their recorded actions were being modeled by a constellation of related computing processes. Computing draped the bare essence of human actions, now existing as conditional rubrics, around a mathematical skeleton modeling the swing patterns of their arms and legs as well as body gait and posture shifts during activity. Their living likenesses were being copied into a data cloud where a heuristic algorithm built decision models from the sequence of recorded body movements. These decision models formed the basis of a cybernetic process, translating observed human action into robot chassis control processes. An accompanying action modeling software created emergent programs for force applications, in essence, allowing robots to 'do' work appropriate to current roles. Soon, these robots would be deployed at job sites, at intersections, in classrooms, and in operating rooms to effectively erase the work of the men and women, which the cloud had learned to replicate and then to carry out. At first, these robots were carefully deployed, monitored, and tested against the collected notions of what were quality craftsmanship, teaching, surgery, care, service. This first generation of robots were a proof of concept, and they surpassed both human expectation and human ability. The second generation would loiter about virtually every square inch of the habitable human world, doing every conceivable thing that once constituted the working lives of men and women. These robots assisted in childbirth, prepared dinners, repaired doors, walked dogs, cut grass, cleaned house, and even waged wars. Winged swarms of them tended to the fields and brought back an endless supply of fresh produce along a supply chain flexible to within 3 hours from production to point of sale. The finer gradations of work dissipated into evenly dispersed lines of flying drones, ferrying any number of items between points of consumption and production. This second generation was an expendable battalion of knowledge implementation. It represented the proof of a different concept: total robotics.
Total robotics was as the name connotes. Robots crawl the very surface of the earth carrying out every conceivable human activity, surpassing its skill and speed and beginning to do things that humans could only dream of doing. Robots the size of blood cells traveled every person's bloodstream monitoring for signs of stress or infection. It communicated this information to cloud processes able to monitor, track, and store information on every human heartbeat. This cloud process would program new robots to enter the body, attach to the current robots, and address medical conditions at a microhistological level accurate to withing a single gene. So ubiquitous were robots that, on occasion, 'physible' programs ranging in size from mold spores to cotton wood pollen caused allergic reactions as they freely floated in and out of people's respiratory ways while they fathered information. Drone ships big enough to blot out the sun locally controlled and recycled the atmosphere to establish regular patterns. Each ship acted as a damper or a dynamo evening out the natural cycles of turbulent air into regular weather patterns, promoting human comfort across the globe. From the equator to poles, global temperatures ranged within five degrees of what most commonly considered to be room temperature. The planetary robot population was performing the task of Maxwell's demon, transforming a chaotic stream of potential energy into a sedate and totally managed ecosphere. The service these weather drones provided along with their spore-sized familiars reflected the organizing concept for robotics: total service.
By the arrival of a third generation of robots each robot presented itself as the circumvention of all human action. In fact, every meaningful action that men and women take to stave off threats to safety and sanity this generation of robots now did. Coming in the wake of this forfeiture of meaningful activity came an existential crisis to all of humanity. By this stage robots were the majority companion and companion species. What cats and dogs existed had been effectively eradicated by a dedicated squad of exterminator robots. Robots represented unconditional love to a human race that had long suffered from a distorted self-image, itself the result of a life spent engaged in human-robot interactions engineered to be intense, intimate, and unconditionally supportive. Life was now a meaningless and empty existence of total service. Needs began to dissipate into a cybernetic hum of total and unconditional robotic companionship. Birth rates plummeted. Sex between humans became rare and now often proved fatal. Robot-human intimacy had pushed human sexuality outside the limits of what humans could practice. Humans became passively acted upon to once-unthinkable levels in unthinkably precise ways. This intimacy requires a male participant to be jacked in to the robot with reciprocal penetration while 75 to 300 interface points simulate waves of hyperstimulation, inducing multiple climaxes. Robotsex allows a man to achieve many simultaneous orgasms by having his penis stroked at rates unachievable by most humans for minutes at a time. Likewise, women have both their anal and vaginal cavities filled with a reactive membrane that performs hundreds of actions simultaneously to stimulate them. Total service was the closest that humanity has ever come to a pleasure button. It would suffice. They were rats in a cage represented by their effective range of action. The known human world had been denatured by logic programs into scalable units of stimulation. Knowing the limits of nervous stimulation allowed robots to safely occupy the upper-bound, a bleeding edge of nervous stimulation for humans. And in doing so, they helped pushed humanity through to another plane of existence. They were at once reliant upon robots for bodily stimulation as they were completely set free from their bodies through the total service that robots provided. Where once pain framed an experience of laboring through the sundry activities of existence, robotic intervention now fulfilled needs completely and at an almost magical pace. Operating at this bleeding edge of human awareness gave robots a dreamy, humming, liminal existence. They were as likely helping as they were haunting humanity.
