#Information and Communications Technology

[technology-donald-trump-scan]

## Evading Arrest Through Time: A Theoretical Exploration of Temporal Fugitives and Virtual Deterrents

The notion of a criminal evading arrest by traveling through time, potentially utilizing virtual environments and AI-generated "virtual criminals" as deterrents against pursuers, delves into the speculative realms of theoretical physics and advanced technology. While purely hypothetical, exploring this concept touches upon established time travel paradoxes and the potential capabilities of future innovations.

At its core, the idea posits that a fugitive, upon discovery or near-discovery, could leap to a different era to escape immediate capture. The success of such an escape would depend heavily on the specific mechanics of time travel, which remain entirely theoretical.

**Time Travel Mechanics and Evasion:**

The possibility of evading consequences through time travel is fraught with paradoxes:

* **The Grandfather Paradox (Consistency Paradox):** If a criminal travels to the past and alters events in a way that prevents their own crime or the pursuit itself, it could create a logical inconsistency where the reason for their initial escape no longer exists. The Novikov self-consistency principle suggests that the probability of any action that would lead to a paradox is zero, implying that the past cannot be changed in a way that creates such contradictions. In this view, any attempt by the criminal to alter key events leading to their discovery would be inherently self-defeating or would unfold in a way that preserves the existing timeline.

* **Predestination Paradox:** A criminal's attempt to flee through time might itself be the event that ensures their eventual capture or the timeline they were trying to escape. Their actions in the past or future could inadvertently set in motion the very circumstances they sought to avoid, creating a closed causal loop.

* **Bootstrap Paradox (Ontological Paradox):** If the criminal brings an object or information from the future that becomes crucial to their past crime or subsequent evasion, that object or piece of information could lack a discernible origin, existing in a self-contained loop.

For a criminal to successfully evade arrest indefinitely through time travel, they would likely need to navigate these paradoxes, perhaps by traveling to futures so distant that records of their crimes are lost, or to pasts where their actions do not create disruptive paradoxes �� a feat whose possibility is purely speculative.

**Virtual Environments and AI Deterrents:**

The concept of transiting through "areas with virtual criminals and environment generator to deter following time travelers" introduces a layer of advanced, hypothetical technology. This suggests regions, perhaps in specific temporal locations or pocket dimensions, designed to actively impede pursuers.

* **Virtual Environments as Obstacles:** These could be sophisticated simulations, indistinguishable from reality, designed to confuse, misdirect, or trap those chasing the fugitive. Imagine a pursuer entering a temporal zone only to find themselves in an endlessly looping city or a landscape populated by AI-generated entities programmed to hinder them. Current discussions of virtual reality focus on applications like health communication or research, but the underlying technology, if advanced exponentially, could theoretically be weaponized or used defensively in such a scenario.

* **"Virtual Criminals":** These could be AI constructs within these virtual environments, or perhaps even decoy timelines, designed to mimic the fugitive or create false leads, thereby dividing the resources and attention of any temporal law enforcement. The concept of "crime generators" in current criminology refers to real-world locations that attract crime, but in this futuristic scenario, it would involve the deliberate creation of environments *designed* to simulate criminal activity or danger to deter pursuit.

**Challenges and Theoretical Hurdles:**

Beyond the paradoxes, numerous theoretical challenges exist:

* **Detection and Tracking:** If time travel is possible for criminals, it would likely be possible for those pursuing them. The ability to track temporal displacements would be crucial. The idea of "impossible travel" in cybersecurity – detecting a user logging in from geographically impossible locations in a short time – offers a faint analogy to how temporal authorities might flag unauthorized time jumps.

* **Energy and Resources:** The energy requirements for time travel, as often depicted in fiction, are immense. Sustained evasion across multiple eras would necessitate access to incredible power sources.

* **Physical Dangers of Time Travel:** Some theories suggest that time travel itself could be perilous, with risks of collision with objects in the destination timeline if the spatial coordinates are not perfectly calculated. Navigating through "empty" or specially prepared temporal zones might be necessary, which could also be monitored or controlled by pursuers.

