Words&Dirt

“When he saw Tommy step out onto the tallest rooftop in the city, wearing a small, horrified smile, Joe felt the passionate, if not the factual, truth behind Kornblum’s dictum. He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained to him in the world. Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit, in his cabinet of mysteries on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, serenaded by a tirelessly vamping orchestra of air currents and violin winds, the trumpeting of foghorns and melancholy steamships, the plangent continuo of passing DC-3s. Like Harry Houdini, Joe had failed to get out of his self-created trap; but now the love of a boy had sprung him, and drawn him at last, blinking, before the footlights.”

––The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, pg. 536

“Proponents of some new technology, confident in its superiority to existing alternatives, are often dismayed when other people do not share their enthusiasm. But people’s resistance to novel and nominally superior technology need not be based on ignorance or irrationality. A technology’s valence or normative character depends not only on the context in which it is deployed, but also the vantage point from which its impacts are evaluated: what is a boon from one person’s perspective can be a liability from another’s. Thus, although mechanized looms increased the economic efficiency of textile production, the Luddite handloom weavers who anticipated that the innovation would render their artisan skills obsolete may have had good instrumental reasons to oppose it. The point here is that if ‘technological perfection’ is to name a widely convergent instrumental goal for intelligent agents, then the term must be understood in a special sense––technology must be construed as embedded in a particular social context, and its costs and benefits must be evaluated with reference to some specified agents’ final values.”

––Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, by Nick Bostrom, pg. 112