2017年4月25日 星期二

Only memory can back me up

Dear stranger
How do I find someone who's name I can't even remember?
We met at the anniversary party of good life coffee,( happy birthday GLC)she wore a slick black dress. We danced, talked and had occasionally awkward silence. On our way back to Rautatientori we walked pass a heart shape pond on the pavement. She told me a story from a Finnish short novel about the tragic love between a mentally disable aged man and a young girl. At the end, the man killed the girl without realizing it because of his mental illness. Somehow this small conversation stuck in my head for couple days now. If God or whoever/whatever up there allowed us to meet again, I want to hear more stories from her. All I got is my memory to back me up and we all know how fragile this is.

Maybe i will meet her again and more possibly i will never meet her again. What this incident struck me the most was that the more i think about it, the more blurry it became. At one point, i started to realize that if I only have memory to show this is true and not some cliche story. It felt just as unconvincing as a dream i had last night.

It also made me reflect on Westworld that I just started to watch, in the show we can clearly see so many classic science fictions' influence, the matrix, ghost in the shell just to name a few. The hosts were so perfect that the only flaw they had was they were design in the image of human beings. We as human beings were imperfect, we will die, forget, making mistakes. It is a blessing and curse at the same time. If we have perfect memories like the hosts we would probably kill ourselves just for the weight of our memories and not to mention the fact that we will die at one point this reality makes us the way we are right now.  We die and we forget that's what make us human.

Boldly speaking, what if a sentient being will never die and has perfect memory, how does this "perfect" condition will affect its consciousness? Can we imagine this happen to us human? And how does this ultimate change affect our civilization? Maybe we will start to give more serious consideration about global warming which we still believe is something of the future and the current need not to worry about. Maybe this is why i have a hard time believing the so called AI domination scenario because it is still perceiving AI in human logic.