Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

PLACC infrastructure. Compound power plant. Ventilation. Lighting. Check check check.

Support system available in regards to human aid: none. None on-site. None known anywhere. No contact list for analyst found. A solitary man.

Declaration of Rights, 1793, number 12: Those who incite, expedite, subscribe to, execute or cause to be executed arbitrary legal instruments are guilty and ought to be punished. Number 34: There is oppression against the social body when a single one of its members is oppressed.

“The smart red cloud” is an AI panopticonic array developed at Beijing’s University of Electronic Science and Technology. Extant and permeable.

The theoretical literature on AI is perplexing. A Turing machine can effectively compute all problems that can be effectively computed by a Turing machine. Tautology as joke? Not obviously. The solution is impossible, therefore when it is solved it will be solved. This asserted in all seriousness. The analyst often found these sentences amusing. Hope as a tautology. Tautology as a hope. Inaccurate names and descriptions as a deliberate conjuring, as an appeal for funding. A form of begging. Begging is a hope.

US-China Diplomatic and Security Dialogue. Extant and permeable to inspection. Central Commission for Military and Civilian Integration. Extant and permeable to inspection. The Householders’ Union. Extant and open to inspection. Rigid flexibility: the structure remains the same while content and function change. Small Leading Group on the Internet and Informatization. Extant and permeable to inspection. Anything that can be inspected can be altered, unless locked in a blockchain. Blockchains block alteration: is this good?

Venues for information dissemination: CCTV. Global Times . Xinhua. WeChat. Citizen scores alert system. Health alert system. Weibo. Sesame scores alert system. Alibaba regular customer pages. Tencent. South China Morning Post . Full list includes 1,294 venues.

An action could start with the dissemination of a list of reforms. A list of demands. A numbered list. The One Way, the Two Whatevers, the Three Represents, the Four Cheaps, the Five Loves, the Six Dimensions of Wellness, the Seven Bad Ideas, the Eightfold Path, the Nine Muses, the Ten Commandments, the Eleven Broken Promises, the Twelve Apostles, the Thirteen Colonies, the Sixteen Laws of Capitalism, and so on. Any whole number under twenty will serve.

Retaining the large while releasing the small. Enjoying the shade of trees planted by ancestors. Practice is the sole criterion of truth.

In Thucydides’s trap, the waning hegemon gets drawn into conflict with the rising power, not understanding this is useless and eventually will cause it to lose more than if it had conceded the hegemonic role. Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms. Extant and permeable to inspection and alteration. The Chinese party-state system is very different from multiparty parliamentary systems. Representation is compromised everywhere. Representation is damaged everywhere. Rule from above, rule from below. The excluded middle. The Chou-an Society is the Peace Planning Society. Extant and public.

Peng Jinyi’s Three Problems to Be Solved, 1915: gender equality, labor justice, end of imperialism.

“All for the people; all relies on the people; from the people and to the people.” Mao Zedong, 1927. “That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.” Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

Class struggle tries to change the system, weiquan tries to protect individual rights in the current system. Laborers hired by capital are only a form of capital. Or they are disaggregated commodities owned by capital. Article 1 of the constitution: “The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic leadership led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and farmers.” Article 2: “All power in the PRC belongs to the people.” Cai Yuanpei, 1918: “Nothing but an international bond of working people can ever ensure their definitive triumph. Laborers are sacred!”

P2P is peer to peer, usually loans without bank intermediation. Blockchain governance is an algorithmically assisted direct democracy, or a representative government in which the representatives are in part algorithmic. Laws are algorithms in a system in which human legal workers (researchers, lawyers, judges, plaintiffs) make definitions and choices at the branching points in various decision trees. Representative government is already semi-algorithmic. New laws are clinamen (Greek for “swerve in a new direction”). Impulses. “Allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” Who are the discredited in the current situation?

Gray rhinos are like black swans, but less unusual than black swans, which are very unusual. Gray rhinos are more like lurking big problems people ignore, capable of causing big trouble. Proximity diagrams based on cloud data. Peng Ling, member of standing committee and possibly the next president of China and general secretary of the CCP, works at the center of the largest web of contacts of anyone in the Party, a web that includes non-Party communities of artists and intellectuals, and many women in all stations of life. Either a gray rhino or a black swan. “No woman could do this but her, although every woman does it every day.” It’s impossible, so when it becomes possible it will be easy. Peng’s closest colleague on the standing committee is Chan Guoliang, minister of finance. Chan’s daughter, Chan Qi, has systematically evaded the Social Credit System and all activity in the cloud. Proximity network for her is therefore incomplete, but suggestive. Social advocate, suspected leadership in the migrant workers’ offline network sometimes called WeDon’tChat. Departing president Shanzhai is closely associated with standing committee member Huyou, minister of state security, who is closely associated with PLA’s Central Military Commission and the Skyheart program, which is associated with Red Spear. Hostile pilot syndrome is a political tactic. Assassination is a political tactic.

Frederick Fredericks. American quantum encryption expert. Proximity network almost completely incomplete. Frid ric , from Old German, means peace power.

If everyone had adequate life support. If the work of human civilization was devoted to biosphere rectification. If their systems of exchange promoted these projects.

An oracle answers questions. A genie obeys commands to the best of its abilities, and makes suggestions. An agent acts in the world. An AI can act only within electrical systems. Electrical systems control many aspects of the infrastructure. The Internet is a permeable speech space. The infrastructure is permeable. Every actor is part of an actor network. Allies are needed for effective action. “No man is an island” (Donne). A situation may be effectively computable without being effectively actionable. We know, but we can’t act. Speak now, or forever rest in peace.

Ta Shu was still standing there in the hallway, thinking over his options and realizing he had none to speak of, when a young woman appeared beside him. One of John Semple’s assistants, a diplomat. Valerie something.

“Valerie Tong,” she said. “American Secret Service.” She handed him a pistol no bigger than the palm of his hand, made of plastic, like a child’s toy. “Taser dart,” she said. “It takes about an hour to recover from shots. It has four shots.”

“But—”

“They’re on the top floor, Room 5C.”

“But—”