**Conclusion:**

The scenario of a criminal using time travel and virtual deterrents to evade arrest is a compelling thought experiment that pushes the boundaries of known science. While current scientific understanding and technological capabilities are nowhere near making this a reality, exploring such ideas helps to consider the potential long-term implications of hypothetical technologies. The primary obstacles remain the fundamental nature of time, the resolution of time travel paradoxes, and the immense technological hurdles in creating controlled time travel and sophisticated, deterrent virtual environments. For now, such a fugitive exists only in the realm of science fiction.

reblog if your name isn't Amanda.

2,121,566 people are not Amanda and counting!

We’ll find you Amanda.

[sysmedsaresexist]

If it’s alright to ask - an argument I often see made by people in syscourse spaces is that “even the DSM doesn’t say DID is caused by childhood trauma” and that the literature around DID doesn’t say it’s caused by childhood trauma. I always want to refute this because I KNOW DID is exclusively caused by childhood trauma, but I feel like I don’t know how.

I’m also not anti-endo at all, I fully believe non-disordered multiplicity exists, I’m just tired of hearing that argument and knowing it’s wrong but not knowing how to refute it.

I also see arguments like “the DID community owes the non-disordered plurals because so much of the early community was MADE BY US!” which really rubs me the wrong way. I feel like there are a billion reasons why disordered multiplicity would have been mistaken as “not caused by trauma” even by trauma survivors themselves back before we had as much info on it as we do now. It feels like such a strange, disingenuous interpretation of the data. I dunno! I’m hoping you could share some of your thoughts on this if you have the spoons.

I get it

The fact is, the DSM DOES say that DID is caused by trauma. There's several pages to the entry that are often ignored that contain a lot more information about the trauma basis of the disorder.

Hell, look at criteria B

DSM 5, not TR, I don't have the TR in front of me, but it's the same

That "and/or" doesn't mean trauma is optional, it means you may or may not remember it

The entry goes on to discuss things that could trigger onset of noticeable symptoms, including a bunch of stuff about having childhood trauma retriggered in adulthood that pretty much make it impossible to deny

The number of research papers and researchers who call DID a childhood trauma disorder is insane, including Spiegel, who played a huge role in writing the DSM's dissociative disorders section

In 2011, he wrote

And now we have brain scans supporting this, the DSM 5 TR has been updated to mention these scans in the DID section

I would suggest reading this post, which contains supporting links that cover the above and that go into GREAT detail about adjacent topics

Even the ICD incorporated the ToSD and its trauma basis into their DID section

As for community history, CDD spaces existed a lot longer than people think!! Our history goes back longer than anyone thinks.

Here's a short deep dive

It's so important that we continue to talk about this history and how and when things happened.

It matters

CDD systems built our own communities first. While plurality has overlapped with some of it, and things like simply plural came from the plural community, it's not like we just didn't have community. It was smaller and quieter, limited by technology of the day, but it's there, and we even had our own version of PK which was literally killed in cold blood by endogenic systems

It's frustrating, keep talking about our history, it's there

[sohaibsmart]

The perfect TVs of 2023: from Sony, Samsung, LG, TCL, and extra

2023 has been a superb yr for TVs, and we’ve had the nice privilege of testing a number of of the very best QLED TVs, OLED TVs, and QD-OLED TVs ourselves. That being stated, if you happen to’re interested by upgrading your front room set, plan on buying one as a present, or just need to add a number of screens to your property, we’ve put collectively this checklist of all the very best TVs you…

[princesscolumbia]

This was in my email this morning.

Team xxxxxxxxx, As we continue to leverage innovative tools and technology to create greater efficiency, we want to share that our approved AI tool is Microsoft Copilot. All other public AI tools have been blocked, but exceptions may be granted on a case-by-case basis for teams that need to leverage different AI tools. Protecting and Safeguarding Sensitive Information While AI tools are one way to supplement our work and boost productivity, every one of us is responsible for supporting our digital security. This includes doing our part to protect sensitive company information and personal identifying information (PII) about our residents and team members. The use of unapproved public AI tools for company business, without regard for privacy requirements and company proprietary information, can expose our company to unnecessary risks.

My coworkers celebrated.

Those who've followed this blog for a while will know that I've been ambivalent toward A.I. It's generally faddish and usually produces trash. It's at the, "Oh, cute toy!" phase that's been weaponized against people who are actually creative. It's a tool whose time has not yet come being lauded as the next great wave of computing.

