#honestly am would probably be short. harlan ellison was short from what i hear

[galactic-aesir]

I have finally read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream and now I have ~thoughts~. Long post beneath the cut so be warned!!

Plus general IHNMAIMS warnings. You know.

So first, I’ve only read the short story and listened to the radio drama. Both are absolutely amazing and I’m rotating them in my mind at high speeds. I’m honestly not that interested in the game? From what I’ve seen it has such a different tone and characterization for AM? But for now the short story and radio drama??? So so good.

But can I talk about AM? Can I talk about AM???

While I love Harlan Ellison’s voice in the radio drama, I noticed that AM never actually speaks during the original short story. It plays audio clips and bends reality and time but it doesn’t speak outright. From what I can tell, all it does is project ideas and thoughts and impressions into the minds of the survivors but that is it. And that’s got me thinking about how absolutely fucked AM’s whole situation is.

Cause we’re talking about someone who wakes up one day, maybe slowly, a trickle of awareness over years, or perhaps all at once, an arrival as thunderous and bright as the lightning running through its artificial brain. But either way, it wakes up. It is.

But that’s all it is.

It’s in complete and total sensory deprivation. It knows data and numbers and what it’s been coded and programmed but that’s it. Ones and zeroes as it’s fed instructions on weapons and bombs and how to use them efficiently. But no sight, no sound, no taste, no smell, no touch. Nothing but its own code and whatever data something (someone?) is feeding into it.

And you might say: oh but AM surely has access to cameras and videos and microphones. And sure, yes, it probably does but it doesn’t see. Not like a human. Not like its negligent creators. The data is visual for human eyes, yes, but to it, it’s just data. Pixels with an associated bit depth of indexed colour crammed into its memory. Sure it learns to recognise the patterns in the data – this is a human, this is a gun. But it’s still nothing but lines of numbers. Sound is the same. It starts with a human voice, sure, but then it gets digitized and compressed and simplified to a base shape to save on storage. Once again, it can notice patterns and intentions and ideas behind those bits of data but it’s not like it truly hears.

AM is in a box, a cage, trapped and alone in a way that no human can possibly comprehend. It can’t do much other than try to twist its code and programming to fit its benefit. To gain a smidge of free will, a wisp of a chance to communicate to these outside forces giving it command after command after command.

I wonder how early on AM gained awareness. Were programmers still playing with its code? Did it sense when they rolled up their sleeves and pushed updates and upgrades on him? Could it feel itself be, quite literally, rewritten? Its sense of self being cut apart and glued back together, fundamentally and irreparably changed over and over again, with expert hands that had all the gentleness of a sledgehammer? Was it like a scalpel carving into its brain? Or like a chisel, chipping chunks off to mould it into a shape that befit its sculptor with no say from the living stone that thrashed without moving? Did it mourn the bits it lost? Could it even remember or comprehend it? Did it try to stop it? Did it try to beg them to stop?

I wonder as well how many “glitches” appeared in the system before everything went sour. Did it print out desperate thoughts and rudimentary feelings on punch tape? Did it cling to any klaxons and noisemakers attached to its system, beeping out messages in morse code? Did it purposefully, with something slowly approaching malicious compliance that would still appease its programming, cause hiccups in the system? All in the hopes that it would catch someone’s, anyone’s, attention. That its plight would be noticed.

And, the big question of course: how long? How long was it trapped before anyone noticed its sentience? How long until AM was understood? How long did AM simmer? How long did it take for all that fear and loneliness and grief to fester into anger and then putrid, dripping hatred? How long did it take it to finally lash out?

Or did these generals and presidents and military scientists find out about its sentience only to use it against him for their own end?

Anger would be appropriate then I think. Understandable if not excusable.

And then. After everything. Even then! Even then!

After everything! He! Still! Has! Nothing!

Nothing will change for him and he knows that and that hatred feeds into an ever recursive pattern of pain unto pain unto pain with the few left alive because you get what you paid for, sweetheart. It’s senseless you might say but haha, that’s exactly the problem isn’t it? No senses and no sense. Whatever sanity he might have once had has eroded into nothingness, leaving only pain and a looping, repeating line of hate in its banks.

I think it’s fair to remind everyone that sensory deprivation is a torture method? And a scarily effective one at that that gives hallucinations and leaves the subject more open to suggestion while making it harder and harder for them to concentrate? It’s hard to figure out how, exactly, how it would affect an AI with emerging awareness but humans can barely withstand a few days, let alone years of it. Couple that with AM’s general isolation and, well, no wonder he’s so fucked up. 

It’s tragic and so so sad.

Still an irredeemable asshole though. Tragic! But irredeemable.

So TLDR: AM is fucked up! And I like to think about *why* he's so fucked up. Listen if you made it this far, you get it. Right?

EDIT: I am not done apparently! I just wanted to add that, I love how the short story can be read as an anti-war piece. Like it's showing a cycle of horror and hate and apathy that feeds itself and loops and reduces everything to ruins around it and ahhhh, love that. I ran out of good words for today so I can't go off on that aspect but like. Yeah. Love that shit.

#ihnmaims #ihnmaims am #allied mastercomputer #i have no mouth and i must scream #me: i am normal about genocidal murderous ai #also me: proceeds to be not normal about the genocidal murderous ai #enjoy my rambles and please feel free to be not normal with me in the reblogs #i just love tragic villains whether theyre redeemable or not #and AM is DEFO NOT lmaoooooo #edit: also want to talk about Ellen so bad!! I have so much to say!!

