/lit/ - Literature

>>13073285
>"So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it's expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution's gonna weed it out just like that."

>"Maybe it did." He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. "Chimpanzees are smarter than orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can't always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can."

>"So what's your point? Smarter animal, less self-awareness? Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient?"

>"Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks."

>"So why didn't that happen to us?"

>"What makes you think it didn't?"

>It was such an obviously stupid question that Sascha didn't have an answer for it. I could imagine her gaping in the silence.

>"You're not thinking this through," Cunningham said. "We're not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence."

I turned on my car and the stereo started and it was a soap opera, the original soap opera, character arcs spanning fifty years, plotlines leaping from vacuum tube to transistor, oak to bakelite to 3-polypropylene. There was a woman talking. An old woman. She said
>"I stayed with him until they found him a bed."
She was talking about a hospital. And it made me think how far we've fallen. There aren't enough beds for the sick, and this fact has permeated so far down into the bedrock of the society that it has reached an Institution as resistant to change as the the fucking The Archers. If there are sacred duties, then surely caring for the sick is one of them. What lines are there left to cross? Things aren't coming apart except at the edges. Spin the sphere at thousands of rpm and it begins to warp, break,, the outer layers ripped off by irresistible force. But the center holds, and so we continue to spin, faster and faster, smaller and smaller. We will be diminished. We will be exhausted and miserable and we will endure as much suffering as it is humanly possible to bear and our children will have it worse.