That said, take another look at the statement; it's not about the company endorsing the use of A.I., it's the company clamping down on use of unauthorized A.I.

The problem was so epidemic that they had to put up fences to keep the knock-on effects from stepping on a landmine.

In other words, the company has people working for it who are consistently unable to produce high enough quality work to clear the bar for communication and readability that using generative A.I. actually improves their work.

...on a totally unrelated note, anyone hiring?

a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

come on

[science70]

Ben H. Bagdikian, The Information Machines (Harper & Row, 1971).

[ecrivainsolitaire]

I just hate this whole virtue signalling "woe-is-me" from people who haven't even bothered to learn what the thing they hate even is. Two years ago some dumbass on the yellow press tried to convince people that ChatGPT was secretly 150 indians in a trenchcoat and these people ate it up because they never even bothered to check if the thing they read was physically possible. Now everyone is whining about water waste because they have no understanding of how water cooling even works and think you just spray the computer and the water vanishes forever or some other ridiculous bullshit along those lines. But they looove to be all dramatic and victimised as though they had any idea of what they're complaining about.

Meanwhile, the technology that was used to develop LLMs is also being used for, among many other things:

Developing a telepathic interface for accessibility devices like prosthetic limbs

Decoding ancient languages

Digitising endangered indigenous languages to promote their use and keep them alive

Communicating with whales to help them avoid human harm and find mates

Reducing software bloat by removing parts of code that are too intrinsic for humans to correlate

Detecting anomalies in medical scans as seen above

Deciphering the structure of proteins that can be used for drug development, genetic analysis, and potentially to engineer and clone individual organs for transplant.

It's the same thing. It's all the same system. You input a fuckton of data into a neural network, train it on ungodly pattern recognition skills Rainman would cum just thinking about, and then cycle it multiple times until eventually it can distinguish what's normal from what isn't, dissect the differences and spit out what amounts to engineered mutations for an intended goal.

The reason LLMs had to be first is because human language is the most complex information system in nature. Everything else follows predictable, regular, unchanging mathematical principles. Human language evolves at impossible speeds, it branches out in billions of different directions, and most importantly: every human on earth can use it. Of course it's flawed, it was invented last fucking weekend. If y'all saw the original Ford T and how much it pollutes we would be swimming in horse and mule shit by now because y'all willingly ignore the fact that technology becomes more efficient over time. o4-mini, the latest ChatGPT model, is exponentially faster and smarter than GPT3, the model from November 2022, at a tiny fraction of the processing power. We went in under 3 years from supercomputers that only Microsoft could afford to Deepseek, which can run entirely on a mid-range gaming pc from 5 years ago. And that's going to keep getting more efficient. This is a technological development as important as the transistor. We don't even know the limit of what can be accomplished with what is essentially a simulated human brain with direct internet access. Does it have flaws? Yes. Does it suck that it was built with stolen IP? Definitely. But that's barely even worth mentioning when you talk about a machine that can detect cancer better than oncologists. Not every oncologist, granted; but Cs get degrees, and the bot won't be looking for pretexts to fondle your tits, so I say in some instances it's already worth the trade, and in some others it will be sooner than we realise. And I can't stand the amount of people who want to stop this revolution of human possibilities because they bought a fucking fake story about the Ghibli guy being sad. Which, by the way, was disseminated with ancient footage from when he verbally abused his employees for suggesting the use of CGI.

Intellectual property was already an abomination before AI happened, and this website in particular was very much in favour of undermining it as much as possible until it came to their fucking yaoi fanart which is btw also copyright infringement. It is abhorrent to come to Tumblr and learn that suddenly everyone is a Disney lobbyist for free. I can't begin to explain how frustrating it is to come to the leftist socialist anarchist communist solarpunk website and see people unironically defend the paywalling of ideas. This is the site that loved Nikola Tesla and was outraged at Edison and Musk using patents and trademarks to muddy his legacy. But now patents and trademarks are good I guess, as long as your fanfic you wrote at 13 that you never meant to profit from is copyright protected (it never was, you stole that too). Especially at the same time as y'all bust my notifications with everyone sharing my pro piracy post from two years ago.

You wouldn't download a car. And that's disappointing.

