quahaug

Fucking rad.

Yeah, wired runs lots of stories about stuff that quite simply never happens.

I used to keep a lot of back issues of wired, which I saved because I thought they had some cool stories. Surprisingly, many are packed with examples of very obvious vapor ware, and have aged really poorly.

A small handful, however, still read like notes from an exciting future, and I find myself returning to them, when searching for inspiration.

This isn't a matter of choice for me, from what I gather. It's already obvious to me that very powerful faceless people, somewhere out there, have decided that this WILL happen, one way or another, and the dismal tide will creep up around us all.

It doesn't matter much, whether my car or your car is autonomous, so long as the prevailing wind perpetuates a certain concentration of robotic vehicles on the road. Choice, freedom, privacy, become mere platitudes in such an environment. Meaningless words parroted in the same sentence as terrorism, patriotism, job creation and affordable healthcare.

Yeah, ban cars because cars bad. No people drive cars. People no can think good. People not designed for fast car speed. The car think better for people. Then never bad things happen and all people will be controlled by good cars that think good.

That's just a replay attack. The consciousness is still bound to the cells. No new, unique information is generated without the presence of the cells.

The term "uploaded" is being subjected to special semantics in this case. Consciousness is not transferred over to the receiver by the act of transmitting a signal.

If I make a telephone call, and leave a voicemail message, the answering machine does not get up and walk around. Even a sufficiently advanced voicemail recorder would only be an interpretation of artifact left behind by a creature, and not the original being.

I have a different mental model of the nature of the signal. I don't imagine that it was transmitted as a focused beam attenuated by an aperture. My thinking is that it was a sphere shaped pulse generated by an apparatus like a broadcasting tower, or perhaps discharged from a device that targets a specific band of the EM spectrum.

When you think of it as an event similar to an electromagnetic pulse from a hydrogen bomb, and not as a beam from a laser pointer, it changes the rationale for why it might not be a repeatable event. If it was a pulse and not a beam, it might still be prone to occlusion, in terms of whether pulse were generated on the surface of a planet, and on the side that only happened to be facing toward us at the time (not away), while our antenna was pointed at the night sky, but that still increases the probability of reception.

The alternative concept for a pulse, is that it was generated from a small space craft or space probe, and not on a planet capable of eclipsing the signal.

Considering that it lasted 72 seconds, that might fit the profile of a weapon, if you consider the duration of typical video of a mushroom cloud. 72 seconds might also fit the profile of a jamming signal generated while a weapon was en route, to prevent detection while being delivered to a target.

But with what motive? If you were to create a single high-energy pulse, deliberately, and willfully apply a degree of entropy to scramble the signal, why?

You can't upload consciousness. At best, all you can upload is a representation of personality and memories.

Well, at the very least, if it seems to be a diliberate signal originating from an organized intelligence AND anomalous, then it might be useful to consider the intersection of those two characteristics.

Where do we see intelligence and anomalies converge?

- War, and other forms of political conflict

- Accidents, even if non-destructive, like when the cat sits on the keyboard

- Experimentation, and research into novel discoveries, unfamiliar to a civilization

- Distress, final acts of desperation, where no hope is provided by circumstance, but behavior is engaged in anyway, because there is no consequence

Consider that a specific communications channel for a civilization/culture-specific technology were being jammed, as part of a hostile operation.

  Scientists say that if the signal came from 
  extraterrestrials, they are likely to be an extremely 
  advanced civilization, as the signal would have required a 
  2.2-gigawatt transmitter, vastly more powerful than any on 
  Earth.

That would certainly explain the intensity, brevity and lack of repitition for this particular signal?

One might expect residual evidence of destructive forces at work, such as a debris field or hot gas clouds, but that assumes that the weapons are of a conventional nature we might readily understand.

This is ridiculous. It's like something out of Smokey and The Bandit, or The Dukes of Hazard, or maybe Super Troopers. (meow)

Actually, this crops up as a legal/insurance concern for larger valuable companies every so often, where company policy must stipulate in writing that critical numbers and/or groups of employees should not fly on the same airplane at the same time, since airplanes, though statistically safer than cars, are still prone to catastrophic accidents and are opperated by pilots not under direct control of the company.

In order to fulfill certain contracts or receive insurance coverage, written language for company travel policies must ensure the continuity of proprietary trade secrets, and redundancy for mission-critical personnel, in case of disaster, or catastrophic accident.

There was a tech company (during the 80's or 90's?) that was completely destroyed by a single random plane crash that killed a handful of the key people in one fell swoop, but the name escapes me, and my google skills are failing. Maybe someone else will remember. I want to say it was a vintage video game company, but it might've just been some old (now defunct) electronics company...

For this same reason, the president and vice president of the united states don't fly together. I think military command adheres to similar rules.

Especially considering that human beings can, very easily, become totally divorced from healthy, "normal" human values.

It's not enough to merely keep humans in the picture, but to keep healthy, undamaged humans in the picture.

Let's say, perhaps, that after a particularly costly war, the only humans left are a mixture of mentally unstable, angry, ambitious, victory-driven amputees, with intense biases imbued upon them by surviving particularly horrific and violent combat. These people, in a warped attempt to say "never again", optimize an artificially intelligent, fully automated child-rearing skinner box [1] to mold children into their own image, as the natural and perfect outcome which produces a society averse to violent warfare. The result is that every child that emerges from the skinner box is an angry, warped sociopath, missing limbs, who rationalizes even trivial behavior with an arbitrary moral high ground of extreme polar ideology.

But wait... aren't humans... technically classifiable as self-assembling intelligent constructs, spewed forth from the bald nothingness of space and time by mere coincidence? What if WE are the beast we fear?

Oh... oh god.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner

  ...yeah, sure, let me just call my buddy who used to be a mechanic for Tupolev.

Every single troubleshooting tip is of greater urgency than the last!

Given Facebook's predilection for collaborating with the NSA, perhaps this is a government program to civilianize the image of drones. The military industrial complex really needs someone from the commercial sector to step up and rinse out a the bad aftertaste of all those funeral and wedding attendees that were blasted limb from limb by hellfire missiles.

Jeff Bezos tried his damnedest to make them seem like santa clause just in time for christmas, but we need some real megawatt tech celebrities to work their magic. Bezos is balding, for christ's sake.

I mean Mark Zuckerberg with all his cute, cuddly animal-loving vegetarian tendencies wouldn't harm a fly.

If HE'S okay with drones, then they MUST be okay! (insert obligatory emoticon)

And, oh yeah...

  CITIZEN ALERT NOTIFICATION: WITH THE PROCURMENT OF A FLEET 
  15 PANOPTICOID DRONES MANUFACTUED BY LOCKHEED, YOUR LOCAL 
  SHERRIF'S DEPARTMENT WILL BE ENFORCING ALL EVICTIONS IN 
  YOUR COUNTY BY NON-LETHAL PEPPER-STUN DRONE STRIKE. IN THE
  EVENT THAT YOUR HOME IS FORECLOSED, YOU WILL BE ORDERED TO 
  VACATE UNDER THREAT OF NON-LETHAL FORCE. 

  ---

  CITIZEN ALERT NOTIFICATION: WITH THE PROCURMENT OF A FLEET 
  27 PROTOBEDIENT DRONES MANUFACTUED BY NORTHROP/GRUMMAN ALL
  TRAFFIC STOPS ON STATE ROAD 902 WILL NOW BE CONDUCTED 
  AUTONOMOUSLY. DO NOT TAUNT THE PROTOBEDIENT DRONE.

  ***end citizen alert notification***