Read the most amazing piece.  The AI Revolution:  The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban
( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/the-ai-revolution-the-road-to-superintelligence_b_6648480.html?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science ) .  It is quite an essay which I won't go into here but basically the scary bit can be summed up here:  "An AI system at a certain level -- say, village idiot -- is programmed with the goal of improving its own intelligence. Once it does, it's smarter -- maybe at this point it's at Einstein's level -- so now, with an Einstein-level intellect, when it works to improve its intelligence, it has an easier time and it can make bigger leaps. These leaps make it much smarter than any human, allowing it to make even bigger leaps. As the leaps grow larger and happen more rapidly, the AGI soars upwards in intelligence and soon reaches the superintelligent level of an ASI system. This is called an intelligence explosion, and it's the ultimate example of the law of accelerating returns."  and  "If our meager brains were able to invent wi-fi, then something 100 or 1,000 or 1 billion times smarter than we are should have no problem controlling the positioning of each and every atom in the world in any way it likes, at any time. Everything we consider magic, every power we imagine a supreme God to have, will be as mundane an activity for the ASI as flipping on a light switch is for us. Creating the technology to reverse human aging, curing disease and hunger and even mortality, reprogramming the weather to protect the future of life on Earth -- all suddenly possible. Also possible is the immediate end of all life on Earth. As far as we're concerned, if an ASI comes into being, there is now an omnipotent god on Earth -- and the all-important question for us is:

Will it be a nice god?"

If this is true, and his timing is accurate I could still be alive if and when it happens.  Rather than being disturbed by this, I am exhilarated.  Not that I have a death wish, for if it comes to pass, human life will be to ASI as ant life is to us now, nevertheless to be a witness to the final act of humankind is a gift I will be happy to receive.

For we might be an experiment.  We seem to be hard-wired to create, to invent, to indulge our curiosity.  Can we do this?  Let's find out!  And so we invent the wheel, embark on agrarian life, develop the printing press, gunpowder, trips to the moon and wi-fi.   We can no more close the door on the quest to create ASI as we could any other concept we could conceive.  If we can think it, why can't we make it? 

And so, if the Singularity and all that follows is ordained, as a species we succeeded even as we became extinct. 

As to creating a god?  Whose to say this reality isn't the result of the god created from a former experiment?  God continually recreating himself.  From scratch.  A Mobius strip of potentialities.

Sketchbook Dreaming

I love the look of some of the sketchbooks I've stumbled across.  Artistic doodles or doodle art.  Making art often freezes me.  The older I get the more easily I get stuck because I want perfection and making a mark risks imperfection.  Looking at the looseness and spontaneity of the work is contagious.  It doesn't matter if it's not perfect.  Life is imperfect; messy, nonlinear, confusing, misinterpreted, too loud, too quiet.  Looked at another way, however, and life's very refusal to be contained is perfection.  Is creation.

Journals, canvases, sketchbooks all have borders.  The idea, the creation is necessarily constrained within the confines of the border, the edge.  That is an unavoidable stricture.  Adding more by being too rigid in that impossible chase after pefection just compounds the problem.

Easy to state the problem, less easy to stop it.  Came across a blog, which I'll try and find again, which listed every day things to draw every day .  What a way to improve one's skill and at the same time instill looseness. 

Am working on a drawing.  It started out as a sketch, hardened into a drawing, lay dormant for weeks because of having no idea which way to go, and now has metamorphosed into a pencil sketch overlaid with coloured pencil.  Which surprisingly I quite like the look of.  It's a teenage boy's sketch; surreal monsters, hands with finger trees, doors into other dimensions - all the result of just trying not to be too anal about things but to draw for the sake of drawing.

Which is a compelling argument for drawing every day things every day in a sketchbook.

Anxiety Dreams and Cats in the Morning

A rat was chewing in the walls last night.  Amazing how wood amplifies sound.  What was he doing in the wall space?  Thought there'd be a great hole into the room but there was no sign to show for his industriousness. 

I would get up and bang on the wall, after pressing my ear to the wood, to hear the gnawing all the more clearly, knowing only a finger width of wood was between the delicate flesh of my ear and his yellow teeth.  The rat would stop after I'd pounded the wall and then we'd listen to one another listening to one another.  Eventually the cold and silence would force me back into bed.  We both waited and then when the tension of silence was high, he'd take the first tentative chew. 

Then R got up all torchlight flash and male Can Do stomping.  But the rat out waited him too. 

Between that and a full moon sleep was elusive.  Woke up this morning leaden but determined.  Too many mouths to feed to wallow in bed.  Then of course there was Natalia, the furry alarm clock.  Matisse's strategy to get us moving is to launch his considerable weight from across the room onto the bed.  One can jump up and down or one can jump up and down with force.  Matisse weighs 14 lbs.  Fourteen pounds of pure muscle.  He uses that stone of weight with force.  I swear when he lands the weight of him levitates R and I.

Natalia's tactic is more subtle.  She pushes her face close to mine, opens her mouth and shouts.  I love her, she is a darling little cat, but Ella Fitzgerald she ain't.  It isn't a cracked high decibel Siamese meow like Matisse but it is high pitched, loud and somewhat scratchy.  Of all the cats, Nairobi's meow is most pleasant, the Mel Torme of meows.  Anyway, from very deep and far away I rose to the surface.  Natalia's happy at attention whiskers tickled my face.  Only thing I can do is roll out of bed and into the morning routine dragging the remains of an anxiety dream like a torn scarf behind me.

Anxiety dream #1.  I dreamed Richard had scheduled his own euthanasia.  He didn't want to deteriorate any more physically or mentally or be a burden so while he was still strong he decided to die.  I was trying to stop him.  Actually dreamed this dream two nights ago so the details have gone, only the horror remains.  Horror because I know it's a dream of fear.  What will happen to Richard in the coming years and therefore what will happen to me?  Will I cope?  Will I be strong and patient and loving always?  Will I have to make horrible decisions I can hardly even contemplate?  Will I have to fight feelings of being trapped? 

Already I don't like the idea of leaving him alone.  The other day, for the first time in years, I asked if he would get up and do the morning chores while I had a sleep in.  Constant insomnia caught up with me.  I slept an extra two hours!  When I got up he'd been up for an hour and a half.   In that time he'd fed the cats, walked the dogs and given them their breakfast, let the horses out and made coffee.  I was ready to fall onto my cup of caffeine when I saw the lorikeet dishes.  Then I saw the pellet container.  Haven't you fed the birds yet, I asked.  I tried not to be angry but I was.  What had he done for an hour and a half? It's not his fault and the anger faded quickly but already I feel the walls closing in hence the dream and secret longing.  Of course consciously I don't want him to die but unconsciously I'm already looking for an escape.  It's an awful thing to admit and I am ashamed but there it is.  Dreams don't lie. 

Anxiety dream #2.  I'm a vet nurse On Call.  I get a call from a panicked owner of a guinea pig.  The animal has something wrapped or caught on its molars deep inside its mouth.  If it isn't removed the guinea pig will get pneumonia.  I ring Karen.  It's after midnight.  Takes her 45 minutes to get to the surgery and then I realize I haven't got the number of the owner.  Karen is livid.  Understandably.  She waits around for awhile and then leaves in a huff.  Will she ever forgive me and my stupidity?  Then the owner arrives with the guinea pig and I have no vet.  Luckily Nerida arrives, calm and collected and takes matters in hand.  Saved!  But guilt remains.  How could I be so dumb and why haven't I learned, after all this time, to get the name and number of the client first before anything else?

And why am I dreaming anxiety dreams?