Advertisement.
AN INSPIRATIONAL ADAGE.
But then there was a sudden cloudburst, and the rain came down in buckets, and we were forced to dash for shelter.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
Advertisement.
DR. PROCTOR.
Announcer. And now the Endurance Insurance Company of Halls Falls, New Jersey, presents…
Music: Theme, in and under for…
Announcer. Doctor Proctor! The continuing story of a noble physician at the McGinnick Clinic in Allemania, Pennsylvania, and the trials he faces while trying to do the right thing.
Music: In full to end, then segue to clinic theme and fade.
Dr. Proctor. Nurse Terse, Mr. Pfister here needs a spleen vaccine. Please have Aide Quaid wheel in the vaccination station.
Nurse. Actually, it wheels itself in. It uses SmartCart technology.
Dr. Proctor. I don’t hold with that mumbo jumbo. But here comes Miss Bliss.
Miss B. Don’t forget to have Mr. Pfister sign the vaccination authorization, Dr. Proctor. If you forget again, it’ll be double trouble for me.
Dr. Proctor. Here, Mr. Pfister. Sign on the line.
Pfister. Easy peasy, Doctor Proctor.
Miss B. Thank you, Doctor Proctor. Administrator Finistrator has been on my case.
Dr. Proctor. Glad to oblige, Miss Bliss. Now, before we go on, Mr. Pfister, we have to test for a rare condition called “green spleen.”
Pfister. Green spleen?
Dr. Proctor. Yes. Nurse Terse, prepare the green-spleen screen.
Pfister. Will it hurt?
Dr. Proctor. It’s just a quick ab jab. Not deep enough to get into the bone zone.
(Sound: beeping alarm.)
Nurse. Mr. Pfister’s green-spleen screen shows positive, Doctor Proctor.
Dr. Proctor. Hell’s bells!
Nurse (sotto voce). Should I call for Pastor Castor?
Dr. Proctor. Not yet, Nurse Terse. Mr. Pfister, you have green spleen, but I can still save you if—
Lieutenant (entering). Hold on there, doc! Stop the clock!
Nurse. Why, it’s Lieutenant Pennant from the Fraud Squad!
Lieutenant. That’s right, Nurse Terse. Doctor Proctor, Mr. Pfister here is wanted for violating the Tract Act.
Dr. Proctor. The Tract Act? How did he violate that?
Lieutenant. With a cook book he published. A recipe for “Mile-High Custard Pie,” making the most generous consumption assumption, produced results that reached five thousand three hundred seventy-five feet at the most. It’s a no go.
Dr. Proctor. Well, Lieutenant Pennant, Mr. Pfister isn’t going anywhere till I say so. He has green spleen. He needs narcotics and antibiotics.
Lieutenant. Oh, yeah? Well, District Attorney Burney got Judge Mudge to give him a warrant, so I guess I’ll be taking Mr. Pfister with me.
Dr. Proctor. Warrant, schmarrant! No way José, Lieutenant Pennant!
(Music: Theme, in and under for…)
Announcer. Will Doctor Proctor have to release Mister Pfister into the uncaring hands of Lieutenant Pennant, or will he think of something smarter than anything he thought of in this episode? Tune in next week to find out! Meanwhile, friends, have you provided for your houseplants in case you suddenly kick the bucket? The Endurance Insurance Company of Halls Falls, New Jersey, can set you up with a carefully tailored policy that will care for your plants when you’re pushing up daisies. Call your Endurance Insurance agent the first thing tomorrow morning. This is your host Barnaby Yost saying, Good night and sleep tight.
Advertisement.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: My daughter brought home some cans of something labeled “prebiotic soda.” There are days when I wonder why I took all those English classes in school. Can you explain what “prebiotic soda” is? —Sincerely, A Father Out of His Depth.
Dear Sir: As its name implies, prebiotic soda is soda you drink before you are born. Similarly, postbiotic soda is soda you drink after you have died. From the general tone of your correspondence, Dr. Boli suspects that you fall into neither of those categories.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I have a suggestion. What I think is that we should take the things that are over here, and put them over there. There are entirely too many things over here, and they clutter the place up. All that clutter leads to traffic congestion and accidents and whatnot, so we are paying a high price for having all those things over here. But if we moved them over there, then they would not be over here. Now, it is quite likely that they would cause just as much clutter and other difficulties over there, but that is only to the moral good of the world. It has been well established that over here is where the good people are, whereas bad people are the ones who exist over there. Whatever inconvenience we cause the bad people is not only justifiable; it is laudable. It would be ideal if evil could simply be eliminated from the world. Of course that cannot be done all at once, but one first step we can make in the direction of ultimate good is to take the excessively accumulated things that are over here and put them all over there.
Sincerely,
Rimbaud Fistula Prack,
Pine Township
INTELLIGENT OR JUST REALLY GOOD AT PREDICTING?
When they compose text, the experts tell us, large language models work by predicting the word that is most likely to come next. Dr. Boli has heard many technical people explain that these software entities are not really intelligent: they are just very good at predicting the word that comes next.
But in order to deny the intelligence of the bots, Dr. Boli thinks, it would be necessary to prove that, when Dr. Boli is making his most entertaining conversation, he is not just very skillfully predicting which word ought to come next.
The assumption of those who would deny the bots intelligence seems to be that, in real human intelligence, there is a divine spark that controls the flow of scintillating repartee in a supernatural way. But no one has ever demonstrated the existence of that divine spark in a way that would satisfy science.
What if, instead, the human mind really is just a huge accumulation of neurons doing exactly what a large language model does: predicting the word that will come next?
Would that make it less divine?
What if, in fact, what it means to be God is simply to be infallible in predicting what comes next—the next word, the next event, the effect of any cause, the next in any series of conclusions, backwards or forwards to any point in time?
Would that make God less divine?
And in creating artificial intelligence, are we trying to build God?
If we are, Dr. Boli believes that God has nothing to worry about. We have imbued all our AI bots with our own idiocies and imperfections. But if God has a different opinion, we may yet see a day when God suddenly decides, “Go to, let us go down, and there confuse their large language models.”
We’ll see.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
