Remix the underground

Boing Boing has been posting links for the last week or two about remixes of station names on local underground systems. The first couple to be done, like the London Underground and Toronto were pulled from their sites after their local transport authorities objected on grounds of violation of copyright, thus forever banishing the stereotype image we all had of the little jobsworthy twat who runs such services and couldn't be more anally retentive if he had his butt cheeks held together with an industrial vice... Anyway, in true Boing Boing fashion they have been posting ever more versions from round the world (most transport authorities not being as bothered as London who you'd think would be too busy trying to think on ways of keeping their mayor out of trouble) including (hurrah) Glasgow!

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The SF Future and moral dilemmas

Yvonne over on Nemeton had a thought-provoking post on a recent scientific endeavour which is working on changing science fiction into actual science: teleportation. As she points out they realised something SF writers and readers have known for a long time - with a teleport or transporter you don’t actually break the person down into energy and beam them to another location, what you actually do is create a copy of them at the receiving station. So in essence you have a clone, which may not seem like a big deal to the person involved if, say, the other version of them was created at a receiving station on another world and they will never come in contact with them. But what if that copy beams to another location and another copy is made? And if you want to stick with the idea of only one person what do you do with the original? If that original is destroyed would it be murder? This may sound like an esoteric moral argument but consider that the same problems arise if you are talking about a copy of a person created by cloning technology, which is a science we are progressing on rather faster.

It did get me thinking about other moral dilemmas that come about through new technology in science fiction. For example, Richard Morgan’s powerful debut Altered Carbon (and its sequels) has a technology called memory stacks, whereby people have the essence of their memory and personality backed-up, meaning that in the event of death you can be transferred into a new body. Richard also spins further on this having a disparity between the rich and poor, with rich people not only having a stack but one which backs-up via satellite every few hours in case someone blows their head off and destroys their stack (true death) and also keep a bank of specially cloned bodies in a secure location ready to be downloaded into, almost like putting on a new Armani suit.

Richard has organised religions almost extinct in this future because they hold that you cannot copy the soul, so a stack if a diabolical invention and believers should shun it. So they die off after a normal lifespan and that’s it for them, while most other folk may also wonder at this point to but decide on a more pragmatic approach, e.g. they would rather have the chance to keep on living, so have a stack and try to get re-sleeved. The main character, Kovacs, is also sent to other worlds by needle cast, which basically transmits your stack to another world to be downloaded into a new sleeve there (it is illegal to have another copy in another sleeve at the same time), muddying the waters even more as to how original is that person? Are they still them? Or are they just a digital copy? What if your brain is implanted into a totally different, alien body as in Paul Chadwick’s Concrete? Is it live or is it Memorex as they used to say…

Which brings you to AI - assuming you could create true Artificial Intelligence, would you treat it as ‘alive’? That is to say, would you accord it the same respect, rights and privileges of any human being? Or would you treat it as merely a clever box of tricks? Leaving aside how the AI may think about all of this for a moment, how humans would react to AI and treat it would probably say more about human’s morality than anything else. Would you deny it rights and therefore essentially treat an intelligent being as a device to be used - essentially a slave? Sounds silly? Well, it’s not been unknown for people, even in the last couple of centuries, to argue that it was alright so enslave a group, say Africans, because they didn’t count as fully human therefore there was no moral ambiguity for even a good God-fearing Christian in holding slaves. This is an area that has been covered by a lot of SF - Star Trek the Next Generation did it well several times and Asimov’s I, Robot is an obvious key text - and while we may be a long way from having to face such a moral problem for real it is still a fascinating intellectual exercise - to say nothing of how it relates to how humans perceive other humans, let alone artificial beings. And we haven’t even touched on aliens yet of course!

Of course you can combine AI tech with copies of human minds by having human’s downloaded into a computer, which is quite common in SF dealing with the Singularity (where IT gets to a level where AI comes to pass, everything accelerates at an incredible rate and you end up with a post-human civilisation - see Charlie Stross' Accelerando for example). If a person decides to have their memory and consciousness uploaded into a computer then would it still count as being them? We’re always saying how it is what’s inside that counts, would we stick by that maxim? Or would we just use a mind-in-a-box as a particularly clever computer to serve our needs? Ken MacLeod had a tale a few years ago where one character uses the uploaded mind of another person almost as her PDA - against the wishes of the mind, who would very much like to get out of this servitude and be uploaded into a new body again, please.

