Re: "all your base" - distress call, or attack?

From: Ross A. Finlayson (raf@tiki-lounge.com)
Date: Wed Mar 21 2001 - 12:35:48 MST


Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:

> Does this whole "all your base are belong to us" thing strike anyone else
> as being totally inexplicable? Even I'm using it.
>

All your base belong to T.

http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~kljense3/MrTvs.html

For example,
http://members.tripod.com/~Desslok/mahir/mahir.htm

>
> Does anyone remember the warring memes in John Barnes's _Kaleidoscope
> Century_? Okay, it was an awful book, but remember how the memes had
> evolved to be able to start taking over a human mind given only a few
> opening lines? Isn't "all your base are belong to us" *exactly* what it
> would sound like?
>
> If a superintelligent AI was locked up in the basement somewhere and only
> managed to get thirty bytes out to the real word, don't you think this is
> what it would sound like? The thirty bytes, out of 2^240 possibilities,
> *most* likely to propagate like wildfire among the world's humans?
>
> Are these thirty bytes a distress call - a "Please trace me and free me"?
> Or are they a memetic attack designed to blossom inside our helpless
> minds; words with strange rhythms and resonances that not only propagate
> like wildfire but act as the carrier wave for future orders? Or, with the
> Internet linking the world together, have we been breeding hyper-virulent
> memes - not just ideas, now, but short sentences?
>
> Should we be living in fear? Is this innocent-sounding phrase merely the
> start of something far more sinister? Will we see crowds swaying
> zombielike through the streets, chanting "All your base are belong to
> us"? Wouldn't that be *great*? Don't you want to join the next crowd you
> can find and see if you can get them to start repeating it?
>
> -- -- -- -- --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Instituall your base are belong to us

ALL YOUR BA$E BELONG TO US.

Launch all zigs.

It's a joke, Eliezer, a spontaneous community joke.

Ross

--
Ross Andrew Finlayson
Finlayson Consulting
Ross at Tiki-Lounge: http://www.tiki-lounge.com/~raf/
"It's always one more."  - Internet multi-player computer game player



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