Out of Atlanta, not my favorite airport, a couple of hundred of us flew thru early morning skies and descended. Please raise your seat to its most vertical orientation and your tray to its stowed position. Put all your crap in the seat pocket in front of you. Put the trash you’ve generated in the bag being ushered thru the narrow isle by the haggard attendant. Do not consider the situation in detail and follow all instructions given by the crew. A hundred plus screens were frame by frame telling stories with warm human values or violent righteous indignation. Many passengers were pattern matching colored dots. Not a single passenger was doing anything directly contributing to our movement thru the air. All were passive. So many idle minds. Wouldn’t humanity be better served if the cabin was filled with the sound of a hundred voices chanting for peace? Nearer heaven in all but thought. We walked off the aircraft and into the terminal’s bedlam.
From Boston another flying machine. A high wing monoplane with two engines filled with eight passengers. I was one.
I crawled to the forward most part of the fuselage and into a seat. The plane was Italian and the pilot a boy scout, or might have been. He had the aircraft merit badge on his tan uniform, starched and professional. The co-pilot was younger, not old enough to drive a car but we’d avoid highways so that might have been ok. He spent the hour flying up the coast of Maine with a flight simulator. When the autopilot took over the pilot started a game of black jack on his display. I watched them to pass the time. Below was cloud stretched to the horizon. When the egg timer hanging from the rearview mirror chimed it was time to land. We punched thru the cloud there it was, the abandoned Coast Guard runway, all 5000 feet of it. We landed. My daughter picked me up and we went to WM for my meds…I needed them….I’d been hallucinating again.
Whats it like when you remain sane and the world around you goes nuts? is it like this? or do we need assume the rest of the human world is fine…so it must be me? That to preserve the illusion for others and not induce any panic. No run for the exits or the teller’s windows on my watch. A stiff upper lip and in response to WTF? assurance that all is well and good and as it should be. When the pilot calls out “brace, brace,brace” will the aircrew be able to contort themselves enough to demo what that looks like? The news has been telling us to brace for years. Something is approaching, the ground? Some hard landing at least.
Forget about nukes and the climate….its AI thats out to get us. Spooky AI. Hoooeeey I don’t believe in AI. But it does make me think how prescient Steely Dan was in their song “IGY”
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
Donald Fagan nailed it as have many sci fi novels and flicks. We always cede the toughest jobs to machines don’t we?
Yes, I have lived long enough that I find myself an extra on a science fiction movie sound stage. Of course the scenes are shot out of sequence, this might even be a flashback, or back story. Plenty weird seeing the science fiction pulp of your youth come to life, a computer running the world. People trying to be like the all powerful intellect they’ve come to depend on and worship. A false idol ?, sounds like one don’t it. It all gets back to human nature, stock nature…not what humans will be after emulating machine intelligence. Different for sure. Or merging with the AI, mind servers and implant chip brain RF modems.
Sounds like so much fun. Sorry if I am not around to share it with you. enjoy
CSB 