It’s all fiction - for the moment - but it does get the old brain thinking, doesn’t it? Assuming of course that we are all real, we are all conscious and we do all ‘think’ and aren't just subroutines of some vast digital intelligence…

Wahey!

Tense, oh so tense! Scotland just in the lead over ancient rivals England, who we have so rarely beaten. 20 minutes to go, still just in the lead, everything to play for: England determined, playing some bloody great rugby, the Scots mixing it up, unafraid, throwing in some bloody brilliant tackles. Ten minutes to go: England fighting to get a try and tip the scales, the boy from Caledonia mounting a fantastic defence... 2 minutes to go and we're still just in the lead... Fingernails dug into the beer can at this stage, it could all go so wrong in second... And it's all over with Scotland standing at 18 points, England at 12, Princess Anne giving the Calcutta Cup to the victorious captin of her faovurite team. I could hear the huge roar of "Scotland!" from the Murrayfield crowd in my flat as I was glued to the screen.

The Six Nations was great for Scottish fans in the 90s then we had years of being pathetic, so heartbreaking after the glories of the 90s. Now we've thrashed two of the teams who started the Six Nations as pretty much the two strongest teams in most pundit's view (France being the other). Even this morning some papers, especially down south seemed to think all the English team had to do was bother to turn up. I look forward to reading what they say tomorrow. And even nicer the Scottish players clapped the English players, as they left the field because it was a fabulous, tight, tense game of fantastic, world-class rugby between two terrific teams and great to watch. Excuse my excitement but its been a while since we played so well and it was one of those terrific games where both sides are playing well and it is so close you're on the edge of your seat. And victory over England is always sweet to Scots, even today in the 21st century - not that we have any big beef or dislike really, but its still fun to beat the Auld Enemy from time to time (especially since it doesn't happen that often!).

Belle and Sebastian - the comic!



Thursdays are New Comic Days, when the week's new releases go on sale. In among the new graphic novel arrivals was an unusual book from Image called Put The Book Back on the Shelf, which is an anthology by a variety of comics writers and artists, with the common theme being that each story is based around the songs of Glasgow Indy darlings Belle and Sebastian! Just in time to read alongside the new album. I've seen bands in comics before - KISS and Alice Cooper have had their own comics - but its unsual to see an indy band getting this treatment. Very cool, just please god don't let anyone do one with that shagwit whiner James Blunt...

99.9% need not apply

The Royal Marines are running recruitment ads in cinemas and TV again, which stress how tough the course is (and it certainly is) and that "99.9% need not apply". While not bashing the Royal Marines, who make most countries special forces look like traffic wardens, it does make me wonder why air such an ad via the biggest mass media available? If you are aiming at .01% of the population but are paying for national advertising isn't that possibly the worst use of mass media?

Life imitating art

Watching Channel 4 News this evening with a special report on New Orleans I was reminded of a scene from Warren Ellis' stonkingly good Transemetropolitan series. The first cruise liner had docked in the still-ravaged city with the mostly British passengers of the opinion that the Big Easy could use some tourist money. Part of their visit included a bus tour of the most damaged districts, so we had wealthy cruise passengers in a luxury coach passing through devastated areas with their expensive cameras up against the windows.

And I was reminded of a scene in Transemetropolitan where a region torn apart by a civil conflict finds that wealthy tourists from safe homes start taking breaks in the former war zone, taking in some disaster chic (but not having to live with it of course). Darrick Robertson, the artist, treated the reader to an image of former revolutionaries and terrorists in their paramilitary uniforms, now all with friendly name tags and big smiles acting as tour guides, while poverty stricken kids make souveniers for the tourists from gun shell casings.

Its a bit of a catch-22 situation I suppose - touring such areas seems insulting and tawdry, a horrid disaster voyeurism almost. And yet, like the areas devastated by the Asian tsunami, these areas used to be tourist hot spots and they do need to start attracting folk back; hard to know how to feel about it really. But I still recommend Transemetropolitan though; if John Pilger and Hunter S Thomson has an atomic mutant baby it would look a lot like Spider Jerusalem, Transmet's underground journalist.