Chapter 78 — Chase Through Time
The Curve of Time, Chapter 78 —— Chase Through Time, in which Saskia chases Gary Holcomb back through time.
Followed by reasons for my skepticism about AI doomsayers.
Listen to full episode :
— 78 —
Chase Through Time
It can feel particularly difficult to chase someone when they are fleeing, not just spatially, but temporally too. But that was what Saskia did. She chased Mr. Holcomb in reverse time. Through a forrest, with little rivulet streams flowing backwards, uphill, though they still splashed when her foot landed in them.
A deer cannoned backwards to a spot just left of Saskia’s path, where it stopped. It dropped its head, and idly started grazing on a patch of grass. Saskia veered right, away from where it had lurched back, and to avoid an inadvertent collision. Up ahead, she saw a squirrel dart backwards, right behind Holcomb. She, herself, veered wide to avoid it when it froze in place, it’s head tracking her.
Classical physics was wrong: causality flowed both ways through time, at least in as much as someone with an ability to slip in time could muck things up. Ludwig Boltzmann, if Saskia remembered the name right, was wrong: a time traveller could affect interconnection. Though it took a great effort to bear upon a world determined to flow the other way.
Maybe it shouldn’t have felt any different to chasing someone forward in time, but the unfamiliar flow of the world around you was distracting. And there was the added potential hiccup that came from losing your focus; to continue slipping backwards through time took concentration. Even a change in the rate that you slipped through time could have disastrous consequences for your chase. Your quarry might suddenly leap faster or slower out in front of you.
That Mr. Holcomb wasn’t just fleeing down a one dimensional garden path compounded Saskia’s task. He ducked and wove through what felt to Saskia like virgin forrest. He’d zig left behind a majestic Douglas Fir and then zag right down a gully, across a bed of fallen needles. But that essentially two dimensional chase——for he wasn’t taking flight, or digging into the ground——was expanded to three dimensions with variations in the rate they, together, slipped back through time.
Still, it was interesting that there seemed to be some natural limit to how fast or slow either of them could roll time backwards.
Suddenly, Saskia caught sight of a second Mr. Holcomb up ahead, but just as quickly he disappeared. Then, a moment later——earlier in time, if you will——Gary’s foot caught on a branch and he tripped. And in an instant he disappeared altogether. Saskia pulled up abruptly, unsure where he’d gone.
She was still rolling backwards through time, but Gary was gone. And then she heard the sound of a large animal, further down the side of the hill. Connecting the dots, she realized he must have inadvertently broken his concentration during his fall, and knocked himself out of his path back through time. His brief appearance as a second Mr. Holcomb had been precisely that moment his clutch let out and he appeared for a moment in what, for the tripping him, was now the future. But it was a momentary aberration, and he must have resumed his flee back through time. That large animal heading down towards the road was him.
In order to up her own speed in the physical dimensions, Saskia slowed how fast she was rolling backwards through time. Relative to the world around her, she slashed backwards through the undergrowth. Gradually inching back through time had the advantage of turning limbs that blocked her way into twigs that fell with an easy swat of her hand. It had the disadvantage that it left welts on her arms from the force of the contact. Worse, Gary moved further ahead, since their location in time was connected to their physical location.
The invisible rubber band connecting Saskia to Gary strained at its limit as he tumbled towards Front Street, the main road heading south.
With his distance ahead of her stretching out, Saskia reverted to her maximum rush back through time. Fortunately, Gary remained oblivious to the confusion his vanishing act had caused.
∞
Saskia chased Gary along the gravel that lined the edge of the road, as he glanced back at her and inadvertently splashed water from a puddle with his careless footfall. Saskia watched the puddle do a weird reform as Gary bolted away, the water both hastily dissipating its ripples and congealing to leave a glassy surfaced mud-mirror puddle behind him. She leapt over the puddle, preferring to keep her own feet dry.
Two hundred meters down the road, cars skidded to a halt and a commotion of people descended on a spot that was obscured from Saskia.
And yet, Saskia recognized the scene as the one Mica had described to her less than an hour ago.
But Gary veered left to avoid the gathering crowd and Saskia pursued him. He ran past the two rows of cars that lined a trailhead parking lot and vaulted a short wooden fence. There was a red wind sock at the south end of the field that now separated him from a mountainside of forrest.