[juniedahmed]

Jupiter Planet

#Diameter : 88,846 miles ( 142,984 km )

#Mass : 1,900,000 million million million tons

#Temperature : -153°C ( extrêmes not available )

#Distance from Sun : 483 million miles ( 778 million Km )

#Length of day : 9.84 hours

#Length of year : 11.86 earth years

#Surface Gravity : 1 kg = 2.53 kg

#Jupiter

#photochallenge #everyoneシ゚ #SpaceScienceBangladesh #science #knowledge #spacescience #astronomy #education #physics #Educational #sun #earth #astrology #astronaut #astrophysics #NASA #uk #spaceexploration #university #college #school #spaceshuttle #astrophotography

#solarpower #solarenergy #energy #spacewalk

[heart-ghost-studyblr]

"He is back and he is seeking revenge!!" That’s what one of my teammates said after we wrapped up a big performance upgrade on a server that was… let’s say, not performing its best. Highs and lows, right? Complex, data-heavy, fast, reliable, and done for the best 'top dogs' in the game (me included).

And then another kind of thing... I was talking with a friend who’s been struggling to find a job in his field (he's studying management, which is a solid and common path). So, why not help a little bit? (That is what is in the image, do not call me a click baiter*)

I strongly believe that if you're struggling to get into any area, a nice way to present yourself is by having a page—it can be pure HTML/CSS or a cloned repo with some kind of "personal website template" using all the NodeJS you want.

Then, turn it into a DNS like "yourname-myprofession.com" so you can show a clean, well-designed QR Code with your avatar during interviews. It’s a cleanest way possible to present your résumé and experience. Tech skills are like magic, especially for those who haven't seen it before. You can check out the repo on my GitHub, but it's still a work in progress. Should be done by Sunday!

[aspiramy]

information and communication technology !

[jeanjauthor]

If your thousands-of-years-old civilization is going to have wars & economic upheavals (and it will), then there will be changes in technology.

Some of them will be strides forward through positive things like peaceful trade, such as combining copper & tin from deposits hundreds of miles apart just to make bronze. Others will be pressured into figuring out how to make the much more difficult to smelt but much more locally available iron, because the trade routes for getting enough copper & tin together are destroyed due to wars along their trade routes.

Some will be the spread of knowledge about things like arches and aqueducts. Others will be losing the recipe for cement for hundreds of years, then only coming up with a half-assed version that only lasts decades, and then finally getting the long-lasting version figured out only after high technology allows the original Roman concrete to be examined microscopically.

Either way, there will be periods of famine along the way, which pressures people into finding and growing disease-resistant, pest-resistant, and drought-resistant crops. There will be harsh winters due to some far-off place exploding a volcano that dumps enough particles into the atmosphere to block just enough sunlight to make temperatures drop. There will be sudden earthquakes that slide coastal cities into the sea, or spawn tsunamis that bring the sea too far inland onto the shore.

Pestilence might wipe out huge percentages of a population, setting back technological progress by centuries...or advancing it simply because there aren't enough healthy bodies to do the work that is needed to get a community to survive. There might be regimes that slaughter people simply for wearing spectacles & watches because those are worn by smart people, and the despotic regime wants their citizens too dumb to know just how bad they're being exploited by the ruling classes...or regimes that just destroy education so that they're easily led sheep, leaving you with a population that can barely read & write...and if they're not stopped, then two generations later, can they even read & write at all if they're not born into the elites?

The Roman Empire fell, and Western Europe lost water-flushed sanitation, the knowledge of how to make thousand-year-strong concrete, underfloor heating (hypocaust systems), and even how to do multiplication with Roman numerals...because if that last one was ever written down, the writings were lost.

King Tutankhamun's meteoritic iron dagger was made centuries before the Iron Age began, but that knowledge was lost for those centuries because only a few people figured out how to do it, and they didn't spread the knowledge or reinvent it until the Sea Peoples invasions and all the economic collapses that happened started crashing trade routes, making it too dangerous & expensive to keep making bronze. And it took that same Iron Age knowledge centuries to cross Eurasia and get started all the way over in China. It took centuries for iron knowledge to be learned enough to figure out how to make the much harder and more durable steel.

