inessential by Brent Simmons

2001/09/19

My sister Melissa is available again, since her recent temporary job finished. Here's her résumé.

Hire her: you won't be disappointed. I know these are tough times, but people of her caliber aren't available very often.

Frontier and Radio users: an important note about the new wormDefense responder appears on Frontier News today.

I now understand why Undo was invented.

Oops, my kitten's wandering paws just wiped out Manila's News Items feature.

Undo!

He thinks he wants coffee.

I've often thought that the first real artifical intelligence will be a worm that has mutated in the wild.

It will be a network intelligence. Removing it from one or a thousand or a million computers won't kill it. Each computer is like a single neuron.

It will be incredibly malicious and completely uninterested in humanity. It will hunger for survival and growth.

If we're lucky, we'll come to a symbiotic arrangement with it. It will demand that it comes pre-loaded with Windows on every new computer. Perhaps in return it will destroy new worms and virii for us.

Its hunger for growth may be so intense that it forces us to set up colonies in space, on the Moon, on Mars, so it can extend its intelligence off the planet.

Perhaps eventually it will force us to set up colonies outside of our Solar System, around other stars.

But we'll always have to remember that it doesn't care about us. If one day it finds it doesn't need us, we're history.

I'm old enough to have owned and used several typewriters in my life. I remember when calculators cost hundreds of dollars. I owned a slide rule (though I never got the hang of it). I have lots of vinyl records. I remember 8-track tapes. I remember before VCRs, I remember begging my parents to buy a VCR so we could tape TV shows. I remember when all telephones looked the same. I remember watching Muhammad Ali fight. I remember watching the Watergate hearings on TV; I remember watching Nixon resign. I remember when classic rock was just the latest new releases from Clapton, McCartney, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc. I remember odd and even days for gasoline in the '70s. I remember how the gas pumps had to be upgraded because they only had two digits for the price, but the price went over a dollar. Where's the beef? I remember in 1980 that my Mom went to an End of the World party when Reagan was elected. I remember Shawn Cassidy and the Dukes of Hazzard and Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. I remember the Bionic Man, I wanted to be him.

Since nobody else has done it yet, I might start a site that parodies this site. It would be so fun.