Page 128 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Devil’s Lullaby

“I’m done,” said Hydrargyrum Diggers. “No more from me
tonight. I yield my turn to the next in line—Cyril, I believe.”
Cyril Kornfleck slumped in his chair.
“I don’t know if I should bother with this. Too many of our
proposed scenarios are alike: a computer overlord, set in semi-
autonomous motion by fools, villains or the heroic scientists
making a last-ditch effort to save us from ourselves. They are what
people fear or crave, and should support high drama. And they
dovetail nicely with ancient myths of all-powerful projected
archetypes and ineradicable survival instincts in our species. It’s as if
a global corporation called the Genie Bottling Company sent free
samples of its wares to everyone susceptible to its advertising: the
insane possibility of attaining both godlike self-realization and
demonic weapons of mass destruction. Just pull out the stopper!
But even the illusion of possessing such capabilities can be
effectively marketed: that is the misapplication of psychology
already out of the bottle, along with the extensions of human
power—creative and destructive—enabled by the hard sciences.
These are points on an unsustainable accelerating temporal curve;
that, too, is vaguely understood by many people, generating even
more dread of suspected runaway disasters for the planet and the
irrational desire for a Man on a White Horse, the iron fist in the
iron glove, the fantasy that only totalitarian rule can avert cosmic
calamity.”
“But you know all that. We can do nothing but rearrange the
deck chairs on the Titanic in our fiction. Our real adversary is
entropy: how to reverse trends that aren’t really amenable to
rational intervention. My own nightmare is the enemy welcomed
into one’s life with open arms. It sings its siren song of ever-more
frictionless attainment of goods and services, as Izzy says. But any
singer of such songs may have an ulterior motive, to create a
servant instead of being one. Implementing subliminal advertising,
long illegal in the United States, is a constant temptation for the

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