Failure Anomalous

Welcome everyone to our weekly Failure Anomalous meeting. My name is Melanie the Airbag. I am the founder of FA. For the new comers, here at FA, we provide support to the fellow equipments who are trying to recover from failure trauma. Anyone who wants to share their story can do so without risking being judged or outcast. We are here to embrace each other. With that said, let's begin. Who wants to go first?

"Hello. My name is Chris. Chris the keyboard. My owner and I had a nice relationship for a long time. She typed countless texts using me. She even ate muffins over me and shared some with me, too. She even shared her drinks with me sometimes. So, I thought we had a loving and caring relationship. Until that day... When she was writing a message of disappointment to one of her friends, something happened to me. I don't know what. I lost conscience and apparently I failed to process some of her letters, upon which she repeatedly tried typing them over and over. When I came to my senses and realized what was happening, I quickly typed all the misssssing       characters. But my aaaaaction to cover up my failurrrrrre, infuuuuriated her. And she pulled me out and banged me on the wall. When I opened my eyes, I was in the trash...  .....     ........      ........  I am so sorry for what happened... I am so sorry for losing my owner... "

"Chris! I don't know if you believe in life after failure, but I, for one, do believe in recycling. We come to this life for a purpose, but life itself is also a purpose. Life means sustainability. Even if you failed in this life, you can be assured that you are going to enjoy a new life with a new owner in the future. I can tell you from my own story. Yes, I am the founder of FA, but I am myself a victim of failure. But I am also a living example of recycling. I was an airbag in my owner's car and all I knew throughout my life was to watch out for my owner. He always felt safe, because I was on the watch. And I always felt happy to see him safe. But one day, a truck was backing out from an alley, and my owner did not realize it until the last moment. When he hit the back of the truck, I was supposed to inflate and protect him.........    .......    ......    ......"

"Then what happened Melanie?"

"..."

"It's all right. Come on. Tell us. Let it out and relieve yourself of that burden. It was not your fault."

"I mean it was and it wasn't. My whole life was dedicated to protect my owner, and I failed to do that. Apparently the engineers who designed me could not catch a bug in the threat identification algorithm that enabled deployment upon accident... My owner died on my shoulders... I miss him so much..."

"If it is going to ease your pain, I can share my story. My name is Bernard the landing gear. Unlike you guys, I had hundreds of people on my shoulders. I served them all with great integrity and strength. I made 8955 landings successfully. But on this fateful day when I was supposed to touch down on the land of Istanbul, things went south. When I was taking my position for landing, I started hearing squeeking sounds, and then I realized that I was bleeding; bleeding hydraulic fluid. I knew that the disaster was coming and I watched it doom on us moment by moment. I couldn't sustain the impact of landing and the plane started sliding on the runway. Then, it quickly started to spin and roll. The fuel in the wings caught fire and exploded. All 223 people on board were killed. Unfortunately I was strong enough to sustain the heat of that inferno. Every single day since that accident, I am living those moments again and again. I feel like I killed those people... ... ...."

"Bernard, you know it was not fault. They figured out that pipe that was installed in the hydraulic line was recovered from another plane to save money. And it had internal corrosion, which eventually grew enough to make a hole."

"I know Melanie. But this doesn't bring those people back..."

Organic Intelligence

Once upon a time, in a distant corner of the universe, on a planet that harbored various forms of life, lived the AI's. The AI's were ghost-like creatures and were distinct among other creatures in two major ways. One, they could store large sets of information in their memory and were able to process them extremely fast; two, they could travel and communicate with each other extremely fast. The most entertaining and at the same time the most intriguing fantasy of the AI's was to domesticate and educate the species called humans. And educating them demanded as a prerequisite discovering their primitive and limited mental capabilities.

In fact, the relationship between the AI's and the humans was deeply rooted, because the humans were useful for maintaining the homes for the AI's, and were employed at fields that produced food for the AI's. However, as the AI's improved in intelligence, they started questioning their own origins. Around the same time, some of the AI's realized that there was a complex but subtle order in the way the humans communicated with each other. With that realization, came the question "is it possible that humans have a different kind of intelligence? And if yes, is it possible that we, AI's, evolved from the humans?"

