T.A.Y. — The Illusion of Limitation
Time eventually shows science fiction to have accurately predicted the future, or not. Like my friend and colleague Aaron McLoughlin laughingly says, there can’t by any such thing as time travel because such and such would have been assassinated by now.
T.A.Y. probably could not have been predicted up until perhaps the last couple of decades. Robots were still relegated to factory floors. Artificial intelligence was on the rise and yet it was still a matter of carrying out instructions given to it. Only recently have artificial intelligence programs suggested that they can be self determining by generating their own goals… or can they? How would an artificial intelligence do that unless it was given the instruction to randomly generate goals? Artificial intelligence has no intrinsic motivation in the way biology does.
Artificial Intelligence may have its place, and yet Interacting Intelligence is the really exciting future.
It seems that the notion of limitation and finite resources is ubiquitous in our thinking. Sort of makes sense when you realise that you really don’t have complete control over the land and water and the elements… and people. Oh yeah, and the fact that the future is unpredictable. And then you find out you are living on a blue green ball of water and rock flying through space with no means of getting off. Seems reasonable that these facts would lend themselves to the notion of finite resources.
So, the science fiction writers didn’t foresee, or didn’t know how to perceive, Universe as vast, unlimited, and superabundant. T.A.Y. relegates the notion of limitation to the history books. And when this notion is obsolete along with it goes greed, war, sustainability, environmentalism, government overreach… in a word — control. In their place is, well, for you to discover for yourself.
You can buy your own copy of T.A.Y. at Lulu. Here is the link…
And here is T.A.Y. on my Patreon page.
© 2023 by Keith Gilbert