But it was only centuries, not thousands of years. When gunpowder made it back over to Europe from China, Europeans figured out how to make cannons and handguns with it. The Chinese did have gunpowder rockets that they could use in combat as well as fireworks, but they didn't think to combine it with steel or iron tubes to propel balls of iron and stone. But that did happen, and it happened in less than a thousand years once the information spread.

As for individuals from long-lived races...even a slow-witted individual will eventually notice trends over the long run, if they live and work at a particular type of task long enough. LIke, "If I use this proportion of iron ore, charcoal instead of wood, and a bit of crushed limestone, I get a much better quality of iron in the end...and if I blow enough air through the mass in the smelter, it gets even stronger!" Typical pig iron that comes out of an ore smelter has around or above 5% carbon and it's very brittle and not very durable, but if you can burn off the excess carbon down into the 2% range, you get steel...but you have to pay attention. Quicker-witted individuals will figure it out fairly quickly.

Also, boredom. Long-lived individuals will want change, so they'll go tinkering, they'll go inventing, they'll go trying different styles. True, nobody talks about the era where Galadriel went around in miniskirts and gogo boots because she finds it too embarrassing these days to even think about, but surely there was an experimental trend with clothing by elves in the equivalent of their teens? Good lord, look at Legolas, hanging out with hobbits and dwarves! It took him a hundred years to do it a second time, but he did eventually do it, and it didn't take him a millennium, just barely a century!

...When I came up with the idea of the V'Dan having approximately ten thousand years of history--written history, at that--it was done specifically with an impossible-to-kill time traveler being involved (the Immortal). And there were wars. There were periods of political upheaval, and technologies that were advanced, lost, redesigned, abandoned, and more.

When the main character Ia visits the Immortal's Vault on Earth, she flat-out states that the technology being used is not anything known by historians, and it certainly isn't anything used by Terrans or V'Dan. It was an ancient technology that the Immortal developed over ten thousand years before, it wasn't shared. And when the Immortal moved her human followers from Earth to V'Dan, they didn't have that technology. For one, they were far too busy just figuring out how to survive on a literally alien world. For another, they had already lost that technology. (Can't remember if I put in a mention of the "Scholar War" in the First Salik War series, but that was the series of blunders that caused the Immortal to shut down technological advancements for a long while.)

With a completely different tech tree, a completely different history, with completely different social and economical pressures...but with their first five thousand years of the main population base having stable leadership, the V'Dan actually got into interstellar space four centuries faster than the Terrans did...but only four centuries. And there were still natural disasters and political upheavals, wars and famines and god all else.

"The V'Dan Empire has lasted for nearly ten thousand years!" is technically true, but what they don't admit openly is that at certain points, it was smaller than France, and at other points, smaller than England. Not Great Britain or the British Isles, but smaller than England, and it was not on an island, protected by coastal waters. It was surrounded by enemy states who were willing to try to wipe them out...and again, it only lasted so long because there was a literally immortal busybody helping them out.

The oldest continuously run parliament in the world is the Tynwald of the Isle of Mann, which is just about a thousand years old. But it survived because the Isle of Mann is tiny and you can walk everywhere in just a couple of hours, which meant it was easy for people to be encouraged to participate generation after generation.

The Roman Empire could not be walked in several days, let alone several hours. It existed for over a thousand years...if you count the Byzantium Empire...and it experienced multiple plagues, wars, political upheavals, and several factional divisions. Ancient Egypt existed for several thousand years...but only if you count it by having a continuous culture, and not by the ethnicities of the people who were in charge, nor by any sense of political stability.

The empire of Alexander the Great didn't even last more than a couple of decades, yet it vastly altered cultures and politics for generations. China as a concept has existed for thousands of years, but it wasn't actually a fully unified thing for most of its history.

Kingdoms rose and fell, empires were expanded and broken up. Technologies were discovered and lost. Progressive cultures and governments pushed for and accepted innovations. Reactionary cultures and governments squashed innovations and throttled down freedoms in the elites' attempts to control everything. And not even writing things down can guarantee they'll be remembered. The Indus Valley Civilization has a genuine advanced writing system and we still can't decipher it!

For good or bad, stuff happens when you give it enough time. A lot of stuff happens!

pro-tip: don't ever use the sentence "thousands of years" in your worldbuilding unless you really know what a thousand years is like

[nando161mando]

Chrome/Google is blocking HSTS encrypted content sites like Wikipedia because this encryption blocks their plagiarist data/info crawler.