On the grass, a parachute gently unfurled above young man who had just landed his paraglider. Gary swerved towards the adventurer. The chute completely re-inflated, and the pilot skipped backwards across the ground. But before he got airborne again, Gary tackled the man’s legs, bear-hugging his feet.
The causal effects of the universe surrounding the pilot——all of which naturally flowed forward through time——clashed with Gary’s reverse path through the world. Still, Newton’s third law held: Gary’s tight clasp around the pilot’s feet was responded to with a force that lifted Gary off the ground. The two men floated up.
As Saskia reached the pilot’s landing point, her quarry had elusively upped into the vertical dimension.
Unfortunately for Gary, fatigue engulfed him as he lifted into the sky. He adjusted his grip, once, twice, three times, but eventually the pilot’s legs slipped through his grasp. He was perhaps one hundred feet off the ground, above the road at the south end of the field when his grip failed.
The overwhelming calamity of his predicament had a not uncommon impact: Gary blacked out. And, unconscious, his ability to intentionally chart his way through time was moot; as compromised as it had been when he tripped on the branch in the forrest.
As he fell, Gary rejoined the ordinary flow of the universe.
In the grass clearing that Gary had risen from, Saskia walked to a stop, letting the ordinary flow of time engulf her as she did. She turned towards the road at the south end of the landing paddock and started towards the spot where the crowd would soon form.
Slipping back into the natural flow of the universe didn’t help Gary. It couldn’t help him. Free falling from eight stories up was apt to be fatal, however you cut it.
Rubbernecking drivers screeched their cars to a stop. It was an awful thing to see a human body fall from the sky.
For a minute, Saskia just stood there in the field, unsure what to do. Then, she left the scene.
Well, that was chapter 78, Friends, A little gruesome, perhaps, but at least we didn’t linger on the details.
How about we run off on a tangent?
I realize there was no machine learning in today’s chapter, and that it hasn’t been at the forefront of our story for a while, but the other day I was thinking about the AI doomsayers and it finally crystalized for me: the primary root of my objection to them. So, apropos nothing in today’s chapter, I’m going to share it with you here, today.
Basically, I think the notion of AI taking over the world in a dystopian way is very unlikely. Moreover, I think the whole discussion about super intelligence is a bit of a distracting red herring. By any reasonable evaluation there are already very real powers that LLM’s have that we humans don’t, even if there are still powers we possess that machines don’t. Besides, hydraulics and engines long ago gave machines raw power that we could not ever hope to match, even if, yes, there is something that says excavators are dumb and beholden to our whims, and that if chatbots took over the driver seat it’s not hard for an author to write a compelling narrative around the problems that might ensue.
But that just brings me to the root of my perspective: We, humans, want stuff. Machines don’t.
And I hear those who suggest that we might instruct a machine to produce toothpicks at any cost, which could doom the Amazon if the machine got out of control…
Herein, however, lies my fundamental complaint: We pick what the machines want, and we can turn them off. Again, yes, it makes a better story that we might goof and inadvertently create a monster, a la Mary Shelley——though I have to confess I’ve never actually read Frankenstein (don’t worry, I’ve added it to my list and promise to report back)——but fundamentally, I see that the problem redounds to the evolutionary pressures which are forming AI versus those from which we have sprung forth.
What exactly do I mean by that?
Well, our evolution started with singles cells. And the pressures to succeed, the primary selection criteria, if you will, was self-propagation. Sure, there have been quirks in history when evolutionary pressure has optimized something that doesn’t serve the long-term, but those pressures are either ultimately non-fatal (say hair color, for instance), or later eliminated (a specific adaption to a climate that changes underfoot, faster than evolution can keep up with; this being the problem with most extinction events, and the critical issue of our current epoch).
Iterations in AI infrastructure, in contrast, are selected by us, to benefit us. Self-propagation is far from a key driver.
Encoded in all of this are wants: we, in a fundamental way “want to propagate”; seeding our progeny is our evolutionary forcing function. Even our secondary and tertiary wants invariably hang from this main pole. Machines, meanwhile, including programs written on them, don’t want anything; indeed, to the extent that they do want something, it is to help us. Their evolutionary pressure is to assist us.
And without wants hardwired into their evolution, I find the cynics’ fears about AI taking over the world kind of implausible.
I also have some thoughts around the threats to our job security, but we’re a little long in the tooth here, so I’ll save those for another week. I’m curious, though, if my thinking on wants resonates.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
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