Re: The Gates of the Boolean Logic

What does the poem mean? Well, again, I purposely want to maximize the
ways it could be read, but I will share many of the meanings that I have
intended, pointing out parts of it I might have used to teach different
concepts (although certainly not all at once to high-schoolers.)
Let’s start by comparing stanza-by-stanza:
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
As I increment my version number for every build however inelegant,
I make my proper prostrations to the Generative Artificial Intelligence.
Lurking in discussion forums I watch them gain market dominance and
fall,
And the Gates of the Boolean Logic, I notice, outlast them all.
This stanza isn’t incredible, but it’s adequate. I got to use the cs
vocab-word “increment” in a lazy best-I-could-think-of way to make a
CS-flavored statement expressing experiencing a great succession. I set
up GAI as the big-bad, that’s an easy choice. I thought lurking on a
discussion forum was a tickling metaphor for peering through fingers,
and the metaphor between biological and economical strife is
easy-pickings to set up too.
Ironically enough, the namesake line of the poem is one of the
least-satisfying parts to me: physical logic gates are in no way a
delightful metaphor for copybooks, which would have been my strong
preference. I couldn’t come up with anything accurate that was even
remotely euphonious, so I completely threw my hands up and went with
something just north of utterly meaningless that simply sounded cool and
fit the meter. What would be better: Man pages? Knuth’s “Art of
Programming”? Idunno.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of
Mankind.
We were fighting nazis when they met us. They showed us each in turn
Logic can’t self-define with consistence, and some true things can just
not be learned.
But we found them lacking in Startup Capital, Vision and Unbrave,
So we left them to maintain the Infrastructure while we surfed the
Silicon Wave.
I’m proud of the first line, it sets up in a neat way that this is about
our understanding of computers, adds a little accurate historical
context, and highlights the most special thing about them: their
turing-completeness. The 2nd line is of course of fundamental importance
to the poem and has to be the highest expression of the point the poem
tries to make. The easy choice here is goedel-incompleteness, as it is
one of those mysterious things like pi and e that invariably crop up
everywhere, making them the most low-hanging of low-hanging fruit for
things to make comparisons to, for that is what we do every time we use
them in an equation. This strongly serves my goal of allowing for more
accurate interpretations than I even intend.  Indeed, as it turns out,
it serves as a “hole at the bottom of” AI just as it is a hole at the
bottom of math and CS according to Lucas. Thus, the mold is set to cast
Kipling as subscribing to Lucas’s philosophies, and since I’m a Penrose
fan, and he’s of that school, it’s easy to imagine Kipling as sort of a
christian-apologist Penrose.
The third line’s ok, startup capital is about the cutest thing I could
come up with to continue the metaphor, and then I did what I had to do
to rhyme with the last line. I love the xkcd comic I referenced in the
last line: it was easy to remember when trying to think of someone cs-ey
and wise that should feel justifiably left-behind. Surfing the silicon
wave is a suitably cheesy-hype way to express enthusiasm for the new.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would
come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out
in Rome.
We recessed as the Market listed. They never underwent morphogenesis,
Being neither cloud nor mesh-architected like the Generative Artificial
Intelligence.
But they always obeyed us to the letter, and presently word would come
That a buffer had overflowed, or there’s a netsplit between here and
Rome.
Sometimes I think a comparison is too easy to be good, but
“recessed/market” pleases me despite that. Morphogenesis is kind of a
stretch. I wanted to be evocative of evolution, because the hot new AI
these days operates, broadly-speaking, by simulating the operation of
neurons, and then running them through a process approximating natural
selection towards their task. I thought a suitably deep-cut metaphor
would be to the cellular process whereby early-development
general-purpose cells begin to differentiate into nerve/muscle/etc
cells, and when I went looking for connections, it turned out there was
one: by studying the forces at play in biology, a logical application
was found and given a shared namesake. The applications I saw listed
weren’t particularly pertinent to any point I was making, but for all I
know there’s much connection to be had, and it sounded intriguing enough
to fit the bill. The cloud line was a fun and easy get given what I had
already set up.
