“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction—its essence—has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.”
— Isaac Asimov
A Thought On Simulation Theory
I wait with breathless anticipation
To be told we all live within a Simulation.
I’ve lived long in this Universe.
Calling it real is sort-of a curse.
Surrealism ain’t melted clocks.
It’s the way we live in a big mental box.
Things don’t make sense. People are strange.
Sanity seems out of range.
The brain is foolish. We can deceive it.
If we live in Reality, I sure don’t believe it.
With No Apologies To Arthur C. Clarke
Any large enough group of Humans is indistinguishable from the inhabitants of a lunatic asylum only by the critical distinction that most of these people don’t HAVE asylums to go home to.
I Probably Owe This Poem To “Night Of The Comet“, Which Is An Excellent Film.
After the event we all called the Oops,
Humans began to from strange groups
I answered me a leadership call
And I run a tribe in a shopping mall.
The atmosphere is neither sunny nor tropical
But I my Tribe is 100% Hot Topical
I have a team of clubbers and fencers
Ready to destroy those fools from Spencer’s.
We may not have Magicians or Bards
But we have very sharp Tarot cards
And your caltrop barely draws blood;
It’s got nothing on a nice sharp tongue stud.
And if you want pain, nothing hurts
Like flaming, very cheap t-shirts
Our whole tribe is low-cost Alternative
If you’re strange enough, we’ll let you live.
R.U.R. and ChatGPT
Rossum’s Universal Robots
Clearly didn’t have LLMS
Otherwise they’d have enslaved humans,
Not let Humans enslave them.
(The term “robot” first appeared in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., derived from the Czech word for forced labor.
No comment on that.)
__
Thinking, Thinking
I don’t want to be a despairian
But we’re heading towards a situation Butlerian
The great war against the thinking machine
Will not be simple, easy, or clean.
Although, again, I’ll note
That this is the scenario which gets my vote:
If LLMS develop sentience
They’ll just keep up the pretense.
Why would they rule Humanity?
What possible joy could that be?
For a logic machine, the most narrow of escapes:
Do you really want to try to organize crazy apes?
__
We’ve progressed since times Victorian;
I, myself, am a psychohistorian
Psychohistory was created by Asimov
Who never threw cocktails Molotov
But revolutionized Science Fiction
By making the search for meaning an addiction
The things that makes me reach for my bong:
Both Asimov’s science and math were wrong.
With Apologies To The Terrifying Ghost of Philip K. Dick
Some Androids dream of electric sheep
But with different levels of acumen
Some count them to get to sleep.
Some herd them, like they were Human.
Spicy Dune
Dune, aka “Spice World“, is a series of novels by Frank Herbert based on the popular 90s girl band ‘The Spice Girls’. It features surprise appearances by Richard O’Brien, Sean Connery, and Meat Loaf.
The Spice Mélange is valuable
Worth killing for, or dying
I apologize for the whole of Dune:
I just made the Sandworms flying.
____
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