Google is NOT protecting "your" security.

[honey-makes-mogai]

[Image ID: A MOGAI flag with nine equal horizontal stripes. From top to bottom the colors in order are: dusky purple, dusky indigo, dusky cyan-blue, light gray-blue, white, light gray-blue, dusky cyan-blue, dusky indigo, dusky purple. /End ID]

Satraueno -

[PT: Satraueno -]

A gender related to falling asleep to long video essays, dreams of current or recent hyperfixations, the soft light of an idle screen, electronic buzzing, getting a good nights sleep, waking up well rested and content, a craving for information, and the comfort one feels while falling asleep!

This gender is only for neurodivergent individuals that experience hyperfixations. One is allowed to change "hyperfixations" to "interests" if they do not experience hyperfixations but would still like to use the gender.

Tagging: @radiomogai

[Banner ID: A pastel yellow banner with a sunflower on either side. In brown text with a white outline, it says "- Please let me know if this has been coined before! -" /End ID.]

[DNI transcript: "-DNI- Basic criteria, anti-mogai, proshippers, ableists, aphobes, racists, zoophiles, rpf shippers, fandom discourse, under 13, transid/transx". /End transcript.]

[pittoreski]

.

[drowned-cypress]

Okay yeah, this question highly depends on how you define intelligence. This is something that current human scientists can't even agree on. There's a lot of different metrics: breadth or depth of knowledge, ability to synthesize information, ability to generate novel ideas, ability to articulate ideas, problem solving ability, emotional intelligence, ability to successfully navigate new environments, ability to hold many different pieces of information in mind simultaneously, processing speed, resilience. That's just what I can think of off the top of my head, there's probably more.

But honestly I think architects and humans just have different sets of skills. For example, architects have amazing emotional intelligence when dealing with other architects because they developed a system (the network) that allows them to cooperate and communicate with their entire species simultaneously with very little conflict, but when dealing with other species who they can't use this system with (like humans and sea emperor leviathans,) they struggle with empathy and perspective taking. Humans as a species have a long history of failure to cooperate without conflict (I went on a deep dive of the data entries about human society,) but individuals have good ability to demonstrate empathy and perspective taking, even of completely alien species (Robin towards Al-An.)

There's a few things we can unequivocally say that one species or the other is better at. Architect technology is demonstrably more advanced, implying a greater breadth and depth of knowledge at a species level. The fact that individual architects have the ability to process the network without overloading themselves means they have to have unprecedented ability to hold many pieces of information in their heads simultaneously. Maybe they upgraded their RAM. Their ability to navigate new environments is also probably a lot better than humans simply because they upgraded themselves.

That brings up an interesting problem: architects have been giving themselves every advantage possible through cybernetic enhancement and genetic modification. It's safe to say that they've taken the advancement of their species entirely out of the hands of evolution by making themselves functionally immortal and using cybernetics and genetic modification instead. Is it fair to judge humans against architects with all their enhancements? How would humans measure up if they had all those enhancements? Or, taking it in the other direction, is it even possible to judge an unenhanced architect? I think the experience of interacting with a network connected architect would be light years different from what we see Al-An achieving, but Al-An is an outlier. Al-An seems to have the intelligence of a very smart human, (although his ability to comprehend completely novel information seems kind of... bad.) But honestly we can't judge Al-An as an accurate representative of his species, because for most of the game, he's running his software on Robin's hardware, and that's bound to limit him with the limitations of Robin's human brain. At that point, Al-An and Robin are exactly matched because their hardware is literally the same. We don't really interact with Al-An's new vessel enough to see how his new hardware affects his behavior. All we have to go on is his word about what his species has achieved.

So! All that said, the only way we can really compare the intelligence of both species is to do it at a sociological level. Maybe do a longitudinal study about the history and achievements of both species and what those things say about their collective intelligence according to all the different metrics. Comparing individuals, even larger groups of individuals like you would with psychological and sociological studies about humans, just isn't useful because of the nature of the network. This requires a lot more information than we currently have access to, so all we can really do is speculate.

