Fallow of the Woods

“A thought is a vine, and some thoughts nurture thorns that bleed the soul. An endless growth that blots your vision and strangles your trust.”

This is a close up? A CLOSE UP YA JERK! A CLOSEUP!

Switching from from Scream to Laughter is a lot easier than switching from being a coal or oil plant to, e.g. Solar. It’s the same technology (closet doors) and the same distribution and collection system. The only change is the front line workers, and given that laughter is so much more powerful, even a bad comedian could keep their job.

Waternoose isn’t running the De Beers company, happily creating/exploiting a fake shortage to get richer. The City is suffering from regular brownouts and he’s about to lose the Company, that’s why he needed to start kidnapping and soul-sucking random kids. If he knew about Laughter, he could’ve switched over for the cost of a few nights of comedy training for the scarers.

Monsters, Incorporated, in the movie, is the lie of the Old Company, and Sully is the Company Man. If you show up, and do your work, the Company will take care of you and your community. Sully is proud to be a Scarer, not because it proves he’s cool or because he’s the best, but because hes proud to be part of this Great Work that supports the city. Monsters, Inc makes electricity and he gets to be part of that.

Mr Waternoose isn’t his Boss, some old coot in charge who doesn’t get the little guy: he’s a former scarer himself, a mentor to Sully. He might own and run the factory because it’s been in his family for generations, but he gets it! He presents himself as wanting good scarers not just because it makes him money but because the Company Needs It. He doesn’t want to lose the company not just because he wants to be rich but because he’s presenting himself as part of a system the city needs.

It’s a very out of the 50s idea, the company you work for your whole life and in exchange it takes care of you. It’s a very liberal sort of idea, honestly, this marriage of Labor and Capital.

And the film’s criticism is that The Company was a lie, it was not this happy family here to care for you, it was willing to do atrocities to keep from collapsing and it was willing to kill anyone—even the Golden Boy Sully—that might threaten that. You cannot, actually, trust Waternoose, however he presents himself—he is not your Dad, he is your Boss.

Trust

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

"Okay," says the human, dangling upside down, suspended by a group of tentacles. "I got it."

"Right," says the voice, which comes from everywhere and nowhere. "Now consider a cat. The cat thinks you're kind of like a cat, but you're so big, he has some problems understanding that all of your body is really you."

"Am I the-"

"Yes. Now listen. Especially under the blanket, the cat doesn't really know where your body begins and ends. He sees your feet, and decides to attack them. He's only play-fighting, but his claws are real sharp, so it hurts. What would you do?"

"Well," says the human, gently spinning in the tentacle's grasp, "I'd try to tuck my feet under the blanket."

"Ah, but then it's even worse," claims the voice, triumphantly, "because now your cat sees Blanket Monsters and attacks them twice as hard."

"So you have to grab the cat."

"It's either that or burrito her," says the voice, squeezing the human in the grip of its tentacles. "And since in this metaphor the blanket represents the fabric of reality as you know it, I don't think you'd find it very pleasant."

"Fair enough," says the human, blood beginning to pool in her head. "Can you please put me down, now? I promise I won't attack you again."

graystoke hated feet and frequently attacked them.

>look inside