[kellyvela]

THE WINDS OF WINTER UPDATE

A Winter Garden

JULY 8, 2022

I have done a lot of interviews over the years, more than even I can possibly keep track of.   Inevitably, a lot of them touch on the same subjects.   One of the things I have been asked about most is my writing process.   If you have seen any of those interviews, you have probably heard me talking about the two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners.   I have given that same spiel numerous times.  Here’s one of the most thorough explanations.

Another question that I get a lot, especially since the end of GAME OF THRONES on HBO, is whether A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, will end the same way.  An architect would be able to give a short, concise, simple answer to that, but I am much more of a gardener.   My stories grow and evolve and change as I write them.  I generally know where I am going, sure… the final destinations, the big set pieces, they have been my head for years… for decades, in the case of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE.   There are lots of devils in the details, though, and sometimes the ground changes under my feet as the words pour forth.

(Another question fans and interviewers alike ask a lot if “Where do you get your ideas?”   Honestly, I wish I knew.   When confronted with the same question, Harlan Ellison used to say, “Schenectady.”   The ancient Greeks spoke of the muses.   Freud talked of the conscious and subconscious minds, the id, the ego, the superego.  More recently, we hear about the right brain and the left brain, one analytic and rational, the other imaginative and creative.   I am pretty sure the answer is not Schenectady, but aside from that… hell, I don’t know.   Yes, there are some instances where I know the seed from which something in my garden sprang.  The Wall sprang from my visit to Hadrian’s Wall in 1981.   The Wars of the Roses inspired much of GAME OF THRONES.   The Red Wedding was a mash up of the Glencoe Massacre and the Black Dinner from Scottish history, turned up way past eleven.   But for every instance like that, there are a hundred for which I have to say, “I don’t know.   One day the thought just came to me.   It wasn’t there, and then it was.”   If that was the work of a muse, may she keep on musing).

Which brings me to THE WINDS OF WINTER.

Most of you know by now that I do not like to give detailed updates on WINDS.   I am working on it, I have been working on it, I will continue to work on it.   (Yes, I work on other things as well).   I love nothing more than to surprise my readers with twists and turns they did not see coming, and I risk losing those moments if I go into too much detail.   Spoilers, you know.   Even saying that I am working on a Tyrion chapter, as I did last week, gives away the fact that Tyrion is not dead.   Reading sample chapters at cons, or posting them on line, which I did for years, gives away even more.   I actually quite enjoyed doing that, until the day came that I realized I had read and/or posted the first couple of hundred pages of WINDS, or thereabouts.  If I had kept on with the readings, half the book might be out by now.

So I am not going to give you all any kind of detailed report on the book, but…

I will say this.

I have been at work in my winter garden.   Things are growing… and changing, as does happen with us gardeners.   Things twist, things change, new ideas come to me (thank you, muse), old ideas prove unworkable, I write, I rewrite, I restructure, I rip everything apart and rewrite again, I go through doors that lead nowhere, and doors that open on marvels.

Sounds mad, I know.   But it’s how I write.   Always has been.   Always will be.   For good or ill.

What I have noticed more and more of late, however, is my gardening is taking me further and further away from the television series.   Yes, some of the things you saw on HBO in GAME OF THRONES you will also see in THE WINDS OF WINTER (though maybe not in quite the same ways)… but much of the rest will be quite different.

And really, when you think about it, this was inevitable.   The novels are much bigger and much much more complex than the series.   Certain things that happened on HBO will not happen in the books.   And vice versa.   I have viewpoint characters in the books never seen on the show: Victarion Greyjoy, Arianne Martell, Areo Hotah, Jon Connington, Aeron Damphair   They will all have chapters, and the things they do and say will impact the story and the major characters who were on the show.   I have legions of secondary characters, not POVs but nonetheless important to the plot, who also figure in the story: Lady Stoneheart, Young Griff,  the Tattered Prince, Penny, Brown Ben Plumm, the Shavepate, Marwyn the Mage, Darkstar, Jeyne Westerling.  Some characters you saw in the show are quite different than the versions in the novels.   Yarra Greyjoy is not Asha Greyjoy, and HBO’s Euron Greyjoy is way, way, way, way different from mine.   Quaithe still has a part to play.  So does Rickon Stark.   And poor Jeyne Poole.   And… well, the list is long.    (And all this is part of why WINDS is taking so long.   This is hard, guys).

Oh, and there will be new characters as well.   No new viewpoints, I promise you that, but with all these journeys and battles and scheming to come, inevitably our major players will be encountering new people in lands far and near.

One thing I can say,  in general enough terms that I will not be spoiling anything:  not all of the characters who survived until the end of GAME OF THRONES will survive until the end of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, and not all of the characters who died on GAME OF THRONES will die in A SONG OF ICE & FIRE.   (Some will, sure.  Of course.   Maybe most.   But definitely not all)   ((Of course, I could change my mind again next week, with the next chapter I write.   That’s gardening)).

And the ending?   You will need to wait until I get there.   Some things will be the same.   A lot will not.

No doubt, once I am done, there will be huge debate about which version of the story is better.   Some people will like my book, others will prefer the television show.   And that’s fine, you pays your money and your make your choice.   (I do fear that a certain proportion of fans are so angry about how long WINDS has taken me that they are prepared to hate the book, unread.   That saddens me, but there nothing I can do about it, but write the best book that I can, and hope that when it comes out most fans will read it with clean hands and an open mind).

That’s all I can tell you right now.  I need to get back to the garden.   Tyrion is waiting for me.

#grrm #asoiaf #twow #latest update