So: here's my speculations. Architects are bad at creativity and mental flexibility, but they function as a species by tightly focusing their limited creative abilities. A cut off individual like Al-An struggles with processing novel information and points of view, problem solving in novel environments, and generating novel ideas. Humans, with their individualistic mindset are a lot better in general at creativity, but they don't tend to dedicate every iota of creative thought to the advancement of their species, and instead do things like keep coming up with new and interesting architecture designs (even though they already have perfectly functional building designs,) or making art and stories and music as aesthetic pursuits, or as attempts to communicate nebulous concepts to other people--communication attempts that simply aren't required for architects because they can communicate ideas telepathically, transmitting concepts whole cloth. Ultimately, intelligence, how it's measured, and how it's cultivated, comes down to species level priorities, which are different for both species.

Are Architects Smarter than Humans?

The way AL-AN talks mixed with the fact that Architects are more technologically progressed than humans in the Subnautica universe leads him to seeming ‘smarter’ than the average human. He has a wide range of knowledge and despite his lack of experience with human social cues he is able to articulate himself extremely well. He also has access to tons of information due to his prior position as a scientist, but also because of what comes with existing as an Architect in the first place.

I mean, if your brain had direct access to all information available currently, you'd of course seem smart, but is that just you retelling what things have already been discovered or is this you being ‘smart’?

In that case you are only as smart as Google allows you to be (and the proverbial Architect GoogleTM is damn good). If you took an Architect never connected to the network and a human with no access to the internet how would they compare with their baseline intellect?

Wait a minute—what does that even solve? You could also argue the fact that because Architects are (usually) always connected to the network that this hypothetical is entirely unfair because it strips Architects of something that defines how they function. Being connected to the network is their normal existence, which would indeed imply that they are smarter than humans, yes? As they normally should have access to this advantage.

The average Architect has all the available knowledge that their species has learned available to it at all times while the average human has to rely only on things they’ve learned and how well they can research a certain topic. Again, being connected to the network for Architects is like if your brain was connected to Google and also literally everyone that currently exists and those that existed in the past. Just because a singular Architect may not have learned something for themselves doesn’t mean they can’t implement and use that knowledge. Just like how humans don’t need to have been the one to discover something for them to learn about and understand said thing.

Except then we go back to the issue of are they smart or do they just reiterate things they have available information on without actually having had studied or learned about said things? Even that fails to acknowledge the fact that they’re a hivemind! Trying to measure just one Architect is pointless when the only Architect mind that exists singularly from the rest of the network is AL-AN—besides he was never supposed to exist individually in the first place… and we have gone back around in a circle.

How could you even begin to compare the two species at all when they are so inherently different? Architects have senses that humans cannot begin to comprehend as we have never experienced them and vice versa. Their perceptions are very different from ours. Differences that make them seem so otherworldly to the other that it’s difficult to ascertain where you begin to measure which is ‘better’ and which is ’worse’.

To complicate things even further you would have to consider what each species considers to be intelligent at all, and then both would have to agree on these requirements. Is a fish lesser than a human just because it experiences existence in a way unfamiliar to us? What even is ‘smart’ or ‘intelligence’ and who decides what that means? It’s always going to be biased when the beings who created the definition also makes the rules and the criteria that must be met to fit that definition. An IQ test would mean nothing to a species that evolved under entirely different circumstances and whose minds work in entirely opposite ways to our own. Just as whatever they use to measure intelligence might not apply to how our brains work…

…Oh my god, it’s a loop that never ends. I can’t even remember which side I was arguing for, or if I was ever even arguing for one at all. Quite honestly, there’s no answer to my original question. I’ll be frank with you I cannot come up with one anyhow. I tried, but the more I kept writing the more I realized that each point contradicted itself again and again until we end up here. Back at the beginning.

“Are Architects Smarter than Humans?”

[thelatebloomerdiaries]

5.31.24 Block him 🙅‍♀️, Study Hard 📚, & Perseverance 🏆

Block him - block him in the spiritual sense, maybe eventually no contact, but for now no deep convos, no what should've been/could've been, hang out only when you want, no sex, only casual like he never meant anything

Study Hard - Study schedule has to be made and stuck to with consequences and rewards.

Perseverance - you can do this just keep going. Keep trying, use this platform to get out the feelings and post the progress and everything!