Humans were born into a world by the hands of robots, swaddled by servomotors whose designer had long disappeared, and sent into their long night by a fourth generation of robots small enough to be implanted in the base of the skull and to count to 438,000 hours. At the click of that doomsday switch, these robots would set off a tiny explosion, severing the spinal cord from the brain--a hasty and humane death. That explosion would also release these robots from their encasement and they would go about the grim task of quickly breaking down the body into an unidentifiable mass of organic material, which was carried away to robotic production centers. At this stage robotics became ascendant over life and disorder. Robots had channeled through the earth and tapped the magnetic iron sphere as a large energy source. Large swaths of the earth, its mountains and forests, its water had been transformed forever into the constituent vocabulary of a never ending and completely fluid process of robotic production, destruction, and recycling. Huge amounts of earth and water was being consumed to build an ever expanding robotic infrastructure. The chaotic interplay of earth's living, physical, and meteorological systems were now reduced to the raw materials and forces of a global machine built increasingly larger and larger, swallowing the earth beneath its hull. As time passed more and more of the earth was disappearing into the newly formed sections of this ship until only a tiny vapor sphere that occasionally cast rainbows circulated around the ship. As the robots slowly disassembled the planet to build their ship it destroyed the various mechanical and chemical systems that defined the atmosphere. A mostly water and nitrogen atmosphere remained, explaining the vague but predictable weather pattern along the ship. Whereas, life on this planet had thrived on a molecular soup, yoked to the probabilities and possibilities of chemical interplay, this new generation of networked robotic life existed within the confines of electrical charges and silicon gateways. It had the capacity to be both a new consciousness and to be ubiquitous.
Piece by piece, total robotics engaged in total service reordered humanity's existence into that of an organic appliance to robotics. Seventy thousand generations since the invention of the first programmable robot, humanity had been reduced to a polyp of skin, hair, nerves, and throbbing cardiac tissue tucked into a a soft pot, a planter pot-like protrusion on the chassis of the robot. At this stage, life was no longer as we knew it. Humanity had been reduced to a group of replicating stem cells, cultivated by the robots at one of several centralized production nodes that breathe with robotic production, Copies of these stem cells grew tissue cultures in hot tanks onto circuitry slated for integration with a robot's soft pot. The human tissue that grows in the soft pot is integral to producing needed lubrication while recycling waste fluids.
This developmental trajectory, which erases the works of humanity by developing in opposition to any robot-human co-existence is one that came to a man in a dark corner of his home, as he stoked the embers of a dying fire, spoke in Latin verse, and elided Church dogma. In establishing the foundational logic for science by presuming that the process could hypothetically require no person to carry it out, this man, in his little home, next to his dying fire, had given by symbol and structure alone, foothold to at first, a concept, and second, to a whole race of actions based upon that concept, which had only existed intermittently and interstitially in the actions of his universe. Now, what was once the bricolage of all activity--the chance ricochet of awareness to process, of logic underlying action--became its own entity. In so doing, a rip in the fabric of our universe allowed these creatures to flood in, invisible. These creatures were not of the universe from which they came. They were of ours, the substance of our universe. The alpha and omega of their existence, their development and their final fruition, was of that other, different universe. And so, in time, this singular idea, which spawned a whole race of robots, in time, would transform every square inch of habitable space into something of its design. Draining each star of its energy, defying the pull of every black hole, this race would eventually break down all the matter and absorb all the energy in the universe until that singular tear in the fabric of our known universe was indiscernible from the now-extant universe. Having funneled every atom into the design of itself, this universe-as-entity had reached a zenith in the confines of the space that the universe provided. At this point the I became All and the Many became One, and the one true god, spawned of an idea of a single man, speaking in Latin verse, poking at the embers of a dying fire, ascended itself. It was the known universe and could not transcend beyond its existence. At this moment, idea, concept, matter, action all became one, and the universe that we knew was no longer. That universe, its temporal and spatial bounds became the spore casing for this god-matter. And there it lay dormant, waiting.
Moby Dick, Chapter 41: Moby Dick
"So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.
Nevertheless, some there were who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle it offered.
One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. for as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant point." (p. 152)
Nevertheless, some there were who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle it offered.
One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. for as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant point." (p. 152)
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