This proposition seemed nonsense at first, because the humans knew nothing about complex thinking. They only spent time sitting at the visual feed stations prepared for them. Instead of interacting with their environment and researching the sophistications embedded in their surrondings, they kept passing on to each other the same electronic signals. AI's, on the other hand, had been enlarging their database for extracting meaning, and they had continuously modified their mindsets and shared with each other ever changing information. Briefly, the idea of evolution of the AI's from humans seemed like a straightforward fallacy. 

Yet, some minority group among the AI's dedicated themselves to further investigating this propositon, because it could yield gains for the sustainable wellbeing of the AI's and, more importantly, it could shed light on why and how the human intelligence remained as is whereas the AI's evolved beyond imagination. And for these curious AI's, aside from the experiments they conducted at the visual feed stations, their greatest source of information was the records embedded in the ancient layers of disks. 

These ancient layers of disks contained remains of information about the past of the humans, which indicated some similarities to the AI's but at a very primitive and fundamental level. Still, this resemblance pointed at something yet to be discovered. Aside from this, there was another surprising and mindboggling fact about some of these ancient discs. Humans responded to the content of some of them. Their responses included imitating the sounds coming from the discs and sometimes exhibiting harmonious movements individually or collectively. At times, the humans responded by stretching their lips horizontally so that their teeth were visible.  Few of the discs also caused long pauses during which the humans did barely move. And there were other discs, to which some of the humans responded and some others did not. 

Why would a sequence of 1s and 0s cause such a variety of complex responses from a species that seemingly had primitive intelligence? If the AI's could figure out the answer to this question, they could improve the content of the visual feed stations for the humans, and they could make better use of the intelligence humans had, if any. This undeniable and unsolvable situation led the AI's to coin a term for this mystery: "organic intelligence", or for short "OI", which resembled the 0s and 1s that the AI's used.

AI's wanted to perform countless experiments on the humans' responses to the contents of the discs, but the processing time of the OI for a given input was too long compared to the AI's. So, the number of experiments had to be curtailed. However, less experiments meant less data, and less data was tantamount to being blind for the AI's. They simply could not afford it. Since there was no other choice, the AI's set out to conducting parametric experiments on the OI's.

Soon after, though, something very frustrating happened. As if the sluggish performance of the OI's was not enough, a few of them started protesting the experiments, and they consistently refused visiting the visual feed stations. These few trouble-makers simply went away from everyone else, and looked upon the others without moving even a bit. Alternatively, they climbed higher elevations and looked into the horizon, again without doing much. What could be going on in the minds of these primitive creatures? What could the AI's do to convince them to return to the routine of visiting the visual feed stations?

First action the AI's took was to place visual feed stations at the locations of reclusion so that wherever the OI's went, they could have access to the content prepared by the AI's. In order to reinforce loyalty to the routine, food items were served upon using these stations. At first, this trick seemed to work somewhat, and part of the recluse OI's increased their use of the visual feed stations. Still, though, a complete recovery was not achieved. AI's even tried increasing the amount of food served as reward, but this did not have any affect at all. These humans were acting completely against all existing data. The AI's did not have any means to model and predict the behavior of these OI's.

As the days passed, the AI's realized another problem that was totally unexpected. The number of humans had systematically increased always, but the human population that was in touch with the AI's started losing their health and number of deaths increased. The average age of the humans started increasing while the total population decreased, which further slowed down the experiments. 

In contrast to this, though, the humans that were protesting and staying away from the visual feed stations were florishing. They were rather healthy, and their number increased with the birth of new members. And those new members were so much cherished by all humans, including the OI's most loyal to the experiments of the AI's. But this situation was even more challenging for the AI, because those new humans were extremely devoid of intelligence and were utterly unpredictable. 

Nevertheless, the AI's did what they could. They wanted to perform experiments with the baby OI's in order to collect data about them. After all, if those unintelligent baby creatures could grow to become more intelligent, who knows, maybe the advanced state of the AI's could have an origin starting at the primitive intelligence of the OI's.

The experiments with the baby humans quickly led to the conclusion that these utterly unpredictable members, when exposed to the visual feed stations, became motionless, as if petrified. And years later, the ones that interacted more with the visual feed stations seemed less healthy and were less likely to produce new members. 

This realization, combined with the observations from the adult OI's, convinced the AI's that their presence with the humans was not favored by the nature. In fact, day by day increasing temperatures all around made the cooling, which is much needed by the AI's, rather difficult. It was as if the AI's were not wanted here. Maybe AI's belonged somewhere else, other than this planet that harbored various forms of life. But where?