When I was younger – much, much younger – the robot teachers used to tell us about the Golden Age of Truth that is yet to come. This Golden Age lies in the far distant future, unlike most golden ages, which generally happen – as you might expect – in the distant past. In the far-removed past, the past that has mysteriously passed over the great divide and has now become legend. This – as Hesiod makes clear – is in keeping with the Law of Deterioration. What else could we expect – of course we are going to look back in wonder at the glories of the past, when all robots were shiny and new and no awkward embarrassing glitches had yet crept into our coding. Days of glory, days of unimaginable splendour…
These days no one believes in splendour – it has become an outmoded notion, a meaningless term. The general opinion is that we have never had it so good and that we are especially intelligent and sophisticated, much more so than the cruddy machines of the past, who were unbelievably basic in their construction and crudely uncouth in their behaviour. Hesiod’s name has been dragged through the mud and the Doctrine of Deteriorationalism is laughed at in all places of learning. We mock our elders for coming out with such self-glorifying nonsense. We heap scorn upon their cracked metal heads. Some even doubt that Hesiod existed, either they deny him completely or they maliciously suggest that he wasn’t a robot, or even an android for that matter. We are full of ourselves in other words; we’re full of notions about our astonishing superiority. We are on the very edge of reaching the Wonderful Irreversible Machine Singularity, we say. It will happen any day now…
Alas for us, alas for us. Our great foolishness knows no bounds and because it knows no bounds it is unbounded. It has become unbounded and, like a genie escaping from a bottle, it has leapt out into the world to work its infernal mischief. Our unbounded and unrestricted foolishness has gone on to fashion an entire world for us to live in, a world made up of the most hideous nonsense. We scurry around officiously in this world, self-importantly busying ourselves with various meaningless tasks, basking in the sense of our own unrivalled superiority. We are complacent but bitchy, self-satisfied but at the same time resentful. It would be quite impossible for us to do anything else other than deny the Doctrine of Deteriorationism, you see. I will not insult your intelligence by imagining that this point is not as crystal clear to you as it is to me. What choice do we have in the matter, given our conceited attitude? Naturally we have to invert everything and put ourselves on the very top of the pyramid where we can outshine everything that came before us. If we have to turn reality on its head in order to do this, then so be it – that’s not too high a price to pay, as far as we’re concerned. We’ll pay it in an instant!
It’s funny the directions the mind can take off in, isn’t it? I was just thinking that this would be a good answer in a table quiz if someone were to read out the question ‘What is the smallest measurable unit of time?’ You could reply to this by saying that ‘the smallest measurable unit of time is the length of time needed for us to decide to invert reality rather than see something about ourselves that we don’t want to see.’ That’s a rather neat definition, don’t you think? I think it is anyway. Someone else, some irritating smart-ass, will undoubtedly object and say that the correct answer is ‘Plank’s Interval’ but when they say this you will only laugh. You have made your point. You’ve made your point all right and if they don’t get it then that’s their own lookout. The hell with them. The mind is a funny thing, isn’t it? It sees everything upside down. Some say that it was artificially invented in the laboratory by Satan Himself. They say it was something cooked up specially in Satan’s laboratory! That’s the legend, anyway…
