0286 - Aleph means a robot has salvaged something

[dr pepper]

[sirgarberto]

Ah, turning the dead into truth. Yeah, I'm pretty sure if Zoa is forced to think of the implications it'd have to destroy the shirt.
I'll have to say, tho: unless Hebrew fell completely out of use by this century, its statement of it being "not human-readable" is pretty much a lie.

[Derleth]

Ah, turning the dead into truth. Yeah, I'm pretty sure if Zoa is forced to think of the implications it'd have to destroy the shirt.
I'll have to say, tho: unless Hebrew fell completely out of use by this century, its statement of it being "not human-readable" is pretty much a lie.

Yeah, of all the languages to be "not human-readable" the one the Jewish people have been actively preserving through thousands of years of exile is an interesting choice, especially since Judaism isn't "just" a religion and even secular Jews would want to preserve the language.

It's possible Hebrew is gone in Forward's time. The way you do that is by making Forward's time downstream from a genocide more effective at wiping out Jewish people than the Holocaust was. Which raises a lot more questions about why AIs are using it now.

[Truec]

I think the idea here isn't that the symbol itself isn't readable (because it very clearly is), but that there's some meaning robots attribute to it that isn't relatable to humans.

[Derleth]

OK, leaving aside the semiotics of the AIs using a letter from a people traditionally associated with slavery and exile and genocide, and using it in a way that explicitly calls back to a myth of an artificial creature being created as a savior-figure by that violently oppressed people, there's one more issue being implicitly raised here: Unless some human programmed in this aleph-marking behavior, and then marked it as not for human consumption, it's AI culture. It's a cultural behavior shared by the AIs in the Forward universe. Nothing Zoa says about how she's just a miserable pile of algorithms can be taken seriously anymore. (Realistically, that point was probably passed a while ago, but even if you consider the story to be more-or-less a malfunction the aleph stuff is explicitly shared behavior with a meaning that's being kept from humans.)