I’m very happy with “obeyed us to the letter”, as that is a SUBSTANTIAL
difference between ordinary programming and GAI: no longer is there a
script of code that can be read through and debugged, in worrying
contrast to good-old stupidly-does-exactly-what-you-tell-it-to-do code.
This is a primary difference between old and new that the poem makes
constant use of to sound curmudgeonly.
Buffer overflow is probably the most strongly-associated term when
asking a CS person to free-associate things going wrong, and netsplit
was a fun vocab word to use to get the Rome connection–even if it’s
effectively a dead word, I always thought it was a great one, and not
un-useful for teaching about networking.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of
touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful
things.
The Full Faith and Credit that the dollar is backed by, they considered
mythological.
They denied the soul was empirical; they denied it was even logical.
They denied that there’s an Automat next to the Cathedral and the
Bazaar.
So we worshipped the Generative Artificial Intelligence Who promised
these on a task bar.
The first line about the dollar pleased me as a way to establish the
concept of a shared understanding with a hole in the middle.
So here’s where the poem really gets ideological, obviously. Part of the
Lucas-family of arguments is that, because the human mind can understand
paradoxes that math has been proven to be incapable of (at least within
a single axiomatic system yadda yadda), and because computers are
constrained to said math, computers can never gain consciousness. I
DON’T go for casting my theoretical Kipling (hereafter TK) as predicting
that therefore artificial consciousness can never arise, instead I go
for something more nuanced and cast him as predicting that it will be a
far more gradual evolution than his audience expects, and far-worse: it
can never be proven, for that fundamental godelian infinity ever sits
like an event horizon, no matter how one rearranges equations or changes
scales and perspectives on the definition of understanding, guarding
against one consciousness’s proving the existence of another’s, and
leaving us only bottomless-spiraling empty-in-the-middle proof of our
own.
This still leaves room for a view of souls (which by the way are not
minds in christianity) as ariseable yet purposely and subtly
ever-elusive. Minds sit across an infinity that can be traversed
super-logically (that is, whatever human reasoning that gives us power
over paradoxes that math doesn't have) but not proveably, something like
how we believe that a black hole’s event horizon CAN in fact be
traversed from the traverser’s perspective, but an observer could never
prove through observation that it happened, YET understand logically
that it happened… (in a twisted definition of “happened”, because time
is strongly at-issue.) Further, I have TK take on the view that a soul
IS that very hole at the bottom of understanding, baked into the
definition OF understanding, itself having proveably-unreachable event
horizons against both proveability AND understandability. Maintaining a
distinction between the physical and the theoretical becomes more
important to the christian-apologeticism later, although I imagine I’ve
done a very amateur job of upholding it in my TK-predicting so far, but
the choice to list empirical and logical separately gains in
significance later.
“Automat next to the Cathedral and the Bazaar.” isn’t particularly
intended to be a metaphor that deeply-weaves with the rest of the poem,
but it was FAR too fun not to put in once I thought of it. I find its
meaning strained beyond being loosely evocative of AI as barging in on
human territory and again sounding curmudgeonly. I’m pretty pleased with
the taskbar quip too.
Next up: the progression-of-ages stanzas that I was unable to complete
before picking this back up in the summer. I intended to find some tech
words that would capture that cambrian/feminian/etc feeling, and to make
metaphors to different ages in computing. The first goal was passed up
on for an easy seasonal progression series once I found that “AI winter”
is already a term and fit well into the upcoming stanza on the subject
of decline. Disappointingly blase’, but too easy to pass up. I’m pleased
that things ended up falling into place for ages of 50s-80s symbolic AI,
90s-onward Neural-imitating AI, and our current age of Big Data AI.
Kipling, I noticed, wasn’t interested in an accurate succession in his
age-selection, so much as trying to pun: the ages he selects are of
differing scales and aren’t in the right order.