The Vanguard

I’ve been thinking a lot about community and identity lately; blame uni for this – one of my units started banging on about ideas of community and nationhood, and as you’d expect, it’s kinda stuck in my mind. I’ve never really given my ancestry as much importance as perhaps others might’ve. For most of my life, I’ve considered myself Australian. As I’ve gotten older, and fallen more in love with Britain and the UK and learnt more about where my family comes from, other than Australia, I’ve had a growing sense that ‘Australian’ just doesn’t quite complete me. My British ancestry isn’t from, say, three generations ago. It comes straight from my mother. I can get a British passport because my mother was born in Liverpool.

I still remember her telling me once to go home, home meaning the UK. I’ve never forgotten that, and I suppose that’s when I had this dawning sense of being half-English. Okay, if I’m honest, a third Australian, a third British, and a third Welsh. Mum’s mother’s family are Welsh, and Granddad carried a Welsh flag when he used to march with the Normandy vets in the ANZAC Day marches.
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Kinda on a dodgy 80s movies kick right now. It’s epic. XD Anyway, just watched Electric Dreams (ZOMG ), and it got me thinking, because I have a habit of crying when AI computers ‘die’. See: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Silent Running (1972), and Electric Dreams (1984) – yes, I have cried during all three, for HAL, for the three ickle droids, and for Edgar. ;_;

(As an aside, if you haven’t watched Silent Running, you should – it’s… haunting and incredibly sad. It stays with you. Srsly.)

I’m not one who likes writing hard sci-fi. I tend to stick to dystopia. This doesn’t stop me reading hard sci-fi though, and empathising with these AI computers. And it’s this ability to empathise with these AI computers that got me wondering what sort of ethics humans will need to adhere to if/when we get to a point in the future where AI computers are widespread.

Why do I say that we’ll need ethics? They’re just machines, right?
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For a long time now, I’ve wondered why it is that some writers prefer to write to instrumental music as opposed to music with lyrics, and why I’m the total opposite.

As much as I adore music, it’s written in a totally different language and my brain can’t interpret it or understand it. Now, music with lyrics, on the other hand, because there are words, written words, I can cling to them and understand them as if they’re a translation of the music. This is why instrumental music is often boring to me. There’s nothing to hold my interest and nothing to tell me what’s going on.

So while for some, music with lyrics is distracting because the lyrics distrupt their writing, for me it’s the opposite. Music with lyrics I find far easier to write to than instrumental music because it’s music I can understand. It’s like the difference between me watching a film in Cantonese (which I don’t speak), without subtitles, to watching the same film with subtitles. One I can understand, the other I can’t. Visuals aren’t enough for me to interpret what’s going on; I need the words to translate those visuals into something I can understand.
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I’m one of those people who’s either Gen X or Gen Y, depending on the source. Some cite 1983 as Gen Y, some as Gen X, so I figure I’m actually just really awesome and have a foot in each camp and I refuse to be classified. XD

(If I’m being technical, I am Gen X, since I’m the child of baby boomers. But I like my special awesome not part of either classification better. )

Anyway. I’m a rather nostalgic person. I’ve mentioned it before on here. I adore vinyl, old movies, VHS, cassettes, retro games, old consoles, all that awesome stuff I grew up with. At the same time, I’m very at ease with modern technology and the internet. I’ve been using the net since I was in my early teens, around a decade.

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Whilst this article a friend linked me to recently makes some good points, I would like to respectfully disagree with one, that the Internet allows you to filter out the idiots and the annoying.

I think this is wrong. If anything, the internet only increases the incidents of running into morons. The anonymity the Internet offers makes morons even more intolerable because they have less inhibitions about what they say and many more places to say it without censure.

Also, the article seems to assume that finding groups of people that like the same things you like automatically eliminates idiots. It most certainly does not, and anyone with any Internet experience at all will be able to tell you this firsthand.
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