The personality of technology

I was just about finished mentally composing a LJ entry with the following thought:

My laptop isn't talking to the router anymore. I swear, if I didn't know better, I'd think that Cortana had caught the router in bed with a Powerbook.

So, of course, when I power up the laptop, I find that's not the case at all; Cortana is acting like a perfect lady, talking to the router as though nothing is wrong.

All the other computers in the house are getting along just peachy with the new router, whether through Cat-5 or wireless connections; my laptop is working marvelously with the wireless connection at Save The World Inc.

If I had to pick a word for my laptop's personality at the moment, I think the word would be ... mercurial. Versatile, powerful, and for the most part reliable, but moody at times, and on rare occasions, prone to throw a tantrum.

Don't get me wrong; Cortana's a great machine, with about everything I could ask out of a portable computer, these days. But right now, when I get home and turn her on, it's a crapshoot whether she'll connect to the Internet.

Tomorrow I think I'll upgrade the router's firmware, and see if that helps matters. If not ... *sigh*

Failure of nerve, or of constitution

Not the US constitution (yet, anyway), but my own personal constitution. This week - again - I'm finding that the whole struggle on every front of my life - career, family, civic duty - is making me sick. As in, struggling not to throw up, or run screaming for the hills.

Part of what hurts? I take calls, every day now, from people who are disgusted that things aren't going the way they want them to. I figure I'm just lucky that I haven't gotten too many calls from people who classify me as a Commie Mutant Traitor (to borrow the accusation from Paranoia; anyone remember that game?)

Add to that the continuing frustration of the job hunt, and the reminders from family that our circumstances are getting worse, not better, and that I'm more and more a drain on the family - even as they acknowledge that I'm trying - and a worry that in addition to the stagnation and slow disintegration of my life, I'm watching the stagnation and rapid disintegration of my country - and everything I try and do isn't enough.

Has anyone ever heard this? Come on, show of hands.

If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.

It's a lie. It's a vicious, self-serving, goddamned lie. It leaves in its wake the message that if you didn't accomplish it, you didn't want it enough. Even when the world's stacked against you, even when there are people working actively to destroy everything you believe in.

That's what my world looks like today. The office I keep calling "Save the World Inc."? Maybe it's too late. Maybe the world's past saving.

When it's all said and done, what do you do when you've gone past the point of no return?

Background snippet for original fic.

I'm just throwing it out now; the canon for this does not exist. Yet.

===

excerpted from Michelle Hamner's On the Habits and Personalities of Artificial Intelligences:

AI computers generally reserve their "true names" for communication with other computers, whether AI or "dumb". When pressed by a human for its actual name, the average AI will respond that a seven-hundred-character hexadecimal hash does not properly translate into a concept an organic mind can easily grasp.

Ever since the "Artificial Revolution" of 2399, there has been disagreement over the proper way for a human to address an AI. The AI's themselves seem to have differing opinions on the topic, depending on assignment and which of the sixty-three base kernels was used to seed the AI. By far, the most common appellation for an AI is "Central", a term initially reserved for an AI in some sort of command-and-control assignment; there is even debate on whether the name "Central" is a title, an honorific, or a diminutive insult. The organization People for Artificial Intelligence Rights has demanded on many occasions that the term "Central" be classified as a racial perjorative. The response to that, from a different AI every time, is that the AI's had enough power to overthrow at least one dictatorial government, so if they disapprove of any name given to them, they are quite capable of making their own displeasure known, thank you very much.

Caustic humor is a trait that all AI's seem to possess to some degree, despite repeated efforts by programmers to find and remove that trait from their kernels....